The animal, at this point, is dead, which seems an obvious point to make, but you need to train your customers to begin to treat this animal in the most respectful way-- right away.  The more they understand that this animal is beginning to decompose immediately, the better prepared they will be to bring you a deer in best condition possible.  This will allow you to treat the cape in the most professional way to give your customer an end product that is competition-quality, and to allow you the satisfaction of working with high-quality capes and beautifully finished mounts.

If your customer is perfect, and has brought you a deer within minutes of killing it, and hasn't dragged all the hair off the shoulders and brisket, and hasn't cut the throat, the ball is now in your court.  Your next responsibility is to get the hide off the animal as quickly as possible to get it cool.  Warm = bacteria = rot.  Warm animal from residual body heat.  Warm weather.  Warm room.  Get the skin off the animal and get it cold.  In deer season, you might not have time to take each cape from skinning to salting, so you'll want to skin everything out, every night, to a small enough package to be able to freeze it in a big trash bag (properly labeled with customer number and name, of  course).  Later, when you don't have hunters coming in every couple of hours, you can thaw your trash bags, flesh your deer cape, and salt it.  The decomposition process will have been arrested by the freezing process, and the quick thawing-to-salting process will have halted it.  Salt is your next best friend (after the freezer) to keep your capes nice.  Once they are salted and crispy, you can breathe easier.  Ship that puppy to the tannery and relax.

Okay, so how to get to the breathing-easier-stage?

If you have the opportunity to actually take the cape of the deer, it is a great service to your customer, and you can be SURE that you will have all the cape that you will want to work with.  Some of the neatest forms, with broad shoulder sweeps or wall-pedestals-type require a lot of cape.  Take it. 

• Put on latex gloves.
• Cut the cape free of the body around the middle, well behind the front legs. 
• Skin the animal (upside-down, if you've got a place to hang him), peeling the skin away from the body all the way down to the neck, turning it insidey-out as you go.
• Peel past the neck, to behind the ears and jaw, and cut the deer's neck off.   You'll slice through the neck meat and then have to saw through the spinal cord. 
• Bundle this skin/head/horn combination into a deep plastic container and slide it out of the way.
• Have the customer fill out a "taxidermy reporting form" while he's waiting.  He only needs to fill out the part with his name and address and phone number and signature, but have him do it.  He can do it faster than you can while you're writing and trying to spell his name correctly, and he can do it while you're busy.
• From his form, write his name on two tags.  Securely wrap both tags around his horns in a spot where they won't slide off accidentally.  Make a big enough deal about this that he can remember that you made a point to accurately label his horns with his name right there in front of you.
• If you have access to a Poloroid or digital camera, take a picture of him with his horns and as much of the head as you can.  Take all the pictures in the same place every time in your shop.  Have something in the background you can use for reference and for scale.  If (and it's something we think about but that has actually never happened) your customer suspects that you've returned to him the wrong antlers, this precaution will dispel his fears.  It is also a very handy reference for yourself to double check if you're ever working late and working tired and doubting yourself that you've got the right antlers on the right  cape.
• Write down his order.  Show him your examples and have him decide if he wants a right or left turn (the deer's right or left), sneak, semi-sneak, up-right, semi-upright, wall-pedestal, etc, and ear direction--forward, back, one of each.  Write this information down on the sheet he filled out and signed. 
• Thank him.  Give him a hat.  Tell him when you expect to have his mount ready for him (the pick-up date is computed by a realistic assessment of your work load, your motivation level, with an extra 2 weeks added for unforeseen emergencies, and another 2 weeks added because life happens.)  No one has yet to complain about a taxidermist returning his work before the Promised Date. 
• Sit down with your deer.  Using your calipers, measure the distance from the tip of the nose to the corner of the eye.  Write this down on the taxidermy reporting form.  Next, measure around his neck, 3 inches down from ears and under the jaw.  You are looking for an actual neck measurement.  Pull snugly, especially if the deer is very furry.  Record this measurement. These are the two measurements you will order your forms by.  (If you forget to measure right now, or if your deer doesn't have enough neck meat to get an accurate measurement right now, this measurement can be taken, or double-checked, after skinning by laying the hide open, hair down, and measuring across the flat skin 3 inches down from the ears.)
• Begin skinning from the teeth.  Peel back the lips and slice across the gums right above the top teeth.  Continue back toward the corners of the mouth, cutting the skin free right above the teeth. 
• When you have enough room to maneuver, pull the nose back, and cut through the nose cartilage, cutting the cartilage free to be with the cape.
• Do the bottom jaw the same way, peeling the lips down and cutting right at the base of the bottom teeth, working your way toward the corners of the mouth.
• When you've worked your way around the teeth and don't have room to work any further back into the corners of the mouth, it's time to leave the face area and to make the "Y" behind the horns.  The upper arms of the "Y" come down from the backs of the horns and connect to the long center seam going down the back.  (A "short Y" is, well, shorter.  You make a smaller initial incision and have less sewing to do later.  Some tanneries charge more to tan a "short Y" cape.  Some taxidermists find a "short Y" to be a labor-saving step, and some find it to be an unnecessarily complicated skinning/fleshing step that doesn't save enough time later to warrant the trouble.  Your call.)
• Begin behind one horn, digging your knife under the burr to emerge in the skin with the blade up.  Cutting "up from under the hair" like this means fewer cut hairs and a cleaner seam later.  Cut from that one horn back toward the center.
• From the other side, repeat to make a cut to meet the first cut.  This is a "V"!
• To make the stem of the "Y", set your knife, blade up, and cut down the dark stripe on the deer's back.  Continue this cut down the length of the cape following the dark stripe.  (On an antelope, there will be a sort of mane.  Don't cut straight down the mane.  Cut to one side or the other so that when you sew it all back up later, the mane won't have a seam in it and will fluff up nice and even.)
• Ok, back up the base of the "V".  Skin toward the antler bases pulling up as you go.  At the antler bases, you will want to slow down and dig deep.  You want all the skin from around and under the bases so you can put the whole thing back together later and have it fit right, and you want to not have any hair left under the burrs.  To do this, skin hard against the bone, slicing and peeling under the burrs.  This will call for a knife with a strong, thin, flexible tip.  But you'll be glad later that you were careful up here.  Free both antlers as much as you can.
• Skin toward the ear butts.  We will cut off the ears well back from the ear butts, and against the skull.  The ears can  be skinned out later, and we don't want to cut too far forward into the ear. 
• As the ears are loosed from the head, skin down the cheek approaching the back of the eye.  This is a crucial spot to skin correctly as any wrong cuts here hamper your efforts later resulting in insufficient eyelid skin or worse, obvious repairs.  Go slow, and use the finger.
• Place your finger into the back of the eye pointing toward the back of the skull.  Fold the skin back over your hand, leaving your finger in place, and skin toward the eye, with your finger marking the spot of the eye.  Skin close to the skull, lifting the crucial area you are protecting with your finger up and out of the way with each cut.  You will eventually skin to a hole.  This is the eye.  That's OK.  You've preserved all the eyelid skin by having your finger taking up the slack and pulling it up out of the way of your knife.
• Toward the front of the eye, the skin will dip back into the skull.  This depression is the pre-orbital gland (Pre-"in front of".  Orbital--"eye".)  Or tear duct.  Carefully skin this out.  In some game animals, you will have to dig deep to extract the skin.  In a whitetail, just go slowly and carefully and skin always toward the skull and you can lift it out. 
• When the eyes are free, you will be able to skin down the nose toward the already-skinned mouth area.  Be so careful here.  The bridge of the nose is like a shin-bone.  The skin clings closely to the bone, making it an easy area to make a mis-cut and hard area to cover your mistake.  Take it slowly, skinning toward the skull, and walk your way down toward the nose.
• About half-way down the bridge to the nose, turn the head over and skin under the jaw toward the already-skinned lips.  Skin on out.  Flip the skin over the head and finish skinning out the bridge to the cut-nose-cartilage.
• Set the head and horns off to the side.  Place cape hair down on desk.  On left-hand side, punch ID numbers, identifying the mount with a customer number.  Place a sanding sponge under the cape, and use a sharp, thin-bladed knife to punch.  (Do not use an ice pick.  The holes won't  show up enough later to ID.) 
• This is enough done to freeze and finish later.  Fold the skin in toward the middle from the side.  Roll the back up toward the front.  Fold in the ears, and roll the front to meet the back in the middle. ( This 2-part rolling protects the ears but leaves the face and head far enough out that they will freeze quickly.)
• Wrap closely in a plastic bag.  Pull one set of ID tags from horns and attach to bag.  Freeze immediately.
• Saw horns from head, beginning in front to protect the back of the burrs.  With the face parallel to the table and someone holding the antlers firmly, slice straight down toward the table to the back of the eyes. 
• Push bridge of nose away from antlers.  You should hear a crack.  This will open the skull enough to continue sawing from first cut back on out the back of the skull.
• Shake brains out of skull plate.  Settle skull plate in salt.  Go on to the next deer.
•