ELLWOOD CITY — Doug Peffer worked a knife into a large buck hanging from a hoist in his butcher shop, pulling the hide from its body.

It's one of hundreds of deer he'll process this season.

With the two-week rifle season under way, it's not just hunters who will be busy. The processors who butcher deer expect a stream of business as hunters return from the woods with their bounty.

Scott Donley, 33, a sales engineer from Ellwood City, shot his first buck — an 8-pointer weighing about 180 pounds — on Monday morning. He had tracked it for two hours before shooting it with his father's 30.06 rifle.

"It's Miller time," Donley said. Besides keeping the meat, he planned to have the head mounted for $350.

Peffer can skin and butcher a deer by himself in about an hour. A 150-pound deer will yield about 70 pounds of venison in roasts, steaks, burger and loins. At $60 a deer, that's a lot of venison at under a buck a pound.

"I guess it's in my blood," said Peffer, who has been processing deer for 18 years. "It's paid for college tuitions, weddings. It helped me through some bad times."

Monday, when the temperature climbed into the 60s, Peffer would do no butchering. That would come later in the week, when the rush slows down; most deer are taken in the first three days of the season.

The immediate task was getting deer into a large walk-in cooler. At midday, the cooler held some 50 bucks and does and hunters continued to bring him more.

"What you want to do if you got to travel any distance is get to an ice machine. Get ice in the cavity," to prevent spoilage, Peffer said.

Peffer has been butchering since mid-September, during bow and muzzleloader seasons, and said he'll probably process about 800 deer by the end of the season.

Michael Lavia, who is in his second year of running Breezie View Deer Processing in Yorkanna, York County, said he had 10 deer Monday.

"It's mostly bucks right now. I got one buck in that was part albino, so that was interesting," he said.

"It's something that I enjoy. I thought it would be something to give back to the hunters," said Lavia, a former grocery butcher for 14 years.

Most hunters, he said, take their deer to a processor. "I think it's more of a convenience thing," he said.

Not all venison ends up on hunters' tables. A growing number of hunters have been taking part in a program that donates venison to food banks.

Hunters Sharing the Harvest was formed in 1991, in part to combat the growing anti-hunting sentiment, said John Plowman, the group's executive director.

Last year, a year in which the deer harvest was down, the nonprofit donated some 70,000 pounds of venison to food banks across the state, said Plowman, of Lower Paxton Township. The meat is ground for burgers, chili or sauce.