13e S y hut n Archer link 14
.April, 1343
A‘n. 12
Score One for the Ten-Pointer Z??/ Myron IF. Freeland, Fort Wayne, Indiana I am not an author but when ever I read stories about ten point bucks the hunters get I feel impelled to write about the one I did not get. He was so beautiful, or should I say handsome, that I am rather glad I didn’t. I left Fort Wayne about nine in the morning for a three hundred sixtynine mile drive to the Michigan hunt ing territory. I was alone because I was going with bow and arrow. If I had been going during the gun season I couldn’t have hauled all who would have wanted to go with me. But the Michigan bow and arrow season opens the first of November and the gun season the 15th; and as I knew of no other archers who want ed to go I went alone. I reached my uncle’s place about ten-thirty that night. He did not expect me until the fourteenth or fifteenth and wanted to know why I had come two weeks early. When I told him I was hunting with bow and arrow he laughed and laughed until I brought my tackle in from the car. When he saw the broadheads I had filed and stoned razor sharp he said, “1 do believe you could kill a deer with those arrows.” I use a fiftyfive pound hickory bow and thirty inch, 11/32 arrows with one inch broadheads. I carry a belt axe, hunt ing knife and compass. I carry the compass even around home and be lieve it is a good habit always to have a compass with one in the woods. When my uncle had seen my tackle he did not laugh so much and said, “ I believe if I had had an outfit like that when I was a youngster I wouldn’t have burned so much gun powder, as all the bucks I have shot were not over thirty or forty yards
away.” He had killed many deer befor. he Jost his leg in a hunting accident. If he had used bow and arrows he probably would have two good legs today. As I never had seen him before we sat up till the small hours talking of deer. As I never had been off the city streets before, so to speak, the wildernesss just about frightened me. Everything was so quiet and still one almost could hear the silence. He told me his son had seen a tenpointer the day before and the buck seemed rather tame as the boy had come within thirty feet of him be fore he bolted. The next day I looked the ground over and saw plenty of tracks but not a hair of a deer. The next day I was away before daylight. Perl want ed me to take his gun along as he said there were bear and lynx and he didn’t know what back in the hills behind his farm. But with a bow and arrow license firearms were taboo. Besides I’d tackle any bear or any thing else with bow and arrow, hunting knife, and axe. I’d have shot’ a bear but I’d have climbed into a nice safe tree before I did—bow and arrow, gun or any other weapon. It was snowing and a" good trackt ing snow it was. Soon I picked up ‘‘WW cow tracks HclUW ” cllXU and 1I xviievf, knew, or felt, it was the ten-pointer I’d been told about as the tracks were too large for those of a doe. AV hen I first saw him he was on the side of a ridge standing in the shelter of a small bush watching me follow his tracks. I saw him when I was about fifty or sixty yards away. I was afraid to shoot for fear I’d miss. He and I stood and glared at each other; I afraid to move closer