Teaching My Daughter to Hunt: Patience, Trust and a Roe Doe

She was twelve the first time she lay still in a high seat for two hours without complaining. I had taken her twice before — at eight, and again at ten — and both times she had lasted an hour before the whispered questions became too frequent and we climbed down quietly, having seen nothing.

That third time, she was different. She had decided she wanted to do it properly.

We were in a high seat above a roe deer feeding meadow in the Dordogne, on a cool October morning. I had explained everything the evening before: the wind, the approach, the silence, what a clean shot on a roe doe looks like and why it matters that it is clean.

She listened in a way that twelve-year-olds rarely listen to their fathers.

The morning

We climbed the ladder in darkness. Settled. I handed her my binoculars and she glassed the field edge without being told. At 07:12, a roe doe stepped from the tree line at 55 metres, quartering to us slightly.

I watched her breathing slow. She raised the rifle — a .243 with a light recoil — and settled the crosshairs. I could see through my own glass that she had the right placement. Behind the shoulder. Low. The shot broke cleanly.

The doe ran eight metres and went down in the grass at the field edge.

What followed

We sat for two minutes. Then climbed down. She walked to the deer without drama — no performance for me, no tears, no celebration. She knelt beside it and was quiet for a while.

"Is it sad?" I asked.

"No," she said. "But it should feel like something."

That, I thought, is exactly right. It should feel like something.

The drive home was mostly silence. The good kind. The kind where both of you are thinking about the same thing and neither needs to say it.

She has hunted every season since. She is now twenty-three and stalks roe deer in the Corrèze on her own ground. She is better at it than I am.