By Ricky Cooper
I admit, I am not a great bow hunter. I’m probably not even classified as a great hunter period. If your like myself, I have watched You-tube videos of hunters like Ted Nugent talking about practicing with your bow everyday to become a more proficient bow-hunter. I guess I don’t have that drive in me anymore. Getting older changes a lot of things. Things like work and family can occupy a lot of our time. Another reason that I have never really took to bow hunting, was because when growing up poor in the hills of the Cumberland Plateau we didn’t hunt horns. When you live on a hog/cattle and tobacco farm plus work a regular job, you don’t have time to hunt for horns. So when we went hunting, we took a gun and made sure to bring back meat.
I can’t say that I can remember very many bow hunters back in the day growing up. Another reason was because where I lived, there weren’t a lot of deer back then. We had rabbits, squirrels and lots of fishing.
Eventually, like every young hunter, I got the bow hunting bug. Never really had a lot of success though. Bow season always seemed to come when fall crops started coming in and it was a fight against the weather to get it done. When we had a chance to catch our breaths, heck it was nearly thanksgiving and time to get the gun and get some meat. It was really more about some either alone time in the woods or about getting together with family around a camp fire.
I got to thinking the other day when I was practicing with my bow, that when I draw my bow and watch that arrow sped through the air and getting the satisfaction of seeing it strike the target and stand quivering, It makes me wonder why don’t more people take up bow hunting habit.
I started thinking of all the reason’s why bow hunting is good for you. Like, It’s good exercise. It works many of your muscles, not just your arms but your back and leg muscles.
Bow hunting involves a lot of walking and calls for using concentration.It also gives you an excuse to get away from the daily grind and out in the woods where you can relax and rest your brain from all the hectic things going on in this crazy world.
Just a few thoughts, and I’ll catch you down the trail.