For readers interested in accessing the full text of "Doe Season," several online resources are available. The story has been anthologized in various collections of American short fiction, including "The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction" and "The Oxford Book of American Short Stories."
| 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). | Doe Season By David Michael Kaplan Full Text
This is the story’s climax. She is not rejecting her father—she is rejecting the false self he helped create. The car ride home is silent. She cries, and the story ends: For readers interested in accessing the full text