The deer was really dead. Vicki got sick as soon as they took it out of the body bag and hoisted it up on the, the hoisty thing. The deer was about as dead as can be safely recommended. Some guy who looked like my mom's ex-boyfriend got sick when they cracked its pelvis open. I laughed. Funny shit. Funny sounds. Why is that grammatically incorrect? What?

The ranger guy was probably Satan. He was from Minnesota and he had jet-black black hair and sunken eyes and a sinisterly handsome mole on his cheek and that Prince fringe beard with a grown-out goatee. I liked him. He was always very smiley with his Minnesoty accent. Jim or something (his name). Everyone at this god damn camp had come to terms with death, or at least other people's. Terren had little pets that died every hour on the hour, enough dead fish and rabbits and eskimos to mar an army of folk-singing lesbian FBI agents into existence. You knew the Jim guy had imagined himself dead on a chain bleeding vinegar out of his ass like a dead deer. Or at least I was. It made me giddy. Actually, Satan Jim Guy probably just watched Sex in the City like a normal person and didn't worry too much about drowning in formaldehyde when he was eating popcorn chicken at home after work. Good guy. Real solid. Always wore a hat. I was going to ask him for a button but I was kind of out of it and then I forgot later.

Jim Satan stabbed the deer in the ass like a vampire bird who was getting paid, looking like Dennis miller with bloody fingers. "And, uh, remember to always wear gloves," Dennis Miller Satan Jim guy grinned at us with bare hands looking like he was taking out a faulty transmission so he could eat it. He parted the red skin with a shiny knife, like when my cat got neutered, and pulled out a clear plastic bag filled with an assortment of brightly colored beach toys for $1 every day made in mexico. Actually it was deer guts wrapped in red flannel. There was no flannel. Never mind. Like a wet duffel bag full of water balloons. No, I forgot! First he took the jaw out so they could tell how old it was. It made a sound like bones cracking. Sometimes I forget that bones are made out of bone stuff and not space age transparent fiberglass alloy scraped off of Skylab. The deer had probably forgotten that too. The bone popped out and left the deer looking like a former minor league catcher looking like a sick human cartoon character telling kids not to chew smokeless tobacco and get jaw cancer and have your jaw removed and look dumb. The deer was dead anyway. It turned out to be Barely Legal, just beary baringly not a Spotted Foal which gets amenities or something, that Geneva Convention thing. Not that it mattered at this point. It's dead. Its name is Yossarian. No it wasn't. But it would have been funny. That's a Catch-22 joke. Never mind.

I am the deer! No I'm not. I was going to write this from the perspective of the deer but I decided not to. It sounded like a dumb idea anyway. I just thought I'd tell you.

So then he snapped the deer's pelvis in half, I forget with what, he said the sounds were better then they were older or fresher or something. I thought the sounds were great! Wow! He pulled out all its rubbery fat guts with mysterious no fat to be noted later and halfheartedly hosed them clean of the pierced bladder's escaping contents. He called the antlers horns. He made a pretend liver fluke out of a piece of its liver and talked about this guy who had always fried up the liver without checking and had been eating fried flukes unconsciously his whole life and made a funny face when Jim Satan found thirty perky liver flukes living productive liver fluke lives in the guy's deer's liver but it wud jes protein when ya fry um up, gol dander! Our deer had no flukes but a billion ticks on its soft underbelly. That's why he had to make one. He ran a knife down each tiny ventricle in each lung looking for moving white hairs. The deer's eyes were closed because its eyes were full of flies. Or open. Something. I kept spelling 'flukes' 'fluckes' just now. They have to look at things to gauge the health of the herd. They keep the evidence of sex or something. They keep some things. They give some things back. It's give and take.

Then we took the dead deer to the zoo as a present for the deer-eating mammals and reptiles. We had driven the dead deer to the check station too. That's where we were. I didn't know till after, both times. I would have wanted to make it ride shotgun and wear an orange hat.