Posts Tagged → Eastern Traditional Archery Rendezvous
Book review: Secrets & Science of Primitive Archery
Ryan Gill’s book, The Secrets & Science of Primitive Archery, is a must-have for all stick bow hunters. You cannot find your way in the dark without a light, and this book is the illumination every traditional and self-bow hunter needs. I don’t care how long you have been hunting with your Osage orange self-bow or even a traditional bow by a small maker. If you hunt with something that does not have training wheels, then you need this book.
I must admit that I am almost ashamed it has taken me over a YEAR to review this book. Actually almost two years. Author Ryan Gill deserves much better treatment for all the hard work he put into this book. What can I say, Ryan. America has had a lot of ups and downs since 2021, and for political watchers and commenters like me, practically every day has felt like an all-hands-on-deck. All the political stuff has taken up the blog space. I am sorry, buddy. Hopefully I finally give you and the excellent book your due here.
As a traditional archery hunter since I was about fourteen, I have been enamored of bows made of a simple stick and a string. When us kids made our own bows out of saplings we cut in our woods (fifty years ago…), we would tie on a piece of baling twine and shoot arrows made of tree branches, goldenrod, whatever we could get our hands on, and practice with what we had. As the years went past, some of us were gifted compound bows, and others got simple recurves. I got a recurve, and some pretty sorry secondhand Easton aluminum arrows, to which I attached basic Bear broadheads.
If I had a nickel for every deer I collected hair from, I would have enough to buy a malted milkshake at the Lewisburg Freeze, which was fifty cents way back when, and costs five bucks now. That is to say, I never killed a deer with a bow, but missing didn’t stop me from trying.
Fast forward and I had my own kids, all of whom enjoyed shooting little fiberglass kid bows. When the boy attained the age of about seven, he demanded a “real bow,” and so off to the Eastern Traditional Archery Rendezvous we went. There we located a nice faux curly maple kid recurve with about 20 pounds of pull. Enough to skewer a squirrel or ball up a bunny in the back yard, which the boy kept after. Many years later we would go back to ETAR to get his real Big Boy bow, a reflex-deflex by the Kilted Bowyer. At 43 pounds pull weight at 26 inches, this is a true hunting machine, pretty, yes, but in all the clean simplicity a true bow should have.
But in between the little boy bows and the last big boy bow there were a lot of experiments over the years. Saplings cut, strings attached, arrows made, trials run. Like I did when I was a kid fascinated with the basic but powerful physics of archery. And this is where Ryan Gill’s fascinating book enters the picture.
Ryan Gill came to our attention by his YouTube videos. Because we were naturally looking for information about what we were doing right and doing wrong. Ryan doesn’t just cut saplings, attach a string, and shoot some crappy home made arrows. Au contraire! Ryan makes all kinds of powerful self-bows from all kinds of different woods, including Osage orange, hickory, black locust, and others, that will kill deer, bear, wild hogs, and even huge bison. And then Ryan strings the bows with real animal gut. And then he makes real cane arrows, tipped with real flint and chert heads that he himself knapped. Talking the real deal here. And through it all in his videos and his book, Ryan explains how primitive archery really worked tens of thousands of years ago, and how it can work really well for us today.
I learned a lot from this book.
Because I am a numbers guy, Ryan’s statistical analysis of his different bows, using different strings (animal and plant fiber), using different arrow shafts (river cane, wood) etc, really speaks to me. He does a great job of tabulating his data, which, when all his testing is said and done, tells us exactly where to go: Osage orange bow stave that is dried daily, using either a modern bow string or an animal gut string, and shooting properly made river cane shafts fletched with goose feathers and tipped with the proper and surprisingly small stone arrowhead, that go at least 130 feet per second, with 150 fps or better being the best and most likely to catch an unaware deer standing flat-footed.
If you are at all a traditional or aspiring primitive archery person, you need this book. This is a must-have resource that you will find nowhere else. It has an incredible amount of fascinating and directly applicable how-to information to every step and facet of primitive and traditional archery, as well as the historic and anthropological background to how primitive archery evolved. I read it twice before I felt qualified to write about it here, and I highly recommend it.
Eastern Traditional Archery Rendezvous 2022
Jack Keith brought me to my first Eastern Traditional Archery Rendezvous in 2000, back when it was held at Denton Hill State Park in Potter County, Pennsylvania. Jack was the new and the first president of the Pennsylvania Parks and Forest Foundation, fresh from the Army National Guard out at Fort Indiantown Gap. I helped Jack get the brand new PPFF office set up, and he treated me to a trip up north that changed my life.
At the 2000 ETAR, Jack introduced me to Mike Fedora, who was one of the individual forces behind resurrecting traditional archery in America. Many people will argue that traditional archery never went away, but after Mike Fedora started making modern stick bows in reflex-deflex (a high performance combination of long bow and recurve), a lot more bow makers joined in. Fedora made me a bow to my body’s specifications that fit me like a glove, and that I still use. It is a 52 Lb @ 28″ reflex-deflex that is an extension of my soul. Having hunted small game and deer as a kid with cheap fiberglass bows and also a basic Fred Bear bow, I was excited to get my very first custom bow.
Fast forward 22 years and ETAR is now held at Ski Sawmill on the Tioga County-Lycoming County line, on the beautiful Oregon Hill plateau near Pine Creek Valley.
Two years ago my son purchased his second custom bow at ETAR (his first was when he was eight years old). It is by David Darling at The Kalamazoo Bow Works, a 46# @ 25″ draw beautiful statement about how far bow making has come in the past twenty years. Better epoxies, better bow presses, better materials, and constant refinements of the reflex-deflex style now yield bows that are as light as a feather, but which pack enough punch to take any North American animal.
Last week I got to participate in one of traditional bow hunter Fred Asbell’s classes. Although Mister Asbell is 82 years old, he is still out shooting a traditional bow and helping people figure out everything from their grip to their release to how and when to draw on a deer that is just five yards away. While you can watch online videos of sheep hunters killing huge wilderness rams at 450 yards with ultra magnum rifles topped with the Hubble Space Scope all day long, what you won’t see much of are the rare Fred Asbells, taking huge trophy rams with a recurve at 40 yards after a day-long crawl. Fred Asbell is a legend for a reason, and we are so fortunate to have him helping us today.
The two things that Mister Asbell said to me that I took away were I must “allow” my brain to follow its natural inclination when shooting instinctively. This allowance is a natural flow that is easily interrupted by overthinking a shot, aiming a shot, etc. Second, he said that in order to ingrain that natural pattern of allowance so that it becomes truly instinctive, I must both “practice daily,” and make sure that I am “practicing smart.” Meaning, concentrate on each and every arrow being released. He said that as soon as I find myself mindlessly flinging arrows, it is time to stop, because it will simply reinforce bad habits, instead of honing good habits and improving skill.
Advice like this sounds basic, but that’s the genius of someone like Mister Asbell: He breaks down all the artificial complications into just a few words and physical activities that can be easily achieved, if the shooter but focuses each and every arrow released off the bow rest.
Lots of Amish are beginning to camp out at ETAR, and I am hearing more and more from hunting outfitters from Quebec and Newfoundland to Alaska how their Amish and Mennonite clients are showing up with traditional bows and muzzleloaders, and yet outshooting the other hunter clients who are each carrying the super ultra magnums topped with a Hubble Space Scope. Just sit on any of the many ETAR ranges’ firing lines and watch tiny little barefoot Amish kids step up and let fly, and you will understand how they do it, why they grow up to be such amazing archers. No training wheels, no special stabilizers or sights on their bows…
One of the things I always enjoy about ETAR is that I can strike up a conversation with literally anyone, and have a long conversation about American politics and culture, or a long joke-telling session, and always end with a friendly “Real nice to meet ya!”
My own desire is to see Clay Hayes and Ryan Gill set up separate and joint workshops on primitive archery (not just traditional, but a stick and a sinew string with flint-tipped arrows). Plenty of ETAR participants are bringing nice Osage orange split bow blanks, so there is a demand for this kind of truly rustic archery.
This year’s attendance was over 4,000 on Friday, so overall it was probably over 10,000, guessing, when it wrapped up lunch time on Sunday. Major brands like KUIU were represented. To my eye this year’s ETAR was a grand success. If you have a desire to get back to basic archery, so you can have more fun both shooting and hunting, then I recommend visiting ETAR next year. Bring a trailer or a tent, and be prepared to camp out among a lot of other really neat, positive, happy people. When we drove off site, we were watching people begin to potluck Friday dinner. People probably save up their best pronghorn, elk, bison, and venison cuts to cook and share at ETAR. Talk about good people and good times…
A dedicated young man practicing with his new bow at ETAR 2022. His shooting form was praised by an old timer as “a stone cold killer.”
Traditional archery legend Fred Asbell helps Dave improve his bow grip
The swap-meet is probably the most exciting opportunity to acquire raw materials, rare items, hand made archery stuff. When it first started the place was a zoo! Probably a thousand people excitedly milling about looking at all kinds of neat items laid out on blankets
This photo does no justice to the huge number of tents and campers we saw at ETAR 2022
The all-American man who got me back into traditional archery. Jack made me a set of cedar arrows twenty years ago that now sit as a remembrance to this amazing human being. Dear Jack, it is good you are not here to see what has happened to your beloved West Point, your beloved US Army, or your beloved America…but don’t worry, we will fix it