OK, quick improvised knife story.

Two of my friends from work, walked in a couple of miles on an early November morning to hunt deer. They split up at the location and stand-hunted at 2 different ground blinds about 500 yards apart. One guy has all of his hunting equipment in a backpack, which he placed on the ground in the blind.

A little after daylight a buck walks past this guy and he shoots, it runs off into heavy cover, mortally wounded. The hunter waits a couple minutes then heads off tracking it through the bush; but he leaves the backpack of equipment in the blind. Eventually he finds the deer dead a few hundred yards away.

In the meantime Hunter # 2 goes to the blind where he heard the shots from but no one is there, he figured this partner missed and he picks up the backpack to carry it out to the vehicle.

Hunter #1 returns to the blind to get his equipment, including his knife to field dress the deer, but finds his backpack gone?

So Hunter # 1 returns to the deer and with the sharp edge of a rock manages with considerable effort to open up an 8 inch slit in the deer's abdomin, through which he pulls out the stomach/intestines of the deer from below the diaphragm to above the bladder. He then walked out to the truck, found his buddy with the "lost" backpack and they both returned to the deer to finish field dressing it properly with a knife and extract it out of the bush.

At this time about 20 years ago my EDC knife was a medium-sized Swiss Army Knife (this was pre-multitool time), I think it was called a Lumberjack model. The blade was only about 3 inches long and I wanted to see if it was big enough to field dress a deer. So the next year I shot a nice big buck on opening day and that little SAK cleaned it out no problem, I even used the saw blade to split the pelvic bone.

I have never done this with a rock, or piece of an ammo can, but if you take your time and do not abuse the edge it is amazing what you can do.

Mike