The Archery Letdown, By Pete Joers

The Archery Letdown

By Pete Joers

Being a self-proclaimed and very dedicated archery bum, I feel I must share a very peculiar chain over events that happened recently, which may help other archers:

The 2010 target season had just ended and what a blast! I never had so much fun flinging arrows with my family and friends, traveling around shooting many of the big tournaments, all topped off with my home club hosting a state championship. It was very busy, but what a blast!

Several times during that busy spring I had received phone calls from other archery bums inviting me turkey hunting. “Nope I’ve got plans…” I’d say, “Tournament here, tournament there, the archery club needs this done,” and so on and so forth.

Tournament season began winding down and it was time to get ready for August bear hunting as well as deer and elk hunting in September plus, as a bonus, I had drawn a quality deer tag for the Quilomene unit in eastern Washington. Time to switch gears!

My preparation ramped up, hiking, biking, shooting, lifting, culminating with chasing big mulies and two weeks in the alpine after the elusive elk. Now this is why I LOVE archery!

November rolled around and I was skunked so far, of course that just meant more opportunity for deer and elk hunting! Thanksgiving arrived and I was out the door headed for new hunting grounds with a bonus tag in one hand and my bow in the other.

Here’s where it gets interesting. I’ve been training and practicing all year, shooting thousands of arrows and I am now in a new area way up in the mountains, with great friends, hunting very hard, and I manage to harvest a great buck; the highlight of my hunting career…a genuine adventure. Once home, I took the buck to the taxidermist, cleaned the blood off of everything, put gear away, and made a movie (we got the whole hunt on video). The fun never stopped, that is, until indoor Multicolor started.

My target bow, which felt so good in my hands a few months ago, suddenly feels foreign, and after shooting it I can’t stand to look at it! I felt like I was just going through the motions: come home from work, go to the club, shoot a round of multicolor, get angry at myself and the bow.

One night when I got home after one of these self-inflicted indoor torture sessions and I see a big set of very familiar antlers sitting on the kitchen counter. “Taxidermist called and said to come pick up your horns, so I did it for you, thought you might like to see them again,” my wife Elizabeth said. With tears in my eyes I pick up the “horns” and instruct my wonderful wife that, “you can not play these, thus they are not horns, they are antlers!” Hugging them to my chest, and not waiting for my wife’s retort, I run off to my man cave. Sitting, thoughtfully looking at this mass of bone, studying every beam and point, I look up and there, hanging in its rightful place at the top of the bow rack, is my hunting bow.

Remembering back to the times I was too busy with “archery” to go archery hunting, things suddenly became clearer. Maybe this is where I lost my passion for archery, and maybe where I will find it again. I started thinking back to ten years ago when I was happy just to hit a paper plate at 40 yards and then discovering 3D and a whole new group of friends. Now we shoot “dots” at 80, 90, and 100 yards. Had I let my passion for tournament archery consume me to the point where I hated it, or had I just let my priorities get mixed up? I had forgotten that the reason I shoot a dime sized dot at 20 yards over and over, and travel the state listening for that beautiful sound of arrow hitting foam, is for that one chance, if it may happen, that the lord graces me with an encounter with one of his beautiful creations; for that one chance to see the wonderful flight of the arrow in the most chaotic of situations.

Setting the antlers next to my hunting bow, I gathered up my target stuff. Turning back for one last look I think to myself, “This is just the beginning of another hunting season. What a fantastic sport we have!”

The start of one amazing adventure

“There’s a buck!” Uncle Scott said, “ I think it’s a shooter!”

What happened next was a mad scramble for bows, releases and rangefinders, as our once well-organized gear became strewn about the ground.

The buck walked a mere 20 yards away from the outskirts of camp, watching us with an amused look on his face, his perfectly symmetrical 2x2 rack sticking out like a billboard saying ‘better luck next year!’

Having been in camp only 15 minutes, we all found this little guy pretty amusing and dubbed him “Leroy,” as he sauntered to the shade of a Sitka spruce only 20 yards from camp. The amused look on his face never left as he bedded and commenced watching us gathering our gear that had been thrown haphazardly around.

This was the start of our 2011 wilderness hunt.

Fresh off the excitement of having a “camp deer” and wanting to get a feel for the area, I quickly unpacked the rest of my gear and dawned my camo. Pete was the first to comment: so you’re going on a Jameson walk? It should be noted that a ‘Jameson walk’ has become synonymous over the years as either being filled with a. close encounters, or b. a successful harvest of an animal. Just the mere utterance means that something odd may happen.

This ran through my head as I eased my bow back down from full-draw. I had been working through the clearings near camp in hope that a mule deer or bear would take full advantage of the full moon phase and head for the open meadows. With the light fading quickly I progressed into the final clearing near camp.

Entering the opening I noticed the gray hind end of a deer not 20 yards to my left, half-obscured by berry plants. Quickly nocking an arrow I peered through the brush, looking for the signs of a shooter buck but all my binoculars showed was the perfect 2x2 rack of good old Leroy.

Another flash of gray caught my eye, as a deer fed away from the meadow to my right. Adjusting my Leupold binoculars once more I focused on another buck. He was a small-framed 3x3 with a small sliver of velvet hanging down on one side of his rack. My rangefinder flashed 34 yards, as he quartered away from me, his head lodged in the foliage.

Coming to draw, I settled my glowing sight pins behind the bucks shoulder blade. It was at this point a strange thing happened: I second-guessed myself. Easing my bow back down, still undetected, I thought of the 15 days of hunting yet to come and the realization that I had only been in the backcountry for a mere 5 hours and was about to release an arrow.

“Never pass up a buck on the first day that you would be happy to harvest on the last day,” was what Uncle Scott had told me not two hours before. ‘He’s right’ I thought to myself, as I eased my bow back, once again settling my pins on the buck, easing into my shot sequence.

In a flash my broadhead tipped arrow was in flight, contacting the exact point I had aimed for, connecting with a “CRACK!” The buck immediately sprinted for cover, lunging several times and crashing to the ground a mere 30 yards from the point of contact.

An incredible sense of relief rushed over me, as I replayed what had just transpired, pleased with the fact I had made a clean, ethical shot and would be able to fill my freezer with some amazing venison.

As we hung the buck in camp Uncle Scott, Pete, Rick and I joked about being in camp only five hours and having a 3x3 Mule deer down, and how it was sure to be the start of one amazing adventure. Little did we know what the very next day had in store…