I started shooting a bow when I was just a little duffer. My dad brought home one of those little fiberglass longbows that fling an arrow about as far as a four-year-old could throw it, but I didn’t care. It was a bow, and it was mine.
I graduated from that to my dad’s old Bear Grizzly recurve. After shooting that bow for a year or so, I stepped up to my first compound. Its draw weight was adjustable from about 20 pounds all the way up to 30 or so. Again, it didn’t pack much of a wallop, but it was mine.
When I started approaching the legal age for hunting, Dad and I began looking around for a bow I could take hunting. The legal age was 14 in those days, and I was big for my age.
A hunting bow had to have a draw weight of at least 40 pounds to be legal, so my first compound wasn’t up to the task. Dad shot a PSE Laser II, and I always admired that bow. You could have knocked me over with a fletching when we found one in excellent condition at a gun show. And at a hundred bucks, it was well within my price range.
That was the beginning of a long history of hard-earned money being exchanged for archery equipment. I’m not as bad as some of my friends, who seem to have a new bow every year. I’m still on my fifth bow. But I can’t deny that I’m lusting after three or four different models out there this year.
I have plenty of other archery-related stuff to spend my money on. Things like arrows, new broadheads, releases, sights, more arrows, targets, fletching jigs, stabilizers, another dozen arrows, field points, bow cases, quivers, and even more arrows. The way I shoot, I could have probably saved up a respectable college fund for my boys with the amount of money I’ve spent on arrows.
I’ve heard people claim they hunt because it’s cheap meat. These people must not hunt the way I do. Because if you figure how much I’ve spent on archery equipment into the overhead for that meat in the freezer, it’s probably running about 80 bucks a pound. Ahh, the joys of being an archer.
