(Photo courtesy of wideopenspaces.com)
The author, John Marek, is executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.
Over a period of several months in the late 1960s, my Ohio hometown was beset with numerous sightings of a large cat-like animal prowling at night. The belief amongst the locals was that it was either a cougar or a female lion.
Those claims were not quite as ludicrous as they might initially sound. A couple of years earlier, a tourist attraction known as “African Lion Safari” had opened just outside of town, and the speculation was that one of their animals had escaped and they were reluctant to admit it, or that the animal was somehow escaping at night and then (somewhat inexplicably) returning in the morning. More likely, it was an oversized house cat gone feral combined with a few overactive imaginations and perhaps a Budweiser or two.
Nevertheless, those sightings were a cause of great excitement for a certain 6- or 7-year-old boy who badly craved “adventure” and took it upon himself to defend his family’s backyard from incursions by bloodthirsty carnivores. I was deemed still too young for a BB gun, but my parents relented and bought me a toy bow and arrow set. It was a flimsy plastic bow, about three feet long, and a couple of foot-long wooden arrows with suction cup tips. It was designed to be completely harmless, but I had a dark secret. Unbeknownst to my parents, I quickly discovered that the suction cup could be removed and the tip of the arrow sharpened in a pencil sharpener. The suction cup could then be replaced over the sharpened tip until “lethal force” was needed and no one would be the wiser, excepting, of course, any marauding beasts.
Now, I don’t want to exaggerate the lethality of this device. It was still a cheap plastic bow that propelled the arrows at near-glacial speed for a distance of maybe 15 to 20 feet. Still, at close range I’m betting those sharpened points would have broken skin, or at a minimum hurt like heck. Alas, I never had the opportunity to release an arrow in defense of the homestead; the cat sightings stopped and I moved on to other outdoor adventures … remind me to tell you about damming the drainage ditch in the backyard sometime.
All that to say I’m not much into archery. In fact, unless I’m forgetting something, those clandestinely sharpened arrows were the last I ever let fly. People often assume that if you participate in one type of outdoor sport, you participate in them all, and I guess that’s why my local sporting goods stores all send me their fall bow-hunting catalogs. Not that I mind. Actually, I find bows fascinating from an aesthetic point of view. Compound hunting bows are like steampunk works of art, with their various cams and pulleys and cables and springs. And as they get more expensive, they get more absurdly complex. There’s a $750 model in the latest Cabela’s catalog that looks like the lovechild of Rube Goldberg and Salvador Dali.
The idea behind the compound bow is that all those cams and pulleys confer a mechanical advantage which allows for more rigid and efficient limbs while maintaining a reasonable draw force. In other words, it takes less effort to pull the arrow back and it goes faster when it’s released. Interestingly, despite their almost Victorian appearance, compound bows have only been around since the mid-1960s, with the patent issued in 1969.
But my favorite item in the bow-hunting catalog is the slightly naughty-sounding “whisker biscuit.” As near as I can tell, it’s a device that attaches to the front of the bow and helps guide the arrow on a straight path, but that’s just a guess since not one of the product descriptions actually explains its purpose. I guess if you have the need for a whisker biscuit, you just know it.