Out in the courtyard of Kalispell Middle School on Wednesday was an unusual sight — deer and elk hides stretched tautly with rope on wooden frames lying fur side down on tarps.

Picking up hand tools, eighth-graders in Kris Schreiner’s Montana History class crouched around the hides, which were in different stages of the tanning process. This was the first time Schreiner was doing the project as part of a unit on the fur trade.

“That’s why they’re doing it in the more traditional sense, why they’re using hand tools and nothing mechanized,” Schreiner said, pointing to pelt scrapers and an all-purpose knife called an ulu.