In the last two years I’ve become the father to two great little boys. Like any father, I have great expectations and hopes for their futures, but one of the things I’m looking forward to most is the hunting trips we will share. My Dad introduced me to hunting and has been my hunting partner since I could pull a bow. Hunting has been one of the tools that helped establish our relationship, and that still continues to this day. During those years of shared experiences Dad always gave me the first shot at whatever we were hunting. Our most recent hunt helped me to understand the joy my Dad experienced when he gave me the first shot.

My Dad has bowhunted for 30 years and the majority of those years he hunted with a compound. He always planned to transition to a recurve or longbow and this year he made the switch. With the kids out of college and out of the house and the business doing well it was a good time to buy a new bow. After looking around at different bowyers, he settled on a Wes Wallace custom recurve and ordered it in time to have it before elk season. There is some debate between the different schools of bowhunting thought and practice but we always adopted a common sense approach of, ‘shoot whatever works for you, compound or stick bow, and be able to shoot it well.’

This year we only had four days to hunt in eastern Oregon and we were set on making the most of it. We were out early in the morning and coming in late at night trying to locate some elk. Conditions were hot and dry and the elk weren’t talking much. We hunted for the first couple of days with little activity but on the third day, the weather turned cooler and rainy. Early that morning we were overlooking a good-sized drainage, I bugled and finally a bull answered below.

Taken by surprise, my Dad tried to put me in the shooter position, but I hurriedly told him it was his turn to take the shot. I figured that he needed to break in the new bow, and I was glad to finally be able to call in a bull for him. We moved down the hillside and Dad set up below me. The bull was worked up and every time that I bugled he would bugle right back. He was covering my calls as we continued to work down the hill towards him but he didn’t seem to be moving. We hit an old logging road and worked over to the tree line on the edge of a clear cut among a stand of white fir.

I bugled again and he bugled back about 100 yards down the hill, the hair stood up on the back of my neck and the adrenaline started pumping. With as much speed as possible I tried to back off and get set up behind Dad but the bull was coming up the hill in a hurry. Dad crouched down on the side of the old road and I tried to take cover about 20 yards behind a small ponderosa pine. I saw the tops of some horns quickly come swaying up the hill and the light brown body of a 5-point bull emerged. All I could see was Dad’s back and I was hoping that the bull would present him with a shot; there was not much I could do. He angled up the hill to the road, stuck his head and neck out as if to look both ways, and then he fixed on my Dad. I could see Dad’s bow shaking ever so slightly and knew that the bull was probably going to spook, as you could almost see the bull’s eyes getting bigger and bigger. Sure enough, he whirled and started running down the hill, I cow called to try and get him to stop. I held my breath with great anticipation to see how my Dad would handle this challenging shot. As the bull crashed through a 10-yard opening I saw him pull back and release and we listened as the sounds of the bull crashing down the hillside faded away.

“Did you hit him?” I stammered.

“I’m pretty sure”, he replied.

I knew that if Dad said that he hit him, he probably did. I had seen him make too many amazing shots, and he was shooting his new recurve very well. We started looking for blood and began following his tracks, with the rain we didn’t want to take any chances of losing any sign. He worked down the hill following the bull’s tracks while I marked the trail. About 125 yards down the hill, he yelled, “Chad come over here”, in my mind I was thinking, “oh he’s spotted the bull bedded down, why doesn’t he shoot, what does he need me for?” I hurried down the hill and there the bull lay. I whooped and hollered and we celebrated. I was happier than if I had shot the bull myself, a feeling that I hardly expected.

He had made a perfect shot, 35 yards running and quartering away, the arrow entering at the 4th to last rib, cutting through the lungs and top of the heart and into the shoulder blade on the offside. He was a 5×6 and a good bull for the area we hunt. I had finally set my Dad up with a shot, it had been a major success and the new recurve had done the job.

Hunting is made up of those rare opportunities at an animal, sometimes short and sometimes a long time, sometimes you connect and sometimes you miss, but whatever happens you always have a story. I hadn’t filled my tag but I experienced hunting in a new way. Setting my Dad up for the shot was just as good as or better than taking the shot myself. I know what my Dad had felt those countless times that he gave me the first shot and have an idea what it will be like when my boys get old enough to hunt and the moment I give them the first shot.