Put as many pots of water as you own on a roaring campfire. Ownership is fluid at a camp. Put on as many pots as you can find. Insist on city water over reclaimed roof water, but it won’t make a difference. The birds are so dirty when dipped.

Roll out Tyvek on an outside table. All the tables are outside tables. Call it sanitized.

Pretend surprise when camp members melt away, find sudden obligations. Hide your surprise when your travel companion watches over your shoulder, then follows your lead.

Stare blankly at the camp owner. He doesn’t want the one living bird to know what you’re doing. It will traumatize her, he says. Set up the cleaning station beside her coop. Listen to her car-alarm call as you turn on the hose.

Marvel at the way skin fits around each individual feather shaft, how the hole slowly shrinks once the feather is removed, how difficult it is to pinch out each accompanying hair.

Huddle around your phone with your travel companion for half a dozen Internet videos. It gets tricky after this. Do not let the others know what you are watching. Listen to recordings of red-state men who talk like your grandmother. Do not make fun of them like you once did her slurry vowels. Hang on their advice. Replay and listen again.

Do not laugh when your travel companion comments, “It’s warm,” as his hand enters the body cavity. When it is your turn, the same words will slip out of you. It is a genuine comment of shock. For a moment, the wrongness of this warmth is all the brain can muster.

Don’t think of Thanksgiving or stuffing when you rupture the creature’s crop and half a cup of corn kernels and gravel pours out of the gaping hole that five minutes ago was a neck.

Decide all that visually separates a turkey, the bird, from a turkey, the meal, are white feathers and a head. The transformation happens in minutes.

Do not forget your prayer, the one you save for road kill: “Please take this spirit.” As a child you entreated a wolf god you called Libretto, named by a finger placed randomly in a dictionary. Now you pray to habit, to transubstantiated guilt. You do not pray for people.

Three hours after the fully dressed turkeys are packed into a cooler, after hand washing and an outdoor shower just south of freezing, after a new set of clothes, your only other set, know that the smell of blood and shit and raw meat will not leave you.

Wear the pants with the blood spatters for months after. Whether they ask or not, tell as many people as possible what the brown sneeze is from. They will not ask.

When you have known a travel companion for less than two months, when you find yourself side by side at a plastic folding table pulling the viscera out of a pair of his-and-her birds, recognize in that moment a level of companionship very close to love. That might even be the word you start to use, for that moment and for all the moments to come.