by Deborah Lee Luskin
Sybilline Press, 2025
Deborah Lee Luskin has been a writer and teacher, a mother, a hiker and skier, and a gardener. At 60, she decided to become a hunter. Reviving Artemis: The Making of a Huntress is the story of how she learned to hunt deer in the Vermont woods near her home.
“This is the unlikely story of a woman born in mid-twentieth-century postwar America into a suburban tribe that hunts for bargains and houses, a people who navigate highways around large urban centers; a clan who think ‘game’ means tennis, baseball, and Parcheesi,” Luskin writes in the opening chapter.
From there, she delves in to feeling a “call to hunt” as she entered her 60s. As she answers that call, she weaves some common themes through the 250 pages of her story: family and friends, living and dying, the traditions and ethics of food production and consumption, the challenges of stepping beyond gender biases and a fear of becoming lost – to enter academia, to overcome sexual abuse and harassment, and to head into the woods with a rifle in search of deer.
She also returns many times to Artemis, whom she describes as “the Greek goddess of wild animals, the wilderness, and the hunt, childbirth, child welfare, and chastity.”
“I only knew a little about Artemis, mostly from art, where she’s routinely depicted as tall, slim, small-breasted and fleet – none of which describes me,” Luskin writes. “But as the mother of daughters, I knew how to nurture girls and women; as a gardener, I knew how to care for the soil. In becoming a hunter, I would learn about stewardship of the wild.”
Luskin’s journey to hunting begins with a writing assignment to cover “Doe Camp” in Vermont, the state where she has lived since her 20s, after a childhood in suburban New York and several years as a young woman in Manhattan. She introduces readers to a series of mentors who help her learn the basics of hunting and safety in the woods, how to sight and fire a rifle, how to look for deer sign in the forest – and the importance of being confident and patient.
Through the book’s 12 chapters, readers follow Luskin’s progression in hunting as she learns how to navigate a landscape and to overcome the fear and discomfort that come with being alone in the woods. Through three rifle hunting seasons, she spends countless hours in the forest, spotting deer and deer sign but never getting a clean shot at a buck. Along the way, she weaves in information about the impacts of deer overpopulation – from decreased habitat and quality food sources to increases in invasive species replacing native plants – and thoroughly covers the ecological importance of hunting. She notes that she feels like something of an anomaly as a new gun owner, drifting “in an uncomfortable nowhere land between those who believe the Second Amendment is as sacred as a biblical commandment, and those who believe no civilians should own any firearms of any kind.”
Luskin describes the eleventh day of her fourth season as almost magically beautiful. She starts out early, in an icy fog, and spends the day hiking from one post to the next, encountering does at various points. By early afternoon, she has turned toward home, content with a day in the woods, when she encounters a buck within range. She takes a shot. Success.
She goes on to cover field dressing, dragging her deer out of the woods, curing it in the garage, transporting it to be butchered, and eating the meat she has harvested from the forest. It is a story, she suggests in the book’s final pages, that will continue, as she continues to hunt and to learn – including taking up bow hunting.
“Deer hunting in November is now an integral part of my rural life. I’ve gained enough woodland literacy not just to find my way in the woods, but also to find the deer,” she writes. “While I’m sitting alone in the woods, I don’t feel lonely; I feel connected – connected to the many people who have helped me learn this ancient skill, to my local community of hunters, and to the long-lineage of mythic hunters going back to the start of time.”