Hooks and bullets

Upstairs in the grad student cubicles at the department of fish and wildlife, or as I call it, the department of hunting and fishing, or, as someone else on campus once referred to it, the department of Hooks and Bullets, I notice above one student's desk (among the many photos of young men in camo displaying turkey fans and truckbeds spilling over with limp duck bodies and a black labrador retriever happily and softly holding a limp duck body in his mouth) a photograph of a fully assembled skeleton of a deer, maybe eight or ten point, I can't recall. That was a class project my senior year at Louisiana Tech, I heard a voice say, we stayed up late drinking beer, trying to put that thing together, and I put the ribs on backwards, I put them on this way (making a curving gesture across his chest) instead of this way. You dumbass, they said, you put the ribs on backwards. We used special little drill bits and little screws that taxidermists use, and wire to hold it together. I would like to try to draw that thing, I said.