Over the next five years, there were animals taken, animals lost, animals missed all together. There were times we would harvest a deer, a turkey, a pig. Times we would track an animal for two miles or more, only to have the blood trail disappear, returning home tired and left only, with a sick feeling in our bellies. Through these five years, Jordan and I had learned many lessons, most of them the hard way, all of them valued.

  When a hunt went wrong, I would replay it again and again in my head, analyzing every detail. Was the shot too far?  Did I hit too far back? Did I wait long enough before I started tracking? As time ticked, kept on ticking, and I learned my lessons, a couple of other questions slowly crept into my head. Was I getting penetration? Was my arrow fast enough? Could Pee Wee be inadequate? “No, Pee Wee, say it ain’t so!”

  Fast forward, a bit, to modern history, April the third, Two thousand and seven. I woke up at four in the morning, made coffee and let Jordan sleep in. He had forgotten his box call, so no turkey hunt that morning. The sun came up; I shot a few arrows, then a few more. Jordan got up, I fixed us some breakfast, as we ate we watched The Outdoor Channel, one of our traditions. It was muggy out and getting hot fast, so we decided to find a place locally to buy a call, do a little scouting, and then hunt later in the afternoon.

  We jumped in the truck and headed to Center City, a little town with a little store called Head’s Hardware Inc., where we buy batteries for the feeders or whatever hardware we may need for the ranch house. There, up high on the wall, is a shelf I like to look at, it holds trophies from years past, a few nice bucks and a bobcat, mounted in classic fashion, gathering dust, staring at everyone who walks in. It ain’t Cabela’s, but that’s O.K. As usual, they had just what we needed in stock. A Burnham Bros. box call, twenty four bucks, not too bad.

  On the way back to the ranch, I asked Jordan if maybe we should stop and get our bows, he said “Naw, we won’t need them”, and so we headed up to a draw, which we thought, could be promising. Spanish oak and walnut shade the draw and a small spring flows there, filling a watering trough. We always… O.K., usually, see something there. As we walked, Jordan hit the call; as soon as he did, there was a response off in the distance. He hit it again and that tom must have been in full stride, because this time he sounded like he was right on top of us. Rule number one; always take a weapon while you’re scouting. At a quick pace we made our way back to the truck. I looked down and something caught my eye, without thinking I reached a grabbed it, hardly missing a step. In my hand, a perfect dart point, blue gray flint and a beautiful patina. It was bound to be a magical day.

  After grabbing our bows, we made our way up a tree line before the draw, found a place to conceal ourselves back in some shrub and started calling. We half expected the turkey to be long gone, but off in the distance we heard the gobble of a tom with love on his mind. I was back in the brush about fifteen feet behind Jordan and had a clear line of sight up the tree line. Jordan was right on the edge, tucked between a bush to his right, and a large live oak on his left. The bird came right up the tree line, stopped, and strutted his stuff a bit, then kept a steady pace in our direction. As the tom approached, the trunk of the oak blocked Jordan’s view of the bird. I could see the bird clearly but couldn’t move or make a sound to alert my partner. Before you could say “gobbler”, the tom popped out from behind the oak and was standing no more than seven yards in front of Jordan. He couldn’t move, draw his bow, or think too loudly. He stared at the turkey, the turkey stared at him. Then there was the moment of realization (for the tom not us), he didn’t know what we were, but he knew what we weren’t.  He knew we weren’t right, and at that he was gone.

  All this happened in a matter of fifteen minutes. We didn’t get our bird but we were pleased we called a turkey in that close, and I was able to make these mental notes: Be in a place where you can see the bird coming while drawing your bow, and the no brainer, use a decoy, for goodness sakes.

  The rest of the afternoon consisted of lazin’ at the ranch house, eating some lunch, watching Uncle Ted on The Outdoor Channel, Jordan taking a nap and me walking around the yard, kicking up little pieces of the past.

  The house we stay in is not on the ranch. It’s in the small town of Star and was built around 1910. The time spent between hunts always passes slow for me, every thirty minutes or so I’ll check the clock, like a third grader waiting for a birthday party. Walking around outside helps pass the time and gives me a glimpse into days long gone and fading from thought. I can tell the folks that lived there enjoyed picking up pretty rocks and I never know what I might find washed up from the previous rain. This time it was a fossilized urchin that had found its way back to the surface, with a little help from water draining off the roof, another trinket for me, and another memory for my collection.

  Finally four O’clock rolled around and we headed out to hunt some hogs. It was hot, in the upper eighties, but a front was supposed to be moving through later on. I took an extra set of camos to change into before the hunt and a bottle of Scent Blocker even though I had bathed right before we left.

  Hogs had only started making their way onto the ranch about three or four years ago, and we were curious how fast they were spreading. They seemed, for the time being, to be bedding in an area of buck brush, which covered about two hundred acres. They would move from that area in the evenings, hitting our feeders then working their way down to where the livestock is kept. . On the way up, we ran into a young man that had been given permission to trap hogs around the cattle pens. He told us, in the previous two weeks, he had caught fifteen hogs. He would then take them to Stephenville and sell them to a man for butcher.

  We got to the feeder, and I'd like to say, I don’t hunt feeders except for hogs. I emptied the five gallon bucket of mash that I had made. We hung our lights and sat down in a blind I had rigged up, the hunt before, using a large downed mesquite, and camo netting. At this point, I remembered a few of the negative factors of springtime. We had quite a few seed ticks crawl on us, mosquitoes searched for bare patches of skin, and blue tail flies buzzed around us, landing in the tree, every now and then, to devour the caterpillars that were building their webs in the branches.

  I was excited about trying out the mash I had made. The plastic bucket, I had it in, was swollen and when I popped the lid, a “pssssss” exhaled from within. The breath that escaped let me know the yeast and molasses, I had added, did the job. It wasn’t just a breath, more like morning breath after a two week sleep.

  Now, we knew the hogs would come out to the feeder sometime in the evening; the mash was just to entice them a little early, so we could get back to the camp house before too late. Unfortunately, the wind was against us, not carrying the sour odor into the brush, but wafting it directly in our faces.

  While all this was going on, the expected front was coming in. Thunderheads grew toward the sky where the cold northern mass was colliding with the moist southern air, and as the light faded, fingers of lightening stretched above us. Insects crawled on us and buzzed around our head covering. The smell of rotting corn filled our lungs, and after two weeks of waiting for this moment, it seemed the hunt would literally be a wash.

  I can say, and Jordan will agree, I’m a die hard when it comes to hunting and when he said, “It’s fixin’ to start pouring”, I cringed. By this time it was almost completely dark, and a walk back to the truck in pouring cold rain wouldn’t have been pleasant. So, when he prodded, “Come out here and look at the sky” I reluctantly got up from the blind, stood beside him and watched the chaos brewing above us. “I think it’s moving south” I said with confidence but not certainty. Then out of my mouth came a sarcastic “Perfect”. In a split second our attention was out of the clouds and back on earth.

  From the buck brush, came a multitude of silhouettes moving in our direction. We froze unbelieving. No less than ten pigs weighing between thirty and fifty pounds each, rushed the feeder. Following not far behind were four big sows, two at around a hundred and fifty pounds, and two others that had to be pushing two hundred.

  Jordan had left his bow in the blind, but I, learning my lesson, had bow in hand. The young ones moved in an amorphous mass around the corn, looking up at us, inquisitively, wondering what we were. The lumbering sows laid back another fifteen yards, clearly wary of our presence.

  I drew on the piglets which were all facing me. But instead of seeing a target, all I could make out was the continual movement of pig flesh. I let the tension off of my bow, and waited for an opportunity. I looked at the sows, then back at the piglets. Finally, I chose one of the larger young ones, and let my arrow fly. I heard the unmistakable “THUNK” of a broad head hitting flesh, and all hell broke loose.

  I watched my quarry run in a semi-circle and head back towards the brush. In the darkness I could make out my arrow protruding from the pig; directly behind the foreleg and half way up the body. Jordan and I both thought we heard it go down, so while we waited, we reveled in the excitement which had just taken place.

  We let thirty minutes pass, and then went in search of my prize. We found two drops of blood by the corn and that was it, not another trace. We marked the blood, checked the route we had seen the pig run, walked the hog trails that ran back into the brush, an hour and a half later, nothing… nothing. A dark night, a black pig, thick brush; it was futile, my heart sank. This time I knew, the arrow was on target, the shot was fine; Pee Wee had let me down. The remainder of the night passed slowly, I lay in my bunk, watching my misfortune play over and over in my head.

  With little sleep, I rose at four a.m. to a chilly house. During the night the temperature had dipped into the forties. I stumbled to the kitchen, made myself some coffee and started breakfast. I fiddled with couple decoys we were using for the morning hunt, and woke Jordan at six. We ate the breakfast tacos I had prepared, and were on our way.

  We set up in two tree stands, some fifty yards from each other, each of us with a decoy, each of us hoping for a gobbler. Jordon had a good size tom come in, but not close enough for his bow. I had a jake hang around a few minutes, peck at the ground but not pay much mind to my decoy. Neither of us got a shot off, but my first spring turkey hunt had peaked my interest and I look forward to my next opportunity.

   After our morning hunt, we searched, again for my pig. We walked the trails into the buck brush to a spot where we had found a bedding area and several wallows, on a previous hunt. I wondered, to myself, if hunting with a traditional bow injured more animals than was acceptable. The answer came to me as I exited the brush. There on the ground was the partially decomposed skull of an eight point buck. Not the first, but the third, we had found this year.

   I thought to myself, how many rifle hunters take shots at deer, think they miss, but truly wound a deer that dies later. The difference with traditional bow hunting is, you absolutely know when you hit an animal, the animal is right there in front of you, up close and personal. It’s this personal interaction that brings me closer to the animal, closer to nature. Though I may make mistakes, these mistakes educate me, not only to be a better hunter, but also to be a more ethical hunter.

   So this hunt ended, and with truck packed, we made our journey home.  Jordan and I talked the entire ride back to Austin. We spoke of past adventures, lighted nocks and string trackers for our night hunts, lessons learned this time around, and our next hunt, which is now a little over a week away.

   As for Pee Wee, well, I’ll use him on rabbits and squirrels from now on. My new bow arrives on Monday and I can’t wait for our first big adventure.