I can\'t really explain my attraction to the bow and arrow.
I\'d probably made more than a dozen bows of various woods before I ever saw a piece of Osag.
When I first started making bows I used the woods I had close at hand; mulberry, common persimmon, red maple, white cedar, etc.
The second held together quite well and is probably still around somewhere and capable of shooting an arrow, though it would probably draw about 70lbs.
My first bow, a decrowned mulberry flatbow, broke within about 10 shots.
I made my first real bow when I was in high school, after getting a copy of the Traditional Bowyers Bible in the mail (more on this in a moment).
The pleasure of jumping rabbits and seeing the feathered shaft streaking toward them was a thrill I\'ve never forgotten.
Although I\'d get several shots a day I never did hit one on the fly but I remember that fall fondly nonetheless.
That fall happened to be a good year for cottontails around our little farm and I spent countless hours walking the fields and shooting at them as they busted from underfoot.
They both drew about 50 lbs if I recall.
One was a short bow, probably no more than 48 inches and the other was more of a standard size.
When I was about 12 or so my brother brought me two old Ben Person recurves he\'d found at a yard sale.
The small creatures around our home were plenty safe.
My arrows were fat and unfletched and would scarcely fly more than a few yards, usually tumbling over in midair.
A discarded hay string would serve as a bowstring.
When I was a kid I would make crude bows from green plum branches, big at one end and small at the other.
It still holds that attraction, same as the hearth.
With the dwindling of the Pleistocene mega fauna, mammoths and such, the bow became more important and indeed helped to make us who we are today.
We are built to run, to pursue big game on the open savannas, to kill and eat them.
We have been hunters forever.
We\'ve been carrying the bow for maybe five thousand (atlatls and spears before that), and pushing the plow for maybe two thousand.
Experts say that humans have been around for some fifty thousand years.
What we think of as civilization is a new experiment in the eyes of Father Time.
These things are in all of us I think, some vestige of our primitive past buried so deep in our genome as to be inseparable from what it is to be human.
It\'s just there.
I can\'t explain the pull of a camp fire either, or the ocean, or the open hills where you can see forever.
I can\'t really explain my attraction to the bow and arrow
