First, your have to take a Missouri department of conservation approved hunter's safety course. I'm sure you can find those on the MDC website. You might not be able to hunt legally this year. Any place that sells hunting permits abs tags should have hunting regulation booklets. Are you planning to hunt archery season or rifle season? Rifle season is i think a week and a half long, archery season is four months long i think. As mentioned by another poster, there are a lot of pubic hunting areas around, but they might have different species rules, so be sure to check it the booklet and the poster boards at the various MDC parking lots. Be aware that there are a lot of overly ambitious hunters in the woods on opening morning. That makes me a nervous enough to avoid rifle hunting opening morning (to be fair I don't know anytime that's been shot in a hunting accident, and my closest call was when I was doing to good of a job calling in a turkey). There's a lot of MDC land or by pleasant hope, around Stockton Lake, and there's a few thousand acres south west of Miller. Like someone else said, you really need to scout before season. Generally deer are more active right around sunrise and sunset, but during the rut they're out there running running around like oblivious horned up teenagers.

For me, working a deer up will take most of a day. One favor archery hunting and I favor waiting until the weather is cooler so I don't have to be in as big a hurry. Typical you'll field dress the deer where you kill it or nearby. That is disembowel it. For food safety reasons take care when cutting out the anus. Does are easier to butcher in this area because of the shape of their pelvis. You'll want a gambrel and hoist to hang the deer. Of course sharp knives will make the job easier and are safer. Skinning some deer is easier than others. I've seen videos where people successfully pull the hide off by hand (and with a gold ball and a four wheeler), but I usually pull and cut at the same time. If you want to tan the hide (which I've never done) i think you want try to get as little fat and muscle of with the hide as you can. Also, it's generally not recommended that you hose the carcass of at any point as that can facilitate bacterial growth. I typical find it fairly easy to quarter the joints out just by following the contours if the muscles with the knife, feeling for the tendons and ligaments. The front legs aren't really in a socket, so they might be easier. Depending on the damage done by the kill, i usually carve the meat off the neck rather than take the neck of like the legs. I should back up a little. When the hide is pulled before the knees i typically just cut the shins of with some limb loppers (yep, with my tree pruners). To remove the skull, i follow it's base through the meat with the knife, cutting some tendons, and then I'm usually able to twist it off the rest of the way. I usually turn almost all of the legs and neck into ground meat and jerky. Sometimes I'll cut roast or steak out of the back legs. I'm not a trained butcher, so I just cut it up how i feel like. I do tend to cut my deer lean and then grind some of it up with beef fat. Some of it I leave lean. I weigh it to get an 80% 20% ratio, but that my preference. I do that mainly for burgers. Everything else (meat loaf, chill, hamburger helper) I'll general just use lean. Sometimes I'll grind in some bacon ends for fun, and I use of fat if I'm making sausage. I've been able to get super cheap scrap fat from a butcher i know in the past. People often call the back strap a tender loin, but that is imprecise. The tender loin is in side the rib cage sort of behind the kidney area. If gutted properly, they should be pretty obvious. They're usually not very big compared to a pork or beef tenderloin you'll find at the grocery store. The back strap (probably like a human trapezius?) it's generally the hunter's favorite part of the deer. Your fish fillet skills might come in handy here. They're on either side of the spinal ridge running from the neck to nearly the pelvis. You'll run your knife down each side of the spine, then along the back of the ribs. I usually cut these down to one and two person serving sizes with maybe one or two family sizes depending on the size of the deer. I should have prefaced all of this with, I'm far from an expert, but this is what works for me. YouTube is our friend. I typically have discarded most of the ribs, but I might get a bone saw this year and try some smoked or bbq'd deer ribs this year. Also, I've seen a guy butcher a deer without gutting it. He had it hung, skinned it, cut off the quarters and back straps, and just made a longish incision in the lower abdomen and just sort of pushed the guts to the side and pulled the tender loins out. I'm more loquacious than i am experienced, but if you have any questions feel free to DM me.