There were well over 20 of us. So many they had to turn some away.

Not because there wasn't room in the room. Still plenty of seats.

They just didn't have enough heads.

Deer heads, that is. Stinking, rotten, fluid-leaking deer heads. Folks been collecting 'em for months for this. Lopping heads off every reasonably fresh roadkill they came across.

Now it was time to dig in.

Nine body-less remains of once living deer, spread out on the rear end of a flatbed truck. Now to be disected to locate and extract the retropharyngeal lymph glands. Surrounded by folks in red shirts and blue latex gloves, plus a few in the grey or dark green shirts of the local reservation.

We had an hour of orientation before, dealing little with the disease we will be sampling for (chronic wasting disease, of course) and more on procedures. How to blow in and inflate the latex gloves before slipping them on. How to change scalpel blades without slicing yourself to the bone (easy to do, the vet with scars on his fingers could aver), how to sterilize the tongs and scalpel between samples.

When asked about the creamy white disinfectant, the vet couldn't be specific as to its chemical nature. "But if it can denature the prion it can't be good for you. It's gotta be carcinogenic, hallucinogenic, and every kind of "genic" you can think of."

"So don't drink it."

He glossed over the detailed survey the hunters will be expected to complete, particularly on where they killed their animal. (Now there will be a project... as the vet explained, some of these folks don't even know what state they're in.) The stick-on barcodes that will link samples with hunters, and the website they will use to find the results on their deer.

And then the more interesting stuff. Finding the angles of the jaw. Cutting a curved incision from corner to corner, pulling back the larynx, and finding the little grey masses below. And how to scrounge around for the mandibular lymph glands if the retros aren't available (like ours... a vehicle-mangled deer that had been finished off with a shot to the brain, thereby splattering one retro lymph to smithereens).

All did not start well, with my partner breaking the scalpel and jamming it across his thumb. But in the end, and after swiping a second head, we were both comfortable in what we were doing. (Okay, so he was. I did this last December,and lo and behold, deer this year have their pharyngeals exactly where last year's deer had theirs).

But it was good training, and necessary. Suspect a couple of those folks who have volunteered to help with the sampling this fall have never handled anything without scales on it. Or feathers.

Now, to order my porta-potty for all the help I'll have at check station next month. (And I'm not kidding... actually going to have a major convenience of civilization out there along the highway. No more peeing in bottles. For a few days, anyway.)

Oh, and as we were packing everything away, a final compliment from the vet and his staff. We're one of the last areas of the state to get this training, and according to them, we've had the freshest heads of all.

That's important, you know.