Photo by Dave N. Richards

As I sat down to write this article, I realized that I'd have to admit something right up front. My assignment was to write an article previewing the upcoming archery season in Louisiana. If I'm truthful, I have to admit that bowhunting is something I've never done.

Had my assignment been to preview turkey season, or muzzleloader deer hunting, or squirrel hunting, or duck hunting, I'd have been in my element, because these are sports in which I have been involved for decades.

Perhaps I never hunted deer with bow and arrow because of my unhappy efforts at mastering the bow. My "mastering" was more a disaster, reminding me of my ineptitude at horseback riding. My two cousins, with whom I grew up, had a horse, and they looked so at ease galloping bareback down the gravel road or across the pasture. Every time I crawled on the back of old Sapphire, she'd start out at a slow trot and I'd end up sliding off and landing beneath her belly. Fortunately, Sapphire came to know that when it was I who got on her back, she had to be ready to skid to a halt in a hurry to keep from stepping on her hapless rider.

My horseback riding episodes were not unlike my introduction to shooting a bow. My friend the late Sterling Harrell was a skilled bowman who hunted exclusively with his longbow. While I was visiting him one day to do a story on traditional archery, he invited me to shoot his bow. I obliged, but came away after my first and only shot with an ugly bruise that ran from my elbow to my wrist. The problem, it seemed, was that Harrell was a left-handed archer, and when he put the forearm protector on me, a right-handed shooter, he unwittingly put it on my left arm, leaving my right arm vulnerable.

Fortunately, I have quite a few friends and acquaintances who are accomplished archers. By picking their brains, I've gained a wealth of knowledge about bowhunting to the point that I don't feel handicapped when I sit down to write. One of those experts: Ruston's Larry Pyle.

When Pyle began bowhunting more than two decades ago, he was fascinated with the possibility of bagging deer by means of stick and string. Finding equipment, however, was another matter. "I began bowhunting in 1976 after hunting with guns all my life," he said. "I can't help but laugh when I think of the equipment I used when I started out.

"I bought my first bow at the old Gibson's Discount store in Ruston. Those first compound bows to come on the market were … well -- you could hurt yourself with them. They'd get arrows in from time to time, and every time they did, I'd go buy a dozen. No dozen were ever alike in length or weight. It's a wonder anybody killed a deer with the equipment we had back then."

According to Pyle, bowhunters' high success rates today have two basic causes. "First, we have lots more deer than we did in the 1970s, and second, the equipment today is light-years ahead of what was available twenty years ago," he said. "If hunters today had to use the equipment I started out with, I guarantee the success rate wouldn't be nearly as high."

Once he began bowhunting, Pyle laid his deer rifle aside and elected to do all his deer hunting with his bow. "Bowhunting is so different from hunting with firearms," he said. "You have to totally rethink what you're trying to accomplish. Like a golfer who wins tournaments with his putter, it's the short game that puts bowhunting in a class by itself.