I was not ready. When she and her sister began carefully browsing the feeder after a single hour, it felt like something had gone wrong. The sanity test of my waiting and the natural world it reveals still lay ahead: the darkening changes in the sky, disappearing contours of brush, the straining of my senses. But I would not turn away a perfect offering just because I was not kept waiting. I have done that before and driven home with coolers filled with ice and nothing else. I shot. She jumped straight up and ran into the cedar and her sister ran into the field.

I breathed, opened the bolt, and leaned it against the wall of the stand, promising myself I would wait. An hour would be prudent. I looked out and slowed my breath as my limbs tingled with oxygen. I had done an irreversible thing.

There was blood, bright red, like fake blood. Smears on low twigs, heavy drops in the dirt. On my hands and knees I followed her through a stand of cedar, into an opening, through another stand. Here, where the brush ended, she had seen the open field, taken a deep breath and pushed, but instead of flying over the grass, she blew a spout of red froth out the hole in her side and went down. She lay there waiting for me. Warm, her eyes wet and sharp, legs askew.

I touched the fur on her head. Some fondle and pet the animals they kill, as if love had been what they were after. I felt this urge but stayed my hand, a strange scruple, given what I was about to do.

I arranged her on her back, legs splayed apart, and made a cut near the base of the tail. Holding this edge, I pushed the knife into the invisible layer between the anus and the pelvis. The skin was diaphanous, offering no resistance, ducking the blade. It was for this I kept the knife sharp. With careful strokes, I completed the circle and pulled. The end of her colon came out an inch, which was not enough. I worked the blade deeper around the delicate white tube as brown pellets shifted inside. I sought to demonstrate that this was not the south end of a single, magical being, but a discrete organ, separable from its companions. When it was loose enough to pull out several inches, my back ached from crouching.

I made a small incision below the rib cage and went down around the mammary glands, relieved she had not been nursing. The air was near freezing and my fingers would have been numb by now, but the meat was hot and kept my digits loose and sensitive. I inserted two fingers and placed the tip of the knife between them facing up and slid the structure just under the skin and fascia without breaking the pressurized intestines which pushed up into the night air behind my hand. At the sternum, I shifted my grip and yanked the knife through all the way to the neck. Steam came up through my headlamp like I was hovering over a giant bowl of soup.

I reached in and groped until my fingers encircled the windpipe, a hose encased in muscle and soft connective tissue. I got each slippery finger around, and yanked, exposing it, cutting it.

The diaphragm separating digestive from cardiovascular compartments was now a trampoline open on one side. The opposite edge was submerged in hot blood had to be cut by feel and, regrettably, I nicked the tenderloins. While massaging my wife’s temples, I had watched a pair of gloves at this distance search through her in a bowl of blood, finding my daughter, untangling and lifting her out like an organ with its own organs, wiped down, weighed and scored, swaddled and set aside.

My back was getting worse, cantilevered over the carcass from my knees. I felt the failure of my own degenerated discs, where bone met bone, and felt with my fingers and with my knife, the shining white perfection of warm cartilage and ligament.

Grabbing the free end of the windpipe, I yanked, pulling the heart, the wrecked lungs, and everything else down into the unified cavity. With both hands, I scooped it all, everything, past the old moorings of the diaphragm, down between the legs and over the damn of the pelvis, pulling the loose colon in and over with the flood. To remove the sloshing liter of blood remaining, I had to hoist up her head and shoulders on my thighs.

I retrieved the heart and liver from the gut pile and cleaned them of viscera, setting them aside like newborn babies, then stood and stretched my back. There was blood on my thighs, one sleeve rolled up, I panned the bushes with my headlamp. I placed a sling and carabiner on a branch in a nearby mesquite and ran a rope through it.  She was still heavy and I shredded my latex gloves on the rope pulling her off the ground.

Finally able to work at eye level, I cut around her ankles, down the legs. My knife traveled along a loose boundary between the deer and its’ skin, crossing a structure of wet fat, fascia, and a sheet of muscle that made me think of a horse twitching its hide. I yanked the skin down off the rump, down the torso, stopping to cut, pulling, cutting. After freeing the forelegs, I said goodbye and pulled the cape down around her head like a sweater that won’t come off a three year old, just before that long moment when she is blind and her mouth and nose are obstructed, facing straight ahead, trusting me against the signals from the deep, primitive part of her brain.

Donning my reading glasses, I considered the tiny bubbles forming in the fascia, the product of one of many transformations happening in this animal. The smell was not of blood or iron but simply of deer.  To expose as much of the neck as possible, I yanked down in jerks that made me concerned about the rope, my knees in mud made from blood. My pants felt like they were catching on my knee somehow, pulling up when I squatted but not falling back when I stood. My work had become aerobic. When I paused, my awareness expanded abruptly from the carcass in my headlamp to the night around me. I pulled up the cuff of my loose carpenter’s pants, then the long underwear, carefully lifting it past my knee. A prickly pear thorn protruded from the soft place southeast of my kneecap. I rubbed the fingers of my right hand to warm them and remove dried blood, and carefully pinched the end of the needle, and pulled. The thing came easily and seemed to keep coming, the better part of an inch. What had it done in my meat? I carefully swung my leg, it seemed ok.

I found a grip on the head covered in inside-out skin and turned it while bracing the hanging carcass with my hip until it came to the end of its natural range of motion, and wrenched it, hearing a movement inside that sounded like someone dropping a handful of wooden alphabet blocks. I worked my knife through the joint and it was free.

The carcass, hanging out of a black plastic contractor bag, was across my shoulders as I carefully walked back to the house and quartered it in the sodium light. There was no steam, and when I closed the lid of the cooler I no longer felt like the companion of a dead thing, but the owner of forty pounds of venison.

A shower and a good night’s sleep, the drive home, the butchering and the packing of the freezer: these things sutured together the opening torn into the world. For the most part, I don’t think about where my food comes from, except when I thaw a two-pound lump of butcher paper, and the separate cuts fall apart, and I smell the deer. It is almost too personal to eat. The cast iron is hot when it lands, rubbed in kosher salt and cracked black pepper, sending up new smells, charred protein and steam. I sear the outside, let it rest and serve it warm. It’s juicy and fresh tasting and still smells like deer. There is too much information and it doesn’t feel like food to me, but the smell is a red thread I follow back through the knife, along the blood trail in the meadow at night, on the wet cedar twigs, in the dirt. I can see all this from the kitchen when I watch my daughter and my wife eat but I don’t mention it. Some people don’t need that level of detail.

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