Reviving Artemis: The making of a huntress

By V. Paul Reynolds

In case you are not up on Greek religion and mythology, Artemis has always been best known as the Goddess of the Hunt. But she also represented a wide range of other realms including wilderness, wild animals, nature, child birth and chastity, to name a few.

Deborah Lee Luskin, a Vermont academic and back-to-the-lander, chose Artemis as her literary mascot when she decided at age 60 to take a transformational leap of some proportion into the deer woods as a hunter, or huntress, if you will.

A former city girl, who eventually found her way to rural Vermont with her physician husband, Luskin taught literature and spent 30 years raising kids and fruits and vegetables. Not afraid to get her hands dirty (she slaughtered pigs), she nonetheless harbored a longtime fear of getting lost in the woods and was never comfortable around firearms. So her late-in-life determination to become a bona fide deer hunter, like so many of her rural Vermont neighbors, was a challenge that she relished and intended to write about.

At the very beginning she had a lot of mentorship from friends and neighbors, who knew their way around guns and the deer woods. She writes,”To be clear, all the men who helped me learn to hunt were kind, patient, and respectful, as well as encouraging and knowledgeable.” Still, she discloses her concern that a female hunting solo in the woods might pose risks for herself, more from homo sapiens than from wild animals.

Artemis found her way into the book’s title later on into the writing process. It was at first to be titled “Learning to Hunt.”

Make no mistake. This is not your typical book about deer hunting. Oh, it is about the hunt and the learning curve in the deer woods, but it is also very much a most personal memoir of an urban Jewish girl whose journey to womanhood was fraught with familial dysfunction, sexism and the loss of friends and loved ones.

Expecting a purely deer-hunting book, I was at first skeptical and at a loss to see where this book was going.”When are we going to get in the deer woods?” I asked myself. Then, about a third of the way into the book it struck me: her life experiences were formative. It took shape. We all live on a kind of continuum, a series of connective experiences that lead us to different places. Luskin herself may not have known it, but life led her to find answers and solace in the deer woods.

This is a wonderful book! Luskin is a master wordsmith and a deep thinker.

The last four paragraphs of this book are sheer poetry and precision – a sparkling, soaring treatise on the question that many a deer hunter has posed: Why do I hunt?

If it doesn’t give you goose bumps, you probably are not a true deer hunter. Here is just a taste: “Learning to hunt has included lessons in humility and wonderment…to face my fears and to acknowledge mortality – mine, and the natural cycle of birth and death evident throughout the forest, which is a bible of decay, survival, and regeneration.”

“Reviving Artemis: The Making of a Huntress” by Deborah Lee Luskin is published by Sibylline Press. It is available on Amazon and book stores.

The author is editor of the Northwoods Sporting Journal. He is also a Maine Guide and host of a weekly radio program “Maine Outdoors” heard Sundays at 7 p.m. on The Voice of Maine News-Talk Network. He has authored three books. Online purchase information is available at www.sportingjournal.com, Outdoor Books.