fw.ky.gov Fall 2006 Kentucky Afield 15

IT WAS A typical opening day at Deb’s Deer Processing. Hunters pulled up in trucks, bringing in the morning’s

yield from the surrounding fields of Greenup County. The men propped elbows on the sides of their truck beds, chatting lazily as they sipped coffee. They’d taken plenty of does, and a few had managed to down some small bucks. But nothing of size had shown up yet. Already a few hunters lamented a slow start to gun season, others nodding in agreement.

Then a blue Buick Skylark rolled in, with the heads of two wide-antlered bucks hanging out of the trunk. Ninety-year-old Hazel Garvin stepped out of the driver’s seat. The passenger door swung open and a cane crunched on the gravel as her sister, 81-year-old Cora Bocook, climbed out.

Hayley Lynch photo

Two great-grandmothers prove it’s never too late to start deer hunting

Sisters In Arms

By Hayley LynchAbove: Cora Bocook, left, and her sister, Hazel Garvin with their 2005 deer antlers.

Kentucky Afield Fall 2006 fw.ky.gov fw.ky.gov Fall 2006 Kentucky Afield 1716

Photos courtesy of Cora Bocook and Hazel Garvin

Hayley Lynch photo

Hazel Garvin’s impressive garden.

The Sally Bond homestead.

Left: Cora Bocook took an 8-point buck during the 2005 hunting season.Above: Hazel Garvin poses proudly with her 6-pointer.

Kentucky Afield Fall 2006

Below: Hazel Garvin poses with a doe as sister Cora Bocook holds her hunting rifle.

“We tried crafts for about 10 years,” she says.

“But that got boring.”

The men stared. It wasn’t often that a pair of great-grandmothers wearing blaze orange jackets showed up with a trunk full of big buck in their family sedan. Some of the other hunters gathered closer to the Skylark for a better look. Others slipped their own freshly cut deer racks behind their backs. One stepped quietly to the side, hiding the spike buck lying in his truck bed.

One hunter remembered the sisters from previous seasons. Since 1999, they had brought in several deer apiece.

“How do you do it?” he asked, eying the 16-inch antler spread of Hazel’s 6-point buck. Cora’s 8-point was a bit narrower at 13 inches but still impressive.

“What do you mean?” Cora answered. “Just be patient – then shoot.”

WINTER HAS COME and gone since that day in 2005, and Hazel sways

quietly in her porch swing and idly rubs the edges of a thick leather photo album. Cora sits beside her and slowly turns the pages. “We tried crafts for about 10 years,” explains Hazel. “But that got boring.”

She points to a picture of the two of them in blaze orange coats, posing with deer rifles. They don’t own any camouflage. Instead, they hunt in simple jeans or sweats. In place of a truck, there is an overstuffed car trunk with old rugs protecting its paint job from sharp antlers. Then there are the sisters themselves. Perhaps the stares in the parking lot of Deb’s were more about the hunters than the size of the antlers.

“They didn’t believe they were ours,” Cora remembers, looking at their antler mounts from last year. “They said somebody baited them in for us. They didn’t even believe we pulled the trigger.”

Although they hunt in Greenup County, a local newspaper columnist heard about their feats and wrote the sisters up. Even today, people in their hometown of Olive Hill are still talking about the two fine bucks that Cora and Hazel brought in opening day.

It would be nice to say that the size of the antlers doesn’t really matter to these two women. But that just isn’t the case.

“Mine are bigger than yours,” Hazel reminds her sister.

Cora bristles.“Yeah, but I got mine first.”These weren’t easy shots, either. Each

sister took her buck at 200 yards and counting. Cora shoots a .270-caliber rifle. Hazel prefers a softer shooting .22-250. It’s easier on her pacemaker.

They each have their own strengths when it comes to hunting – Cora never misses a shot, but Hazel sticks it out until she brings something home, even if it means shivering for days in a shooting house built by her son, Joe Garvin.

“We were worried about Hazel a couple of seasons ago,” says Cora’s daughter, Phyllis Tackett. “I called Joe and he said,

her husband died in a clay mine, she raised six children on her own and fed them from the land she worked.

By a modest estimate, Sally delivered over 1,000 babies in the hills of Carter, Lewis, Rowan and Elliott counties. With no hospital nearby, she would set off on horseback when needed, and stay with women for days until they could manage on their own. When they could not pay her $5 fee, she took food in exchange for her services. Sometimes she accepted no payment at all. Her nickname, however, had more to do with spirituality.

“Mom went to the barn to pray,” recalls Cora. “She prayed so loud, all the chickens and the horses could hear. She walked three miles to church every Sunday, no matter what.”

Perhaps it was her mother’s faith that helped Cora survive polio as a child. She not only lived through a crippling disease that claimed thousands of lives in those days,

but also managed to teach herself to hunt along the way. Cora learned to shoot a .22 alongside her younger brother Napoleon when they were young children.

“We would shoot the clothes pins right

off the line,” she says. “Then we’d go out and get rabbits. Mom peddled produce in town, and we shot everything on the place while she was gone. We were taught that if you killed something, you processed it – so we’d skin it and put it down in the well to keep it cool until dinner.”

Hazel helped her husband Tom trap rabbits. “He’d set the traps and send me out later to check them. I think I got the bad end of that deal,” she remembers with a smile. “But I could skin a rabbit like a man.”

Cora nods. “There’s nothing like her fried rabbit,” she says. She squints her eyes and leans forward. “That’s good eatin’.”

Hazel did plenty of cooking, raising six children of her own. In addition to her work at Jones Finishing Company, a greeting card factory, she milked cows, fed hogs and cooked breakfasts and dinners. Her days began at dawn and the work wasn’t done until dark. Cora put in her own days at sewing factories.

The sisters didn’t find time for deer hunting until just seven years ago, when Hazel was 84 and Cora, 75. At a time in their lives when most people are through with

hunting, they discovered a new passion.“They’ve always said they wanted to hunt

deer,” recalls Joe Garvin. “But they never felt that they could.”

So Joe bought them a pair of binoculars and wide-angled scopes for their rifles. He taught them where to aim and set them up in the small shooting house where he hunts. Joe and his wife, Roxanna, help spot deer that are far away. But then it’s all up to Cora and Hazel.

“They’ve got no problem hitting them,” says Joe. “Now, they can shoot.”

Joe’s concern in recent years is getting his mother to slow down a bit.

“We found her up a ladder one day, cleaning the gutters,” he says. “We try to keep her from doing so much. My brother Harold tried to limit her to 50 feet of cord for the weed eater, but she snuck out and bought 200 feet. Now she wants a new hoe for the garden. You can’t stop her.”

As the afternoon begins to cool down, the sisters stroll through Hazel’s bountiful garden. They speak of meals they have made from it; pounds of vegetables to go along with Hazel’s famous deer steaks. Enough to eat for days.

Cora still cooks on her old wood-burning stove. But in the past year, her health has faltered. Last fall she spent three weeks in the hospital. She couldn’t stay down too long, though – it was deer season.

“The doctors told me not to go,” she remembers. “But I took a double-dose of pain killers. I wasn’t going to miss the season. Bringing down a buck like that – it’s the best medicine there is.”

She stops walking for a moment to rest against her cane and looks seriously at Hazel. “Now listen,” she says. “When something happens to me, I want a bunch of these flowers on my casket. And I want those deer horns sticking out.”

Hazel laughs and looks fondly at her sister. “She’d get up out of her casket to go deer hunting.” n

‘she’s staying until she shoots something. She won’t leave.’ ”

The sisters tap Joe for help field dressing and dragging out their deer. But what hunter wouldn’t accept the hauling help of a friend? Besides, bringing up eight kids between them ought to earn them some strong-backed help.

These women know hard work. They were raised with it. Born in Middle Trough Camp, a tiny community near Olive Hill, they shared a one-room house with four brothers and sisters on a farm where the chores were never finished.

“Everybody had a job to do,” remembers Cora. “We worked the fields, hoed corn, set tobacco and cut hay. We learned lessons kids don’t learn anymore. It was a good life.”

“But it was a hard life,” adds Hazel, tapping her sister’s leg. “We learned

everything the hard way.”Their mother was Sally Bond, known as

“Shoutin’ Sally” to her many friends. After