Program 10: Mother and Daughter

A mother and daughter hunting team talk about a buck they shot on the first day of deer season, 2005, and the responses they got from their male hunting companions.

Transcript:

Gayle Streeter

Gregory L. Sharrow
Deer Stories is a documentary series from Vermont Folklife Center Media. The series explores hunting from an insider’s point of view and is drawn from interviews with hunters from around Vermont. In this program Gail Streeter and her daughter Hannah tell a story about the first day of hunting season, 2005.

Gayle Streeter
Last year Hannah and I decided we were gonna go out together and so about a week before hunting season we went out, scouted around, and, you know, found actual places where we wanted to sit. You want to kind of get in there and make sure you can see around. You don’t want to be doing a lot of, making a lot of noise that opening morning. And, of course, opening morning: crunchy, crunchy! You know, leaves. No coating of snow. I think there was a light dusting of snow, but it was very noisy and so Hannah and I, we got out there and we got up to the top of the ridge. We were gonna go get into our spots and so we got situated and, you know, I kept thinking I was hearing things in kind of a couple different directions. The next thing I know I hear this—it sounded like a couple of horses coming down a trail through the woods and it was a predominant trail, something that was used a lot by wildlife in the area. And they come down, a doe runs out into the field right in front of me and the buck comes flying out, runs past her, stops. And so I get off a shot. I see that it’s a legal deer because it had to be more than a spikehorn. This ended up in a 5-point buck. So I got a nice shot at it. It was one shot, killing shot, and very clean. It didn’t run off very far. Went up and located where the deer was. Went up and got Hannah out of her stand and she could hear all this, but she stayed put, which was safe for her to do. And so I’m waiting for the other guys in the area. I knew my husband was off hunting, actually, quite a ways away, off on the other side of the logging road, but I figured he probably would have heard. And I shot. And waiting for these fellas to come, you know, give us a hand, us girls a hand. No one shows up. Well, guess we’ve gotta take care of this on our own. So we dragged it out of the woods, up to the house, got it in the back of the pickup, and brought it to camp and, you know, was cleaning it out before anybody that was showing up. [LAUGHING.]

Hannah Streeter

And so they were all quite surprised that—we were lounging at camp when—with our deer all done for the season. And most people, when—with my experience, in my experience, the men, they’re: Okay, you shot the deer. We’ll give you that, but, you know, Joe, your husband or boyfriend or whoever probably was with ya. It had something to do with the fact that they were with you. That’s the general feeling that I get from people. They don’t tend to take you seriously. So this was a real triumph for Hannah and I because there were no men in the area to help with anything. [LAUGHS.] So they had a lot of work ahead of them. They were scrambling the rest of the season. [LAUGHTER.]

Gregory L. Sharrow
You’ve been listening to Gail and Hannah Streeter of Morristown, Vermont. Deer Stories was produced by Erica Heilman and Gregory Sharrow for the Vermont Folklife Center of Middlebury, Vermont. I’m Gregory Sharrow.