Category: Other

There is a gentlemen that walks his Springers behind my house, exercises his falcon within earshot of my backyard, is the husband of one of my son’s teachers when he was in high school, and, as I found out a year or so ago, shoots a longbow. He’s quite friendly to boot. He told me about the 3D league that the local archery club was putting on, and I didn’t need too much convincing.

We’re just over half way in the league, having gone through 7 out of 12 shoots (I missed one; only 10 out of 12 count for the total score), with a different set-up each week. The club owns a variety of targets from most of the local wildlife to more exotic, including a crocodile (or alligator, it’s hard to tell), and we shoot at 12 of them from 6 stations, two rounds each night. The compound guys get one arrow per target to make it happen; the trad guys are expected to be not so accurate, so we get two arrows per target, each round, so 48 shots.

Here are some quick impressions and lessons learned so far:

1. Despite my generally ornery disposition and dislike for crowds, I am enjoying this.
2. Low light and distances stretching out to 40 yards make that I can barely read the numbers identifying the targets; that has to have some influence on accuracy. A visit to the laser people may be in my future.
3. Having two tries per target really helps. It’s probably not a good reflection of a hunting situation, but it makes our scores look less dismal.
4. Out of five trad shooters, I am the only one deliberately aiming.
5. Despite having two arrows per target, of which only the best arrow counts, I still had six 5’s on the last scoring sheet, on 24 targets; a five meaning a hit outside the kill zone.

 

 

So, for the remaining five, here is the plan:

1. Aim for the X! Regularly I find myself aiming for the animal, and not for the 11-ring. Focus, focus, focus!
2. Keep trying to execute, and fight the TP*. Sometimes I have trouble releasing the arrow.
3. Shoot at least one evening using only one arrow per target. My inflated 75% kill shot percentage may not look so hot when I don’t have a second arrow.

*Target Panic

My first foray into traditional archery ended abruptly, when a brutal swing of sharp-edged axe cut my bow in half.

As a young boy, I spent at least one of each weekend day at my uncle’s place, where my cousins and I did our best to find trouble and often were successful. My uncle owned a swimming pool, a large vegetable yard, a small orchard and a piece of wooded land that backed onto many square miles of fields and pastures. The neighbour’s property was likewise wooded and even had a few wild apple trees that produced small rock-hard green apples. The edge of those woods was home to a healthy population of rabbits, that burrowed under the roots of century-old trees.

Given those circumstances it doesn’t take much imagination to see how we were in desperate need of tools that would allow us to reduce some of those rabbits to possession. We tried spears without success. Obviously a bow would give us the striking range we needed. A saw was quickly borrowed from my uncle’s shop and sisal rope was lying around in big bundles everywhere. Hazel nut bushes provided long and straight and bendy sticks, and bamboo sticks from the vegetable garden made for pretty good arrows.

I don’t recall that we ever killed a rabbit. But I do remember that it didn’t take long for us to tip those bamboos with small rock-hard green apples. Soon we were flinging arrows at each other, pretending to be Robin Hood, or a tribe of warring indians. Most arrows were crooked and after given flight rarely followed a straight path. One lucky arrow however left my bow, and after an impressive arc, landed square on my cousin’s leg. He did not take kindly to that, and made an equally impressive run into the house, wailing like a banshee. Which led to the unhappy scene described earlier.

However, this early success planted the seed deeply in my being, where it lay dormant for forty years, waiting for the right circumstances to sprout and find fertile ground.

Sometimes all it takes is a little misfortune. Like the cone of the jack pine will not release it seeds until a fire rages, it took a time-out in my working life to create the right circumstances for the next step into traditional archery. I mean, how many hours a day can you really be looking for a job. I was in dire need of a keep-sane project, and building a bow seemed like the right combination of manual labour and research into the how-to. It started the journey that will be documented on these pages.

If you are a newby you might learn something, if you are old hat you’ll probably shake your head over all the mistakes made. In summary, I built a bow, learned to shoot, bought another bow and went hunting. In the process I corrupted the mind of my hunting partner, so I didn’t have to suffer alone. Follow along, if you please.

Frans Diepstraten