I spent four months telling myself I was ready, and the whole time I was setting up a miss that I could have seen coming a mile away.
It was my second season with a bow. The first season I got skunked six times and saw one spike that never got within sixty yards. I blamed the wind, the moon, the deer, the state of Missouri, everything but the dumbest variable in the whole equation, which was sitting right there in my own garage.
All summer I shot. Every Tuesday and Saturday after work I dragged the foam block out into the yard and sent arrows down to the fence line. Twenty yards, thirty, forty. I got to where I could stack them tight enough that I had to start moving to different dots on the block so I wasn’t busting fletchings on my own nocks. I felt dangerous. I felt like the kind of guy who shows up at deer camp and doesn’t say much because he doesn’t have to.
The One Thing I Never Practiced
What I did not do, not one single time, was shoot a broadhead.
I know how that sounds. I know you can see the clown coming before I even finish the story. But here’s the thing that makes it dumber than you think. I knew broadheads were different. I had read it a hundred times. Every old guy at the archery shop would remind me every time I walked in for a dozen field points. “Gotta shoot your broadheads, son.” Yeah, yeah, I’d nod. Sure. I’ll get to it.
I didn’t get to it.
My reasoning was this. The broadheads I bought cost thirty-five dollars for three of them. They were razor sharp. If I shot them into my foam block all summer, I’d dull them, and then I’d have dull broadheads for opening day. So I told myself I was being smart. Save the factory edge for the deer. Shoot field points all summer, get the bow dialed, and then, maybe, the week before season, I’d screw in a broadhead and confirm it hit the same spot.
The week before season came and went. I worked late Tuesday. It rained Saturday. You can probably write the rest of this paragraph yourself. I showed up on opening morning with a bow that had never once fired a broadhead through it, arrows that had never been tested with the things they’d actually carry, and a chest full of confidence I had done absolutely nothing to earn.
Opening Morning
The first hour was slow. Light came up gray and cold. I sat in a hang-on stand over a white oak flat that drops off into a thicket of cedar. My dad hung that stand for me back in July, and I’d hunted it twice the year before and seen nothing but squirrels.
At seven forty the deer showed up.
It wasn’t a monster. A two and a half year old eight point, maybe a hundred and ten inches if you were feeling generous. But to a guy on his second season with a bow, he might as well have been a B&C giant. He came off the flat walking straight for my tree, and my heart started doing that thing where it sounds like it’s trying to climb out through my teeth.
Twenty-two yards, broadside, head down, eating acorns. Perfect. Textbook. The shot every bow hunter dreams about all summer with a foam block and a six pack.
I drew. I settled. I put the pin right behind his shoulder, the exact spot I’d been drilling for months. And I released.
The arrow went under him.
Not close under him. Clean under him. It buried itself in the dirt a full six inches below his belly, and he blew out of there like a bird had dropped a rock on his head, white flag up, gone over the ridge before I even knew what happened.
I sat there for a long time. I ran the shot back through my head about forty times. Pin was on him. I settled. I didn’t flinch, I don’t think. I didn’t punch the trigger. So why was the arrow four inches low?
The Broadhead Told the Truth
The next morning I found my answer. I screwed a broadhead onto one of my arrows, walked back out to the yard, and shot it into the block at twenty yards alongside a field point.
The broadhead hit three and a half inches low and two inches right.
Different arrow. Different flight. My bow was tuned for field points, and a broadhead is a completely different animal in the air. More surface at the front. It catches the wind, it steers the arrow, and if your bow isn’t tuned for it, it’ll land somewhere you didn’t aim. The field point told me I was a marksman. The broadhead told me the truth.
Here’s the part that still makes me want to throw my boot through the garage wall. I had known this. Every old timer had told me this. The internet had told me this. The guy at the archery shop, the guy who mounted my rest, the guy who sold me the damn broadheads, all three of them told me this. I just didn’t want to dull a thirty-five dollar set of heads, so I decided the laws of physics wouldn’t apply to me.
I killed a deer that season anyway. Took me three more weeks and a cold clear morning in late October, and I shot a doe at eighteen yards with a broadhead I had finally, properly, tuned my bow to. The arrow went exactly where I was looking. The way it was supposed to all along. But I only got there because I finally did the thing I had skipped for four months.
Shoot What You Hunt With
So here’s what I’d tell any of you reading this who are getting ready for your first season, or your fifth, and you’re stacking field points into a tight little group and feeling like a sniper. Broadheads are not field points with a point on the end. They fly different. They group different. And if the first time you ever watch one leave your bow is at a live deer, you have to get lucky to recover that animal clean.
Shoot your broadheads before the season. Buy a cheap practice pack if you have to, the ones that come dull and stay dull, and run them all summer. Keep one razor sharp set in the quiver for the field and never put it in the block. Confirm, right before opening day, that the setup you’ll actually hunt with puts an arrow where you’re looking. Every year, not just your first.
It costs you an afternoon and a few dollars in dulled heads. The alternative cost me my best chance of the season, and a six inch hole in the dirt where a buck had been standing.
I’m not going to stand here and pretend I’ve never made a dumber decision in the woods, because I have. But that one, watching an eight point walk off the ridge while I sat there confused, holding a bow that had never once told me the truth about where it sends a broadhead, that one’s going to stick with me for a while.