*Content Warning: Gore. Anatomical stuff. Death of an innocent animal. Swearing.

I'm from rural Michigan, where everybody has a deer story. Here's mine.

From my dorm window, on an October Friday during my freshman year of college, I watched my dad's blue Suburban pull into a parking spot in front of the building. I threw my purple duffle bag over my shoulder and headed down the stairs.

My dad, stepmom, and three younger step-siblings were spending the weekend at my dad's hunting property about forty minutes from campus. (In the Midwest, we measure distance in how long it takes to drive there. How many miles was it? I have no idea. Twenty? Eight? Fifty? Don't know. Kilometers? Haha! No.) My dad had called me that morning to try to convince me to come spend the night out there. He promised there would be Taco Bell for lunch and I'd get to see my dog. I was also homesick, so I agreed.

I wove through the students on the sidewalk walking to class and climbed into the Suburban.

My step-mom, Audrey, was in the passenger seat, rocking some cowgirl style; lots of denim, big hair, black boots with bling. Dad, who is introverted like myself, marvels at the fact that she, "Can walk into a room full of complete strangers, somehow spend hours chatting and come out with five new friends."

After saying our hellos, Audrey frowned. "I've been sitting here wondering how come nobody smiles at each other? They're all passing by acting like they don't even see each other."

"I don't know. You walk by, like, hundreds of people a day, you can't smile at all of them. It would hurt your face." And people would think you're a creep, I thought.

Dad turned around in his seat to slap a cheesy gordita crunch and a bag of Twizzlers into my hands. He was wearing one of his usual deer sweatshirts and jeans. He had a whole collection of deer sweatshirts. He had the ones that cool kids wear ironically now, with majestic bucks in front of sunsets that said things like "The Great Outdoors" or simply "Whitetail Deer". He also had others that half-jokingly boasted his deer hunting proficiency, with wide-eyed cartoon deer and sayings such as "Buck's Worst Nightmare."

He's always had a way of shoving nonnutritous combinations of food at his kids. On a car ride he'd pull a bag of Bugles and a box of Little Debbies out from under the seat and pass them around. When my brother and I were younger and couldn't be trusted to stay behind in the trailer, we would have to sit in the hunting blind with him. When we got wiggly and whiney he'd break out the Planters Peanuts, beef jerky, and Fruit by the Foot.

Now he does the same thing to my kids. We can stop by at three o'clock in the afternoon and he'll stick his head in the refrigerator and come out with an armful of food. "Hey try this dessert Audrey made. It's got pretzels and marshmallows and three different kinds of Jell-O pudding. Oh and we went to the deli today, here's some salami, and I've got some leftover pizza I can warm up." In a flash, all three kids are perched on vintage milk cans at the kitchen island with plates of reheated pizza, sloppy pudding dessert, salami and a Hershey's kiss as a garnish. Then he'll slide three Mason jars of well water across the countertop to wash it all down with.

Anyway, there were two trailers at deer camp: a regular travel trailer, and one that used to be an office trailer, with beige linoleum flooring and a space heater and cots set up in it. Dad had gone into the woods with his bow and I was hanging out in the travel trailer with Audrey, the kids and our dog. It was crowded and noisy and "60 Minutes" with occasional static was on the tiny television. Then Audrey's walkie-talkie started making noise. (Yes, she and Dad communicated with walkie-talkies. It was 2001, and if they had cell phones, they might not have had predictable service in rural mid-Michigan.)

Dad had shot a deer, but there was some kind of problem. It was hard to tell what the problem was over the walkie-talkie, but Audrey seemed worried. A few minutes later, Dad burst through the door of the trailer in his head-to-toe camouflage coveralls.

"Anna, get your coat on! You gotta help me with this thing!"

The "thing" I needed to help with was a deer he'd shot that ran into a swamp and gotten caught somehow and wasn't yet dead. He shoved a pair of his clunky waterproof boots at me and I put them on.

(This is where it starts to get gross and sad, so this is your last warning.)

In a typical deer camp scenario, I would not be anyone's first choice to help with this situation. In a typical deer camp scenario, I wouldn't even be there, as I didn't hunt deer or drink beer (yet- regarding the beer, not the deer). But since the other options in this situation were Audrey, who weighed less than a hundred pounds, and her children all under the age of ten, I was it.

I had no idea how far my role in this was going to go.

Dad and I climbed into the Scout, a little olive green off-road truck-like vehicle from the seventies with a hard top and no plates because it never left the property. He drove us across the field toward the trail into the woods. The headlights bounced around as we made our way down the bumpy trail, illuminating the bare gray branches and tall, bushy evergreens in flashes.

The Scout turned off the trail and came to a stop. Dad turned off the ignition, but kept the lights shining into the marshy area ahead, full of tangled branches and soggy fallen leaves, softened by a layer of mist. He instructed me to wait there, slung his bow over his shoulder, grabbed a flashlight and ventured into the water, snapping branches along the way.

I stood next to the Scout and watched him search for the wounded deer until he went beyond the reach of the headlights. Then I waited and worried, until there was a distant burst of sound: rustling and splashing and deer snorts and Dad swearing a lot and a guttural wail. Then quiet again.

"Dad?" I called into the silence. When he didn't answer I yelled, "Dad?!" again, sounding a little more shrieky and unhinged.

Finally, I heard him. "Anna! I need your help now."

Dad emerged from the darkness, dragging his feet through the muck and pressing his hand against his thigh.

"What happened?"

"Well, I found him. He was still alive, but he's dead now."

"You shot it?"

"No, I slit its throat."

"Are you kidding me?!" Then I noticed the dark blood stain on the pant leg of his coveralls. "Ugh! Why?!"

He was wide-eyed and wired on adrenaline. "The flashlight died and I couldn't see shit out there and by the time I found him, he was right in front of me. He was all tangled and thrashing around. And I didn't want to shoot him again and scare him more, so I got behind him and," he demonstrated how he wrapped one arm around the deer's head and cut across its neck with the other. "But he moved his head and I cut my friggin hand, too!" The skin between his thumb and index finger was bloodied and gaping open. "I can't really move my thumb so I must've cut something important."

"Holy shit, Dad!"

"I need you to help me drag the deer to the Scout. It's big. I dragged it some of the way, but can't do it myself anymore."

I followed him to the dark heap of lifeless deer, grabbed an antler and tried not to look at its face as we pulled it.

Michigan whitetail deer are bigger than those little scrappy deer in more Southern states. The Michigan Department of Natural Resources says a whitetail buck usually weighs between 130 and 200 pounds. And it was a "big one", so it was heavy.

When we stopped for a break, my shoulder was aching. "Can't we leave it till tomorrow?" I asked.

"And who's gonna be around to help me tomorrow?" He rolled his eyes. "Come on, we can't leave it laying in the water. The meat will be no good!"

Somehow we got the deer lifted into the back of the Scout and Dad drove back to camp, with his bleeding hand still pressed to his leg. At that point, I thought the job was done for the night. I wrongly assumed the next step in the plan would be for Dad to seek medical attention for his hand.

After Dad showed off the deer to Audrey and my step-siblings, he announced that it was time to "gut" the deer. We pulled the deer onto the tailgate and turned it belly-up. Then Dad handed me a pair of blue nitrile gloves.

"Okay, you're gonna gut it. Put the gloves on."

"I can't do it!" I protested.

"You'll do fine. I'll tell you what to do. It'll be like your anatomy lab; a learning experience."

"In anatomy lab there's no blood though."

"The blood isn't going to shoot out at you. The cold will slow it down. Put the gloves on. I can't do it because I have to keep pressure on my hand. You have to do this or else the meat will all go to waste."

He had wrapped a white towel around his hand at that point, which was already becoming soaked with blood.

"Don't you think you should go to a hospital?" I asked.

"Later. First the deer. We gotta get this done before it starts to bloat." He was clearly still riding the adrenaline rush; he was all jittery and didn't complain about his hand hurting at all.

I put on the blue gloves and Dad handed me a wicked looking sharp knife. Audrey kept a flashlight pointed at the deer and the kids gathered nearby, watching in eager anticipation.

"Okay," Dad said, "first you have to grab the balls and cut them off." I froze. "Alright, you don't have to act like you don't know where the balls are. Come on," he encouraged, pushing one of the legs to the side a bit more, "they're right there."

So I did that. Then I had to cut a line all the way up the abdomen. After that, it's kind of a blur. With his good hand, Dad pointed out and described where to cut next. Basically the entire digestive system needs to be separated and removed to avoid contamination of the meat. Cutting the tubes at the top end and bottom end, then the diaphragm. If you must know more, there are YouTube videos for that.

Once all the intestines and stuff were released, everything slid out of the deer in a big sloppy mess and onto the ground. The sound it made was just as you'd imagine. The dog swooped in and sniffed it. I thought I might throw up.

"Okay, now we have to hang it up so the meat will be tender."

"Oh, we have to hang it up, too? When does this end?!" I asked in exasperation.

He laughed. "After we hang it up, we're done for tonight. Promise."

By the time the deer was tied up, hanging by its legs from a tree, it seemed like the sun should have been rising. I was sure that the whole ordeal took the entire night. But it actually was only a couple of hours. Dad did eventually make it to a hospital and had a ligament repaired and his hand stitched back together.

This was the first, and likely the last, time I've ever field dressed a deer. Unless we wind up in some apocalyptic scenario where I have to hunt and gather food for my family. And if that happens, and YouTube is unavailable, I guess I'll have a bit of experience to work with.