The last picture of my strung longbow.
May twenty-second was an especially hot morning to be sitting in a ground blind in a muggy South Carolina swamp. Approaching the blind I could see the mosquitoes were thick coming out of ten days of rain. Standing water was everywhere, and the moving water was much deeper and running faster than usual.
I opened up the forward facing window on the blind wide open, then fired up my Thermacell before going into the door at the back. I dropped my backpack and quiver into a corner, then I setup my tripod seat and got comfortable. I did my little routine for ground blind hunting by lining up my coffee cup, thermos, binoculars, cell phone, and quiver so it’s all within an easy reach. Finally I setup an arrow on my rest and connected my string tracker, being this wet it could come in very handy. Soon the buzzing of wings inside the blind died down so I switched off the Thermacell and zipped closed the shoot-thru mesh. All buttoned up and ready to hunt as the sun began to rise on the first morning of my five day hunt.
I wondered if this day could be any more perfect? I got out my thermos and poured another cup of coffee. Apparently, yes it could.
I sit and watch the birds and squirrels a few hours, then watch three longbeard turkeys pass right in front of my blind. I have always loved watching and listening to wild turkeys in close, it’s a nice treat but the climbing temperature is beginning to distract me.
At 10:30 my hunting partner for this trip shows up at my blind. Bud and I both had hunted this property a bunch, and it was good to finally be hunting it at the same time again. He had shot a young boar that sounded about perfect for putting some good meat in the freezer. The rain was close enough to hear coming and we agreed better to go while we had good blood and risk pushing it rather than to wait and have no trail to follow. A good rain was already falling by the time we got to the shot location, but good blood carried us down into a flooded flat about 250 yards away. We tracked into the palmettos slowly knowing we had favorable wind and cover noise. Just a question of if we would see a bit of hair before it could make us out and flee. Unfortunately 30 yards later we bumped him out. At the end of our pursuit we did not have a hog, and we had no more blood. Bud would come back later for walking more circles and a unsuccessful grid search.
It was a bad piece of luck, I hoped there was no more bad luck in store for us!
We went back to camp for an amazing potjie lunch of which I had two large helpings and a bunch of water to rehydrate from the morning sauna, I mean ground blind sit. The rain stopped and we had some good spots we wanted to hunt so we loaded up the Gator and took off to go hunting. Then I heard a “snap” sound from behind me…
I was driving the Gator, and I had put my bow in the bed. My upper limb had stuck out of the bed and got caught up before snapping. I guess this day did hold a little more bad luck.
I wasn’t ready for what came next. I own a bunch of bows, and I’ve had bows break in my hand before. I knew it would sting, but I was entirely unready for the wave of emotions that was about to wash over me.
I had recently realized that somehow over the past 3 years it had become my “one bow”. When I finally caught up with that monster boar hog, it was this bow I used to make that shot. On only it’s second trip it closed that saga. The next summer I took an incredible solo adventure and bagged another nice boar on the evening of the 4th of July. Barely a month later I finally had the opportunity to harvest a beautiful pronghorn buck. For a long time this would have been the answer to the “if you had to flee a fire and could only take one thing” question.
I spent a bit of the afternoon holding it in my lap and thinking back of everyplace it had accompanied me. I soon realized that the broken bow was a small thing, it was the broken heart that wasn’t going to be quick to mend.