I was emotionally crushed by the loss of my bow. It had been a constant through some years of my life filled with shifts and changes. Several times a week I would practice with it while looking forward to the dream of future hunts around the globe. I could always imagine it hanging in camp along side the bows of my hunting partners. Like a bud on a tree being the promise of spring, looking at my bow on it’s peg next to my door was promise of the next big adventure. Now it lay broken in my lap.
My friend Charlie came in and found me, he had an idea. He was actually quite insistent that he drive to town and retrieve our late friend Andrew’s longbow and bring it for me to hunt with the rest of the week. I objected in pretty much every way I could, I knew if anything happened to that bow it would be more than my heart could take. He went and got the bow anyway.
I slid that bow out of it’s case and took a long hard look at it. It was a stout straight end longbow, one that Andrew had told me he wanted to return to Africa and hunt with someday. I looked and found it had a brand new string that I had made for him, I had forgotten even doing that years ago but recognized it in a second. The string didn’t have a nock point on it, it had never been shot. My friend had just had a wrist surgery when I delivered it to him and he hadn’t moved up to this draw weight again after that.
I couldn’t bring myself to even string it just in case it had any unseen damage over the past few years, luckily my friend Bud grabbed a stringer and slid the loop into the upper groves and handed it to me. I tied on a nock point and went out to test some arrows. The bow and the arrows were in remarkable tune, the only problems were in the head and the heart of the hunter. I sat out the evening hunt and instead just watched the alligators in the pond and listened to owls for a while.
I woke up in the morning and took that old Elburg longbow out into the swamp for a walkabout. It was wonderfully light in my hand, and it felt incredible to have an American style semi-longbow in the woods again. I took it into a ground blind late in the afternoon and setup just the way I did with my old bow the morning before. After spending a few hours with deer, turkeys, and hogs parading back and forth in front of me, I found a nice young boar hog walking perfectly broadside in front of my shooting window at less than ten feet. I raised the bow up, and he stopped walking. He looked straight away from me to see what some more distant hogs were up to, and I drew back my arrow. I said a silent prayer at full draw, and I released the string looking at a wet black hair on his side.
In spite of it being very wet, and having another rain storm start immediately after the shot, the arrow had passed perfectly through the spot it needed to go. The string attached to the string tracker lead straight down the trail he departed on. A very short distance later, I found what I was looking for. Bud came along to help me recover the animal after dark, and snapped the picture of me and this boar along with Andrew’s old bow.
I have had many beautiful experiences in my time hunting with longbows, and I have been lucky to harvest some wonderful animals, but nothing I’ve ever done felt so good in my heart as this hunt. Holding Andrew’s bow was a powerful connection to my friend now one year gone on the day I write this.
Rest in peace my friend, you are sorely missed.