This is going to be a bit tickilish. I know my bow hunting friends might very well look at this and think I am knocking bow hunting. I am trying my darndest not to do so. However, it has been 5 years since I had to give up my bow, and as I’m putting the rifles away I must say that I have not missed bow hunting as much as I thought I would.
What got me out of bow hunting was a mix of things. First, my eyes started to go. I was having trouble focusing on the pins and the deer at the same time. I tried a lot of things over the years, but I finally had to admit that middle age had caught up with me. That probably would not have gotten me out of the sport. There were still options I had left to try, but then I got a new neighbor. He did not like me practicing in the back yard, and he let me know that he’d checked the local city ordinances. I really did not have much of a leg to stand on, so I started practicing at my folks. My practice sessions got cut roughly in half, and eventually that probably caused my shoulder to go. I started pulling my bow in 2006, and the next thing I knew I could not lift my right arm over my head. I was still feeling it at Thanksgiving. The doc called it chronic bursitis and signed my medical waiver, so I could hunt with a crossbow.
I tried a crossbow. I’ll probably go back to it next year or so, but I have not hunted with it since 2009. What I found was that I finally had to face up to a basic underlying bias in my hunting; I had stopped taking early season hunting seriously. Part of it was due to the way Kentucky structures its seasons. Part of it was just my own eccentricities. For me, September always seemed too hot to be out hunting. I came of age in a State where the Bow Opener was the first weekend in October, and I was happy with that. As it turned out, the deer on my farm tend to agree. Usually they leave my ridge in late summer and go feed down in the river bottoms, and I don’t usually seem them until about mid-October. Kentucky schedules its early Youth Season and early Muzzleloader Season in mid-October, so that was always a distraction. The peak of the rut is usually just about when Modern Weapons season opens, so even with a healthy shoulder, I was only bow hunting a few weekends before Rifle Season. It hardly seemed worthwhile. Late season? It is hard to get worked up enough to go out in the cold in December and January with a bow if your freezer is packed by Thanksgiving.
The farther I get from my last bow hunt, the less I miss it. However, I still have a hard time putting it in perspective. I was a pretty dedicated bowhunter for twenty years. Some years I used up all my paid vacation on bowhunting. I did not mind the frustration and hardships. I did not mind the practice. I loved being outdoors. What I found was that I found it harder as my kids got older to justify the amount of time I had to spend hunting alone. I also realized that if I was going to have a chance at a nice rack on my property, I had to wait until the rut to fill my tags, and that meant waiting until November. By then it made more sense to have a rifle in my hand as a bow. Lo and behold, the more I used a rifle, the more I liked it. Long before the shoulder gave out, I realized my bowhunting trips were turning into armed scouting expeditions.
So you can chalk family concerns up as one reason for my loss of interest. Health concerns are another. Those are easy, but after 20 years of bowhunting I find it a bit disconcerting to be so far removed from it so soon. The other reasons were a little tougher to grasp as well as own up to.
COST: Bowhunting is hard to do on the cheap. A properly outfitted hunting arrow is probably $7-12 bucks a pop. Granted, you can reuse them up to a point, but still! Everything about bow hunting is gadget driven, unless you go ultra-primitive. My hunting expenses plummetted after I stopped bowhunting. I went from a large-sized daypack and a buttpack to a small shoulder bag for all the stuff I was able to remove.
TIME: It takes a huge investment in time to bowhunt properly. A lot of guys shoot year round. I usually started pulling my bow in July or August. However, the last five years or so that I used the bow, I found it was a lot of commitment, just to go out and sit in a tree. I knew the real show was going to start in mid-November and watching doe and small bucks pass under my stand was fun, but I found I could have just as much fun without a bow in my hand. Early season hunting also consumed a lot of the time I now use for scouting. Practice? I went from twnty or arrows several nights a week to firing a few practice shots with each rifle to check my zero.
HEARTACHE: I have been fortunate over the years. I lost one buck to a blown shot with a bow. I have only one deer not recovered with a muzzleloader, and one with a rifle. However, every time a deer went pound out of sight with one of my arrows sticking out of their hide, I thought I was going to lose it. Sure, I had that happen twice this year gun hunting, but that was with a 35 Whelen; I knew the answer was certain. I just did not know how long it was going to take me to find them or how much effort it was going to take to schlepp them out. With bowhunting, I always walked away with a queasy feeling I had screwed up, even if the deer died 20 yards from the stand. I did not have to shoot at a deer to have heartache either. I cannot count the number of times I had to sit passively and watch a nice fat buck walk by at 50 yards.
FAILURE: As I said, I only lost one deer in twenty years of bowhunting. I missed a few, but they were clean misses. With a modern rifle, I have seldom had any question of the outcome. Over the years, however, I had to keep asking myself, what was the cost of failure? Sure, I suffered a lot, losing a deer, but it was nothing like what the deer felt. While I was actively bowhunting, the price of failure always seemed to be. . . what can I call this? Manageable? Acceptable? Now that I have been away from it for a few years, I see how badly I felt in 2008 grazing a nice buck with a rifle. I nicked the buck in 2008 that got away, because my scope had gotten a bump. If I had done that with a bow, I probably would have been quite inconosolable. Two years later I nailed my #2 best buck out in the middle of a field from the same stand. He jumped the fence and disappeared without leaving a blood trail. It took me a half hour to discover that he had not run down into the ravine I had searched, but was got his antlers caught in the fence and died almost instantly in tall grass right at the fenceline. That was a long half-hour.
SUCCESS: I took some nice bucks when I was bowhunting. I had chances at a few more. There were a few more bruisers that just never got into range for the bow. However, my biggest bucks and my biggest successes have all been with a rifle and all but one has been taken within spitting distance of my stand. I really do not feel all that greater an achievement bow vs. rifle or close-in vs airmail. I will say that when the biggest buck I have ever seen came strolling up to the stand, I was glad I was holding a rifle. This was one shot I did not want to screw up. For me, at least, looking at that big rack up on the fireplace never has me regretting I did not do it with a bow.
CHALLENGE: I do not feel less of a hunter for bagging a big deer with a rifle over a bow. I do not feel less of a man for having put my bow down. To me, the challenge has always been about things much less distinct. Mostly it has been about just showing up. The hard part has been committing to getting out of a warm bed and heading for the truck at 3 AM. I always amaze myself that despite a demanding job and a growing family, I made it out. All the gear, all the food, hunting from a tent, schlepping in a climber in the dark, these were all far more of a challenge in total that what I held in my hand, waiting for the sun to come up.
I do not mean to be knocking bow hunting. However, after completing my fifth season without a bow, I gotta say that my life has improved. I am still out in the woods as much, probably more so. I am certainly more as devoted than ever to the sport; it has been a year round passion since I got the farm. I did not become a slob when I put down my bow, and wearing an orange hat did not make me a slobbering idiot. Granted, I now hunt at a time and place when it is common to hear 1-3 shots per minute for the first three hours of season, However, I have the whole rest of the year to enjoy peace and solitude. For a couple of weeks out of the year, I’m no longer out on a nature walk, I’m out to kill.
If there is a message in this for the rest of you, I just want to encourage folks to keep an open mind in Deer Hunting. So much of what we see on TV and read on the forums promotes snobbery. Bow is more of a challenge. Single Shot rifles are what the experts use– you’ve seen this stuff. I was once called a “booger-eating moron” by a fellow simply because I shoot deer with a 30-06 instead of a more sophisticated cartridge.  Another called me a cretinous hillbilly, because I admitted to hunting with a semi-automatic rifle.  A lot of this comes from the couch potato crowd, but a lot of comes from our own. Having hunted with a crossbow, I can tell you that it is every bit of a challenge– a bit different from a compound bow, but still a challenge.  Shotgun season? Rifle season?  They are different, and they are different enough that it is worth trying if you haven’t.
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