With scissors shear out all mouth and nose meat, being careful not to cut off the whisker pockets, which are usually very prominent when the side nose muscles are partly sheared off.
Skin out the backs of the ears clear to edges by pressing a finger tip inside the ear and peeling over this with finger nail or other dull instrument. With scissors shear off meat of butt of ear and whatever meat and fat adheres to rest of skin.
In sketches of skinned body mark points of shoulder joint and hip joint and note width of pelvis at hip joints.
Remove the skull from the carcass and clean it by cutting and scraping away all meat, pulling out the eyeballs, and scooping out the brain. For the purpose of mounting, the base of the skull may be cut off to facilitate cleaning, but for study (cabinet) skins the skull must be kept intact and always accompany by number the skin it was removed from.
Trim all meat from the leg bones and poison these and the skull when finishing preparation of the skin.
Add a few drops of carbolic acid, well stirred in to the arsenic water used upon skins of small mammals for mounting. This aids in preventing decay and slipping of the epidermis.
Apply the poison solution thoroughly with a brush, to all inner surfaces of the skin and to the toes. If tail was split only at the tip, run a few drops of arsenic water through it.
Turn the poisoned skin right side out, lay it flat, side pressed to side, roll up, place in paper, and cover with a damp cloth. Lay in this way over one night, giving the arsenic solution a chance to penetrate through to roots of hair before mounting. If a specimen is bloody or mussed the blood may be cleaned off before skinning by wetting the spots with alcohol and rubbing the blood and juices out with cornmeal.
The first step in mounting is properly to wire the skull and leg bones. (For details of this see [Fig. 16].)