PORTER – There’s an aging barn off a narrow road that’s surrounded by high country in this Oxford County town. In it are dozens of deer antlers. They’re tacked to the boards that help frame the hay mow. They’re nailed to support beams. They hang from a wall.

Each rack represents a memory of the hunt.

This is the Day Family homestead. It’s the place where six or more generations of Days find their roots.

It’s also the place where hunting – and fishing – is fused into the Day gene pool.

“Hunting,” says Russ Day, “is in our blood.”

He learned to hunt not for sport but to help feed his family. Day’s parents died a few months apart when he was still a lad. His older brother, William, raised Russ and his younger sibling, Richard. William had learned a bit about hunting from his father, Eugene, before his death, and passed his knowledge along to his brothers.

“We hunted to put food on the table,” said Russ Day, 62. He began with partridge and rabbit and gray squirrels when he was 7 or 8 years old and graduated to deer, moose and bear.

Ten years younger than William, he couldn’t do the heavy logging and farming work that his older brother did, which he used to raise hard cash to help keep the family together, clothed and living under one roof.

“Back then there was no junior licenses,” Russ Day recalled. “We’d grab a shotgun anytime we were told to go shoot a bird. It was part of the family’s food supply.”

It still is for the Days. “We’d rather eat venison than beef,” Day notes.

And William Sr. points out that the Days are “a big family. Nothing we shoot goes to waste.”

Now William hunts with his son Bill Jr., who in turn has taught his three sons woods wisdom. Richard takes to the trails with his son and son-in-law, and Russ does likewise, hunting with son Stephen or his two grandsons.

They’ll work the “burnt lands” around Porter and Brownfield, sometimes as a family, other times in ones and twos. But they also cover other grounds. William recently returned from Pennsylvania with a deer in tow. Russ will tromp ridges and bogs from Casco to the Aziscohos Lake region not far from Rangeley then to New Hampshire. The Bills, Senior and Junior, have visited Quebec’s far north more than once to claim a caribou or two.

And the family members are all successful whitetail hunters. Their joint and individual collections of antlers – more than 100 sets in all – along with several mounted heads at each of the men’s homes, are silent witness to just how successful.

They also hunt bear, and have the heads to prove it.

Russ Day will quickly say that he’ll vote no on Tuesday’s referendum regarding bear-hunting tactics, although he adds that he loathes the use of bait and snare traps to take bear.

The family enjoys moose meat, too.

William Sr., who happens to hold the state record for the largest lake trout ever landed, a whopping 27-pound-3-ounce leviathan derricked from the depths of Lake Sebago, was among the first Mainers to legally take a moose when the state resumed the hunt on that species.

The Days have also taken their share of bobcat, hunted in the snows of a Maine winter to the chorus of hounds.

Today they’ll each be out, mostly toting reliable and powerful .30-06 rifles. William Sr. has a place staked out on Oak Hill, he said, and son Billy says he’ll likely be nearby.

Russ will join his grandsons on a ridge not far from his home in Casco, while the rest of the family takes up stands along this or that favorite game trail.

Sometime during the weekend, they’ll touch base with one another and likely learn there’s a deer or two or three hanging from the rafters of the barn. And soon more antlers will join the collection.