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.