Drawing on the memory of early-season elk woods

My bow has wheels and the arrows have three razors.

The points I use on targets, much of the time, look like tiny dunce hats but they drive into blocks of foam so deep it takes two hands and elbow grease to pull them out.

I know just as much about archery today as I did 20 years ago when the guy in the store said, "walk this way."

I was perusing cheap ammo, running my fingers over topwater lures and ceramic tableware with duck motifs, likely burning time because back then time was easily burned as tinder.

He said "put your hand right there, inside that leather loop, and use this gizmo to pull back the string."

I did as he said and peered through a peep sight over an arrow in a room in his store at a target against the same wall where in winter he hung ice augers and Christmas ornaments.

"Touch that trigger," he said and the floor creaked.

When the string twanged softly, the arrow tarried forth like the tongue of a snake smelling a cricket and plugged the target where I pasted my eye, or pretty near that place and he said, "waddya say?"

"Huh," I ventured with academic dexterity I considered to be my stock and trade.

"Pretty nice," I said.

This man had owned the shop on the main drag of this small Idaho town since someone decided that time could be measured by the age of a raccoon, and he once took me outside on a cool autumn morning when the traffic on the main street was sparse to non existent and pointed to a hill. He had once whistled a bull elk to his bow up there using a shell casing.

Back then, the man said, there was an elk behind every tree.

“It was like calling your dog,” he said. “You know what I’m saying?”

And he grinned, and said nock another one.

I spent the better part of the afternoon wearing khakis and a button front shirt sending colorful sticks with plastic feathers into a wall of foam inside the local sporting goods store when I should have been across the street in an office dripping coffee on my shoes.

When I walked out of the place I carried a camo-colored bow made of aluminum alloy that cost less than a set of snow tires. It had fiberglass limbs with two wheels called cams, a side-mounted quiver and a half dozen, made-to-fit arrows with plastic fletching that may be called vanes, but that is where my education stopped.

What I carried was more than a feat of engineering made in a secret enclave in Lewiston, Idaho, that bore an uneasy name: Sidewinder.

I knew I carried the key to a future of tennis shoe hunts in September in the high hills, ridge running after elk talk, hours of horn watching and delicious frustration, exertion and road maps made on napkins in cafes and parking lots in the best part of the state - its small towns - where you can tell an elk hunter by the smidge of face paint inadvertently left on the corner of an eye lid, their dusty rigs, and choice of cologne.

“Psst, Is that Golden Estrus I whiff, or Bull Fire?”

“Shhh. I call it waller juice. Sa‘special blend.”

“Got any to share?”

When late summer turns golden, and the nights are still warm, and lumpy camper trailers start taking root along mountainous two tracks, it’s best to sneak on by real early, before the log loading machines are fired up and block the roads with cut trees.

Trundle quietly past the hinterland camp trailers and then amble on foot up a side hill through the charcoal night, so you’re back where the elk are before the first slick of day fills the shadows.

The gizmos are new, but archery hasn’t changed much.

It’s about being where you want, and putting an arrow where you want it to be.

There is a lot of memory and magic to draw from.

Ralph Bartholdt writes from North Idaho. He can be reached at ralphbartholdt@gmail.com