Writings
The Squirrel Chronicles: Letters to the City
September 5 • September 6 • September 13 • September 16 • September 19 • September 29October 5 • October 9 • October 13 • October 20
Requiem for Jerry Pierce
In a room with a few friends, Jerry Pierce liked sitting near the wallpaper and listening. In a room full of people, he sometimes required a curtain to hide behind, if others allowed it. Neither usually worked for him, at least not for very long. He was not shy, but he had a self-effacing strength of character that could not be dimmed under bushel baskets. It puzzled him even as it drew people to him.Read more...
Tillering the Organic Bow
In Hunting the Osage Bow; A Chronicle of Craft, I defined a bow as "dry wood expertly tillered" and then spent 160 pages of directions and illustrations in explanation.Ten years have passed since the book appeared (almost fourteen since the chapters began serialization in a magazine), and I continue to refine my own understanding of that simple proposition.
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Building Rattan Kids bows
I've published several articles on making kids bows. Their creation has long interested me because of the implications to our sport. To get them into as many small hands as possible, I wanted bows that were economical, easily built, and durable. Beyond those simple criteria, I wanted the construction to be easy enough that kids could witness and participate in it, thereby valuing the results beyond something merely handed to them free. I wanted to arm the neighborhood, so to speak, and in the process inspire adults no less than children.Read more...
Pig 'n' tater sausage
Venison and feral hog meat make sausages and salamis as superior to commercial stuff as garden tomatoes are to hydroponic ones. Significant advantages lie in fresh spices, quality ingredients, real smoke instead of liquid smoke, and recipes tailored to suit your private tastes.Read more...
Leopard Spots
Tangala Camp lies along the southern border of Kruger National Park, South Africa. It is home to lion, leopard, elephant, rhino and Cape buffalo. Plains game gathered there in large numbers during my hunt, attracted to a lush crop of grasses and browse, the result of a burn and a summer of heavy rain. Several times lions roared close to camp through the night when they failed to make a kill, and sometimes after they killed.Read more...
A taste of asparagus
Maria Dimitrakis came to America because she was sent for. George Terezakis, a man ten years her senior, had settled into his new home, started a successful restaurant, and now needed a strong Greek woman to begin a family and take care of the house. My grandmother, only sixteen at the time, wanted nothing to do with the stranger across the ocean.Read more...
Handicapping the Odds
In 1994, while publishing a series of articles in Traditional Bowhunter that later became Hunting the Osage Bow, I remarked that the well-made selfbow was no handicap to the serious hunting archer. Classical archery was comprised primarily of fiberglass then, so most people who read my statement probably dismissed it as wishful and unfounded.Read more...
Patching a Bow Limb
Sometimes bad things happen to the belly side of a bow, especially to bamboo-backed bows that use quarter sawn slats. Typically, a pin knot travels across the width of a limb and cannot take the compression. The area around it begins to cave. Or sometimes a swirl in the grain will break loose.Read more...
Moose in a Dutch Oven
I've been looking for a simple way to cook game in the Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker (WSM). The task is complicated because game lacks the self-basting characteristics of domestic meat. I decided to combine bbq and the Dutch oven, reasoning that together they'd produce savory one-dish meals from the tougher cuts of venison, elk and moose, and also allow the introduction of smokewood flavor while cooking slowly at low temperatures for tenderness and moisture.Read more...
Barely a Ripple
I was drained. An unbraced self bow lay across my lap while warm February sunshine melted me into a pile of slack muscle and bone. Heckuva way to begin a new adventure.Read more...
It's All In the Spin
Yours is not a difficult problem. Many of its symptoms are caused by the common and dangerous practice of seeing yourself in the dim, fun-house mirror of National Public Radio. Unconsciously you are hearing your actions described by pleasant, sensible voices on “All Things Considered.”Read more...
Sharpening Broadheads with a File
Techniques differ, but the principle for sharpening anything—plane irons, chisels, knives, scrapers or broadheads—is the same, regardless of the tool or its edge. There's no secret and it's very simple. First you put the burr on, then you take the burr off.Read more...
Self Bows and Savannah River Swamp Rooters
I’m a close personal acquaintance of Bowhunting Adversity. Heck, I usually don’t go out the door, bow in hand, without him or some of his brood. They move in my company freely and often take turns directing me, like my own native guides.Read more...
Mule Trained
I wouldn't lay the worst of our ordeal on the backs of mules, except it belongs there. If Sis, Jackie and Honker deserved slack, if they hadn't instead bruised my body and worn out my mind, if they'd even then helped us pack out an elk from some bowl bottom, I'd be telling a sweeter story now, no doubt.Read more...
Tree-seat Whitetails
Mike was hunting new ground. He'd worked across a standing cornfield and waded a creek to get to this thicket. Nothing more than a small acre of tangled briars and thigh-sized elms and locust, it poked out into another standing cornfield on the other side of the creek. It looked good.Read more...
Bow Tools You Can Make
Organic bows don't require the inventory of tools and jigs that their laminated brothers regularly employ. No need for thickness or oscillating sanders or for air hoses and bow forms. In fact, hand tools of various sorts employed by the skilled bowyer yield more precise results than power equipment can hope to achieve.Read more...
The Case for INtelligent Design
One of the several advantages classical bows have over their fiberglassed brothers is that you don't get locked into a building style because of a commitment to forms and jigs. You can make a bow any way you please, one upon the lessons of another, searching out improvements in any direction you wish to take, or one upon a whim, puzzling through problems in any direction the bow takes you.Read more...
Barred for Life — A Tale of Grinding truth
Barred fletching belongs on wooden arrows in the same way that a taut string belongs on a bent stick. These form such a perfect union and yield such a timeless truth that Moses didn't even bother to write it down.Read more...
The Principle of Complements
A common misconception is that a flatbow must have a flat belly. Historically, flatbows do sometimes appear with flat bellies, but they can just as well sport radiused or rounded bellies. Compared to a longbow, a flatbow is a bow that has been made wider so it can be made shorter, regardless of its belly shape.Read more...
Reaction Wood
Almost all of us are familiar with boards that either pinch a saw blade into submission or peel away from it like a Y in the road, sometimes even cracking and splitting ahead of the blade when they are ripped along its length. This is the erratic behavior of "reaction wood," as it is known in the lumber industry, wood that is so unstable, under such internal tensions, that its reaction to a change in its neighborhood is unpredictable and dramatic-and sometimes even dangerous.Read more...
Thinking Glue
No one glue is perfect for all a bowyer's needs. Each glue has strengths and weaknesses which need to be considered for each particular application. If you understand these strengths and weaknesses, you can make reasoned choices for your particular need to get the results you desire.Read more...
Seeing Spots
Every primitive archer loves stump shooting (or roving), but this pleasurable activity can contribute to bad habits for the hunter.Read more...
Using the Bowyer'S Edge
Some people have trouble using the Bowyer's Edge™ even after it is set up correctly. They put pressure on the heel of the tool rather than the toe, causing it to bump and chatter. Keep light tool pressure forward. This tool is different from others in that the amount of pressure you exert upon it determines the depth of cut. A finesse curl, a light pass. Hog curl, bear down.Read more...
Dimensions of a Hunting Bow
A hunting self bow is a special kind of bow. I've broken some laminated and backed bows these past years while I've tried different glues, experimented with tempering bamboo, played with limb design, worked with patches and tested the limits of wood faults and stresses. Backed bows can be sexy and curvaceous, especially these reflexed/deflexed bamboo/osage bows with which I like to play. Their allure comes from the fast life they live. But they are temperamental and demanding and you need to keep your wits about you playing with them. The very fact of their complexity requires it.Read more...
Matching Bows to Arrows
The importance of matching arrows to bows has so focused some of us that when sorting arrows into spine and weight groups we go well beyond our skill as archers to perceive differences and perhaps even beyond our equipment’s ability to appreciate our efforts.Read more...
The Elements of Style
The archer who wishes to hunt with traditional tackle should work toward mastering three elements. They form the foundation of shooting barebow, either for the instinctive or the gap style.Read more...
Seeing Bows Bend
Two difficult areas on bows cause even the experienced tillering eye to strain sometimes.Read more...
Venison and mushrooms
Iron skillets are ideal for cooking tender cuts of large game because they permit high heat without warping or losing their non-stick coating. Because of their mass, they do not lose temperature rapidly like steel or aluminum skillets do when you introduce them to a steak. The virtue of high heat is that it sears meat and keeps juices inside, a highly desirable feature in game meat that by its nature can dry out easily during cooking.Read more...
Under the Squirrel Bigtop
If I have a totem animal, it's the squirrel. I might have wished for a wolf, or a tiger or some other majestic and large wild thing to shepherd my spirit through this world, but I ended up with a squirrel. You don't choose these things. They choose you.
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Trip to Greece
Newly returned from a two week tour of Greece [1998] with Mary, two of my sisters and a brother-in-law, which included most of the must-see areas of the mainland, and a visit to the island of Crete, the birthplace of my mother and father.Read more...
