About 20 minutes ago I sold my last (and first) compound bow, a 1987 vintage Browning Mag Reflex, with rigid bow case, two-piece Martin limb bolt quiver, pin site, TM hunter rest and a half dozen 2117 arrows ... for $50 cash to a demolitions expert who says he intends to use it for work (???????). (I'll get photos if I can.)
That bow has killed several bucks, several does and missed the biggest bull I have ever seen that had put on a 10 minute show that still makes the hair on my neck stand up. It stuck two arrows in two trees shooting at two running spikes trying to cut cows off from that same bull's herd. It has never killed an elk. It has killed geese, quail, rabbits, ducks, a bear, some shooting preserve pheasants, chipmunks, squirrels, two coyotes (one at about 10 feet), several grouse, an infinite number of pine cones, stumps, tennis balls, tomatoes and zuchini, and a through and through on a steel Sears garden shed. It has hunted in Washington, Idaho, Oregon, California, Montana and Colorado. It still has blood on a limb from the last buck I shot with it, an Okanogan County whitetail, when I used it as a noose to drag the buck up out of the hole it fell into.
Jay St. Charles helped me tune it. And I got a lot of comments from the guys at Kenmore (shooting range) that it sounded like a recurve. No surprise there.
Larry D. Jones himself convinced me to shoot it with fingers and his advice kept sights off it for five years.
Bud Flowers was standing right next to me with that bow when we watched two bulls fighting on a high cliff and one of them went over the side and rolled and flopped about 1,000 ft toward us before getting up and looking back up at the bull that was looking way down at him ... before walking away. That was in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, another of my successful unsuccessful elk hunts.
It won me the sweetest $5 I've ever had my mitts on in a six arrow flight at 60 yards in the cedar bales at Kenmore from a guy, a better archer, I saw almost every day and never heard a kind word from. And I don't think I have ever shot that well since.
It never really let me down except once, and that was again at Kenmore, on a hot summer day. The top limb broke. The range was crowded and it sounded like a gun shot. It took me a second to figure out what had happened and people were all over me asking if I was alright. And I said yes, of course. And someone said, No, I don't think so. And the sweat wasn't sweat. Something hit me but I never figured out what. It turned out to be a tiny cut in my eyebrow, but a bleeder. I actually was OK but it shook up everybody on the range. Browning fixed the limb right away. No questions asked.
A lot of memories, mostly good. A lot of friends, all good.
And now I am completely and happily without wheels.
Topic: I've crossed the Rubicon (Read 138 times)
