Reviving Artemis: The Making of a Huntress

After thirty years cultivating fruits and vegetables, raising children, and teaching literature, Deborah Lee Luskin stepped out of her garden and into the forest. At sixty, it was time to age fiercely, overcome her suburban fear of getting lost in the woods and her urban reliance on street signs to know where she was. She wanted to forge her own path through the forest by following the deer. A dedicated locavore, Luskin didn’t want just to read the landscape, she also wanted to eat it.

Luskin overcame her ambivalence about guns as she gained a deeper understanding of the hunter’s role in the ecosystem of the northern forest. Her literary acumen helped her read the landscape and—as thoughtfully as she hunts for words—to hunt for deer. With the stories of Artemis, goddess of the hunt, childbirth, and wild nature to inspire her, Deborah became a deer hunter. Reviving Artemis is her story of finding her place in the natural world.