Shirley Grenoble often tells a story about a repairman who came to her house. He looked around her Altoona, Pennsylvania, living room at her mounted turkeys and deer and other game, and commented that her husband really must like to hunt.

"I don't have a husband," she said.

"Well, whose are these?" he wanted to know.

And when she gets to that point in the story, that they were hers, she always has an impish grin on her face.

With more and more women taking to the field these days, few people still are surprised by a woman who hunts, even one who hunts alone. But in the early 1950s, when Shirley began hunting, it was a novel idea.

Like many women, she began hunting because her then-husband asked her to.

"He kept wanting me to go with him, but I didn't want to," she says now. "I finally went along when he had a broken leg, and I wanted to be sure he would be all right. He was training beagles for rabbit season. They ran across a couple of rabbits, and started running the rabbits and barking. It was very exciting to try to figure out where the rabbits would circle and where I should stand to see them. The next time he went out, I wanted to go with him. Pretty soon, I wanted to go when he couldn't go, and I wanted to do things differently than he did."

Before long, she was hunting at every opportunity. Forty years later, she says she hunts "everything," but she qualifies that by saying she doesn't hunt waterfowl because she doesn't have much opportunity.

"Actually, what with my addiction to trout fishing and turkey hunting and deer hunting, I don't have the time or the money or the energy for another addiction," she says with a laugh.

After Shirley had been hunting for 20 years, a friend urged her to write down some of her hunting stories. She spent an entire winter writing the story of the first turkey she ever killed. She sent it to a small Pennsylvania magazine, and was astonished when they published it.

A year later, she tried again with a second story. The same magazine published it as well. Before long, she was selling stories in national magazines.

"If they had rejected that first effort, I never would have tried again," she says. But the magazine didn't, and Shirley has been writing about hunting ever since. Her work has done much to open the field of hunting journalism to women; one writer calls her "the mother of us all."

Shirley is delighted to see more and more women coming to hunting on their own.

"I'm talking about actual hunting, not just trailing along after their husbands, or going out with an extra doe license to get meat," she says. "I see more women in the woods than I ever used to see."

Her advice to those women who have even the slightest desire to hunt is just to find a way to do it. "You can go with somebody who is more experienced and learn the basics, but you can strike out on your own as well," she says. "Women have a lot of resources such as videos and magazines, seminars, outdoor shows--things I didn't have. There's no reason why anyone can't learn to hunt."

Though Shirley has lots of good hunting tales, she says she would be hard-pressed to pick the best one.

"The most exciting and memorable times for me are those when I go out by myself, and I do everything alone. I decide where I want to hunt, what calls I want to use, where I want to take up a watch for game. Then when I succeed at getting the buck or the gobbler, it's very exciting to me simply because it was something I did myself. That's the challenge of it."