Tracy Shaver isn’t telling what kind of perfume or foundation makeup she was wearing when she harvested a 185-pound, nine-point buck.

And, she’s not sharing the joyful noise that her children were making that attracted the big buck to the rye field.

She’s mum on all that. But she’s not keeping quiet about bagging a “trophy” deer after not taking aim for nine years.

“Maybe I’m just lucky,” Shaver said, laughing. “The way it happened, I guess you would have to say that I am.”

Shaver inherited the love of hunting from her mother and vividly remembers the first big buck she harvested.

“I was 18 years old and had just gotten home from work,” she said. “It was late afternoon and cold and rainy and nobody was there except me. So, I just decided to go hunting.”

She grabbed the gun, went to the woods and harvested a nine-point.

That was enough to hook Shaver on hunting. But when she had children, she put her gun in the rack and turned her full attention to diapers and midnight feedings.

“Zane is 8 now and he and Curtis went hunting in December and he got a doe,” Shaver said. “That was his second doe. He got one last year. Jolea is 6 and they are old enough that I could think about hunting again. So, I volunteered as a guide on a girls’ deer hunt up in Springville in North Alabama. The little girl that I was guiding killed her first deer and that really got me wanting to go hunting again.”

On Dec. 17, Shaver took her son hunting and he killed his first buck.

“It was exciting to be there when Zane killed his first buck,” Shaver said. “And it just made me want to hunt even more.”

With deer season quickly coming to a close, Shaver got more anxious to get “in the hunt.”

“Curtis is going to paramedic school and he had to leave early to do his clinicals,” Shaver said. “I wanted to go hunting so I took the ground blind that I had just bought and the children and we went out set the blind up in the back pasture.”

The Shavers have about 123 acres and some of it is ripe for harvesting deer.

“We were inside the blind and we saw this buck,” Shaver said. “It was so exciting to watch him. Zane was so excited.

“He said, ‘Mama, let me shoot him!” But I said, ‘I thought you were going to let Mama shoot him.’”

Zane conceded to his mom.

He said he was too nervous to shoot anyway, so Shaver took aim and brought down the nine-point buck from about 110 yards away.

She and the children loaded the buck on the ATV and took him home to surprise dad.

“Curtis couldn’t believe that it was such a good buck,” Shaver said. “I’ve got three nine-points and two eight-points and this is the best one by far. I’m going to have it mounted, of course.”

With the 2008-09 deer season in the books, Shaver will now have to wait to take aim again. And, while Shaver won’t reveal the details of the perfume she wore, she offers this concession to the male hunters: she wore a camouflage shirt and pants.