Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/801177
118 • S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S Moon, the chest area of my 3D foam deer target had been thoroughly shredded. I knew I was ready. W e were bound for Lupton, Michigan, and Valhalla Lodge, formerly a palatial family residence that has now become one of North America's most exclusive private hunting clubs. But each year Valhalla offers a few choice hunts to non-members, and my friend Anthony Best, Valhalla's hunting director, had invited Chuck and me to experience the place for ourselves. Chuck would be rifle hunting with Ranch Manager Jim Velasquez, while Anthony and I would hunt with my bow, at least for the first couple of days. After arriving and unloading our gear and having a quick lunch, Jim and Chuck headed for a ridgeline a mile across the sprawling ranch. I took two practice shots with my bow, and Anthony and I set out on our own. Our destination was a waist-high log blind discreetly positioned along the crest of a high maple flat overlooking a narrow creek. The light breezes were primarily from the east, occasionally stiffening to fill the air with swirling autumn leaves from above. I reveled in the classic Northwoods setting . . . and, of course, in the old bow I was carrying. An hour before sunset we picked up movement out where the creek bottom rose to a distant thicket as a young doe eased from the shadows with her fuzzy little fawn. It took them ten minutes to make their way down to the creek and up the slope, passing us unaware at less than 30 yards. Then a much larger doe appeared from behind us, exhibiting a stiffer, more menacing attitude, aggressively approaching the gentler pair before stopping and stomping the ground and sidling sideways toward them. The young mother doe took two cautionary steps forward before the older, larger doe rushed her, aggressively pawing the air with her front hooves. "Mean ol' doe!" Anthony whispered with a frown as the young mother turned and took her fawn back across the creek and into the thicket. The old doe turned purposefully back into the flat. Twenty minutes later a fine young eight- point buck appeared, following the trail the doe and her fawn had traced earlier. His rack was wide for his body size, but still brother Alan and 7-year-old nephew Gabe—we three the only shooters not carrying complex, high-tech, state-of-the- art compounds. Then in early September Alan unexpectedly stumbled across the bow of my youthful aspirations—a vintage 60-inch Bear Super Kodiak. The old bow had come to life in 1976 at Bear Archery's plant in Grayling, Michigan, just a few miles from where I would soon be hunting whitetails. With its butter-smooth, 45-pound draw weight, it was still in near- perfect condition, and I soon began considering just how fitting it would be to fetch it back to its birthplace on the edge of the great Huron Forest on my upcoming hunt with longtime friend Chuck Wechsler. I knew there would be a huge difference between shooting inanimate 3D foam targets and hunting a living, breathing animal with the old bow, and I wondered, Could I, should I, even consider such a thing? But the question, once entertained, would not go away, and I became more and more enthralled with the possibilities, until I finally set up the bow to shoot broadheads. To my delight, they shot beautifully, and by the time Chuck and I hit the road north beneath the big October Hunter's S o now it's time to sit for a moment and reflect, then somehow try to write about all that has happened in the past few weeks. But where to begin? How to begin? Is it remotely conceivable that I might find words to convey the essence of what has just occurred, how it all played out, and what it means to have actually done what I so recently thought hardly possible? "Could it be," I had asked, but silently and only to myself, "that I might seriously consider using a 40-year-old recurve bow instead of a rifle on my hunt for big northern whitetails?" I had been shooting recurves and longbows since I was 6 years old. And except for that one fleeting affair I'd had with cable- strung compound bows back in my brief and oft-misguided middle years, I'd always been faithful to the timeless traditions of fine feather fletching and good cedar shafts and the smooth, reassuring draw of a properly waxed, multi-strand single string. But over the decades so much of what I had once done, what I had once been, had fallen by the wayside. And hunting big game with a recurve bow was one of them. For the past couple of years I had been shooting archery tournaments with my Anthony Best (left) and Mike Altizer examine a fresh scrape along the edge of the autumn woods. Opposite: The two hunters pose in front of the log blind from which they saw a number of big whitetails.