Everyone who hunts needs to know: The key to useable meat is to get it skinned, dressed, quartered and COLD as soon as possible.
Ive seen deer hanging in a tree with the hide on for two days, with daytime temps in the 60s, only to be tken home...butchered and wrapped...only to be thrown out a few months later.
Because the meat was crap.
Do the work and get your meat to a locker within 24hrs at the latest. 6 hours is best.
Game bags come large enough for deer and antelope to go into whole, you don’t have to quarter the animal first. Gutting and skinning it first is always best, you do want to cool it off quickly.
You can even fit 1/2 an elk in some of them. I know because I shot a nice 5X5 bull elk two weeks ago here in Montana. We gutted it, caped out the top half for a nice mount, stuffed the top of the headless carcass in a large game bag and hauled it off to the processor. Temps in the low to upper 30’s the whole time.
You lose a lot of meat by quartering the animal so if the temps are cold enough I leave them whole. In Montana temps during rifle season are cold enough. Bow season is another story.
Where I hunt it’s pretty cold during whitetail, gun season. You gut it right away and hang it and it will cool properly. Wash the body cavity if you gut shoot it. Leave it together with the skin on and the meat stays clean until you butcher. I don’t wait more than 3 days to butcher. Even less if it warms up too much.