A couple of years after I began hunting, by father handed me a long coat.
"Here," he said. "I thought you might like to have your Aunt Zu's hunting coat."
In that moment, I was torn between fascination with the remarkable garment he held, and utter astonishment at what he had just said.
"What is it?" I asked, taking the coat from him. "And what do you mean, it was Aunt Zu's hunting coat?"
"It's a GI-issue ski trooper's parka," he told me. "I brought it back from World War II and gave it to her. She hunted in it until just a couple of years before she died."
I had long known that my great-aunt Zu--my father's mother's sister--was an extraordinary woman. Born in 1897, in an age when many women were barely educated, she put herself through Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. Then she went on to Carnegie Mellon University and later to Johns Hopkins University, paying her way by teaching while she earned a doctorate in chemistry.
After she had her degree she returned to her beloved Pennsylvania mountains, living alone in the family cottage on the floodplain of Dunnings Creek north of Bedford. She took a job as a chemistry teacher at the Georgetown Visitation Convent in Washington, D. C., the first lay teacher the convent had ever hired. She continued to commute to Washington and to teach there until she finally retired in the early 1960s.
But in my father's revelation, and in subsequent conversations with him over the intervening years, I discovered a different side of my aunt's life. From her cottage in the woods, she hiked for miles over the mountains after deer and whatever other game she could find. With three neighbor-companions--all men--she took deer, rabbits, and in the summer trout, as part of the sustenance she received from the land she called home.
Only when she reached the age that she feared she would slip on the ice or on a slippery rock in the river and break a hip or be otherwise unable to rise, did she hang up her rod and her gun.
Looking back from a distance of more than 20 years, I still wonder why she never told me she hunted. I visited her at the cottage for a few days in 1972, when I was 20 and she was 75. Though she lent me a rod and reel, and told me where to find the fish, she never said a word about hunting.
Did she think I would not care? Did it simply not occur to her to bring it up? Or was there some other, more private reason, that she chose not to share that part of herself with a naive 20-year-old whose notions of hunting and hunters were based on exposure to Walt Disney movies?
I cannot help but think that my early approach to hunting would have been more understanding if she had spoken about it. My respect for my aunt was so great that knowing she hunted would have drawn me into asking her why, and that in turn might have forced me to confront the realities inherent in hunter-prey relationships.
Or perhaps not. Whatever her reasons for remaining silent, they are lost in the 20-plus years since that last time I saw her. She died a couple of years later from a cancer she chose not to have treated; notations in her medical texts showed clearly that she knew exactly what was killing her.
As I grow older, my father says, I become more and more like her. Now and then when I call my parents, he tells me that when he first answers the telephone he sometimes thinks for a brief instant that I am her. So perhaps, in some small way, a part of her lives on in me.
Women do not have the hunting tradition that men have. And it is true that we do not have many heroines with the stature of Ruark and Hemingway.
And yet it may be that we do, in our own way, share a hunting tradition as rich and varied as that of men. Look back through the pages of history and you will find a few women hunters of note; Annie Oakley comes to mind. Few women have attained the public notice she did. And because we have been isolated from one another, both by time and by geography, we must seek more diligently than men to find our traditions, to learn what we can from them, and to fit those traditions into the patterns of our own lives.
Copyright (c) 1996 Carolee Boyles-Sprenkel. All rights reserved.
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