Getting Started in Bowhunting
by Brian Wensel
Every November prior to my 12th
birthday, as we sat around the Thanksgiving dinner table eating grandma’s
pumpkin pie, there was always a deep, empty feeling in the pit of my
stomach. An empty feeling that deepened
as the day progressed, knowing that once dinner was over the Wensel men, with
trucks already packed, would begin the 3 hour drive north to our hunting camp
nestled deep in the mountains of the Allegheny National Forest, and I would be
left behind for yet another year. You see, in Pennsylvania the Monday after
Thanksgiving marks the first day of the Whitetail Deer antlered rifle season, a
day considered by many to be a religious holiday!
And then that glorious
Thanksgiving Day in 1982 arrived. I was now a man, a man being permitted to
miss 3 days of school to spend with the other men at deer camp. You see for me, Whitetail Deer hunting wasn’t
a sport, it wasn’t a hobby, it was and still is a way of life. As my cousin Gene writes in his book Buckskin and Bone, Postgraduate Whitetails,
“We don’t just hunt for trophies as much as we hunt for treasures. Many are in the form of memories and
dreams.” His words couldn’t be
truer. For those of you who have taken
the elusive whitetail deer with a bow, you have in your memory banks one of
those treasures, a treasure that only your fellow archery hunters understand, a
treasure that drives you to enter the woods each autumn hoping to add another
experience, another treasure to your treasure chest of memories.
This article is being written for
one of two types of readers; you are either a long time hunter and have decided
to challenge yourself and your hunting abilities even further by picking up a
bow. Or, you are not only completely new
to archery, but hunting as well. This
article is being written for both readers but will be drilled down enough to
ensure the reader who may have never hunted is well informed. Hopefully this article will assist you in
acquiring the proper equipment to help rapidly hone your archery skills,
providing you the confidence to step into the whitetail woods knowing that when
you put your pin on the front shoulder of that trophy buck, your arrow will fly
straight and true, hitting its mark and humanely harvesting one of the
greatest big game animal in North America….the Whitetail Deer.
