No animal should be treated like that, Tom said.

Every animal is treated like that, my grandfather said. He still had his rifle to his shoulder, ready, barrel pointed at the ground just uphill from me and the buck, as if he might shoot again at any moment.

We’ve never treated a buck like that, my father said. Never in our lives. Never in all the times we’ve hunted here.

We’ve done the same thing every time.

No we haven’t.

You think somehow you can be safe. You think you can be untouched. You think it’s possible to be moral.

More philosophy.

My grandfather smiled then. Smiled at my father. Different than I had ever seen him do before. And then he turned, still smiling, and pointed his rifle at me. Time to gut that buck, he said.

I thought he was going to pull the trigger. I froze, just instinct, and my father and Tom froze also, and waited. Whatever happened, they were not going to interfere, apparently.

But nothing happened. My grandfather only waited, his rifle pointed at me, and I unlocked from the buck, pulled my arm free from under his neck. I hadn’t realized one of my legs was around him, heel digging into his stomach as if into a stirrup. I freed myself and knelt in the dirt.

The buck’s eye still open, and he did not look dead. Only stunned, held in suspension somehow, but his face still the face of something alive, still taking in the world.

I scooted around to the front of him, my back now to the men. I could feel my grandfather’s rifle on me still. I turned my knife blade up and snagged the tip in the center of the buck’s belly, white hide, and I was careful to snag only the surface. Any deeper and I’d cut into the pale green stomach sack and release bile.

I was facing directly into the sunset, downslope on this fire road, and the sun was lying fat on the horizon and burning hot in my face and the breeze had died. I don’t know where it could have gone. I tugged lightly at the knife and the skin broke and the white hairs bloodless. The knife low and parallel to the cut, my fist lower against that belly, keeping everything at the surface, and as the hide parted a few inches the guts swelled into the gap, fragile membranes, slick and pooling in the light but I was partially blinded by that sun and worried I wouldn’t see the tip catching a membrane, so I slipped my left hand in below the knife, fingers caressing the entrails and riding just beneath muscle, the blade skimming through above.

Ritual. What it does is make the horrifying normal. I was settling in to this gutting already, finding it easy, no longer feeling anything at all for the buck, for the life I had taken. The killing of a few minutes ago already far in the past, shielded. And the men calmed also. No more speaking, only standing in place and watching what they had watched a hundred times before and had themselves performed from the first day they were men.

A ripping sound through muscle and hide, tearing of all that had been woven together, the blade sharp and able to slide along that surface. An opening of all that had been concealed, the inner workings in each of us, a man not so different from a buck. Opening until the sternum, rib cage, brisket, end of the cut.

I wiped my knife on his hide and resheathed it, and then I opened that belly, both hands pulling the muscle away, dark cavern of heat and steam and walls of blood and bone, and it should have spilled out toward me, but the buck’s belly was facing uphill and this would not work.

I grabbed his hind legs and stood with one foot on the stock of my rifle, to keep it pinned. I swung those legs straight into the sky and then heaved against them and this time the buck could not twist against me. This time I rolled him, hams first and gut and chest, then stepping forward to grab his forelegs and rotating those, too, and pulling at his antlers to flop his head.

I knelt, my back to the sun, the buck and men before me, and as I opened that cavern again all was made iridescent in the last light. The stomach sack the largest orb, green-gray with hints of pearl, the liver a deep red in loaves shaped and set here somehow and impossible. The intestine a yellowish and lumpy tubing. The diaphragm shimmering, thinnest of walls. All sliding toward me, spilling out against my knees. The breath of it.

I used my knife to cut the diaphragm in a large arc, thin sheen falling away to reveal lung and heart and rib, cut the esophagus, and felt in the intestines for the colon, stiff tube, raised this into the light and cut through then ran my hands along it to discharge the dark pellets until all was flat and smooth and empty.

I cut through the large vein and artery that fed the liver, resheathed my knife and reached in close and scooped everything toward me with both arms, gentle shifting of dough, my fingers easing apart membranes, but what was remarkable was how little was attached. These guts living separate from the rest of the body, in their own world. My face against his hide, his scent and sweat mixing with these other vapors, and my arms pulled from this other void unrelated to him.

My hands sliding along the walls, searching, and finally all was smooth and I scooted my knees back and pulled everything onto the dirt.

Save the liver, my grandfather said. Don’t let that liver touch ground.

I made sure those dark red loaves floated on top of the mass that had become a creature entire, its own being. Something dredged up from the ocean, slick and shielded by no more than membranes, brought somehow to this dry slope of burr and thorn. Intestines like tentacles.

I would leave it here, and it would dry and pucker at the surface and deflate and be torn apart and eaten by coyotes and ants and everything else, but I knew that first I would have to eat part of the liver. I would have the first bite. I looked up and could see all three men waiting. Turned gold-red by the sunset, their faces no longer white, the landscape bled into them. My grandfather with his rifle held low now in one hand, no longer at his shoulder. Face creased and unreadable, gone, soulless, only waiting.

I cut away a hunk with my knife, a hunk the size of my fist. It had to be enough to fill a hand. How did I know that rule, and was it even a rule? Or was it a discovery repeated in each of us, inevitable?

I knelt before that buck, before the men, and lifted raw liver to my mouth. Still hot as I bit down through, and no resistance, only hot mush that tasted of blood. I could feel myself retching but held it back and chewed and swallowed and bit again and thought of the dead man, thought of eating his liver and could feel the bile rising, my chest and throat convulsing, but I held it in and swallowed again and could taste the inside of every man and beast, could taste that we are made of the same things forgotten and ancient beyond reckoning from when the first creatures crawled from the soup. Taste of seawater and afterbirth in my mouth, reminder of where we came from. And why hadn’t I done this when I killed the poacher? It was the same. Everything was the same, and I should have tasted his liver and then his heart.

I mashed what was left of the liver into my mouth and made myself finish it. Poison catcher. A taste I wasn’t sure would ever leave.

The sun gone down, in shadow now but still reddish, the men waiting. I had the heart still to eat.

Torn diaphragm sagging in remnants, lungs frothy looking, orange tinge to the red. As if our breath were foam, a reminder again of the sea, of our origins. And the heart hanging in place rigid and marbled in white, a thousand miniature designs reaching upward across its surface, every thread of muscle and blood and fat.

I grabbed this heart in one hand, tough and rubbery, same size and shape as a human heart, no different. My other hand holding the knife, reaching upward inside to find the large arteries and veins and cut through, vines in a forest enclosed. Severing all, and more blood, endless blood, running out now hot over my fingers. I pulled the heart free, held it in the open air and turned it over to drain onto the dirt, blood heavy and thick and pooling in the dust.