You could tell he hadn't done this a lot. At least not with elk. He had the heart and lungs out okay, and most the rumen, but was having trouble cutting the liver free. Even after I loaned him my scalpel, with its fresh blade, it still took him a while to realize the liver is attached to the rest of the body in only one spot.

I had spotted them with their elk down from almost a mile off, and with all the new roads in the gas fields, it took a while to find one to take me to them. As it was, I ended up parked fifty meters away. He left the elk and others as soon as I arrived, and greeted me before I had gone a dozen steps. Which is often a suspicious move, a person sent to delay the arrival of authority to the kill scene.

But not in this case. Just an extraordinarily polite young man. Don't think I've been called "sir" so many times in all the rest of hunting season. He told me immediately that his sister-in-law had gotten her elk, and I found all her paperwork was already correctly completed and forgotten in her pocket by the time we got back to the carcass.

I recognized him, but wasn't sure from where, which seems to be common for me. Then he reminded me. He and his buddies had come through my deer check station a couple weeks before, sans any sort of muffler or exhaust system on his horrendously loud rig.

He was quick to point out the muffler was all fixed, now. Something I already knew, since they had passed me a couple times earlier this morning, coordinating their hunt with a grandfather/granddaughter team in another truck that I came across more than four times in the course of the day.

It was the grandfather/granddaughter who finally approached the elk that everyone else had been circling, and got the day's shooting started.

The grandfather/granddaughter were parked next to my rig as I walked back for my scalpel and CWD sample kit, and the man mentioned a couple things about the young man, and the young woman with him.

Among those things was the fact they'd just gotten married. So upon my return, I congratulated them both, and took a position holding the rib case open as he finished gutting his new sister-in-law's elk.

Twenty days ago, he was a young punk beating around the countryside with his buddies, and now he's the man of the family, taking care of the bloody work as his new bride, and her sister, assisted.

Midway through cleaning out the poop chute, which he did not manage without rupturing a bowel and getting pre-poop on the meat, he noticed my name tag. And asked if I had kids.

Yep. One just graduated last year. In the same class as this young man and his bride, it turns out. She knew our son, even that he played "the small tuba" in band. The groom's name was familiar, so when I got home, I checked with the wife. Turns out he was one of our Cubs, so many years ago, in her den with our youngest son.

Finally the cleaning was done, and we rearranged the elk to give me access to her neck. Only to find the hunter had shot her through the neck, at the base of the skull, right exactly where I needed to find a couple lymph nodes to collect.

And could not. Even with the enthusiastic help of the newlyweds, pointing out rounded little masses in the bloody gel that a high-powered bullet leaves in living tissue. Finally I had to settle for a mandibular node. Not ideal for the testing the lab does, but they say it will work.

Then, with the sample properly sealed and labeled, I took off one of my blue surgical gloves, and offered the young man my hand across the dead elk. He took off his wool glove, and tentatively shook my hand in return, not sure exactly why.

You're doing it for all of us, I said, so...

Thank you.

His handshake became firm, and his smile a little more sober. And with that, I left. To find other elk hunters with their elk, and leaving the new groom with his new bride and new sister-in-law to load their elk.

Tuesday he ships out for Iraq.