Long before I was born, she was blazing hunting trails for my generation to follow.
Photo above: My mom, Loretta Berger, practicing with her recurve bow (while pregnant) in 1958.
When my mom was a little girl in the 1930s, her father was a Scoutmaster. His Boy Scout troop was always doing cool outdoor things—camping, hiking, shooting, building campfires. Grandpa used to chuckle when he told me how mad Mom got when, at age five, she was told she couldn’t be a Boy Scout. She wanted to do all those fun things, too.
Grandpa wasn’t a hunter, but he did teach Mom a lot of the same skills he taught his Scout troop, and she grew up loving the great outdoors. When she got together with my dad in the mid-1950s, she finally had an enthusiastic mentor to teach her to hunt. Years of deer hunting with a recurve bow and her trusty Marlin .30-30 followed, with many happy hours spent in the Pennsylvania woods.
She was a stay-at-home mom, while my dad taught at the local high school. The two of them always hunted together on the opening days of the buck and doe seasons, which were school holidays in northern Pennsylvania. Dad would have to go back to work after each opening day, so if Mom didn’t have her deer yet, she’d head back out into the woods on her own.
One of her second-day success stories occurred one snowy December morning in the early 1970s when she drove her snowmobile up on a ridge behind our house, parked it, and hiked out to a good deer crossing she knew about. A couple of hours later, she shot a nice doe. After dressing it out, she lashed it to the rear of the snowmobile and skidded it neatly back down to the house, where it was waiting for Dad to skin and quarter when he arrived home that afternoon.
As a hunting-obsessed youngster shuffling along in both of their boot tracks every fall, I had no idea at the time how unusual it was to be part of a family where hunting with both Dad and Mom was the norm.
Mom passed in 2015, but I think of her every day. Much has changed in the hunting world, mostly for the better. Women are a more visible presence in the deer woods and in hunting camps across the country than they were in her day, when none of her female friends hunted. Today, women are fairly well represented in the hunting media, the firearms industry, and the guiding community, and two globetrotting women have even won the prestigious Weatherby Award. Just about every successful hunting outfitter today is happy to accommodate couples and families, as well as women hunting on their own. It wasn’t always so.
For much of this, we female hunters of today have women like my mom to thank—true hunters who took to the woods simply because they loved it, as well as men like my dad who welcomed them with enthusiasm and were thrilled to have a life partner who was a hunting partner as well. Their influence may have done more than we will ever know to ensure that our hunting traditions will be around for a long time to come.
And on a personal level, her fearless example steered me straight into a life filled with unforgettable adventures in the great outdoors—a truly magnificent gift. Thanks, Mom.
