I have always loved the feel of shooting an arrow. Pulling the right strength bow and watching the arrow sail to the target are so satisfying. You pull a trigger and zip! The shot is somewhere on the target but it simply appears, much too fast to see anything of the passage. The arrow is slower and more visible, more majestic.
My first archery was probably at the Elks camp I attended when I was in the 2nd grade. Like many other people, I let the bow string strike the muscle on the inside of the bow-holding arm the first time I shot. It was very painful and I quickly took to the using of an arm guard.
The bows were simple longbows and shortly I could comfortably use a bow with a 25 or 30 lb. pull.
It was not easy to string or unstring the bow. It was a learned skill that preceded actually shooting. I have written before about the early use of a bow I got as a gift and the target arrow I shot through my sister’s hair.
Over the years, I heard of Howard Hill, sometimes called the world's greatest archer. He used a 90 lb. bow, one that took that much strength to draw back. In Africa, he killed three elephants with four arrows. Modern archer and their equipment are really something. I think it is thrilling to be alive during a time when the simple bow has been modified and improved over the design used for millennia. Today's compound bow
has pulleys and allows a weaker person to pull bows in Hill's range and to be very accurate. In a recent Olympics game, the archers were asked to light a giant upright torch with a flaming arrow. Questions were raised about their ability to put the arrows where they were supposed to be. 500 arrows were shot and 498 were perfect shots!
Many years later, in Wisconsin, a friend invited me to go bowhunting for deer with him. We were walking down a trail toward a good spot to wait for game. He was well in front of me. I was walking happily along with my unstrung bow and arrow in the same hand. I intended to string the bow and be ready once I got to the site. Suddenly, a deer ran right past me, closer to me than I am to the computer monitor in front of me now. I had to laugh. I wanted to call out to please wait while I got set, but I didn’t think it would do any good.
I rarely kept ammunition in the house and I didn’t want to discharge a gun inside the city. So, when the rabbits were really stealing out of our garden, I thought I would try using my bow. The same old bow I had had since the 4th grade. The next time Peter Cottontail was in our garden, I stepped outside with the bow fully drawn. I fired and the target arrow passed out the other side of the rabbit’s body. It was running off with blood spurting out and the arrow jutting out of both sides. I could just picture how the bunny might be able to get as far as some child’s sandbox in the neighborhood and bleed to death in front of a toddler playing.
The wounded rabbit managed to get as far as our neighbor’s front sidewalk and keeled over dead. The neighbors were on vacation at the time. I pulled the arrow out of the carcass and placed it in a plastic bag in the trash. I washed the arrow. Then I got a bucket of soapy water and a scrub brush and scrubbed the blood off the sidewalk. I haven’t been hunting for game since.
