Friday at Targeteers

So I took Friday Feb. 6th off. It was a rough Thursday as my company let go about ten percent of the staff. I'm lucky enough to have not been among them but it was bad start to a weekend that I thought would be all about snowboarding and shooting. The layoffs served to further reinforce my decision to go back to hunting. As absurd as it seems I have to believe the it is not only an ecologically sound thing to do, but an economically wise decision as well. I wonder what the cost/benefit ratio is for hunting? Say over the period of a year you get a deer and some amount of small game as well. What's the cost per pound with tags, gear, and travel included? Here is an interesting chart of the value of meat. Anyway, I bet permit numbers go up this year.



Anyway, I ran some errands early and then made my way into New Jersey to a great shop called Targeteers. It's a short car ride from northern Manhatttan and is focused on the bow hunter. Joe, an older Italian guy who loves the musical stylings of Cher and says "forgettaboutit" without a hint of irony helped me out. First he looked over my existing bow. I knew it would need work, and I'm not exactly sure what I had in mind price wise, but I wanted a working rig for something under $200 in addition to my initial investment of $125. So, like any good salesman, Joe showed me a few new models from their racks (a not too subtle, or unwelcome, attempt at up-sell). Starting price for a bare-bones bow was $250 and that didn't get me arrows or anything else so I decided that we would update my existing bow and I would go from there. So Joe walked me through a number of things. First, we shortened the draw and lowered the weight. Pulling 70# was just a bit too much for me, and once reset to 60# peak draw weight, I was able to get it back. Joe said I'd have to "gonna have'ta workout for that one". It wasn't too bad. Then he reset the peep-site, and added a whisker biscuit rest, removing the old overdraw. He then took me to a short range, and we adjusted the sighting and rest. Finally, he custom cut me a half dozen new carbon arrows and fitted them with 100 grain field tips. I asked for a new quiver and in about an hour of work, the bow was ready to shoot. The final bill was about $260 so basically the cost of the lowest end bare bones new bow. They tossed in some free range time and I shot for about half an hour, quitting when I sank five of six arrows within a six inch diameter circle at thirty yards. That's the other reason I always liked shooting a bow. I was something of a natural.

Also, there were some aesthetics involved in my decision to go with my older bow. This is odd but true, the newest compound bows barely resemble what I think of as a "bow". In your mind take a moment and think of a bow as just the object. What is it? What does it consist of? In the mind of most people it's an image of a taut arch, a tense open parenthetical, "(", with arms that perhaps curve slightly forward at the tips. A hand grip in the middle, an arrow rests perhaps. The arrows, at least in my mind, are white, with feather fletching and suction cups for tips. To this day you say "bow and arrow" and I think of that set that I used to terrorize my cousin Paula and break a few windows with.

This, however, is not the contemporary compound bow. When you first look at the thing, your eye goes to the wheels. There are cam systems and cables, wrapping back and forth. At full draw the weight of the pull lets off almost 50%, so pulling a fifty pound bow, suddenly feels like twenty-five pounds, allowing the hunter to hold the ready position for an extended period. This is a considerable advantage especially when taking aim on a cautious members of the cervids family. Next, the arms of the bow themselves of are almost parallel to the ground when in use, leaving it looking more like an "E" than a parenthesis. This gives it a compact design that makes moving through the brush or shooting in constrained positions easier. Finally there are the "add ons": Peep sights, string silencers, "whisker biscuit" arrow rest, the ballast stabilizer, and quick quiver. It's construction to the thousandth of an inch, it's material, space age polymers and carbon compounds... If it wasn't for the limited range, it would be just another name for a gun. So, the bow for me though still holds some romance. It was mankind's first great missile. It was the first expression of our complete technological advantage. Proto-humans showed an understanding of the jawbone of the ass, and the edge of the broken flint, but it took the homo sapien brain to put together the many parts of the bow. Otzi is my favorite early archer. With the bow, the control we could now express tripled that of the spear or sling in both distance and accuracy. 5300 years ago and now one man could suddenly fell much larger beasts at much greater range of intersection. This was a massive advance for all mankind. And here, at Targeteers Archery of Saddel Brook, NJ, I was looking over it's latest morphology.

It's not like my old bow was some rough hewed long bow, it was a compound bow, with most of the contemporary knickknacks. But at least it still had the arc and size that I expected. It will do just fine for now, until I am better, and ready to move to something purer.