Matthew Dickerson, Reprinted from the Addison Independent, December 16, 1999.
Archery has always held a romantic appeal for me, conjuring images of Robin Hood hunting deer in Sherwood Forest. So perhaps it was as much for me as for my eight-year old son when I gave him for Christmas last year a trip to Freeport to a kids' archery clinic run by L.L.Bean's Outdoor Discover Program. As part of the present, we also set aside money to buy him a bow if he did well.
The program was a big hit--thanks to patient instructors and a 2-to-5 ratio of teachers to youth. By half way through the evening, Thomas was landing arrows in a fifteen inch target from 25 feet. He then moved from paper targets to balloons, until his final success was nailing a bag of M&Ms pinned to the bulls-eye.
A follow-up practice session at the same facility a month later helped solidify his new-found skills. And so, when the snow melted in the spring, we visited Bill Geehan's archery shop in Lincoln: a well-equipped though small room in the back of Bill's house. (Several trophies on Bill's wall attested to his skill as an archer.) For about $100, he was able to outfit the left-handed Thomas with a 15-LB recurve, a half dozen arrows cut to the right length, and the requisite arm-guard and shooting glove. Using some old foam insulation, I then set up a makeshift target in our yard, and Thomas was able to practice under the jealous eyes of his younger brothers and the "careful supervision" of his father. (My definition of "careful supervision" was trying to repeat back to him some fo the phrases and instructions I'd heard the teachers at the clinic give.)
Now I assure you that this was not a preconceived plot to convince my wife to let me spend several hundred dollars on a new sport. However it wasn't too many weeks of supervising Thomas before I decided that archery would be a great parent-child activity. It builds strength and coordination, teaches patience and discipline, and it's lots of fun. So when my birthday rolled around that June, I started hanging out in the archery section of Vermont Field Sports and talking to Tim Little--their resident archery expert. By the end of the month I was $400 poorer but the proud owner of a new PSE 70-LB compound.
For the rest of the summer Thomas and I practiced together. It was a few days before I was grouping my arrows in a tight enough circle to bother sighting the bow. Several weeks passed before I moved from 15 yards back to 25 yards. On my first shot at 35 yards, I missed the target altogether. Nonetheless, by October I was feeling confident at 25 yards, grouping my shots in about an 8" diameter circle. Bow hunting seemed a natural next step--one that would nearly triple the length of my hunting season.
Now I've mentioned before that the overall success rate of hunters in Vermont is only about 10%. I've also been told by one of the best hunters I know that he spends an average of seven days in the woods for every deer he gets. If it takes him seven, I figured it would take me seventy. But as I'd enjoy every second of it, there was nothing to lose. Well along came December 12 and I had not gotten a deer despite fifteen hunting days, much of them spent sitting in a tree stand. Still, I gave it one last try. Late that afternoon I was standing in the woods on the western edge of my property, my silhouette hidden against a large tree. There was fresh sign on the ground, and I had seen deer there plenty of times in the past, but my hopes were sinking with the sun. Then, without any sound or warning, there snuck up behind me not one but two sudden realizations: The first was that I was cold and hungry. The second was that I still had so much to learn about bow hunting that it would take a miracle for me to succeed. The only way I was going to bag anything to eat was to pin a package of M&Ms to my target. Not such a bad idea--especially if they were peanut.