Monday, September 11, 2017

A Memory of My First Compound Bow

Do you remember your first real bow? By real I mean one that you could hunt or compete with. I remember my first bow.

For my 15th birthday my dad bought me a used Brown Bear compound bow. For the past year I had been watching a hunting show every Saturday morning. I don't remember the name of the show or the name of the hunter, but he was a bowman. A very good bowman. Each week he would go on an exciting hunt. I still vividly remember the episode where he hunted antelope by staking out a fence corner and shooting one as it ran by. One of my favorites was the time he hunted geese with a bow, successfully shooting one out of the air.

I had dreams of going on bow hunting adventures with my dad. Now that I had a real bow, I could. Oh! The innocence of youth!

My new bow was beautiful. Unlike most modern compound bows, the Brown Bear was made almost entirely of wood.


Compared to modern standards it was archaic. Have you seen the latest bow technologies? Check out the best compound bows available now! Most of them look like something out of a sci-fi movie. Totally cool!

My bow was not like that, but I loved it anyway. I set the pull weight to 45 pounds (just like the guy on TV had his) and practiced, practiced, practiced. I originally could not afford a sight, so I taped hat pins to the bow with masking tape. You know what? Those hat pins served me well for months!

I also could not afford fancy aluminum arrows. I shot wooden arrows. Yes, wooden arrows out of a compound bow. I'm not sure if I was supposed to, but I never had problems with it. Probably because the bow was so weak and slow.



We lived in a very small town. The only place to get archery supplies was in an old guy's garage. He was an old fashioned bow hunter. Re-curve bows were the only way according to him. He convinced me that the only good broad heads were these long single bladed things. They looked like something out of a Robin Hood movie.



His reasoning was that when you shot something it would run away from you with the arrow still in it. As the animal ran the arrow would wiggle around, cutting it up in the inside. A broad head with more than one blade would get stuck and not wiggle around, causing less damage.

It made sense to me at the time.

Those were good days. I practiced and practiced, never getting very good, but improving little by little. I used a paper plate as a target and hay bales as a backstop. I finally got to the point where I could hit the paper plate almost every time from 30 yards. I also got pretty good at stump shooting. Every time we would go into the mountains I would take my bow and practice by walking through the woods and shooting at random stumps. This was great for teaching me to judge distance. Wooden arrows came in handy here as they did not bend when they hit a rock and were cheap to replace when lost.

I never really went on ant big bow hunting adventures. Bow hunting is much harder than it looks on TV. I did, however, go on some great bow fishing adventures! Including one where I received my worst injury while on an outdoor adventure. 

My bow came with a bow fishing kit that was essentially a spool of twine that screwed into the stabilizer hole and a fiberglass arrow. You simply tied the string to the end of the arrow and shot it at fish. It is so much fun!

I had days and days of fun shooing at "suckers" and "squaw fish" (what everyone called them) in the river on our local Indian reservation. Yes, it was allowed, and yes I had the proper permits. The squaw fish actually had a $2 bounty on them for eating salmon eggs.

My dad would drop me off in the morning and I would fish with my dog until the afternoon. My favorite tactic was to sneak up to a ledge and pop over the edge with my bow raised, shooting the fish sitting in the shade. It is seriously one of my favorite childhood memories.

Kinda dangerous when I think back on it. Once the twine got wrapped around the bows sight and slingshot-ed the arrow into my side. The nock of the arrow went in pretty deep. It happened so fast I had no idea what happened at first. I though that someone had shot me. There had been some racial unrest and some white men had been shot at while on the reservation that summer. I though someone saw me fishing on the reservation and decided to kill me. I honestly thought I was dying, so I curled up in a ball and waited for the end to come. After a while, I have no idea how long, I decided I was not actually dying, so I painfully sat up and checked myself out. It was ugly, but had stopped bleeding. Somehow I made it back to where my dad picked me up each time and sat there, slowly feeling better, until he arrived.

It's amazing all the memories one little object can bring back. 

If you are looking into starting bow hunting, or are currently an enthusiast, check out this site for some great articles and reviews, including bow hunting prerequisites



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