Aagje

Not exactly. Here's where about 2/3 of the legs (and quarters, and presumably all the guts and pelt and arrow and whatnot) ended up: That's an unreachable ledge, or at least I couldn't figure out how to get up there. Alas! Still vaguely amused to have bits of Mr. Bear strewn across the cliffside.

Awkward bear carcass location: This is the ledge of rock just above the woodshed across from the Trapper's Cabin. Going to be a bit tricky getting my arrow back from this one! (Edit: After quartering the bear, half the legs and quarters fell to the ground, half on a partial ledge below this one; God knows where the arrow, pelt, and guts went. Probably some flew off to FM or something wacky like that. Whee!)

If playing on Stalker or Interloper, you may well want to level your Cooking skill to 5 as soon as possible (to avoid intestinal parasites). So, obviously cook everything in sight -- reishi mushroom preparations (mm, shrooms -- look at the pretty aurora, far out, man...), rose hip tea, canned food, and so on. But since you may not wish to eat any of the wolf meat at first from all those wolves you've (hopefully) beaten off with your hatchet/improvised hatchet, one thing you can do to increase your cooking skill quickly is to harvest little bitty 0.1kg chunks of flesh from the wolves; yes, you'll need to cook each one individually, but that's rather the point, isn't it? Ahh, but how do you get those 0.1kg chunks, you ask? Well, let me show you. In the harvesting screen, go up to the maximum (in this image, that'd have been 5.4kg), then drop it down as low as you can -- in this case, 0.4kg. Then, as you begin harvesting, cancel out when you're only slightly done -- on PC, hit Escape. You should be able to get tiny little chunks out by doing that, until you get the carcass down to x.1kg of meat remaining. If you're really lucky, you can get that .1kg remaining down to the point where it only takes 1 minute of in-game time to harvest by hand. (In this instance, the carcass has frozen to the point where I can't use my hand any longer, but it's certainly possible!) So, that's ~50 chunks of meat per wolf that you can use to level your cooking skill, and it's often faster to strip teeny tiny little chunks off one by one than it is to get nice big 1kg slabs o' meat. As an added bonus, using 0.1kg chunks of meat as decoys works just as well as using an entire 1kg slab. So keep a couple of those around to make the other wolves happy and off your back while you drag your pounds of flesh back to your cooking fire!

Conventional wisdom is that hatchets are more effective than knives in wolf struggles. As you say, YMMV.

Well, sure, but then you have to wait for it to burn out. *yawn* Granted, there's not a whole lot else to do with your time in the Hut, but having 2-3 fires can easily double the rate at which you start new fires. We must be efficient!

You can stand just inside the doorway of the Mountaineer's Hut on TWM and work campfires outside the door. Why would you bother, I hear you ask? Well, if you're doing the Nomad challenge (as I am at the moment), you get credit for being in the Hut, and you can still skill up your Firestarting skill and/or work towards the Fire Master badge. I don't believe those campfires get the outdoor-fire burn length benefit, but I suppose you can't have everything.