Doe Season
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the Story
Two men and their children–a nine-year-old girl nicknamed Andy and a boy, Mac, eleven years of age–go on a hunting trip in the Pennsylvania woods. They leave Andys home at dawn. Macs father, Charlie, objects to Andys coming along because of her age and because she will be the only girl in an otherwise all-male hunting party. Her father tries to conciliate Charlie by noting that animals–including deer, he hopes–seem attracted to Andy, and she is adept at handling a gun, although in target practice. Charlie is not reassured. They drive to an isolated location in the woods that Charlie and Mac previously scouted out as a likely deer-feeding ground. Andy arrives in a fairly congealed state, because the heater in Charlies vehicle is defective. Still, she carries a day pack, although smaller than the three mens backpacks, and is to do more than her share of KP duties.
On the first day of the trip, while the three males lie in wait for game, Andy goes off to collect firewood, and she spots a buck and two does moving away. That night she and Mac share one tent while their fathers use the other. Mac teases Andy by baiting her with sexual and other matters, but the girl holds her own. For his part, Charlie has been ribbing Andy about her tomboyishness. Andy assesses them both as dumb. Her father tries to blunt their attacks by defending his “punkin” and “honeybun” despite her nickname.
The following day, Andy walks by herself some distance away from the resting threesome, in whose company she feels increasingly uncomfortable, after being subjected to a concerted assault by Charlie and Mac about being like a boy. Even Andys father concedes that her mother voiced a similar opinion–given what Andy is like, they might just as well have had a son.
As Andy wanders off, she spots a doe, then quietly returns to alert the others, who hurry to the spot. When they find the doe still grazing, Andys father suggests that she is entitled to the kill because she saw the animal first, but Charlie objects vehemently. He fears that Andy will miss. Furthermore, she does not have a hunting license. Andy herself is ambivalent, silently praying that the doe will run away. Because of the direction of the wind, the deer fails to pick up their scent. Finally, at her fathers urging and under his direction, Andy takes aim and fires at the deer.
She appears to make a clean shot through the does heart, but after the animal collapses on the frozen soil, it raises itself and disappears into the woods before the approaching hunters can discharge a second shot. Charlie resumes his complaints about Andys involvement in the hunt.
That night, Andy agonizes over the suffering that she must have inflicted on the doe. Sleepless, she steps out of the tent, just as the living-dead doe enters the hunters camp. The animal helplessly allows the girl to approach closely enough to touch it and palpate the inside of its gaping wound. As Andy cups the does beating heart, its warmth nearly sears her hand. She has difficulty extricating it but finally wrenches the hand free. The girl is struck by the horror and beauty of it all. In this dreamlike sequence–which is narrated as real–she dips her hand in the freezing snow to clean it. Even so, it feels weak and withered to her, so she keeps it concealed in her pocket. The following day, as she lags behind the rest of the party, the three men find the dead doe in a clearing in the brush. “Clean shot,” Andys father declares triumphantly. “My little girl,” he adds affectionately. Even the obnoxious Charlie and Mac are excited.
As her father begins to eviscerate the animal with his hunting knife, Andy runs away. The three males call after her, just as her mother called her to join her in deeper waters the previous summer at a New Jersey beach. In Andys mind, the windblown forest that surrounds her is morphing into a threatening sea.
Themes and Meanings
David Michael Kaplan introduces two children who, although certainly not typical nine- and eleven-year-olds, are nevertheless believable, and their contrasting reactions to the hunt are striking. The younger Andy, although hoydenlike, successfully fights off Macs and his fathers baiting even as, despite her dislike of the pair, she tries to prove herself a worthy companion. Eventually, she seems to overcome her ambivalence about being a girl and no longer responds to her boyish nickname because it is not her real name.
As in several other stories, Kaplan illustrates, implicitly if not directly, the familiar theme of parent-offspring relationships. He does so not only with reference to the two parent-child pairs on the hunt but also with reference to Andy and her mother. Except for waving them good-bye after the breakfast she prepares on their departure day, the mother does not appear in the story. Indeed, mothers are generally unimportant in Kaplans tales; they are often dead, gone, or insane.
During the trip, each father shares confidences with his child,