You can read the full, original story via The Atlantic or find it in literature course materials on Course Hero . Doe Season - The Atlantic
" Doe Season " by David Michael Kaplan is a widely anthologized coming-of-age story about a young girl named Andy whose innocence is shattered during a hunting trip [1]. The 1985 story, which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and the collection Comfort , explores themes of gender identity and the painful transition into adulthood as Andy confronts the reality of the hunt [1]. Doe Season By David Michael Kaplan Full Text
| Element | Details | |---------|---------| | | First‑person, unnamed, a middle‑aged wildlife biologist who works for a state agency. | | Setting | The remote forests of northern New Hampshire, during the late‑summer “doe season” (the period when hunting licenses permit the harvesting of female deer). | | Plot Overview | The narrator is tasked with a routine population‑control survey: counting does, estimating fawn survival, and issuing recommendations to the state wildlife board. While trekking through a stand of red spruce, he encounters an elderly hunter, Earl “Pike” McAllister , who is out of season, carrying a loaded shotgun and a limp. The two strike an uneasy conversation about the ethics of hunting, the loss of wilderness to development, and the narrator’s own strained relationship with his late father, a legendary hunter. As the day wanes, the narrator discovers a fresh set of tracks—two sets of fresh deer prints intersecting with a set of human footprints that end abruptly. The story ends with the narrator hearing a single, distant gunshot and feeling “the forest inhale.” | | Resolution | The story does not resolve the mystery of the missing hunter; instead, it leaves the reader with an ambiguous sense of responsibility, both personal (the narrator’s complicity in a system that kills) and ecological (the fragile balance of the forest). | You can read the full, original story via
Kaplan deliberately leaves the answer ambiguous. What is clear, however, is that Andy will never be the same. The “doe season”—both the hunting season and the season of her girlhood—has irrevocably ended. | Element | Details | |---------|---------| | |
is the story's most potent symbol. Initially, the doe represents Andy's goal and her chance to prove herself. She prays to see one and to make the kill. However, once the doe is dead and being dismembered, it becomes a symbol of Andy herself—of her innocence and childhood. The act of killing it is a violent, irreversible loss. As one analysis notes, "the doe symbolizes Andy's innocence and by killing the doe she feels that innocence is gone". The sight of the doe's open belly triggers her final, visceral rejection of this masculine rite.
It is a small story, barely twenty pages. But like the best short fiction, it leaves a wound that doesn’t close—a mark every bit as lasting as a hunter’s notch on a belt.