A Doe Season

Time to Grow

As children go on through life they experience knew things and go on journeys to finding out who they may or may not be. Some go on a rite of passage while others just sort of grow up knowing they will be a certain way, accommodated to certain things. In the story "Doe Season" by David Michael Kaplan, a little girl by the name of Andrea starts out as Andy but slowly realizes she is really an Andrea while on a hunting trip with her father, her rite of passage.

At the beginning of Doe Season Andy is seen by Charlie Spreun as just a little girl, not the hunting type, Andy however sees herself as a boyish girl, a daddy's girl. Andy sees the men go hunting and wants to be a part of the experience, see what it's all about. To her the woods they are about to go hunting in "were the same woods that lay behind her house... [which]... made her feel good: it was like thinking of God" (456). When she awakens in the morning to eat breakfast her dad stands outside while she is left inside, "wondering Why doesn't he come? And Won't he ever come?"(456-57). This is an example of how Andy wants to impress her father, daddy's little girl image. Her Father doesn't take this image away from her head either as he constantly sticks up for the accusations of "she will add to the noise and get tired" (457) that Charlie claims.

As the story progresses she wants only more and more to prove Charlie wrong and that she is a girls man constantly praying to herself "Please let us get a deer" (462), so that she may be the one to shoot it. Charlie constantly picks on her, questioning her gender role "So what are you gonna be, Andrea? A boy or a girl?" (463). She claims girl. While arguing they come upon a doe and to prove them wrong about her girly girl image her father insists "Let her shoot it" also proving that she is a daddy's girl. At first hesitating but then goes through with the shot.

For Andy the shot is her coming of age, she starts to feel emotions, questioning herself "what have I done?... [trying not]... to think of the doe in pain and frightened."(465) In this moment she is realizing that she is not the girly boy she thinks she is and that Andy is no longer

Andy, in fact she is Andrea. She realizes she is the same Andrea that had gone to the ocean where to her "everything