He and I first headed for
the woods near camp to get some photos of him drawing and shooting the bow. As
it turned out, these few photographs were the only official pictures ever taken
of Fred Bear shooting a compound bow that were ever published.
As all bowhunters know,
when one is in a bowhunting camp, part of the challenge and fun is practice
each day before you go out hunting. Naturally, when friends like our Bear
Archery group gather, there is a lot of competition and good-natured kidding
when arrows are being loosed at targets. In our case, we generally used
styrofoam coffee cups for targets since these were more difficult to hit, and
our sessions were generally held after lunch. They also provided us with that
nice “sweet spot” that all bowhunters concentrate on when they finally arrive
at the “moment of truth” with their quarry.
I can remember the look on
Fred’s face as he tried time after time to shoot the Alaskan bow there that
first afternoon at Bear Paw Landing. He simply could not do it with the
proficiency he had shown all his archery life. The reason was simple after he
thought about it for a few minutes. His was a snap-shooter’s style. He would
rest the arrow on the knuckle of his right hand, not on an arrow rest, and as
he drew the arrow back to full draw. The moment it touched his cheek, he
released it and was deadly accurate. He had that innate ability to visualize
his arrow speeding to the target and he always hit what he was looking at.
Thousands of arrows had left his bows over the years, not only winning him
championships in target archery, but also world-class big game trophies around
the world on his many hunts. And also during the difficult trick shots he did
in his early years working the Midwest
sporting goods show circuit. But when the Alaskan compound bow reached its peak
weight and let-off that Canadian afternoon, it completely threw him for a loop
and ruined his shooting style. He never hunted with the Alaskan or any other
compound bow. Nor did I ever see him shoot a compound bow again. And that was
the reason. Luckily I had that one roll of exposed film with just a few usable
photos on it that I would later use repeatedly in our advertising material.
Fred loved to tell
stories, not only of his many hunts, but also stories about himself,
self-deprecating stories that poked fun of himself. In his later years he even
included my turkey hunting misadventures in his repertoire of yarns. In hunting
camps he would attract bowhunters like honey attracts a bear whenever he sat
down to tell his stories. If you ever had an opportunity to hear Fred speak at
a bowhunter dinner, or in a hunting camp you know what I mean. Fred Bear was to
hunting what Will Rogers was to politics.
Fred spins his yarn magic outside our cabin at Bear Paw Landing, telling his hunting tales.
So it was that as he sat
on the small back porch of our cabin one day there in the sunshine at Bear Paw
Landing, with me hanging out on the perimeter with my camera and lenses, he
started to tell his tales. And, of course, he knew I wanted to get photos of
him working on the Alaskan compound bow. What better way to do it than as he
was telling stories to a bunch of rapt bowhunters gathered on the grass around
him? So, between yarns, he began to take apart the Alaskan bow to show these
fellows how this was truly a Bear take-down compound bow. Many of them were
already familiar with that style of bow that he had designed for their hunting
recurves. Taking the bow apart went pretty well, and I snapped away, changing
film several times, enjoying what I was doing. But then through my viewfinder I
saw the old man’s brows knit up and this serious look come onto his face. I
knew we were in trouble. He could not get the bow to go back together again to
his satisfaction. And if Fred Bear could not reassemble a piece of archery
equipment, we were in deep doo-doo! He quietly set the bow aside, acting as if
little was wrong and continued spinning his yarns to the group of listeners
around him. I’m not sure they ever realized how very frustrated he had become.
Afterward, when he was
safely in the privacy of our small Bear Archery group he called the factory and
read them the riot act for claiming the bow was a “take-down” and one that
could be taken apart and reassembled without any tools. One of the few times in
my many decades with Fred that I ever saw him angry. Needless to say, we never
again suggested that the new Bear Alaskan compound bow could be taken apart for
travel and then easily put back together again when one reached his hunting
camp.
Nevertheless, I had my
Fred Bear compound bow photos and built part of our 1975 catalog around them.
That was the catalog that we also published in French, German and Japanese
translations.
Time to Bear
Hunt
That frustrating day,
however, was soon over. Fred was not one to brood upon something like that. It
was done, he spoke his peace, and he moved on. He did not carry a grudge. So
the remainder of our hunt, there was a lot of fun for all of us. Each of us
were dropped off at a baited treestand in the afternoons where we could wait
for the wild Mr. Bear to come into our shooting range. And there were both
black and cinnamon-colored bears in the area. In the mornings we fished for
delicious walleyes on the waters around camp and enjoyed them in late suppers
after returning from our bowhunting forays. Fred loved to fish for walleyes.
Some of Gordy’s bear
blinds were as much as 50 miles away from camp. The one I hunted the first
night out was 24 miles from Bear Paw Landing. And it was 12 1⁄2 miles off
the main highway. I really knew what it felt like to be alone in the woods
hunting bears armed only with a bow and arrow. It is a very sobering
realization when they drop you off at your blind and drive away, and the
isolation suddenly hits you. You are truly an intruder in the bear’s living
room.
My notes from the hunt
mention a moment that I shared often with Fred and Kelly over the years. It is
a simple moment, but really a memorable one. Here’s what I said in my notebook
from that hunt.
Breakfast time is the best
part of the day, when Fred, Kelly, Hap, Bob and I sit around the table having
our first cup of coffee of the day.
Fred’s hair is tousled,
highlighting and framing his weathered deep-lined smile. He and Kelly in their
flannel p.j.’s with sleep still in their eyes. They’re quiet like me in the
morning. Hap is the over-exuberant one, singing and giving us all the needle
’cause we’re still half asleep. Bob Bigler also wakes up slowly.
We have 10 or 15 minutes
alone each morning to wake up in each other’s company. Then some of the other
people in the camp start coming in for breakfast, including Gordy, who is
always a joy to see in the morning with his happy smile and upbeat ways.
A Bear of a
Headache
I was lucky enough to be
in the right place at the right time next to the small Minnow Lake
and took the only bear harvested by our group with a bow and arrow on that
hunt. Needless to say, when the least-experienced bear hunter in a group like
that in our Bear Archery cabin got the only bear, it was quite a thing to
remember. Unfortunately, as so often happened to me in my younger years, the
next morning I awoke with a horrible migraine headache. I had suffered from
them since childhood and they always seemed to occur after a stressful week at
work, or after a particularly stressful time, such as when I completed my
annual pitch to our Bear Archery sales meeting on our new catalog and
advertising for the coming year. Or, now I discovered, after I successfully
hunted and downed a nice Canadian black bear.
But Fred came to the
rescue for me. It seems he, too, had suffered from these same debilitating
migraine headaches. And he had discovered a medication called Cafergot® that he
used to fight them. If you’ve ever had a migraine, you’ll know what I’m talking
about. If you haven’t, just know that in addition to a horrible sick headache
you usually have a pain in one side of your forehead that feels as if someone
has driven a nail into your skull, you are nauseous and usually throwing up,
you have chills, numbness in your extremities and even vision difficulties. All
you can do is to lie down in a dark quiet room and wait the damn things out. It
usually took four or five hours for me to feel better. But after Fred told me
about Cafergot, I got a prescription, and it greatly reduced the severity of
the migraines.
I first suspected Fred
also suffered from migraines when I saw a photo of him taken the morning after
he had finally taken his African elephant in Mozambique in 1964 just two years
before I started working with him. He looked horrible in the photos and was all
bundled up in a hunting jacket in the African heat. There was no doubt he was
ill, and when he later told me he also suffered from migraines I knew my
suspicions were true. It is said that a lot of creative people suffer from
these things, and Fred was certainly one of the most creative people I ever
knew.
Compound
Gains Acceptance, But Not From
Fred
In the early 1970s
Congress passed the 11 percent federal excise tax laws on archery equipment and
began collecting that tax in 1975. I’ll get into all of that and the part Fred
played in it behind the scenes in another chapter. But as a result, in the
spring of that year he asked me to go down to our Michigan Department of
Natural Resources and see how we could get a portion of the accumulating
archery excise taxes devoted to helping promote our sport of archery. That,
too, I’ll cover in that chapter. But while I was in Lansing, I was asked by our old friend
Merrill “Pete” Petosky, the chief of the wildlife division at that time, to
meet with G. M. Dahl, chief of the law enforcement division, about these new
compound bow products.
In July of 1970 the
compound bow was deemed a legal hunting device in Michigan; however, it was to be unstrung
when carried in a motorized vehicle, as were all archery bows in the state.
This was to keep them from being used as a poacher’s tool and to curb illegal
road hunting from automobiles.
Chief Dahl called me into
his office and wanted to talk to me about what I thought about that
restriction, and I told him that I thought it was total overkill and really
created a hardship for Michigan’s
growing number of compound bow hunters. I explained to him that unstringing a
compound bow generally required a heavy, bulky bow press in those days and that
it was virtually impossible to shoot a compound bow from inside a vehicle. I
told him quite frankly, that Fred Bear, himself, had difficulty unstringing our
new compound bows and putting them back together properly without a bow press
to help him do it.
Chief Dahl bought the
argument and issued a new law enforcement policy following our meeting dropping
the unstrung requirement and instead simply stating that “the compound bow may
be carried strung in a motorized vehicle if securely fastened in a case or
rendered incapable of operation by locking a long-shank bicycle-type padlock
around the inner and outer strings...”
This was a big relief to
all of us who hunted with compound bows, and the change certainly reflected
well on the common sense approach taken by Chief Dahl and the Michigan DNR
while we lived in the state.
The introduction and
acceptance of our first new Alaskan and Tamerlane compound bows went very well,
indeed, compared to this relatively rocky start up at Bear Paw Landing in Canada. But I
never again referred to either of the bows as “take-down” bows in any of our
advertising copy.
And the only other photo I
ever took of Fred and a compound bow was a posed shot I took of him in Alaska. He didn’t hunt
with the compound while there, but I wanted to get him with the bow in an Alaska hunting
situation.
