Archery pictures

[Pat B]

David, the tent is Kenneth's. He and his wife raise and train Paint horses and pack in and camp those mountains quite often. Kenneth packed in the camp stuff and food the week before and we hiked in the next week. The trail head is at 10,000' and we hunted between 9500' and 9000'. The bow I'm carrying is a sinew backed Osage self bow I made.
 In 2006 Kenneth invited me out for my first elk hunt in the same area.The Primitive Archer Magazine in the picture has an article I wrote "The Story Of Elkie" about building "Elkie", the bow I built for the 2006 trip. After the hunt was over I left Elkie with Kenneth as a gift of gratitude for asking me along. Kenneth still shoots Elkie today.
 We were hunting any elk that would come by. This was late August, early September and we only heard a few bugles in the far off distance. 

[Vroomvroom]

I’d love to try a self bow just to see how they perform. I wish they had a surviving artifact of the natives that once lived here.  Some journals of people in the 1600-1700 s said when seeing their bows that they were about the height of a man, the arrows were a yard long with two goose feathers.  We don’t have many tree species. They said they thought it was mountain ash, which is hard for me to believe as their only big shrubs.  Another guy said of sycamores. When is interpreted now as our red maples which don’t seem that dense like other kinds.  I would have assumed the best we got would be yellow birch. Or tamarack/juniper.  Our natives essentially went extinct in the early 1800s. At which time they still completely lived in the country. No interaction with settlers except deadly ones. Other than steel they would steal their mode of living hadn’t changed .  No guns, no tools except an axe or wrought iron nails.  Traps they didn’t know how to use them except to break them apart to make arrow points.   But, I wish more info on their bows were available. Just to understand their performance

[Vroomvroom]

Beothuk or red indians as they rubbed red ochre over themselves.  It’s where the term red skins originated from actually.

[Pat B]

David, most Eastern Woodland cultures, including Canada used longer bows, the length of a man's height. Only the Plains Natives used shorter, sinew backed bow and horse archery. Yellow birch, sugar maple and juniper were all used. Mountain ash(Rowan) is also a good bow wood. The 2 fletch arrows were also common in the Eastern Woodland culture and longer arrows helped the arrow get around the bow plus added extra weight.
 As far as performance is concerned self bows and sinew backed bows were used successfully as hunting and war weapons for over 12,000 years. Before that the atlatl was the weapon of choice. Once Europeans showed up with metals the Natives used these metals for weapons(arrow heads, knives) and other tools.

[Vroomvroom]

Few caribou today.

[Vroomvroom]

Bow

[Vroomvroom]

He doesn’t like when I string the bow. I turned that picture every which way but just won’t do up…

[Vroomvroom]

Spiral wound

[Vroomvroom]

Last few days of rabbit season.  In this pic I’m about 1500 feet. Which is about 1400 above a community a mile or two away .    I have one bad snowshoe but walked up without.  And was headed for the rounded hill in the distance which is about 2000 feet.    Saw one ruffed grouse at lower elevations. One ptarmigan at this elevation and good few snowshoe hare tracks at the lower elevations.