Story behind my first trad kill…

[Bama Creek Bum]

Starting Over​

Part One

Twenty yards it’s only sixty feet. It’s six inches less than the distance from the pitcher’s mound to home plate in MLB, we’re talking ten to twenty feet less than the length of an 18-wheeler, not a long distance in the grand scheme of things. However, when it comes to consistently placing an arrow into a six-inch circle with nothing more than a stick and string, sometimes that twenty yards may as well be a mile.

It's October, here in Alabama fall is in the air, some days. It’s the time of year that bowhunters have waited for since the last day of last bow season. It’s nearing the time of our first frost, the leaves on the Yellow Poplars, Red Maples and Sweet Gums are starting to change colors. The air is drier and less humid and the acorns are starting to fall. For most folks this time of year marks the dreadful end of summer and all that goes away with it, boating, swimming, pool parties, vacations, etc. but not me, I’m a bowhunter, I’m anxious for summer to end and I whole-heartedly embrace the arrival of fall and all that it brings with it.

Bowhunters, we’re a different breed we endure the summer months as we prepare for the fall. We tinker with our gear, we practice shooting our bows, we experiment with different arrow and broadhead combinations, we watch bowhunting videos and read bowhunting articles, all while daydreaming about the fall and all that it will bring. So here I am, in my thirty-sixth year of chasing whitetails with a bow and arrow, thirty-six years of honing my shooting skills, thirty-six years of trying to outsmart my quarry, thirty-six years of experience, thirty-six years of multiple successful hunts, thirty-six years of waiting for fall. Thirty-six years, yet this year is different, it’s all brand new again and I’m like a kid on Christmas Eve.

 

[Bama Creek Bum]

Part Two

I started bowhunting as a teen in 1985 when I purchased my first bow, a compound bow, a Bear Whitetail. Within two years I had purchased a new Hoyt compound bow and just finished my first year of competing in 3D tournaments. It was this fall that I harvested my first whitetail deer, a mature doe, the first of many with a bow and arrow and thus marked the beginning of a lifelong quest. In the past thirty-seven years I’ve pursued deer, elk, turkey and small game with bow and arrow, from the thin-aired steep terrain near the timberline of the Rocky Mountains to the humid, alligator, cottonmouth and mosquito infested swamps of the deep south. My lifetime pursuit of whitetail deer with a bow and arrow has consisted of me being in a treestand, perched high above my quarry, with my latest flavor of compound bow hanging within reach, however, this year I’m not grasping my trusty compound bow, the bow with sights, stabilizer, and high let-off cams, the bow that I can hold at full draw for a couple of minutes if I need to, the bow that I’ve used to cleanly harvest deer at a distance of over forty yards. This year I’m hunting with traditional archery gear, more specifically a longbow. My longbow, to the untrained eye, looks very much like a bowed stick and a string, to me however it looks like a beautiful work of art, like a fine piece of furniture with smooth graceful lines and colorful exotic woods with lots of character. My longbow has about a 49 pound draw at my 30” draw and launches my arrow at maybe 180 feet per second. It’s not fast, but this isn’t supposed to be about speed, it’s a game of closeness and quietness and my bow is extremely quiet.

Back in March of this year I decided that this is the year, this will be the year that I put away the compound bow and graduate to traditional archery gear, specifically the longbow. Now I do own a recurve bow, an old Bear Hunter TD that I purchased new back around 1992. I have shot tons of carp with this bow and even bow hunted deer with it one afternoon. I could just never get comfortable with it and lacked the confidence that I had in my compound bows, therefore it was put away and never used. Having always admired longbows, and never even shot one, I ordered a cheap but highly recommended longbow. The bow arrived and I acquired some arrows, an arm guard and a finger tab and I commenced to flinging arrows. I was a bit discouraged at first due to the fact that I would have good days when my arrows were grouping pretty good and then bad days when they were scattered all over the target and these “groups” that I’m referring to were all shot from fifteen yards! I have killed deer at forty-four yards with my compound and I can barely hit the target at fifteen yards with my longbow? Nonetheless I had made up my mind and I was sticking with it come hell or high water.

It took about a month of practicing religiously with the longbow for me to get to the point where I could keep all of my arrows inside of an 8-inch circle at ten yards. This may not seem like much to the compound shooter with sights but to the new traditional bow shooter with no sights its quite an accomplishment. It was also at this time that I ordered a new custom longbow, I could go into details here but that’s a story for another day. Anyhow, while waiting for the delivery of my new custom bow I continued to plug away with my current longbow. Every day, weather permitting, I would shoot a few arrows in the morning before work and I would shoot for an hour or more late in the afternoon. All of the practice was paying off, my groups tightened to four-inches and the shooting distance grew to twenty yards. Every now and then I’d step back to 25 yards and shoot a few arrows.

It’s opening day, around 4:00 pm, and I’m perched some 16 feet off the ground in a white oak and my friend Lance is a foot and a half higher to me and to me left, in the same tree. Our goal is for me to shoot a deer and Lance is going to film it. So here I am with my trusty longbow in hand with a broadhead-tipped arrow nocked and ready. Its fairly warm, uncomfortably warm, and the no-see-ums are eating my hands up! In front of us is an agricultural field some 80 acres in size with a couple of grown-up hedge rows dissecting it. It has thick bedding areas adjoining it and hardwood timber immediately behind us. There is a well-worn around the edge of the field about 14 yards directly in front of me.

My quarry is a whitetail deer, buck or doe, either will suffice. Whitetail deer are known for their keen sense of smell, their intense eyesight, their superb hearing and their constantly being on high-alert. A southern Whitetail deer is one of the most nervous animals to be pursued by bowhunters in North America. I’m talking wild deer, not the semi-tame variety living in subdivisions, parks and downtown, I’m talking about the crazy, inbred, backwoods, southern variety that tries to come out of their skin and bolts to the next county if they sense something in their world has changed or about to change, and I only need to be within twenty yards of one to hopefully get an opportunity to fill my tag.

We hadn’t been there long when we started to see a few deer meander in and out of the woods. We had a small spike and a few does wander by but only had one mature doe offer a shot. The doe was only about 18 yards but I had to shoot from a sitting position and my arrow appeared to had made contact with a small twig and sailed a couple of feet over the deer’s back. Luckily, Lance got this on video. My first shot at a deer with a longbow and I blew it, AND its been preserved on video so that any time I feel good about myself I can watch it and quickly be humbled.

It's nearing the end of legal shooting hours when Lance says that he sees three deer coming our way and the third deer has a rack. The deer a couple hundred yards away so I go ahead and stand up and get into position, not shooting from a sitting position again! The front deer, a doe appears in front of us some 100 yards ahead of the other two, we watch her ease on by and wait for the other deer. Lance tells me as the second deer is coming into my view “this is a spike with 10” spikes, he’s not the one to shoot, it’s the next deer.” So, we watch the spike ease by as the “shooter” comes into view. As the deer approaches us it stops, broadside to me and I whisper “I’m gonna shoot it” and Lance says “it’s 25 yards.” Now, 17 yards is my sweet spot when I’m practicing, however, I have practiced out to 25 yards. I did tell Lance that I absolutely would not shoot past 20 yards but given the deer’s body position, the opening that it was standing it, etc. I felt like the stars had aligned and it was a shot that I couldn’t miss.

I slowly drew my bow back, anchored and placed the tip of my arrow tight behind the deer’s left shoulder. As the string slipped from my tab I knew that I had gotten a perfect release and I watched the bright green lighted nock seemingly float through the air, I mean it appeared to be travelling at the speed of the Goodyear Blimp, and it hit exactly where I was aiming! I don’t think the deer ever flinched until the broadhead was sticking out the far shoulder. The deer immediately bolted with my arrow sticking out of it, it went to our right and into the woods some 50 yards from us. Lance looked at me, and kind of chuckling said “have you ever killed a deer with one of those bows?” I said “no” and he said “I think you just did!”

From Lance’s position he could see my lighted nock on the ground at the field edge. It was probably 30-45 minutes until we went to the spot where the deer was standing at the shot, we immediately found blood. We followed the blood to my arrow which we discover was missing the broadhead and about the first three inches of the carbon shaft. We followed the blood, not a trail that “a blind man could follow” but we didn’t have to get on our hands and knees either. Maybe 10 minutes into the tracking job, Lance who is leading the way is standing at the last drop of blood and there is a log nearly knee high about a foot from him to our right. We are looking to see if the deer jumped the log or ran past it when Lance takes a step and stops, he looks at me with a big grin and I said “where is it?” he shined his light on the ground to his right about 3 feet away laid my first deer taken with a longbow, a big fat DOE! Yeah, I know, y’all thought it was going to be a racked buck, well imagine our surprise. To be quite honest I couldn’t have been much happier had it been a racked buck.

 

[butcherboy]

Great write up on your hunt and first trad kill. Congrats!

 

[Tdawg21]

Great story. Congrats!

-Dawg

 

[Bama Creek Bum]

Guys the rut is about to kick off here and I’m hoping to get a buck with my longbow this year.