“I’ve called everyone,” Lewiston resident Terry Labbe said. “I called (my girlfriend) this morning (and said), ‘I shot a deer, at my age!’ She was so excited. ‘Send me the picture!’”
Last month, Labbe’s son asked if she wanted to join him while deer hunting.
“I said, ‘Well, I don’t know. I have never shot a gun,’”she told the Sun Journal. “‘I’ll come over; we’ll (target) practice and I’ll see how I do.’”
Labbe said she was surrounded by hunters through the years, including her brothers, husband and son. None had ever asked her to go out before. She surprised herself with her target practice skills, but also admitted to being discouraged when she missed two deer on opening day.
“She grabbed a hunting magazine; she says, ‘All right, you show me where to shoot that thing,’” Jeff Labbe told the Sun Journal. His mother had been aiming a little high. “I put a crosshair mark right where she should shoot it,” he said.
After sitting in a hunting shack for two hours Wednesday, Terry Labbe spotted a buck 30 yards away. After fumbling with the gun’s safety mechanism, she fired and hit the 61-pound animal,
“I think (Jeff) was as excited as I was, if not more,” she told the Sun Journal. “You know, I’m 80 years old, I’ve never shot before in my life, so it was like, ‘Wow, I can still do it.’ It’s not how old you are that counts. You want to do it, you do it.”
According to the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife, about 300 of the state's 219,000 licensed deer hunters last year were 80-year-old women.
On average, for those hunters, the success rate in getting a deer was between 15 and 20 percent.
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