"Oh my God!"

This he exclaimed as he threw himself at least two meters back from the truck, scattering hunters off to the sides. No minor concern, as he had a lethal weapon in one hand.

"Nobody said anything about worms!"

I guess his surprise was understandable. While this fellow who has been extracting retropharyngeal lymph glands from deer for the past two days works for the same outfit as I, the idea of cutting into your work is kind of new to him. As in, it just came up in the past few weeks.

He's a habitat specialist for aquatics. As he said, "I work with rocks!"

We had a load of California hunters come out, with two deer. Which were shifted around to lay side-by-side in the back of the truck, their heads hanging over the tailgate.

Stretches the necks, making the incisions at the back of the jaw that much easier. I had been standing right next to him as he worked, watching him slice down with the scalpel through the grey coated hide and red muscles, clear through the windpipe to the back of the throat.

As the head dropped and the slashed throat gaped open, the gash filled with a mass of wriggling, squirming worms.

Okay, okay. So they're not worms. They're maggots.

It looked like something you might see in a horror film, a disgusting mass inside once living flesh. 'Course, in films they normally use mealworms, a common food for small predacious pets.

These things were bigger. Much bigger.

And they're natural. While technically maggots, i.e. the larval forms for flies, they're called "bots". Probably to distinguish them from the larvae that live off of dead and rotting tissue and waste.

These live off the living.

Laid in the nostrils, they hatch and make their way up into the nasal passages and throat, particularly around the tonsils, and then just hang around, wriggling, for the entire summer as they grow.

Seen 'em before, of course, but never in a mass like this. Poor little buck must have been in misery, 'cause the hide of these crawly things is covered with hard little knobs, and the ends with hooks, to prevent the hapless deer from sneezing them out.

Until they're full grown in fall, and want to be sneezed out so they can pupate in the ground all winter. Buzzing out as big honkin' flies next spring.

Missed seeing the hunter's face when he first caught sight of these creatures trying to crawl back into his meat supply, but I saw it later as we all watched and poked and prodded. A look of revulsion, all concern or questions about the hypothetical chronic wasting disease gone and forgotten.

I insisted nobody touch anything until I had retrieved my camera and gotten a few shots. One of the hunter's buddies did the same with a disposable, probably some lovely shots to show to someone's wife back home. And then, to his credit, my co-worker delved in with his tongs and neatly extracted the lymph glands, leaving all the bots in place.

Except the three I pulled out and passed around in my palm for all to see. Which were then flung into the busy highway (where I suspect they made it safely to open dirt and will probably be buzzing around next spring).

And the four I extracted and bagged, now in our freezer for later show and tell (the wife was impressed).

And then we sent them on their merry way down the highway to the meat processor's.

Maggots and all.