Customer Reviews

Hunting and Shooting with the Modern Bow

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For the deer stalker, legalizing the crossbow for hunting was a Godsend. Today's compound crossbows have attachments like the ACU 50 drawback mechanism. They are not cheap, one thousand to $1200 per weapon.

There have been myths and rumors circulating that the modern crossbows are like high-powered rifles with such accuracy that the poor beautiful creatures in their scope don't have a chance. Deer are graceful, swift animals and have a place in this world. At Cade's Cove in the Smoky Mountains, the city folk park their cars anywhere they can and traipse down the fields to get a better look at just one of them. In Middle Tennessee, at Davy Crockett Park, they act more civilized and slow the cars down enough to look as they pass by. In Lawrenceburg, there are more deer to see, as they are allowed to live in a protected environment. Though, I have seen the targets up for bow and arrow practice. They usually travel in groups in the park, but in Giles County there is always the possibility of one running out in the road sometime during the night, as the car's headlights blind them and they stop dead still and usually wind up dead with a damaged car and shook-up driver. My son Justin has hit more than one, his dad Bill hit one in the park which had to be shot by a ranger.

It's not that I am against hunting per se. At one place in Pulaski, I had a neighbor whose son was an avid hunter and would hang the dead deer behind her house to slit its throat and bleed before cutting it into chucks to eat. Personally, I don't like deer meat. I tried once to cook some a brother-in-law had given to my family and it was tough as well-cooked steak or country ham -- unedible.

Crossbows are not for amateurs or the younger hunters. In the South, you are not reckoned to be a man until you have killed at least one deer. My grandfather caught opossums, and a friend of mine in Nashville, George Cate, was called the old coon hunter. I think raccoons are beautiful creatures like the deer, but he told me how they can get into houses through a pet door and scavenge around the kitchens, causing some consternation for the inhabitants. And Davy Crockett was proud of his coon skin cap. He was from Greenville, Tennessee, with ties in Kentucky, but we had his corn mill there in the Park until it was destroyed in a fire, later reconstructed but never as visited as the old one.

Crossbows can be dangerous in the wrong hands, just like guns. So don't let the kids experiment or they might just hurt themselves and their siblings.