smells a certain way. Likewise the inside of a deer. The guts of a pheasant have a specific aroma, and field dressing a rabbit is something nobody will ever forget, who has done it.

One of the things you don’t get, being removed from the production of your own food, is that the internal smells of animals being butchered share their aroma with the farts you have when you eat their flesh. Turkey farts smell like turkey innnards. Deer farts have that same distinctive aroma as a freshly field dressed deer.

In Africa, while I was hunting, one of our guides ripped off a particularly noisy and noisome fart, and it only took a second to remember where I’d smelled that smell before- in an emergency room, where a colleague at the steel mills was having his intestines reattached to one another and reinserted in his body cavity after having had them gouged partially out by heavy machinery.

Anyway, in camp, everyone else waved their hands and laughed at the rank smell, holding their noses and smiling, but I was a little chilled, despite the summer’s heat. I looked at the guide, and he uncharacteristically looked away from me. He knew; I knew.