The pine canopy swayed in a rhythm that felt like breathing, each needle a soft exhale. I counted the doe tracks—twenty‑eight pairs, a dozen fresh fawn prints—while the sun slipped behind the ridge, turning the forest amber. Somewhere ahead, a crack split the air, a reminder that the season was still a season, and the forest, for all its silence, was listening.
She cannot.
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Lost and terrified, Andy imagines her mother walking into the ocean:
Kaplan uses —shifting between third-person narration and Andy’s internal thoughts. For example, when the men butcher the deer, Andy thinks the “insides” look like “wet, dark snakes.” The narration does not correct her; it stays in her terrified, childish vision. This technique forces the reader to experience the horror not as an objective adult, but as a confused child who has been asked to perform brutality. The pine canopy swayed in a rhythm that
The story begins with Andie, a 13-year-old girl, preparing for a hunting trip with her father and uncle in the woods of Maine. Andie's excitement and nervousness are palpable as she packs her bag and says goodbye to her mother.
Mac loves his daughter, but he expresses love through shared activity—specifically, hunting. He is not cruel, but he is blind. He believes he is giving Andy a gift: competence, wilderness knowledge, toughness. But the gift is a weapon she does not want to wield. The story asks: Can love be violent even when it is gentle? She cannot
Throughout the story, Andy navigates two worlds. Her mother represents domestic safety—staying home, baking, and rejecting the hunt as “silly and cruel.” Her father represents the wild—the cold, the guns, the masculine code of silence. Andy, whose nickname blurs gender lines, struggles to prove she belongs in the male domain.
In David Michael Kaplan's " Doe Season ," nine-year-old tomboy Andy joins her father and his friend on her first hunting trip, eager to prove herself in a masculine world. She experiences a profound loss of innocence and confronts the harsh reality of death after shooting a doe, which shatters her desire to be "one of the guys." The story concludes with Andy symbolically rejecting her tomboy identity and embracing the transition into womanhood.
David Michael Kaplan's "Doe Season" is a thought-provoking and nuanced exploration of adolescence, identity, and morality. The author's intentions can be inferred as follows:
“Doe Season” is a taut, haunting initiation story. Unlike traditional coming-of-age narratives that celebrate a child’s entry into adult society, Kaplan’s story explores a more painful, ambiguous transition: the moment a young girl realizes she does not want the identity being forced upon her. The protagonist, nine-year-old Andrea “Andy” Kaplan (no relation to the author—a coincidental but notable same last name), goes on a deer hunt with her father and two older men. By the story’s end, she has not killed a deer but has killed something else: her father’s image of who she should be.