I’ve never really known all that much about hunting or archery. Even though I’m from the Heart of Dixie, those were just not the sort of things we did in my family. Yes, somewhere along the way my dad got us some shotguns and a .22 rifle (a requirement for dads in Alabama), but for the most part we were focused on football, baseball, and basketball when I was growing up.
In Junior High School, though, I developed an interest on my own in whitetail deer hunting—and doing so specifically with a bow. I began to purchase and subscribe to the appropriate magazines and to watch the Sunday afternoon hunting shows. I really began to eat it all up and thankfully, while my dad wasn’t personally interested in the sorts of outdoor pursuits that were calling my name, he was always more than happy to encourage and support me in whatever I found interesting. That meant I eventually ended up a local bow shop picking out my first bow.
But, like most folks born in the 1970s and growing up in the 1980s, my introduction to archery began with a compound bow—a Hoyt something or another if I remember correctly. I practiced and tinkered with that bow constantly for a couple of years, but, because I was only 13 when I got it, and didn’t really have any opportunities to get into the deer woods with it, the only deer it killed were the ones I imagined shooting in my backyard. That didn’t stop me from considering myself a deer hunter or a bowhunter, though, and fortunately I did get the opportunity to take my first whitetail deer with the Marlin 30-30 that my dad gave me one Christmas during those early teenage years (I used that same gun and its iron sights to take a spike this past February with my six year old son—more on that later).
While my hunting opportunities were few during those early teenage years, and my bowhunting opportunities fewer, my interest in both persisted until my sixteenth birthday when I received two of the best gifts a young man could ever receive—a lifetime hunting and fishing license and the independence that accompanies having a driver’s license. Around this same time, I had become best friends with a guy who had access to hunting land about two miles south of us in Alabama. More important than that, he had enough hunting experience to take me from a being a complete neophyte to just a plain neophyte.
During my last two years of high school, our typical hunting season looked like this: practice high school football all week, play (and normally lose) a game on Friday night, convince our coaches to let us do our required Saturday morning running right after the game on Friday night, and leave directly from the parking lot of our high school to make the two-hour drive to our hunting club. Although we’d roll in late every Friday night, that didn’t stop us from being in the stand before sunrise on Saturday morning, and going hard until after dark on Sunday afternoon—which meant rolling back into our driveways just in time to get to bed for school on Monday morning (oh to be young again).
During those two seasons of hunting with my friend before I headed off to college, I learned basically everything I’d know about deer hunting until my gradual return to it just a couple of years ago. Unfortunately I don’t have a record of my numerous hunts during high school, and the far less frequent ones during college, but I was fortunate enough to take several deer with both rifles and bows. By the time I finished college, however, I had become distracted with other things, and while I never intended to pack my hunting gear away, that is, regrettably what happened.
Now, there’s no need to take you through my non-hunting journey after college which began with a career in software development, while I tinkered on and off with idea of becoming an airline pilot, only to end up becoming a pastor (I told you it was a journey). But, something significant did take place six and half years ago that has slowly brought me back into to the hunting woods—I had a son. We have a daughter as well, and I don’t guess there’s any good reason why I shouldn’t have wanted to take her hunting and I’m happy she’s planning to do that with me this fall, but not long after having our son, it was my wife who said, “You know, you’re going to have to teach him to hunt. You better think about getting back into it.” (Ironically, this is the same woman who, by no fault of her own, captured my attention twenty-some years earlier to the point that hunting deer faded off my radar screen.)
Well, it took a few more years, and some unprompted, out-of-the-blue interest in hunting that my young son was apparently born with that led to my Internet searches becoming disproportionately weighted toward hunting related topics. My wife was right, I was going to have to teach him to hunt and it was time for me to get back into it. But, I wanted to do it in a specific way and I wanted to teach that way to my son. This is what inevitably led me to pursue the route of traditional bowhunting, something the guy at my local archery store correctly warned me would be a difficult but rewarding adventure. While he doesn’t do so exclusively, he does regularly hunt with traditional equipment, and unlike the folks at the other archery store in town, he showed genuine interest in me not only as a customer but also as someone entering into the traditional archery community.
That was almost exactly two years ago. I have yet to be successful with my traditional bow yet, and as I mentioned earlier, I did eventually break down and take a rifle in the woods with me at the end of last season so that I could increase my chances of putting some meat in the freezer and killing a deer with my son. But the commitment I had developed to the ideals behind traditional archery had already influenced me to such a degree that when I called my dad about getting one of my rifles from his house, that I asked him for my old 30-30 (the same one I used to kill my first deer) instead of my 30-06 (the one I had used to kill most of my deer). And the first thing I did when I got my hands on that beautiful old lever action rifle that I had equipped with a scope so long ago, was to remove the scope and order and install a new set of iron sights. Yes, if I was going to use a rifle, I was going to make it as traditional as possible. I guess a muzzleloader would have been a better option, but I didn’t have one of those and don’t intend to hunt many more times with something that has a trigger.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I was happy to take that spike at about 40 yards with that iron-sighted Marlin my dad had bought me about 30 years earlier, and I was certainly happy to have my son with me when I killed my first deer in over 20 years, but in my head I knew this was an exception to the path I have chosen for my return to the deer woods, and it would not become the norm. I’m not saying I will never hunt with that 30-30 again, in fact I fully intend to pass it down to my son. But I also intend to pass down to him this new way of hunting the old way that I have chosen for myself.
I’ve posted a couple of times here in the past, but not much. I’ve also got some good help from one of the regulars here through some private messages. BUT... I have learned a great deal from many of you about this old way of hunting that is new to me, and I am grateful. This forum is a great resource and the community involved with it is even better. I am fully committed to taking a deer with my traditional bow this year, and I look forward to sharing here when I do. Grace and peace to all of you.
Topic: New Way Of Hunting The Old Way (Read 2380 times)
