Meanwhile, the skull still needed to be cleaned. While my grandpa was out and about, I had the whole garage to myself. I had a large tarp spread out on the floor, and I knew I had to clean the skull inside the garage and house. I didn't want to offend the neighbors, so I decided to endure the overwhelming smell of flesh and blood inside a cool garage. I opened a few windows in the garage to create a draft, and began my work, without gloves of course.

I had an entire pronghorn head to deal with, fur and everything. I'm glad I have a poor sense of smell for that, but the pronghorn head still smelled strong enough to make me cringe a few times. I had the hose nearby, and a large bucket, so I could wash off the head in that bucket without showing it off for the world to see. I also kept another bucket in the garage that was full of water, so I could wash off the knives every few minutes or so. 

First, I had to skin the head, so I pressed the knife end hard against the pronghorn's forehead and slowly cut all the way down to the mouth. I slowly but surely peeled off the hide, releasing whiffs of all sorts of interesting smells as I did so. Once that was over with, I worked on removing the eyes. I knew exactly what I was cutting, so no eye stuff would leak out. Then, I used a large butcher knife to separate the head from the windpipe, throat, and upper neck bones.

Now that the head was successfully skinned and removed from the neck, I was able to pull the jaws apart and break them off. Basically, I just ripped it apart, which is how you are supposed to separate the bottom jaw from the top jaw. Then, I took a firm hold on the tongue with one hand and pressed my weight against the bottom jaw on the floor with the other, and discarded that. 

A half hour or so later, I had the skull in a large pot I had brought to an extreme boil. For the next 12 combined hours, I simmered the skull, cut off the flesh, rinsed it off, and simmered it again. Near the end, I added borax and dish soap into the boiling pot, to whiten and disinfect the skull a little bit more. I had to remove some extremely softened bones above the nasal cavity to remove the nasal cavity, as well as to the brains. Next time I do this, I'll make sure to have a pair of long surgical pliers so I don't remove any bones. In the end, while it wasn't perfect, I had myself a pronghorn skull to add to my collection. 

While the skull dried, I revisited the pronghorn hide, which was still damp. To counter this, I spread it out on a card table in the garage, and my grandma let me use her blow dryer to dry the hide. Every 5 minutes, I gave the blow dryer a break, and ran outside to shake the hide and let the sun and wind dry it. It was pretty windy that day, which really helped to dry the hide and blow away all of the excess salt and shed fur. Obviously, each time I ran outside with the pronghorn hide, it kept it downwind from myself so I didn't blind myself with salt and borax. For three hours, I did this, until finally the hide was bone dry and ready to be boxed up and saved until a spot at the tannery opened. As of now, it's in a cardboard box in my garage where no mice can get to it.