Kate Cote is popular with the boys at her school for an unlikely reason – hunting tips.

“The boys always ask where I go to hunt,” said Kate, 12, a cheerleader at Mountain Valley Middle School in Mexico. “I keep my mouth shut.”

Her gym teacher calls her the “great white hunter.” She began this past hunting season by bagging a 263-pound bear on Sept. 3. Twenty-two days later, she shot her first moose. The 672-pound bull walked across a dirt road 15 yards from where she was talking to a game warden. Kate grabbed the downed moose by the horns and said, “Now I can’t wait for deer season.”

She got a jump on most deer hunters by hunting on “youth day,” a week before the official start of the season. She was up at the crack of dawn on opening day and two mornings after that before she shot a 90-pound doe on Nov. 8 with her .243-caliber rifle “Betty Lou.” Kate would not accept help dragging her deer to a waiting four-wheeler. “Since it was my first deer, I wanted to do everything myself,” she said.

A bear, a moose and a deer are the “triple crown” of Maine hunting, said her father, Mark, her hunting partner. It’s one turkey short of a “grand slam,” he said. Kate would like to travel to Labrador to hunt caribou. But the freezer is too full, said the proud father. “We don’t have room in the freezer for a box of popsicles.” Four freezers, one in the kitchen and three in the basement, is each full of game meat.

Kate gets grossed out watching medical shows on television, but she has no problem cutting up her kill. Family pictures show her processing bear and deer at her dining room table with her brothers Aaron, 17, and Andrew, 10, who also hunt.

Kate’s 15-year-old sister, Krista, and mother, Marie, don’t hunt. “My only kind of hunting is looking for what type of meat we are going to have for dinner,” said Marie Cote. Krista said she would eat the game meat, but she wouldn’t hunt “beacuse it’s mean.”

Mark Cote joked that he read his children bedtime stories from Outdoor Life, a popular hunting magazine. He introduced Kate to hunting when she was 10, the legal age to hunt with a gun. She shot her first bear that year and like a true hunter, her stomach would get hot between hunts.

“It’s called adrenalin burn,” said her father with a laugh.