“John! Help! THE KIDS, THE KIDS, get them out first…” Jag woke covered with sweat. “Man, I have to stop that” he said, in a worried voice after waking up from another nightmare of when he lost his family in a fire. A lighting strike hit a tree by their cabin starting it on fire and then the cabin went up in flames 2 years ago. “I have to get something today, I haven’t eaten since last week” he said as he gathered his bow and arrows he had made from a pine tree he cut down. He did have a 20 gauge shotgun but no ammo and it was the only thing he had recovered from the fire, (besides some clothes and a blanket). He had not found any shells so the gun proved worthless.

He set out to his makeshift tree stand he built out of the wood from the pine he cut down with an axe that was in the shed that was about 100 yards from the house. When he got his sweatshirt and coat on he left to go out to the stand. It was still very dark out, no later than 4 in the morning, so navigating his way to the stand was difficult, and when he got there the sun was already completely up. When he got up the tree he started calling for deer with a grunt that he mastered over the last 3 years of hunting. 4 hours later he had seen nothing and with his stomach roaring with hunger he got up to see if he could chase a rabbit out. He got down from his stand and made his way into a thick brush pile where two rabbits darted out straight ahead of him. It freighted him so much that he fell down but his years of hunting told him never to take his eye of the game, and he watched them both stop side by side about 15 yards from his current position.

He slowly got to his knees and pulled out an arrow and just then both rabbits took off like lighting for no apparent reason, knowing it wasn’t him Jag looked around to see what scared them. He looked to his left and about 10 yards away was a little fawn eating the clover. He drew back his arrow took the shot and missed about a foot above it. The deer took off into some brush but Jag wasn’t about to give up yet.

He slowly walked around the brush that the deer went into and climbed a tree that he thought would over look the whole brush. When he got to the top he could see the fawn munching on the same patch of clover that he took the last shot. It was about a 45 yard shot from there. Jag had never hit anything from more than 30 with his bow and never attempted anything from more than 40, so this was a very difficult shot for him. But his hunger drove him to take it. He used his best arrow that he had and drew it back let it go and watched the arrow go straight into the lung area of the fawn.

The deer ran about 5 yards and dropped dead. Jag was so excited he failed to remember he was in a tree and almost fell out and experienced about 50 ft drop. He dropped his bow witch made a loud snap when it hit the ground.

Jag climbed down to see his bow completely snapped in 4 different places. He took the string and left the rest to lay knowing he couldn’t fix it. He went to retrieve his game. By the time he got home, changed, and had the deer cleaned and put in the fridge he had in the shed, it was past midnight, so he was eager to get to sleep knowing he had a long day tomorrow making a new bow.

He slept ‘till about 8 the next day and got rite to work cutting down a small pine he had next to the cabin. He took off all the needles and cut the real small twigs off, and started taking off the bigger branches to make into arrows and then take the main beam of the tree and make that into the bow. Once he got all the branches off he took them and put them into the shed so he could work on the arrows tonight because they were smaller and fit into the shed which was only about an 8×10 little room that had a little heater and a small fridge/freezer. It had blankets he found in his room after the fire that he used as his bed.

Then he took the main part of the tree and started taking off the bark to get the woody part. Once he got all the bark off, he took his pocket knife he got from his grandpa when he was 5 years old and always kept in his sweatshirt pocket, and started shaving down the tree to about a 3” diameter stick that was about 4’ long and then he took the axe and chopped off the ends to make it about 3 ft long and stated to make it into the bow. He made it so in the middle it was the same 3” diameter circle for a grip and then the top and bottom were made into about 2” wide ½ inch thick board type piece so it was flexible, than he made notches on both sides of the top and bottom to wrap the string around (witch was some 30 pound test fishing line) and tied a triple knot around it and then he was done.

He went back inside to work on the arrows. He only used the branches that seemed not to be dead or rotted so that eliminated almost half of the branches he had. He took the remaining 5 branches or so and shaved off the bark and then made about a 2 ½ ft long arrow with a pointed front and end with leaves for stability.

It was about 3 in the afternoon and he only had a little handful of berries in the morning so he was really hungry. He took some of the new meat from the fawn he shot yesterday and put it in the wood heater in a small pan. And let it cook a while then he flipped the meat and put it back in. When he got done eating he went to bed for the nite.