Good comments Gentlemen, if it could be summed up in four words they would be cool, clean, quick and dry.
In the context of where we hunt there are some things I would like to add to the above comments. If an animal is gut shot it needs to be rinsed thoroughly then dried. We had to clean up a “Texas heart shot” caribou one time and put the whole skinned carcass in a fast flowing clear stream. After hanging and drying it was perfect, no lost meat. Once the skin is off and the meat is cool you have to keep it dry or it goes sour quickly. If the temperature is over 40 degrees this happens very quickly. Then it is the problem of keeping varmints out of it. They can be everything from microbes to grizzly bears. For the microbes we put the meat in game bags that have been soaked in a solution of citric acid. This slows the growth of bacteria and flies won’t land on the bags to lay eggs. We also mix a solution from the dry powder to spray on the areas of the meat that dry slowly like the rear quarters where they are cut from the pelvis. Sometimes we also liberally sprinkle fine ground black pepper on the wet areas to get them to dry more quickly. The pepper takes the moisture out and the flies also will not touch anything that is coated with the pepper. I try not to bone meat in the field because every surface you expose to air is another that will get bacteria on it or will have to be trimmed. Hanging the bags in a tree generally stops most of the rest of them. This has to be 12 feet plus from the ground if there are grizzly bears in the area. We usually take a tarp or cheap poncho with us to make a tent over the meat to keep the rain off so it will stay dry. Generally I don’t drag game if there are bears around. The drag trail lets them follow you right back to camp. The bears of Montague and Kodiak have gotten to be experts at stealing deer. With bigger game you have to carry it out in pack loads on your back because access for horses or ATVs just isn’t possible. That’s why most of our successful moose hunts occur within a mile of a river that you can float or a spot where you can land an airplane. Usually success ratios go down with the ease of accessibility. We have passed up giant bulls that were just too far away from any transport to shoot. We use the thin commercial game bags for airplane hunts but for float hunts we make our own from linen table cloths that the local commercial laundry discards as rags. The linen is very strong and they are cheap if you get the laundry to keep the stained ones for you without cutting them up. They are about the perfect size for moose quarters if you just fold them over and double stitch the edges. The thicker linen is tight enough to keep out the sand and dirt that always seems to show up in the raft or boat around glacial rivers. It will go right through the thin bags. Wash and bleach them and they will last for several trips. We used to do all of our own cutting and wrapping but we have a family friend that does it for a living. Sometimes it just pays to turn it over to a professional. I like it when I bring in game and he says”nice and clean, this will be good eating”. I don’t usually have him add fat to the ground meat and if I do it is usually pork fat as the beef fat has too strong of flavor that “buries” the flavor of the game. We got weathered in on an airplane hunt one time for twenty days and the meat was still ok (the portion that we didn’t eat because we were out of everything else but rice). A Moose Wellington with mushrooms and a good Cabernet, nothing like it.