TRADITIONAL TROPHY
This is the only buck I have shot with traditional equipment. I was shooting a Dan Quillian Patriot recurve at the time – a really nice bow. I shot several and this one was the smoothest and nicest one I found.
I shot this buck on November 10, 1992. It was my only buck with traditional equipment. Though I spent a lot of time trying to get good with the recurve, I never was as consistent as I thought I should be.
A few years later, I traded that bow to a taxidermist in exchange for a mount he did for me. I sure wish I had kept it. You can’t even find them on eBay now.
Anyway, back to the hunt.
I spent the entire spring and summer of 1992 trying to get good with the recurve bow and instinctive shooting. I thought I would take to it pretty easily since I was always pretty athletic growing up and had been decent with a shotgun shooting purely instinctively. Hand-eye coordination: probably better than average.
I spent as much as four hours some days on the backyard range. I had good days (maybe even a few great days) but I also had some days that weren’t that great. I was never consistent enough that I felt good about my ability to consistently hit a six-inch circle past about 15 yards.
But, I loved shooting the bow and loved carrying it, so I decided I would hunt with it during the 1992 season.
I can’t remember much about that season, it must not have been very good, but I do remember the day I shot the buck like it was yesterday – funny how that happens!
This deer approached my stand on a trail that was 12 yards from the tree and stopped to offer an easy shot. Unfortunately, in the excitement, I failed to hold low enough (with instinctive shooting it is very easy to shoot too high from stand height). I hit the buck in the upper shoulder with the arrow angling sharply downward.
Fortunately for me (and something I had not known), there is a significant artery there and I sliced it.
I felt sick about the hit but once I got on the blood trail I was surprised to find a good bit of blood and a short distance away, the dead buck.
I shot this buck from a stand at the head of a ditch. Any deer crossing the draw here would have to go around the ditch and any deer traveling along the east side of the draw would funnel past this spot, as well. It is a natural, classic bottleneck rut stand.
LESSONS LEARNED
I expected to feel elated about killing that buck with traditional gear. I thought shooting him with a recurve would somehow make the moment more significant, but I didn’t feel any differently about that buck than any other I have shot with a bow. I guess that is good. It showed me that I just love bowhunting – with any kind of bow.
So, after one year with the recurve, I went back to my compound because I wanted to be more consistent and to have a bit longer range. People think that a compound allows them to shoot way farther, but that is not the case.
Deer move while the arrow is in flight even with a compound, so maximum range is really less about your ability in the backyard than it is about the animal’s reaction during the shot.
My point: don’t let your expertise on the range fool you into thinking that whitetail bowhunting has somehow become a long-range sport. It hasn’t. Maybe with a compound you buy a few more yards than with a recurve, but this is still not a long-range sport and I hope it never becomes one. But, I digress.
The spot I hunted was a classic rut bottleneck – a narrow area where the deer had to go around a slight ditch in the finger of timber extending out into a big CRP field. Any buck cruising that area would likely come past that stand – cutting around the head of the ditch. During the rut, it is hard to beat a funnel like that!
