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AN INTERVIEW WITH: JIM BRACKENBURY By: Larry O. Fischer As I watched the lone hunter follow his dogs across the steep hillside and broken rimrock during an eastern Oregon chukar hunt, I wondered why this bowyer was spending his time chasing a bird that weighs less than a pound and lives in some of the steepest, nastiest country in North America. Jim Brackenbury later replied when asked this question, “the chukar is an extremely worthy adversary. People think you’re crazy to hunt birds that run uphill and fly down.” Maybe he is crazy, but I think you’ll find that Jim Brackenbury is not only an excellent bowyer, but a man that is unwavering in his support of all aspects of traditional bowhunting. A man who believes that “we’re not going to legislate everything ... we as traditional archers need to lead by example; what we do, what we say and how we conduct ourselves.” After spending two days hunting with Jim I realized that for bowhunting to survive, as we know it we must get involved and educate the public about why bowhunting should remain a primitive sport.
How long have you been bowhunting and what was your first animal taken with a bow? A chicken! As I remember it I wasn’t all that old. A local store had a Hickory longbow and it drew about 30 pounds. I remember going in there with Dad and saying, “Boy, I just can’t live without that how.” He said, “you couldn’t possibly draw that bow.” They strung it up and I drew it so then he had to buy it for me. That afternoon I was out in the back corn patch where Mom had a garden. I don’t remember if it was an accident or on purpose and I don’t know if I was aiming at the chicken or if I was aiming at a corn stalk, but I do remember the story was I was aiming at the corn stalk and the chicken happened to be on the other side of it. I arrowed through the corn stalk and through the chicken. It started hollering and I was trying to get it to shut up and it wouldn’t shut up. It was hollering like mad and my mom came down and chopped the head off the chicken and whipped me so bad! She didn’t care if I hit it on purpose or if it was totally an accident. Didn’t make any difference to her. I was getting whaled on for shooting her hen. We had chicken and dumplings that night so I guess that was something of a reward. That was my first bow kill. I started bowhunting in 1968 when I was in the military. The first big game animal I took was a mule deer doe down in New Mexico where I was stationed.
Next to chickens, what is your favorite animal to hunt? I guess elk. I never got into the other animals that are outside of Oregon but compared to deer I prefer hunting elk. They’re bigger and there’s more there to eat. But, to me anyway, they tend to be more of a challenge and there’s something about the bugling that gets your adrenaline going long before the shot is ever made. Usually there’s a hundred times you get the adrenaline going for every good shot that’s made so that makes it even more exciting. Also, I had horses in the original years hunting in Oregon and did a lot of packing into the Eagle Cap Wilderness. I truly enjoyed that. One of the things that I enjoy about bowhunting is the lack of other hunter pressure and where I was elk hunting there was just virtually many square miles of habitat totally to myself or the group I was hunting with. I guess all that totals up lo the main reason I concentrated on elk. In our state if you hunt Blacktail deer there’s a ready supply, but the mule deer population has been hurting these past few years. I haven’t done much mule deer hunting. I never got good enough that I could take an elk soon enough; it took me the whole season to find an elk. I end up getting as many deer as I do elk but they’re smaller deer and they‘re just incidental and happen to be in elk country and get in the way. Now that I’m no longer working two jobs I’m starting to spend more and more time in the field and would like to hunt some other big game animals, like moose and caribou.
Describe your basic hunting equipment for elk. Well, I use a Brackenbury bow of course, 66” and 60 to 65# at my draw length. I’m a connoisseur and a believer in a physically longer bow because I have never met anybody who didn’t have more confidence and shoot better with the longer bow. Once you get use to it I can see no advantage to a shorter how. I hunt elk down on the coast where you literally have to crawl on your hands and knees or lower than that. I get through with a physically longer bow just as well as I could with a physically shorter how. I shoot them better ... consistently better. Other stuff I carry are a homemade leather fanny pack, homemade knives, and homemade quartering hatchets; all the stuff that I built before I started building bows.
Broadheads, what’s your favorite design? My broadhead choice has always been either a Zwickey 4 bladed Eskimo or a Bear Razorhead with bleeder blades. I probably use them 50/50 on the animals I’ve taken. I don’t see an awful lot of difference between them. I have a real bad habit, or good habit, whatever you want to call it, of engaging heavy bone. When I shoot an animal I often hit the shoulder bone. I round the tips of my broadheads. People have told fie that may impede penetration but I‘ve seen them pass completely through two deer with one shot so it doesn’t slow them down too much. I round the tips of my broadheads and they just slide around the shoulder bone and keep right on going. You can‘t do that. With a 3-bladed head or a large 4 bladed head. They just won’t slide. If you round the tip of a Bear Razorhead or a Zwickey or Delta, 90% of the arrows that are hit into the shoulder bones will go right around that shoulder bane. Yeah, it impedes penetration but, if you’ve got 12 to 18 inches into an elk’s chest he’s not going to go very far.
How far do you round off the tip? I cut about an 1/8 of an inch of the end off and round it off like the end of your little fingernail. I remember one deer that I hit. The broadhead slid around the bone and the entry point was a good 4” wide. It slid sideways and went in. I always figured that if the broadhead hit bone straight up and down it would stick. But, one time in the Eagle Caps I shot a cow the last day of the hunt and my arrow hit a bone just like that. It was a round bone below the shoulder. It was just a touch off center and it looked like you’d taken a round-tip wood gouge and went down through the bone and pealed off a chunk. You could see where the Bear Razorhead insert had hit the bone and then sheared. You could have autopsied the animal by looking through the hole I’ve never had one stick in the shoulder bone like people complain about.
What do you use for camo? Do you wear total camo? I wear a beard. I think that helps but I’m not a total believer in camouflage. I guess my camouflage is kind of a state of mind. With some of the attitudes today everyone has got to be a Rambo. They’ve got camouflage shorts now if you want to wear them. I have camo. I’ve bought quite a bit, but I’m not a total believer. After spending some time in Vietnam you learn that camo is great if you don’t move, but the instant you move they’ve got you. You have 3 major senses in the animal to overcome. One is hearing, one is sight and one is smell. First, you have to overcome their hearing and sense of smell. With either one of those they're going to pick you up a long ways away. Sight is the last hurdle that you have to overcome. Most people focus on the sight because that's what we as humans use mainly for detection. We forget that animals use their nose and ears far better and we can't smell at all. They can. They have far better hearing than we do and most good hunters that I know will tell you they hunt with their ears. Until recently most of the camo clothes were made out of rip stop nylon or something else that was the noisiest thing you could find. You didn't have to worry about them seeing you. They were gone long before that. I've hid behind my bow with orange arrows and pink feathers on it with just my normal wool clothes (in a plaid) and had elk stand right there and look at me and turn and walk away never having seen me.
Do you use any type of scents? I think some of the attractor scents are just fine if you use them on a bush or a tree near your stand. I believe scent is one of the biggest hurdles to overcome. I believe that a good clean body is very important and your cover-up scents can make the difference getting from 300 yards to within 100 yards of an animal, hut there isn't a scent made that the animal can't smell you when you're inside of the bowhunting ranges of around 30 yards. Years ago (I don't know if you want to publish all that I'm going to tell you here) some of the guys elk hunting use to take a wool sock and pick up elk urine-soaked dirt and stuff it in the sock and hang it from their belt. They had to leave their clothes outside the camp at night because they smelled so bad. Larry Jones was doing that one-year and he told me this story: He had that scent hanging from his belt and he was getting pretty ripe. One day he stopped and was having lunch on a hillside. The wind was blowing up hill when he heard this ruckus about 100-150 yards above him. A bobcat had caught a squirrel and a coyote was harassing the bobcat for the squirrel. He just sat there watching it and pretty soon the coyote won, got the squirrel away from the bobcat, and went trotting across the hill where he hit Larry's scent trail blowing up the hill. He said that coyote stopped, whirled, spit out the squirrel and was gone. He said, "I looked at that sock and off over the hill it went!" They've done studies on animals and the amount of different scents that they can pick out. They can pick a human scent out of an unbelievable number of others scents.
How do you prepare for bowhunting and what type of practicing do you enjoy? I go to a lot of local 3-D animal trail shoots. Also, I've got a 15-target course for bow testing purposes in the back pasture, which runs down through the trees. Out of those 15 targets you can probably get a hundred different positions to rattle arrows through the trees and we shoot that nearly daily. That's what you do at lunch; run down there and shoot some arrows. I use to do a tremendous amount of small game hunting, which I think made me a better shot on the real thing. I don't do much of that anymore but probably will here now that time is more available. Those are the main ways that I practice for game bowhunting. Next year I've got to do even more practicing because I'm going to be shooting left handed next year instead of right handed. My shoulder has been giving me trouble for years. I had some nerve damage some years ago. It's been getting worse and instead of fighting it I'm just going to switch over and shoot left handed.
How do you overcome your dominant eye? One of the local fellows here has shot a bow and arrow forever left handed. He's always known that his dominant eye was right. People would ask him how he could hit anything and he said I look at what I want to hit and put the arrow there. If he's shooting good somebody better get up real early in the morning to outshoot him. He's won the state broadhead a couple of times, Traditional Division. So I believe that's a hurdle that can be overcome. I've done it in shotgun shooting. Right now I see two arrows a lot of the time. I just pick the one that's looking farthest to left and bring it over.
How did you get into building recurves? About 11 or 12 years ago I was shooting a Bear take-down at a little over 70 pounds when I ran into some arthritis problems on the first finger of my right hand. It flat hurt to shoot that bow. Bear had discontinued making the product. I've built everything else for what I need and at that time there was no resource of takedown recurve bows. It was about 1978 and I said, "Hell, I’ll just build my own!" I did some studying for a year or so of different bow designs and what I wanted to do with it to make it simple and I came up with my first bow. The design specifications I wanted to achieve were for a 65-pound bow that was as efficient as my old 73 pound how had been. That was my main goal. It also had to shoot well. The first bow came out within 2 pounds light of 65 pounds. There's a fellow down in Eugene that owns it today and he uses it every year for hunting. It's held up all that time. That's how I got started. It was a physical need and there weren't any bows available in those days.
How can you produce such a high quality recurve for such a reasonable price? It depends on your definition of reasonable. I think $500 for a hunting weapon in any kind of bow i.e. unreasonably high. There's a lot of things that go into the cost of a how. All of us have about the same amount of money in material costs. Then you have labor costs, advertising costs and overhead costs. My overhead costs are minimal because I don't have commercial property located in downtown Portland. It's on the property where I live. As you know I don't spend a lot of money on advertising, (HA! HA!). All of that stuff has to get amortized back into the price of the how plus a reasonable amount of profit. At the prices I’m charging I’m making a profit, but I'm not getting rich at it. It's my philosophy that people ought to be able to buy a good hunting weapon at a fairly reasonable cost. Another advantage I have that other people don't is my background. For 20 years I was a manufacturing manager and engineer for a large electronics firm. Now, electronics has nothing to do with bows and arrows, but manufacturing practices, process control and process repeatability are things that I've learned very well. How to make a product in the most efficient way is something that I've learned and dealt with in manufacturing engineering for years. Maybe my labor costs are somewhat less than others, I don't know. Some of the bowyers that get a lot more money than I do are doing things that add a tremendous amount of cost to their product, such as cutting the trees, drying the woods and milling them into core laminations for the bows. I've done that on an experimentation basis and I've found that they can add an aesthetic beauty to the bows under clear glass but have very little to do with the performance of the bow. Probably the first hundred bows that I made I used yew wood as a core material and it had been drying not less than 40 years. I can see no difference in the performance of that over the action wood that I use in the core wood.
What length of bow do you sell the most of? I sell almost no 60" bows, which I find interesting because I keep hearing that those are the bows that sell. It's probably about an even split in popularity between a 62" and a 66" with a 64" being about 25% of the total and 60" being about 5% of the total. The guys back on the east coast seem to prefer the 62" how and they buy a lot of 66" bows. The guys out west buy the physically longer bows.
In his book, "Traditional Bowyers of America", Dan Bertalan refers to you as a bulldog. Why? When I start in on a bow I don't think about time. My whole day can go by and I don't remember that I should have had a break or taken lunch. I just keep going. I've got the next steps all programmed in and I get kind of robotic. With my background in manufacturing engineering my process flow is for the minimal amount of movement and the minimal amount of setups that you have to use. Changing and resetting up things are all time losers. Dan said I set up the shop with enough space for 4 or 5 people to work in but you need this much space if you're going to have any kind of a process flow. I built the first bows by hand and after I got to about bow #40 the hand files and rasps had to go. People don't pay you for the time you have in a how they pay you for the product. If you do it all by hand or if you turn it out by machine and if its the same product and its just as good a product, they're going to buy whatever product shows them the best dollar value. Unless there's a perceived quality difference they aren't going to pay you more for something it took two weeks to build instead of one day to build. As far as I know the first bows I built by hand didn't look near as good as the one I'm doing today. Still, everything is built by hand if your definition of hand is that it's all held by human hands when it’s done. The power source may come from an electric generating plant, but I decided after I built so many bows it was time to come big or stay at home. I wasn't going to put 25-30 hours in every bow anymore so I designed the equipment to take the man hour time out of it and put the quality back into it.
Which is worse, your bark or your bite? The bite is a lot worse; fortunately, nobody tests the bite very often. I think of myself as an easygoing, rational person. But my open honesty tends to intimidate the hell out of people. I say what's on my mind and there are a lot of people who don't want things to be said straight up.
What are your thoughts on longbows and which bow do you prefer? I believe Howard Hill was an amazing man. I believe the longbow would be extinct today if he had never lived. Most people who build longbows use Howard Hill as a reference point. The longbow is the ultimate challenge in archery. Shooting a longbow takes more skill than shooting a recurve. I've seen a lot of people shooting longbows and the same people shooting recurves. The ones that I've seen shoot a recurve better than they do a longbow. Nothing against one product being better than the other. I believe the longbow is a bigger challenge for people to shoot than a recurve. Just like shooting a 20 gauge shotgun is more of a challenge than shooting a 12 gauge. It just depends on a man's personal preference and what he wants to use. I prefer shooting the recurve. I've shot a longbow a lot. I designed a longbow specifically with a couple of things in mind. One was to reduce the hand shock. The deflex-reflex design is nothing new. People have been doing it for a lot of years. It's just that it wasn't well known until everybody built the totally reflex style like one that Howard Hill popularized. One of the reasons I use the reflex-deflex design in my longbow was the fact that the heavy recoil raised hell with my elbow and shoulder. For shooting a longbow I had to build something that would reduce that recoil. It's still not as light as it is in the recurve but it's somewhere in between.
…a well made recurve shoots just as efficient as the best of the wheel bows that was ever made.
What do you think of people who call themselves bowyers but don't actually make a bow? I believe a person needs to be honest. If they openly tell their customers that they're marketing a bow that they have designed or they're selling somebody else's designed bow and putting their name on it, there's nothing wrong with that. I don't believe anybody should take credit for another man's creativity and put their name on it. People are going to find out anyway. There are several people out there that are marketing bows and some of them are decently goods bows. They've just had somebody else make them. I know who they all are and who's making them so it must be somewhat of public knowledge. Whether they tell their customers that or not when they order, I don't know.
What is your perception of the bowhunter turning towards traditional equipment? The people that I talk to are not novices in the sport. The vast majority of their previous bows had wheels or cams on the end of them. There are three major reasons that people are considering or are returning to traditional archery. One is physical weight. They're tired of their left arm being 3" longer than their right arm from packing their compound bow around. Second is breakage. They've had one bow come apart or some addendum to the bow come apart ... a sight, a rest, and or many things that makes a bow unusable. They've had some amount of breakage that they don't like because it's undependable. The third thing is gadgetry. They're just fed up with the amount of addendums you can get to add on to the compound how. The vast majority of the people have taken one or more head of game and they're looking for an additional challenge. For one of these reasons they're going back to traditional archery. The thing that they find once they get a bow is that a well-made recurve shoots just as efficient as the best of the wheel bows that was ever made. Most people shooting compounds have never seen or shot a well made recurve how or longbow or any traditional equipment. I taught a fellow to build bows and he's a fledgling bowyer now. But when he first met another friend of mine who was shooting a recurve bow with wood arrows and sharpen yourself broadheads, he truly thought the guy was shooting museum pieces. He knew t h a t people use to hunt with such equipment but he didn't think anybody hunted with it today. Today he's an excellent traditional archer.
What is the most common mistake people make when moving up from a compound to either a recurve or longbow? Too heavy a bow! I think in the 10 years I've been building bows I can only remember two people coming back after they had gotten a how and asking me to take that how back and build them a heavier how. I've had hundreds of people wanting to know if I can take 10 pounds out of their bow. They're used to the reduced holding weight and they've been shooting 75-80 pound bows. They think that they're going to jump over and shoot a 70-75 pound recurve. It's a whole new ball game. They have to learn to shoot a different style. I tell anybody that if they shoot over a 65 pound bow they're wasting their time. I've shot through elk lengthwise with a 65 pound bow. You only get one foot per second per pound of bow weight when you go over 65 pounds and that's if your draw length stays the same. If your draw length reduces, your net gain could be zero or less. Everybody puts their emphasis on the bow, but that's not nearly as important as broadhead selection. I tell them that their choice of broadhead has far more to do with penetration than a few pounds of bow weight.
What is the most common problem people have in tuning a bow? The two main things are brace height and nocking point height. When I ship a how I set the brace height and a nocking point for shooting arrows off the shelf. If the person is shooting feather arrows he or she should he able to put the bow together, string it, and shoot reasonable arrows. I set my nocking 5/8" over square, anticipating people will nock underneath. That puts the arrow at 1/4" to 5/16" over square. That seems awfully high to a lot of people if they're use to shooting a compound at 1/8" over. Once in a while I get a call from people that can't get the arrow to shoot and you find out they are trying to shoot vanes off the shelf. That just doesn't work at all. Or they are trying to shoot too light an arrow. Some people are going back to traditional equipment and trying to maintain the faster than the speed-of-light philosophy and shoot extremely light arrows. People have told me they are getting good arrow flight with 29" 2114 arrows out of bow over 70 pounds. If they're doing it, I don't know how. That arrow should be going every which way but straight ahead.
What should a person do to ensure the longevity of a bow? The bow's three biggest enemies are heat, moisture and FastFlight strings. Too much heat, leaving bows in trunks of cars or inside of cars during the summer, can cause permanent damage or delamination in the bows. The glass is pretty impervious to moisture but the edges of the limbs are not. The finish gets heat off the edges of the limbs and if you're hunting someplace where you have high humidity or a lot of rain, in time the moisture gets in and starts softening the wood. Eventually they will come apart. The third one I mentioned is FastFlight strings. That stuff doesn't stretch. It's like a steel cable on your bow and if you don't build up more tip overlay it will rip the tips off the bow. You can build up the tips so the tips will hold up, but it doesn't stretch and you can only heat on concrete so long with a sledgehammer until it's going to break. That's the only failures I've had is people using FastFlight strings. My testing says when all is said and done you've gained 3-5 feet per second. That's about all you're going to get out of using FastFlight strings. For all the damage it does to bows it's not worth it. If you want speed, if that's the only criteria you have in a bow, then you should shoot a cambow with overdraw and all the other stuff. Speed has some importance but not more than stability or dependability. I often have told people it doesn't make much difference how fast the arrow misses the animal.
Should you leave your recurve strung for any length of time? I'd have to say no. The reason people unstrung the older self-bows was they would tend to follow the string, or take a set. That doesn't happen when you back them with fiberglass. How long should you leave them strung? What I tell people is t h a t when I go out hunting for 2 weeks I don't unstring my bow but when I get back from a hunting trip, if I'm not going to be shooting every day, I unstring my bow. What we do know is that bows loose weight over time. We don't really know why because time is measured in a span of like 10 years. I've had bows on a cycle machine drawing them to 31" for a 114 million cycles. That takes a couple of months and they were within a pound. Most scales don't stay that accurate. So it doesn't seem to be a function of the flexing. I remember a bowyer wrote something once that he made a bow, strung it, weighted it, it was 75pounds, and sat it in a corner for 3 years. He weighed it again and it had lost about 2 pounds; unstrung it for 24 hours, strung it back up and it was the same weight that it was when he started. I don't as a practice leave bows strung over extended periods of time when it's not going to be in use. As far as stringing bows go, I string hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of bows by hand. I can string over a 100 pound bow by hand and I can string a 70 pound bow sitting down. But I string a lot of bows. The only real safe way for most people to string a bow is with a bow stringer. That's both as much for safety to the human as it is to the bow. More than one eye has been lost from people not knowing how to string a bow by hand. I always recommend people use a bow stringer.
When you hear about someone harvesting an animal at 50+ yards how do you respond? Good Luck! I think everybody has done it. I believe if people kept tally of their shots to misses or hits to recoveries at under 30 yards compared to those at over 30 yards they wouldn't be taking long range shots. I am better than average with a stickbow. I'm as good as the average compound shooter and I'm always in the upper 10% of the stick bow shooters at any of the shoots I attend. I don't have the ability to pick a spot and place an arrow well at absolutely anything over 40 yards. I'm not the world's best, but I'm better than most. So if people are shooting at those longer ranges they are doing it out of frustration over they're inability to get closer.
What are your thoughts on either/or choose your weapon restrictions? I was all in favor of it in Oregon; whether it makes a lot of difference in the long run I don't know. It gets back to how much time people have to spend in the field. There are not many people like Jon Skinner who get to hunt and fish for half of the year. Most people have 2-3 weeks vacation and they have to determine how they want to use it. I think it causes the people who are out there to have more expertise in what they're doing because they can only go one way or the other. I don't think it affects total hours in the field. I know there's only so much resource to be distributed and I know that most game commission people are educated in animal biology, how to raise animals and what effects animals. What they get into is a management of people and the hunters. They are not very well skilled in that. They are looking for ways to cut down in the mass of numbers of people, primarily on opening day of deer or elk season. So it's a people management thing.
Respond to the Pope & Young's recent ruling. Do you think they went far enough? I think they went as for as they could. I think it's important that they at least drew the line. I would just as soon see them go further. I believe equipment is one of the major issues before bowhunting today. There's beginning to be a bigger and bigger rub between technologist’s verses Traditionalists. I don't see, that gap as narrowing at all. I see it getting wider. The Pope and Young club a t least finally took a stand and I believe that's the key point. Where you draw the line is not necessarily as important as the fact that the line was drawn. I'm glad to see they took that stand.' I think people miss the point when technology becomes the point of controversy and a lot of people go back to the scientific data or the ability of the equipment to harvest the animal. I don't think that's the point at all. I think most archery seasons are there because bowhunters need more time to harvest animals because they're using a primitive weapon. I think the whole thing is not based on whether the weapon has the ability or the equipment has the ability to kill the animal. With the important thing is where does primitive stop. I've heard of people who have CO2 powered arrows. The arrow actually gains velocity as it goes out. So there's all kinds of things you can do. The creativity of man, which is very large, is just being tapped. I worked in electronics. I made computing sights for aircrafts almost 25 years ago. That technology was there 25 years ago and they didn't have microchips. With the combination of rangefinder and Laser sight there's nothing stopping somebody from programming in such things as the trajectory of their particular arrow and wind velocity, using the return from the laser as a distance measuring device, push one button that causes the beam to reflect down and when you raise it up and put it on the animal, that's where the arrow will strike. That's what we did on planes traveling a 1000 mph on a lead-computing sight 25 years ago. There's no reason we can't do that with microelectronics in archery today. So I think the line they drew on electronics is definitely well founded. As far as some of the other technological advances, I don't know that they've gone quite far enough. We've got a guy in the Portland area who has 450 grain arrows moving over 400 fps and it's something that he's added. He doesn't hunt and he doesn't shoot targets but he creates in advance. The technology is there to get to 400 fps. Can we break a 1000? Where does primitive stop? That's my whole point. That's why we have a bowhunting season. As we start approaching the range at which the average animal is harvested with a rifle why do bowhunters need a special season? Why do the bowhunters need any special considerations? That's what I'm talking about; where does primitive stop?
What do you think we should do as bowhunters? I think we need to analyze why we are there. I guess I go back to a story, I think it was Glenn St. Charles who said it was some numbers of years when they first had an archery season in Washington before anybody killed a deer, and when somebody finally killed a deer with a bow and arrow there was a celebration. Nobody had done it and everybody was happy. Today, it's almost a mind-set with a lot of people and the way that it's put in magazines that if you don't kill something every year or you don't kill something that's very big it wasn't a very good hunt. I didn't start bowhunting strictly for the kill to determine whether the hunt was a success or failure. There's lots of experiences you have in the woods that bring hack a lot of fond memories other than just the harvest of animals. In the past most people got into bowhunting, just like I did, for the love of nature and the opportunity to be afield. That in itself is a reward. Somebody once wrote something like: "The blue sky above me, the good earth below, the barb to my finger, the string to my cheek. So long as life may endure." That fairly well explains the love of the tradition of bowhunting, not just the sport of taking animals with a bow and arrow.
As involved in bowhunting as you are, how do you relax? What do you do to get away? Bowhunting is what I do to relax. When I was working for somebody else bowhunting and shooting the bow was my method of tension and stress relieving. Today, that's all I do. Tension is a whole lot less. I’m pretty relaxed all the time. About the only time I get heated up is when the technology issue comes up.
What do you think about our magazine? What didn't you like? What would you like to see? More and bigger! I think it's long been overdue. There's been a couple of other feeble attempts at a traditional archery magazine. This is the best one to come out so far. I'd like to see every issue have one article about something in the old days ... something that would be of great interest to people, like the forgewood arrows and the process for building those, Maybe something about some of the bowyers of many years ago that people have known, but that are no longer with us. At least one article in every issue because bowhunting is as much a tradition as it is a sport. You're called Traditional Bowhunter so the tradition, the history, what our forefathers did, how they did it and what they faced would be very, very interesting. There's a lot more to the sport in telling of the history and the tradition than what we're hunting today. What we do today will determine what our children and grandchildren are doing in the future. I think Fred Bear and Glenn St. Charles and all those people were futurists and they were doing things and thinking about what affect that was going to have 20 to 30 years down the road. Are people today thinking about what they're doing and what affect that's going to have 30 years down the road or are they thinking in the short term; what it's going to do for them in the next year or two? I think about those things a lot. What we do today sets the trends for what's going to happen 30 years down the road.
Are there any other final comments you would like to make to our readers? Probably but not tonight!
Copied with the permission of Traditional Bowhunter by Larry Fischer 04/03/2008 |