Dressed in boots, camouflage and a bright orange cap, the hunter ties a Remington .30.06 onto a yellow rope hanging from the deer stand nestled between two oak trees at the edge of the field.

Leaving the rifle hanging, the hunter starts up the 14-foot handmade ladder to the shelter at the top. Once there, the hunter sits on the edge and pulls up the gun with the rope.

The hunter places the rifle on the ledge at the top before standing up and backing into the swivel chair. Once settled, the hunter lowers the carpet flaps so that only the brim of the orange hat, the hunter’s glasses and the end of the gun barrel are visible.

The hunter’s eyes focus on the field, watching for any sign of movement. The wait begins.

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The fact is, the rifle’s unloaded. Deer hunting season ended on New Year’s Day.

Katie Watson is simply demonstrating how she is still able to hunt at 84 years of age.

She built the stand, complete with carpet and a shelf for her hunting paraphernalia, out of heart pine 12 years ago. Since her first deer hunt in 1972, she has killed 35 deer, 16 of them since she turned 80.

This past hunting season alone, she killed five, beginning with a buck with 9-inch spike antlers during the weeklong muzzleloader season.

Katie killed the other four during the regular gun season, including a buck with 1-inch spikes, a button-head buck, a doe and a 150-pound, 8-pointer with three broken tines.

“In protecting his territory and his ladies, he had been in a lot of fights,” she says.

If its antlers hadn’t been damaged, Katie says the buck would have been equal to the big one she has mounted on the wall of her den in her home on Highway 49 in Stanly County. She killed that one in December 1993.

Another set of 8-point antlers is mounted on a plaque beside it, and 13 sets of antlers ranging in size from various lengths of spikes to six points are displayed above the mantel with her late husband’s muzzleloader.

Katie was featured on the Carolina Outdoors television program in 1992 for her deer hunting, and she has been included in the North Carolina Fish and Game Finder on five different occasions.

In December of 1994, she made the local newspapers when she downed two deer in Rowan County with one shot. It was during one of the 10 days hunters were allowed to shoot does back then.

Katie was in her stand when she saw two small deer walk out into the open area where she had been putting out feed. They were too small, she decided, so she waited to shoot until a big doe came out.

The bullet went through it and into one of the smaller deer, a button-head buck.“They both ran a little way before they fell, but not very far,” she says.

Her great-nephew, Wes Sells, who works for Pepsi, was delivering to a store near Monroe when a woman asked him if he had seen the article.

“He said, ‘Yeah, I saw it,’ ” Katie recalls. “She said, ‘Well, that’s kind of hard to believe.’ He said, ‘Well, you better believe it. That’s my great-aunt, and she lives right across the road from me.’ ”

Though Katie never had any children, several of her nephews and nieces and great-nephews and great-nieces and great-great-nephews and great-great-nieces live around her on the family farm on which she grew up.

“A lot of them think right much of their Aunt Katie, I think,” she says. “I tell them sometimes when I’ve killed a big deer or something, my ears have been burning the way they’re bragging about what Aunt Katie’s done.”

When she put carpet in the deer stand she built, one of her nephews started calling it Katie’s condominium. “For short, now it’s Katie’s condo,” she says.

Katie was the youngest of 11 children born to Charlie and Maggie Barringer and the only one still living.

By the time she came along, her older siblings had moved out of the homeplace and married. Her oldest brother already had a daughter, and her oldest sister had a son.

Hallie, a sister five years her senior, had claimed the job of helping their mother in the kitchen, so Katie grew up helping their father in the fields.

Her hunting skills were learned from brother Woodrow, who was three years older than Katie. They started out shooting air rifles and making slingshots.

Katie and Woodrow roasted the little birds they killed with their slingshots in their fireplace and ate them.

She received her first store-bought doll when she was 6 years old. Katie opened the box and said she would have rather had a knife. Today, one of her nieces has the porcelain face of that doll.

“I guess it was a right pretty doll,” Katie says, “but I never did think it was pretty when I first had it.”

As she got older, Katie helped hunt for food for the family to eat. “I expect I probably started with a .22 (caliber rifle) when I was 10 years old,” she says.

There weren’t any deer around in those days, so they hunted rabbits, squirrels and opossums.

“That was your main meat other than chicken,” she says. “My mother made real good squirrel stew and fried squirrel and brown gravy with fried squirrel.”

Growing up, Katie didn’t show much interest in boys. When she was 12, Woodrow and his friend carved her initials with the initials of a boy in her class on a slick poplar tree with very few limbs.

“They were sure that Iwould not be able to climb that tree, but I showed them,” she says. “A few days later, with two of my girlfriends looking on, Iclimbed that tree. With my knife, hands and teeth, I left a slick place on that tree where the initials used to be.”

Katie Barringer was a star basketball player at Richfield High School, from which she graduated in 1933. After that, she worked with her father on the farm for a few years before going to work at a Concord hosiery mill operating a looping machine.

After many of the male employees left during World War II for defense work or active service, the man who repaired the machines was promoted to assistant superintendent, leaving his position open.

“He had detected over the years that I had done a lot of minor repairing to my own machine,” she says, “so he suggested that they train me to be a mechanic or a machine fixer. That was, of course, before women’s lib.”

When they approached her about it, Katie decided to give it a try. Back then, all the women wore dresses as part of their work uniform.

“Well, I couldn’t carry screwdrivers and wrenches and hammers and walk around with a dress on,” she says, “so they broke over and let me wear slacks. I was the only woman out of about 300 employees who wore slacks for a number of years, and so I stuck out like a sore thumb.”

Because she was the youngest, Katie continued to live at home, helping to take care of her parents in their later years. Though she secretly married a neighbor at age 30, he continued to live with his sister a mile away.

“He absolutely refused to live with or help look after old folks,” she says.

After more than seven years, Katie says she got tired of him dragging his feet about taking on responsibilities and filed for a divorce. It was only when it came out in the newspaper that her family, friends and co-workers found out she had even been married.

Six months after her divorce, Katie’s mother died.

Not long after that, she met and started dating a widower named Paul Ross. They both enjoyed living in the country and fishing and hunting.

By this time, Katie had earned quite a reputation as a quail hunter. She trained her own pointers and killed the season limit of 100 birds for several years.

When Ross proposed, Katie accepted, and they set a wedding date. Five days before they were scheduled to be married, her father had a severe stroke.

They postponed their wedding until the following Saturday, but when Katie’s father died that morning, they ended up marrying in a private ceremony.

Katie and Paul Ross lived together happily for more than five years, building the brick house she lives in now, before he died of lung cancer.

A year later, Katie met Jack Watson of Pennsylvania, who had fallen in love with the South when he would come down and visit his grandparents in Stanly County.

“When his marriage began to have trouble, he decided to come South and start over,” Katie says. “And he met me.”

They were married for 26 years. They shared a love of the outdoors and spent their free time hunting and fishing together.

When severe health problems prevented him from being able to work or do what he enjoyed, Jack Watson shot himself during a period of depression.“I was working outside and heard the shot,” she says.

The years that followed were difficult for Katie, who says she almost suffered a nervous breakdown. But she started deer hunting right after that and found solace in the woods.

She has become well known in Stanly County and the surrounding area for her hunting skills.

Every year, when deer season starts, the fellow members of the Friendly Neighbors senior citizens group, which meets monthly at Richfield Baptist Church, all ask her how many deer she has killed.

“And if I didn’t show up with deer steak at every meeting, I think they’d run me back home,” she says.

Though she’s no longer a member, a Rowan County hunting club continues to invite her to its annual dinner and asks her to share a few hunting stories.

Katie Watson carries a brag book in her pocketbook filled with photographs of her successful hunts and fishing trips.

There are a couple of photos of the 42 bream she caught in two hours with a fly rod in a neighbor’s pond. “A lot of them weighed over a pound,” she says. Others show the rabbits, squirrels, quail and deer she has killed over the years.

Though she missed a few deer when she first started hunting them, Katie says she rarely misses one now.

“I kept complaining to my nephew who is a gunsmith that my scope wasn’t right,” she says. “He finally took it and tried it out himself and ended up sending it back to the company where it came from. After I got my scope straightened out, I haven’t missed as many.”

Though she’s glad to see deer hunting season end so she can get some rest, Katie says she always looks forward to the next year. There is one deer, in particular, that she’s going after next year.

Katie spotted it two days before the season ended, but it was too late in the day and the deer was too far away for her to get a decent shot. But she had better not say much about it, she says, competition and all.

Because some of her family members worry about her hunting at her age, Katie always carries a cellular phone, and she tries to be careful climbing up and down the ladders to her stands.

So far, she has never gotten hurt. “And I’ve never had a gun to misfire with me and never fell down with a gun,” she says.