Re: Your best ever kill shot?
I have many, some of which may grace the pages of this forum, but one that comes to mind, since we are in a reminiscent mood of our former youth.
When I was a young boy, my mother often took us kids with her to her many different work locations as a resort property manager. Some of them were great, and others were simply heaven for a kid like me. One of my absolute favorites to this day is Lake Powell, and I practically spent every summer of my life there. My mom would be busy organizing boats and timeshare's, and me and my brother's would fish and swim. We would usually go down and move houseboats uplake, so they could be rented again. This trip would take two or three days and was a most favorite job, tying the boats together, driving through some of the most beautiful land earth has to offer. My favorite time was spent onshore, fishing like a psycho, stopping only to chug a drink and down a hoagie mom had made, I didn't even stop to pee (you can hold one rod in the right hand and the other in your left).
Well as I got older and hunting became as inclusive as the fishing had always been, my fancy had become enamored with archery, and I spent every day after school shooting in the back yard. My fingers got raw and my aim got smaller and smaller. And my father turned me on to bowfishing, he had always taken his bow to Powell with us, and I had witnessed some fine shots. As an impressionable youth I thought the combination of fishing and hunting was the crux of outdoor satisfaction. So every summer, I would wade through the waist deep water's of Lake Powell, stalking my prey like an overweight blond heron. I learned quickly that herons and egrets move they way they do for good reason, and just as quickly, I perfected my skills.
It was June 10th, I dont remember the year as they have all washed together in my mind. I just remember the underwater orgy of fish that I found myself surrounded by, and I looked down at my deeply tanned and dry wrist looking at my Casio watch my Dad had gotten me. June tenth was the day that I learned how Carp spawn, the shoreline was a literal frenzy of fish competing for each other's affections. I had shot previously unbelievable amounts of Carp, and their yellow corpses littered the rocks, and the Crow's fought and squawked over them.
After a long morning of hunting, and having refreshed myself with a quick lunch. I went back to it, sneaking slowly along the shore line, my eye's picking out only the faint outline of dorsal fins just under the water's murky surface. Occasionally the fin would even break the surface, and give away the fish's depth, and my arrow would find it's mark just below the surface. In this way I made my way farther and farther down the shoreline, feeling the turbulence of escaping fish on the tops of my bare feet, stinging from the constant brushing against green tumbleweeds that grew along the shore.
I made my way to a point, that clearly held some fish in the shallow water atop one of Powell's underwater rock formations. The sun beat down on my sun bleached hair, burning on my bareback as I slowly moved towards the bountiful harvest I knew awaited me in the moving water's ahead. From a distance of probably twenty yards or so, my watering and squinted but trained eye's began to make out the shapes of the fish. The angle of the reflective image through the water made it very difficult to judge exactly where I should shoot, but having spent so much time judging these shots in knee deep water, it was just a simple calculation in my mind. My plan was to shoot into the seemly ball of fish that were spawning, and get as many as possible onto my fiberglass arrow. Just as I was preparing my movements to draw my father's thirty something year old recurve bow, given to him by his father, my eye's made out something I wasn't prepared for.
It's hard to make out individual fish in such a ball, but this one easily took up three or four other's space. I focused hard and could see what appeared to be a large female, being courted by unknown masses of smaller males. My young heart jumped as I realized it was simply the biggest fish I had ever had the chance to shoot. She sat there still as the others moved about her rapidly, all of them ignorant to the deadly shaft I slowly brought to bear on them. I squinted my eye, and waited for a moment to get a clear shot. The opening would exist for a fleeting second so I knew my time would be short, and as I released the arrow time slowed, and sound faded away, as my every sense focused on the flight of that arrow. The familiar sound of line spinning off the spool, and the humming vibration resonated back to me from it. I watched my arrow break the water's surface, and it came to an abrupt stop, the knock, and several inches of arrow still exposed above the water. It didn't move, but seemed to mock me in its motionless stance. The fish that surrounded my now not so menacing arrow, didn't even seem to notice it's presence between them. It was as if they hadn't even noticed, my heart stopped, and I thought to myself;"you missed!! how could you miss? there was more fish there than water!!" Not wanting to spook them, I stood there motionless, watching closely to see if I could tell what had happened. My arrow was clearly poking out of a bunch of fish, so I slowly and gently pulled back on the time weathered string. As it came tight, I could simply not believe my eyes as the big female I had intended on hitting slowly moved towards me in the water, the other's continued courting her not knowing that her dark eye's could see no longer. My heart raced as I recognized was had happened. My arrow had made its way through her back alongside her spine, and had entered the base of her bony skull. She didn't even move, but was dead on impact.
I shouted full of excitement back to my family who were still on the houseboat a hundred or so yards away. I lugged my prize out of the water and back to the boat beaming with pride over my trophy. And at the time, a shot of a lifetime.
