Everyones ideas are great! They all fill the bill for keeping the venison fresh! You would be surprised to learn that deer meat will not spoil for days at 80 degrees if it is kept sterile and insect free. However - cooling it down as quickly as possible yields the best tasting and most tender venison.
My routine is predicated on the idea that I do not want to butcher the meat untill rigor mortis has come and gone. That takes about 30 hours. Then, another few days to allow for the enzymes, in the "meat" cells, to further breakdown and tenderize the muscle fibers. Last, an unskinned - gutted deer carcass has all of the edible meat sealed in a sterile environment. Just be sure to leave the kidney fat in to cover the fillets.
So say you shoot one at dark, it is 82 degrees, and you don't recover it until first light the next day. When you do - it is bloated like John Candy at the Ming Chow Buffet. No problem....that bloating is from microbal action and autolysis (self digestion) in the gut cavity which both produce gasses. Be a man! Pop the gut - gut the deer - and drag er' out. Get ice in the cavity, between the hams, on the hams, and on the neck-shoulder ASAP. I keep a big, heavy guage piece of plastic in the back of my truck at all times so that I can lay out a deer and ice him if I am not going to be home within an hour or so.
When I get home I hang the deer on a gambrell with the back legs up so that any pooling of blood in the muscle (called morbid lividity) will be away from the hams and back straps. This is very important. Hang deer head down! Put bags of ice in the cavity and over the top between the hams. I bungee a bag up high in the gut cavity, over the fillets, to chill the front of the hams, the rear of the straps, and - of course - the fillets. Pierce the bags so that as the ice melts the cold water drips down through the cavity and the trachea. This will chill the neck.
Replace ice as needed and after 24 hours wrap the deer in a couple of old blankets or sleeping bags! Once the main heat is gone from the carcass and you insulate the deer the ice will last a long time. It will get so cold you won't believe it. Even if there are a couple of blow fly eggs in the cavity they won't hatch and you don't eat that lining anyway.
In hot weather I hang my deer for three to 5 days and when I cart it over to my butcher his hands ache because the meat is so cold. When I grow up I am going to get a walk in cooler.....
