Doe Season

On Andy’s hunting trip, she makes a transition from childhood to adulthood. In the beginning Andy talks about the woods as “…the same woods that lay behind her house…they stretch all the way to here” (Kaplan 456). She finds comfort in this because it is familiar to her; the woods behind her house are familiar to her. Thinking of the woods as being the same made her feel good, “it was like thinking of God; it was like thinking of the space between here and the moon” (456). The woods represent her childhood, the same, familiar, and comfortable. As they walk through the woods the sound of the branches swaying in the wind reminds her of the ocean, when her parents had taken her there the summer before. Andy describes the ocean as “…huge and empty yet always moving. Everything lay hidden” (459). In the end when it comes time to “gut” the deer, she takes the plunge into adulthood, as she runs away and they call to her. “Yet louder than any of them was the wind blowing through the treetops, like the ocean where her mother floated in green water, also calling Come in, come in while all around her roared the mocking of the terrible, now inevitable, sea” (467).