by Jess McCuan / photos by Anthony Bellemare

To call her a tomboy might be something of an understatement. Rachel Wilson got a BB gun when she was seven or eight and started shooting at squirrels and birds. She was also known to pick up dead snakes on the roadside and put them on top of her mom’s car as a prank. Wilson borrowed a rifle to go deer hunting in her teens until she could afford, at age 19 or so, to buy her own Winchester .30-06. And if you’ve never handled a Winchester rifle (hers is outfitted with a powerful Bushnell scope), it’s a heavy gun that’s nearly two feet long and kicks back hard enough to knock a gal out of her deer stand. Wilson, who is 21 and rather petite, likes to point out that the rifle is almost as big as she is.

Growing up in Candler, Wilson says she pretty much lived in the woods. Her neighbors taught her to hunt, and when they killed a deer or some other critter, they used the chain from a tire swing to hang the animal up by its feet. She found the gutting process unpleasant but not horrifying. “When you grow up around it, you don’t think too much about it,” she says.

In fact, she’s always liked macho stuff: tattoos, motorcycles, muscle cars, old trucks. She now lives in Etowah, drives a Mustang, and she and her husband have started collecting other guns. Some are for hunting, others, like the semi-automatics, are “just for fun.” Her day job involves just as much grit. She’s the office manager at Ottinger Systems, an Enka business that removes asbestos, mold and lead-based paint from large buildings and does some demolition. She’s been on the job less than a year, but her boss is currently considering making her a supervisor for asbestos removal sites, since she doesn’t mind suiting up and marching into a building to collect samples. “There’s a lot more of it out there than you think,” she says.

Her general rule during hunting season: it’s okay to kill an animal as long as you can use the meat. After deer season in the fall, she and her husband eat deer sausage and steaks all winter. Next season? She’ll be hunting wild boar.