Episode 11: Small Game Big Payoff

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Code of Traditional Archery, brought to you by Primitive Stone Archery and the founder Grant Richardson. Welcome to the Code of Traditional Archery podcast. My name is Grant Richardson and I will be your host. Really excited time of year for us right now. We are in the pinnacle of our whitetail season. Our rut here starts around the first week of November with the chase period, and it really culminates into right around now where they're really full on in pursuit of those doughs, so hope everyone's having some success out there. A traditional archery, from my point of reference, is all about bow hunting, not field archery or even 3D, both of which can assist, of course, in one's shooting ability, but somewhat less bow hunting ability. The constraints found in learning how to hunt with a stick and string are entirely up to the individual to deal with. No one can replace time in the woods alone. No technology, no courses, no professional social media advice. When I speak of constraints, I'm talking about the limits that are put onto traditional bow hunting by the method itself and learning how to hunt close with all of its nuances. I've had the good fortune since I was young to not only have a family that hunted small game frequently, but bow hunted them as well. And this podcast is entitled Small Game, Big Payoff. Rabbit, grouse, pheasant, and even squirrels were abundant in my youth and provided far more opportunities where I lived. They have taught me more about being a bow hunter than big game actually ever has. And I quickly learned I never had to ask to take my bow out to hunt as compared to asking to grab my over and under out of the gun cabinet as a kid. Of course, my success rate dropped dramatically as a result, and I can say one particularly late afternoon with my Springer Spaniel in tow, I chased and missed at least a dozen times a cubby of Hungarian partridge for well over an hour and a half. I emptied my quiver more than once, picked up shot arrows and tried again, spurred on by knocking the tail feathers off of one. I lost three arrows that day and never did connect, but it was the lessons I learned from it that stayed with me. I recalled sitting down and watching the sun begin to set, staring at the two rusty red feathers I knocked off one of the grey dusty birds in flight. I was so close, but not connecting I realized that it was not impossible, and spurred me on to pursue the art and skill set I was developing. This development never does cease. In fact, having that connection to our kit, our bow, and our own self-knowledge will enable you far more than you think it will. Consider it your woods cred, much like street credibility or the school of hard knocks, no pun intended, that your own path of shooting and hunting with the bow will become your greatest source of inspiration and teaching. The price to pay for all this, of course, is that you will fail many more times and you will succeed on that path, but with patience and pressure comes reliance on oneself and a rock hard resilience to match. I have several standout memories and teaching points go along with those memories when it comes to actual shooting skills and development for hunting, specifically bow hunting, and I have many that have imprinted themselves upon my youth and left great impressions. It was a cold day. Deer season had long gone, and back in the day the only archery only season was a short three week affair at that time here in Ontario. A feverish pitch entered our house during the late October time period as the preparation for what my father's time to commune with the forest. Those days had passed now, and not the snow had impeded us, along with its second passion, was to hunt and chase with his longbow, the snowshoe hare. They were abundant around our home, and they provided many lessons to young eyes on shooting, stalking, and tracking them around the woods and fields of my youth. My father's rabbit stew locally was legendary, passed down from his father's recipe in an ancient blend of seasonings that were not allowed to be written down, and had to be memorized in order to be recalled, although one of the grand ingredients, of course, was ketchup. We met up that day with one of his best friends, a character of sorts, and one that took hunting very seriously with a bow and arrow. He shot the first Howard Hill longbow I'd ever seen, an original Schultz Big Five string follow, a great beast at 70 inches in length, drawing 80 pounds. Its bamboo lamination sending the wood shafts, he shot off it with absolute authority. He was indeed what some folks would call a snapshooter. He would come to full draw, hit his anchor point, and snap. Release. He was also one of the finest instinctive shots I have ever witnessed to this day. That was it. This you know, thing is he was incredibly accurate shooting this way, and the whole crew that hung out with him at that time all had nicknames. His was Frenchie. My father and Frenchie had a simple way to hunt snowshoes, parallel each other around twenty five yards apart, walk slowly, and if a rabbit was seen, a whistle was made and a shot taken. If the rabbit doubled back, then one of the two bow hunters would still get a shot. I was the designated flusher in the middle, the dog, so to speak, and we would walk up and get into heavy cover, and out the hairs would pop. Many shots were running, and this day was no exception. In fact, I would witness several amazing shots between both my father and Frenchie that day, my father with his Browning Explorer too, and Frenchie with his Howard Hill ASL. One would stand out and burn itself into my mind. There was almost a half a foot of snow and slightly overcast that afternoon, and tracks were everywhere. I was washing for the covey of Hungarian parchers that had made their hairy tracks in and out of the field edge hours earlier, picking around for seeds around the frostburnt wild grapes that littered the area like tiny purple balloons. I had chased them the fall prior with my young springer and was eager to see them spring forth from whatever cover they were hiding in. That was not to be, however, as we stepped out of the long grass and grapevine tangles into the edge of the cedar cover and junipers scattered about the area. Hair sign was everywhere, tracks scurried all over the edges running in and out of the short but dense cover. I was already carrying two, one each from my father and Frenchie. As I stepped over a deadfall, a large snowshoe burst ahead of us and ran into the open at breakneck speed. I glanced over at Frenchie and watched him as he tracked the rabbit now at least forty yards out quartering and gaining ground away from him. He brought his hillbow up, its bamboo limbs bending into a powerful D shape. I was standing around ten yards from him at that point, and watched the cedar shaft tip with his favorite broadhead. His wicky black diamond, Delta come back to the stout bow's riser as he loosed the shaft. The rabbit was now in full stride at least sixty yards plus away as he jumped a cedar fence. The arrow caught him in the air and he tumbled into the snow on the opposite side of the old barren cedar planks. I was stunned for several moments after the shaft connected. I had watched some of my father's friends a couple of years ago prior missed the same shot hunting grouse when a cotton tail or two would poke out of the field edges, and they missed with twelve gauge shotguns at forty yards or so. But this, watching the arrow and the rabbit connect, this is another level. No, I've been shooting since I was young by that point, but that shot was something else, and I wanted that skill too. I asked him how he got that shot off. He said, I point the bow. The arrow goes where I look. And he added, Don't overthink it. I see the rabbit. That is what my arrow sees. The bow too sees it. He stated matter of factly. The bow sees it. Never missing a stride, he plucked a large hair from the snow and handed it to me. He walked away, pulling another sheet or shaft from his back cover and continued onward as I ran to my father to tell him about the shot. I spent my winters chasing snowshoes and cottontails all over the countryside, and I would plan my day the night prior, pack a lunch for the woods, and leave, and I wouldn't be back until it was dark. I lost many arrows and wandered many miles doing so, trying to duplicate the shot I saw Frenchikin. However, the cold never did seem to bite too deep or not too hard as the trees hung low with snow and ice, and the world stood still for our Canadian winners. These things called to me and I answered with a stick and string and a lot of determination. In the late eighties, where the term trout or traditional boating began to refer to and separate other forms of hunting to using a stick and string, be it a recurve, longbow, or self bow, I can appreciate why, although I do intend to take a different stance on involving folks in shooting a stick bow, simply put, I believe anyone can do it. But it's also not for everyone. I am reticent to go too deep into the woods with these issues as I firmly believe that anyone can become adept enough to find a way that suits them personally to shoot well enough to hunt game with traditional equipment. The bigger issue lies with the very fabric of the weapon itself. It is arguably a skill that requires, to some degree or another, consistency in its delivery system, and it's a perishable one at that. As a kid, we had no cell phones and cameras at the ready. What I did have, however, was memories and events that became stories, which became in my mind legends, however small, or even by misfortune they spoke to me as I grew and developed into some of the greatest lessons I have ever learned or experienced. Arguably we all have the same skill set potential, but what set some apart, some folks come out as natural, so to speak. Attributes. But wait, what am I referring to? I talk about attributes. The attributes attributes are the qualities that make techniques work. The attributes of the bow being a physical, mental, kinesthetic, and kinetic skill set that makes shooting it work. Stylized or not, whatever method you use. For archery, it starts with the ability to draw the bow, the bow weight, focus, concentration, intensity, and of course, hand-eye coordination, which itself can be broken down even further into this process of development. Now the technique aspect of going through the entire process of holding, drawing, and releasing the bowstringer, easy enough. But that skill transferred into dedicated and consistent accuracy is arguably, as I said, a perishable skill. So how do we get effective and maintain that skill set? By training and applying the attribute development. In more simple words, training the skill sets that specifically make the techniques work for shooting said bow. Whatever bow you choose. I am so outspoken about the training development and shooting abilities directly related to actual boning shots on game. And yes, again, ethics is going to become a large part of the platform. And I dare say the entire paradigm of the training methods are centered around the very principle of ethics in bow hunting. Not field archery, not Olympic style, or even 3D, only bow hunting specifically. How many times have you been at a 3D range or tournament and said to yourself, wow, that target is too far or has poor shot position or is partially hidden behind a group of scrub or other obstruction? We need to muckle on to what happens when the adrenaline dump occurs in order to allow me to explain my rationale further. When stress occurs, when we are presented with stress, we default to our past, our training, our exposure to the stressors of other stressful, similar situations. We do not rise to the occasion but fall to the level of our training and flight time. In other words, exposure to that specific stimulus or other related forms of stress to said task. When the sympathetic nervous system is engaged, we go into autopilot, and essentially, based on what exposures and experiences and again training you have, you will default to that level, to that flight time. Commonly, this is from my personal experience, coaching folks and mentoring, the greatest culprit of the dreaded target panic issue. For new years just coming from compounds, it is getting used to the bow becoming increasingly difficult to draw as the archer pulls the string to their draw length, which with compounds will also be shorter, of course. The valley, where let off occurs with a compound is gone, and this does lead to issues common to that very kinesthetic process where the brain has been trained to anticipate the break that occurs and the comfort of hitting the valley, where a great deal of the weight of the bow is let off, enabling the archer to hold at draw much longer in order to sight the target. When shooting a traditional bow, the longer the hold at full draw, the harder it becomes to hold the weight of the bow. This causes many issues, the primary default being to lose focus and concentration, which is critical to shooting a stick bow without sights, since the brain is given time to think more on the process. The thinking brain is not a good thing under stress, for it removes natural reflexes and reaction time, and I dare say intuition as well. This would work fine and does at times on stationary targets such as bullseyes and 3D. Why? Because they don't move. There's no locomotion involved. They can't jump the string. And the big differentiator is there's no feedback from the animal. Essentially, the animal you're hunting is within a spatial relationship with you when it walks into view and when it closes into close proximity with you, the pressure mounts. Synapses fire faster, decisions need to be made, shot angles, vitals exposed, shoot, don't shoot, chatter. And for some, even the sight of a live animal, by example, is foreign to them. All these things become pressure. And without training in your shooting, no matter what type of platform or method you utilize, it will cause more failure than success, more chance than confidence by not being prepared. Now that's not to say that variables will not happen, but the more we train and expose ourselves to pressures of different angles and types with variables, the more ability we'll have to mitigate the problems and thereby effectively deal with any of the outliers if they do indeed occur, and they will. It's hunting, it's not shooting. To quote a very well known traditional bow hunter I met as a kid when I asked him why he hadn't taken a shot at several bears he had approached him in the bear hunt, he told me simply, The bear didn't give me the shot. He didn't present himself. And I've mauled over that for years in my head and began to understand it after years of flight time sitting in the woods quietly observing animals myself. It took time for me to be patient and focused and had the intent and confidence in my equipment to know where the shot was coming, if it was coming, and when to take it. The thing about traditional is this like a fine instrument, it will connect to you, and you will find your own individual reasons to connect and develop your own mojo with that bow. They have a spirit within them that was enabled through their maker from the bowyer that crafted them. That spirit is yours to find and connect with, and no one else's. Our youngest is now finding her own path as a bow hunter. Shooting since she was two and a half years of age, she's now pursuing game with her recurve, and the inevitable learning curve she is walking currently is hers and hers alone to find, and I am the one following her now. She will be her own guide and her own coach. She is progressing well over the years in her shooting at ability, and twelve can now draw and shoot her forty pound bod bodnet kaiwa with comfort and effectiveness. It's been a long walk from her younger days since she began shooting, diligently working up to shooting a thirty-five pound checkmate the past three years, and now, as I said, her hunting bow. The bow hunt part is where she is now. The great connection she is forming with her pursuit of wild game is maturing with each moment she spends in the woods. She has developed a stout awareness of her surroundings because of it, pointing out each deer track, each bird flying, weather, wind direction, and taking all of it in to become a part of its cycle. The route she will give will allow her to develop strong branches to support her journey, one which will teach her an appreciation for the wild places that only hunting the hard way can. The merging of instinctive shooting and instinctive hunting both come from the same place, the same roots and origins, and the sparks of the past will ignite the fires of today. Watching her walk into the woods ahead of me allows you know me time to learn from her in each step an opportunity to look at the woods through her eyes and see what she sees. It's late season, as I said, for Whittails here in Ontario, and frankly the best part of the season for me. The challenge that come with the snow and cold temperatures also keep the deer moving this time of year. We're looking forward to some exciting stories to share with you in the future. Thanks for joining us. We appreciate all the positive feedback we've been getting from folks over our courses and content from all over the world. This confirms for us the intent we have on our platform message based on the three pillars of the code of traditional archery weapon proficiency with a stickbow, ethics to guide us in our collective journey, and conservation and stewardship in order to protect the wildlife, woods, fields, and waterways we hunt as our themes are resonating. You can now find us on Amazon Podcasts, so head on over and check us out there. Our new training course platform is nearing completion as well, and you will find some great information on our YouTube channel, the Code of Traditional Archery. There's links in the comments. If you haven't already, check out Compton Traditional Bow Hunters, a great organization that ensures the traditions of bow hunting with a stick and string is alive and well, not only now, but for future generations to come. Thanks again for listening in. We encourage you to immerse yourself in the art of the stick bow. Shoot straight and walk with us.