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I admit it, I sometimes make wimpy bows. Worse yet, I usually do it on purpose. It was not always that way to be sure. Back in about ‘98 I tillered my first Osage orange bow from a green stave. It shot quite well, drawing perhaps 50 pounds. After it had cured for a year or so, I could barely bring it to anchor. After shooting a couple of fish with it, I am now content to keep it as a valued reminder of those early attempts at bow-making and rarely shoot it anymore. At six feet and 240 pounds I am no wimp, but I am not young anymore either and struggle against degenerative ailments. Arthritis, especially in the hands, creates challenges for the archer regardless of how much muscle strength he may have. I have a hunch that more than a few of you can relate to what I am saying. You could accuse me of “making a virtue of necessity” here, but in my case the necessity led me to discover the very fine virtues of shooting a lighter bow. It is easy to get hung up in performance, not a bad thing in and of itself, but there are other important aspects of performance that don’t quite fit as easily into our preconceptions.

wimpy bowBy a light bow, I mean one that does not strain you to draw and shoot it repeatedly—somewhere in the 20-40 pound class. Since many light bows will also be shorter than normal, I will also consider short bows in this discussion even though they can have substantial power. I have not made a great number of bows, possibly fifty or a bit more so, admittedly, I am no expert. I have made these in various sizes and from a considerable variety of wood types ranging from Ligustrum (a sleeper) yucca stalks and mesquite to dogwood, scotch broom and persimmon as well as many from more commonly used woods.

Not wishing to waste staves that were too short for full-sized bows, I began making practice bows just for, well, practice. Somewhere along the way I began to notice the disproportionately bright cast of the smaller bows. For example, I have a 70" long bow and a 45" bow both made from the same persimmon tree. The long bow draws maybe 50 pounds, whereas the short bow draws around 28 pounds, or at least that’s the impression I get from shooting them. Both have excessive string follow, an unexpected characteristic of this dense and heavy wood. Despite the size and weight difference, the long bow doesn’t shoot twice as far as the short bow but only betters it by maybe thirty yards using the very same 30-inch arrows. I have noticed the same sort of performance with other woods as well. There could be some aspect of design hidden to me that accounts for the difference but the short ones are basically just stubbier versions of the long bows. If proportionate-sized arrows were used with the short bows, the disparity in cast should be even less. Though the short bows have a lower initial draw weight, they seem to have another quality related to stiffness. The short bows just seem to have more spunk.

Arrow cast is all about string speed and the string of a long bow travels farther but not necessarily faster. After careful observation I finally concluded that the surprising cast is mostly due to the fact that the short bows stack more rapidly and the draw-weight goes up radically in the last few inches of draw without my noticing it. It is remarkable just how high a draw weight a short bow can have. This advantageous quality was not lost on Indians either, evidenced by the fact that many of them shot short stiff bows. Whatever the reason for all this, I can tell you that at ranges I normally shoot with some expectation of hitting small game (25 yards) there is no great difference in trajectory between a light bow and a heavy one. There is for me, however, a great gain in shoot-ability. With light bows I can shoot more at a given session. I can shoot more often and with better accuracy than when I struggle to come to anchor and hold it through acquisition of sight picture and release with a longer bow. Due to this ease of operation, I can also better observe the characteristics of arrow flight, which improves diagnosis of any problems of form or sight picture I might have. All of these factors have allowed me to make more progress with regard to accuracy in a shorter period of time than before. I find myself enjoying archery much more and for longer periods of time now that I have left the pain and strain behind. Sometimes you gain when you lose the pain. There’s a slogan there somewhere.

wimpy bowAs I write this I am watching our lazy cats cutting capers on the small, very-frozen artificial pond in our backyard. It is a sunny 22 degrees and I would not even consider shooting my heavy bows today for fear that my frozen fingers might break off under the strain! I did, however, have an enjoyable session this morning with a very user-friendly 25-pound ash flat bow. If all I had in my arsenal were heavy bows, I would have missed this pleasantry. Also, when you shoot several different bows in a day as I sometimes do, the necessary chore of bracing and unbracing them is less of a hassle.

My archery consists mostly of flight shooting and stump shooting. Here in the Ozarks there are plenty of stumps to shoot at but no really large open areas for genuine flight shooting. Unfortunately at either pursuit I break a lot of arrows when they encounter the abundant local population of rocks. I also lose a lot of arrows as they fishtail through the grass to some enchanted place only to be discovered at a later date by stepping on them. As you can well imagine, both situations are greatly worsened by shooting with powerful bows. Hence, another reason to practice with light tackle. Heavy bows are simply harder on arrows.

Short bows have a reputation for being more difficult to shoot accurately. Because of their shorter draw length a typical corner-of-the-mouth anchor can cause problems. I suspect that this difficulty is primarily responsible for that reputation. Actually, the COM anchor has always been a bit of a stretch for me anyway; it gives my sight picture too much triangulation to comfortably deal with. This is possibly due to the shape of my face. Many years ago while reading a book on Texas Indians, I learned that the Karankawa used an unusual draw with their large and powerful ash juniper bows which enabled them to sight directly down the top of the arrow instead of the side. Doing this made a lot of sense to me at the time, so I developed a method incorporating this advantage and have not regretted it. I basically draw and place the second joint of my thumb (where it joins the hand) between my cheekbone and nostril. This gives a solid and repeatable anchor, which handles the problem of a short draw length rather admirably. It also leaves the shooter with only one main sighting consideration that of trajectory or drop—simplifying the aiming process by eliminating the triangulation. This method will give you a small push on the cheek as your hand releases the string, which might be bothersome if you tried it with a heavy bow; however, this is not about heavy bows. It will feel a little strange at first and other archers will try to correct your form, but I found this method liberating. Instead of hitting at 15 yards, I was now hitting the pocket at 25 yards and sometimes at 35 yards. Once again, the Indians were onto something. If I would stick to just one bow for practice, it would get even better. With really short bows (48" with a draw of about 22") I use a floating anchor by simply sighting down the shaft at as flat an angle as possible depending on stack for the draw length. My hand does not touch my face at all; this works better than it may sound. You can also keep the anchor described above and limit the extension of your left hand to accommodate the short draw length.

wimpy bowI don’t hunt much anymore, mostly because over the last fifty years I have taken a zillion critters by practically any and every means known to man. Country boys were like that back then. We grew up hunting and were almost as wild as the game we hunted. After a lengthy career as a taxidermist, I don’t really enjoy cleaning game anymore; however I do love to eat most kinds of wild game. My Cherokee roots seem stronger as I grow older and I really don’t want to take a life without some necessity existing to justify it, which is not at all to judge anyone else’s ethics. Mostly, I just “hunt in order to have hunted.” Be that as it may, light bows, where legal, do have a useful place in small game hunting. The ease of accurate shooting from a variety of positions makes them ideal in this application and they will also have very adequate killing power with proper terminal tackle. For tough-skinned critters like squirrel, I use broadheads of some sort that are properly sharpened. Blunts are fine for bullfrogs, birds, and cottontails, but if you must use blunts on tougher prey, go to a bigger bow. By way of example let me relate a personal experience.

Many years ago while using a three-eighth inch ramin shaft tipped with .380 cal. cartridge cases for blunts, I whacked a nice fox squirrel less than ten yards away. The first shot from a 35-pound ash juniper bow impacted his chest and front leg with the sound of a stick breaking. The squirrel thudded to the leafy ground below, apparently stone dead. I waited for a self-satisfied minute to retrieve my quarry. My eyes widened as he staggered to his three functional feet and shakily ambled toward a nearby live-oak tree. By the time I had negotiated a barrier he had climbed to eye level on a low, drooping branch. As he hugged the limb facing away from me, I shot a second arrow striking his left hind leg. After a few moments of more hide and seek, a third arrow nailed him amidships with a wallop. Amazingly, he managed to stay anchored in a jumble of branches. Fortunately he died a moment later from the first injury, because I was out of arrows.

I learned a lesson when I cleaned him later and autopsied the chest hit. What I found left me amazed that he had even gotten to his feet again after being hit. His shoulder, ribs and leg bones were in shards with massive trauma to the lungs. I examined the heart and found a gouge running the length of one side, which perfectly matched the cartridge case’s edge. It had taken a shallow plug from the heart while cutting only a crescent on the skin, effectively knocking the stuffing out of him without even penetrating! The impact must have felt like a tube of toothpaste feels when it is stepped on! I can only surmise that a severe adrenaline rush enabled him to keep going as long as he did. A broadhead, however, would have ended it before it even started. Squirrels are tough, really tough. Give them the respect they deserve as game animals and use a broadhead unless you are shooting a heavy bow. Shooting small game with heavy equipment has always disturbed my sense of hunting aesthetics, somewhat like shooting rabbits with a 30/30. Again, this is personal and not meant as a prescription for others. However, with regard to the killing power of light bows, let me first acknowledge the obvious, which is simply to use enough bow for your intended quarry. None of us wants to wound or lose any kind of animal, varmint or not. We do not hunt in order to cause suffering, despite popular misconceptions by the “Bambi” caucus.

Are powerful bows deadlier? No doubt they are, all else being equal, especially if the nature of the prey requires it. Much more important than raw power, is shot placement. As already noted, this is where a lighter bow can shine. A half-dozen pass-throughs in the abdomen will not stop a whitetail nearly as quickly as one solid chest hit, even if the arrow does not exit the far side. Lung tissue is very fragile and easily disrupted. The rib cage itself is not exactly armor-plated either and does not require a great amount of power to penetrate. Hunting with a very controllable and shoot-able light bow cannot help but make you more accurate under the infinite and unpredictable variety of situations that arise while engaging in the grand gamble we call hunting. Balance would be a good principle to apply here.

Even though it is very much in vogue at present, and I do not wish to diminish that at all, I do not believe that even a complete pass-through necessarily causes more damage or kills any quicker than lesser penetration. Heresy, I know, but consider this. A pass-through has already done all the damage it will ever do and that is only in a straight one-and-a-half-inch-wide wound channel. Most bow-harvested deer are taken in woodsy areas and run at least 50 yards even if perfectly hit. Twenty inches of arrow shaft protruding from its ribs are nearly certain to encounter a branch and be jerked rearward causing the broadhead end to pivot forward, with the ribs acting as a fulcrum. This alone would cause far more pulmonary trauma than any pass-through. Yes, I know that you can’t depend on this happening every time, as if any aspect of hunting were much more than a calculated roll of the dice. However this form of killing power is not limited to only this scenario. The same sort of leveraged motion would also occur regardless of incidental collisions with branches due simply to gravity and the inertia created by the jarring, up and down gait of a typical deer’s frantic efforts to flee. Gravity and inertia exist pretty much everywhere in the universe. This additional damage cannot be caused by a pass-through, as it is immediately out of play on exit.

To visualize this, grasp a blunt-pointed arrow (for safety) between your thumb and forefinger about eight inches from the tip. Point the tip toward your chest a few inches away and jump up and down several times. Well, I certainly hope that you now feel as silly as I did when I tried it, even though no one was watching. Certain humilities are bound to occur when you are doing weird science, so get used to it. Ha! But did you notice the bounding, seesaw motion of the shaft? Now imagine that rotational spindle happening inside your chest cavity with a sharp broadhead instead of a blunt. As I said, lung tissue is very fragile. Physics is physics, regardless of whether it is a pass-through or a leveraged, swinging bounce. In this scenario the killing power is actually augmented in continuum by transference of the animal’s own kinetic energy. There is something very Zen about that. This scenario also has the potential to upgrade even marginal chest hits into quick-killing injuries. A pass-through cannot do that either.

A corollary debate in the gun-hunting world over whether a small fast bullet kills better than a large slow one has gone on longer than I have been alive. As per my observation, they both kill animals equally dead, but the debate itself may never die. Admittedly, I tend to dwell on the edges of controversy and I am not ashamed of that. It is only when man questions conventional wisdom that discoveries are made. Whether such discoveries actually produce that elusive chimera of progress or not is highly questionable, but I know that I would be terminally bored if I were not allowed to strain those limits in some way or other. Not thinking new thoughts is a sure way to discover boredom. Remember, one size (or tradition) does not fit all. Whatever either you or I may think of the above, it needs to be tested in the field. I’m fairly sure that I won’t get around to it, so that leaves you. Be careful of any legal impediments.

I have designed, but not yet tested, arrows that are limited to perhaps nine inches of penetration. Strange, I know, but it keeps my mind active. As far as I know, there is presently no law that would prevent the simple modifications I have in mind. All that might be needed is a barbed prong (tip of a fish hook) set firmly in the shaft at 45 degrees on the top or cock feather side of the arrow. I started thinking along these lines while applying forensics to Native-American arrows that have the last few inches of terminal shaft shaved down to a smaller diameter. It applies equally well to the use of fore-shafted arrows. Is this why Indians employed this design? Possibly, but I suspect the real reason was to decrease shaft drag as the arrow penetrated allowing a weaker bow to penetrate deeper in something of the fashion of an iron bodkin penetrating armor. This is to say that it initially creates a larger hole so the rest of the shaft can penetrate unimpeded. I am not saying that the leveraged motion effect did not come into play, however, for quite possibly it did.

Simply stated, the gist of all this rhetoric is: just because you can shoot a heavy bow, it does not automatically follow that it is the best application for all forms of archery or every situation. This is why there are so many calibers of firearms to choose from. If you are still a performance-driven young whippersnapper, all this may seem just an underwhelming curiosity. But, give it another 20 or 30 years and you may come to see some wisdom in it after all. If nothing else, a wimpy bow is an excellent way to introduce beginners to the joys of archery, helping to keep our sport alive in perpetuity. Pinched fingers and struggling to draw an arrow while keeping it on the arrow-rest are hurdles to overcome and can easily discourage some. Early success and low pain levels are especially important here; take it from an arthritic old geezer. If you want to see a child, especially a boy, begin the transition into manhood, just give him a bow and teach him the basics of responsibility and marksmanship and then stand back and watch them grow.

In archery, as with many aspects of life, it often comes down to what we personally like or dislike. Even if I don’t personally enjoy something, I am glad that someone, somewhere does. Celebrate the diversity. It enlarges our sport. But, I sure have more fun with wimpy bows!


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