Skip to content
News
Link copied to clipboard

Hunt runs in the blood

GENESEE TOWNSHIP, Pa. - The green specks glowing deep in the darkness of the woods bring Toot Gilliland's truck to an abrupt halt. That's how the eyes of a deer look, she explains, when they're caught in the glare of a spotlight.

Michael Risser, 25, walks out of the tall brush empty handed on the opening day of deer season.
Michael Risser, 25, walks out of the tall brush empty handed on the opening day of deer season.Read moreED HILLE/Inquirer

GENESEE TOWNSHIP, Pa. - The green specks glowing deep in the darkness of the woods bring Toot Gilliland's truck to an abrupt halt. That's how the eyes of a deer look, she explains, when they're caught in the glare of a spotlight.

As her son Donald trains a handheld spotlight on the deer so she can get a better look, she leans into the window and, under her breath, utters a single word: "Boom."

Although she will fire no shots until dawn, the ritual of spotlighting before the start of rifle season for deer is as much a part of the hunting experience for Gilliland and her family as the hot soup she serves up after a long day's hunt.

It is also a time-honored lead-in to rifle season in this rural stretch of Potter County in northern Pennsylvania, where deer hunting is a tradition so deeply ingrained that it has been passed down from father to son and mother to daughter dating back generations.

"When I was a kid, deer season was bigger than Christmas," says Toot's son, Donald Gilliland, 38, an avid hunter and the managing editor of the area's weekly newspaper, the Potter Leader Enterprise. "You got to see relatives you hadn't seen all year."

For Toot Gilliland, 63, and her fellow hunters, mostly family and close friends, hunting is not so much a sport as it is custom.

And like the hundreds of thousands of hunters across the state, they wait all year for the first day of rifle season, traditionally the Monday after Thanksgiving. In many parts of Pennsylvania, including Potter County, opening day is considered an unofficial holiday, with businesses, schools and even governments shutting down.

For the Gillilands, though, the start of the season also marks a time for relatives, scattered across various counties in Pennsylvania, to gather in the cluttered but cozy farmhouse that Toot Gilliland has called home since she was a child.

This year, the gathering starts the Sunday night before opening day at Toot's two-story farmhouse over bowls of milky oyster soup and chewy snips of venison jerky. Both are made by Toot, 63, who is not just the captain of the hunting party, but the head of the family as well.

Conversation is light and easy: Betsy Long, Toot's niece who works with autistic children, talks about her pregnancy - she is 22 weeks along and expecting a boy. Toot, a retired natural gas company engineer who now grows pumpkins, shows photos from hunts past. Michael Risser, Toot's nephew, jokingly grouses about how early they would be meeting the next morning to start hunting: 5 a.m.

At that hour, dawn would still be two hours away - plenty of time to down a breakfast of eggs, sausage and coffee and head out into the wooded hills behind Toot's farmhouse.

The next morning, no one is late. And by 6 a.m., the hunting party of a dozen people, including Toot and Donald Gilliland, Long, and Michael Risser and his mother Martha Risser, pile into trucks and head out into the woods.

For the locals in this part of the state, there is no need to drive to state parks or gamelands. Much of the hunting is done on family land. And for Toot Gilliland's hunting party, that's the 365 acres behind her farmhouse.

There are no two-way radios or tree-stands for the Gillilands, Rissers and their friends. They hunt the old-fashioned way, with some people tasked with tromping through the woods and others asked to hunker down at strategic spots along its perimeter.

Although the weather is bad for tracking deer - a light fog and drizzle - Toot Gilliland spots a buck, two hours into the hunt, across the dirt road from the hill where she's perched. She can't see through the scope on her rifle, so she tracks him with her eyes until he crosses the road and she can count the points on his antlers.

When she determines he is legal to shoot, she raises her rifle and fires. The shot is dead-on and should have killed him. But in the morning fog, Toot can't tell, so she fires one more time.

"He fell down and then got back up and started running, so I didn't know if the shot had killed him," she says later. "When we skinned him, we saw it went through the shoulder and through to the heart."

By the time the rest of the hunting party catches up with her, Toot has put down her rifle, taken off her hunting vest and tagged her deer, which is now lying on its back as she prepares to "field dress" it, or remove its organs.

A petite but strong woman, she bends over the buck and with her knife, cuts a long slit down the length of his belly. But the stretched ligaments in her achy thumbs prevent her from finishing the dressing. Her older brother, Tom Gilliland volunteers for the job.

For non-hunters, it is difficult to watch the buck's heart, liver and other vital organs, steaming as they're exposed to the cold air, spilling onto the ground.

For Gilliland and the rest of her family who grew up hunting, there is nothing unnatural or gruesome about it.

"Growing up on a farm, you become conscious of the cycle," says Martha Risser, Toot's sister. "Animals are born, they live and they die."

And during the hunt, the field dressing process actually gives the rest of the hunters in the party a chance to gather and swap stories from the morning's hunt - although that talk is cut short when Tom Gilliland accidentally knicks the deer's stomach, something hunters know well not to do.

The stench is overpowering.

"He cut the gut," Toot says, scolding her brother as she turns her head away.

Soon after, she and Michael Risser drag the deer to Tom Gilliland's green Ford F-150 truck, hoist it onto the flatbed and drive it back to the farmhouse. There, it is hung upside down in the shed behind the house to bleed out, be skinned and later, be cut up for meat.

Toot will do the butchering - it's $60 if you take it to a butcher, she says.

And deer hunting is something she's done for too long to let others do the hard work. Since she started at the age of 12, the legal age to hunt in Pennsylvania, she's hasn't missed a single season. She even went out in a walker a few years back, when she was hobbled by surgery on her Achilles heel.

"My legs aren't as good anymore and my fingers hurt. But there are things that happen out here when you're hunting that are awesome," she says.

On a single trip through the woods, she says, she'll spot a raccoon, a porcupine and a skunk. "You don't see all that sitting in the house," she points out.

And the deer she hunts means food in the freezer for her and her family for months.

The deer she killed last Monday, a seven-point buck, produced nearly 60 pounds of meat, she estimates. And that was with the bones out.

"It was a good deer," she says.

One that could last her possibly until next year's hunt.

"Other people ski," she says, "I hunt and fish."

"And I'll continue to hunt until I can't," she adds.