First, a simple question: Do you practice shooting your bow regularly? If the answer is “yes,” then you’re a serious and ethical bowhunter. If you don’t, then you’re something else.

I was reminded of the importance of practice in September 2018, when I traveled to southeast Alaska to hang with a couple friends, both Alaska master guides and superb brown bear hunters, and follow them around as they guided a pair of bowhunters who wanted to walk up bear-filled salmon streams and test their skills against Ursus arctos horribilis.

This is very serious business. Following up on a poorly hit brown bear in the thick old-growth forest jungle can be an extremely dangerous thing. And while placing your first arrow precisely is crucial in all bowhunting, it is doubly so here.

And so, my conversation with one of the clients reminded me of something C.S. Lewis, who authored, among other works, the children’s epic fantasy series, The Chronicles of Narnia once said: “No one can teach riding so well as a horse.”

Nothing teaches you how to shoot better than actually practicing your shooting. You don’t become a better bow shot through osmosis, watching YouTube, reading magazines, or by simply wishing it.

The first morning broke clear and calm, and so I asked the client Jim would be guiding, “Hey, you wanna go shoot some arrows?”

“Nah, I’m good,” he said.

“Are you sure?” I asked. “We’ve got a lot of time until we go out. Be nice to make sure the airlines didn’t wreck your gear.”

After a little more of this, he decided that shooting a few arrows would be OK, so to the beach we went.

The man had a fair amount of bowhunting experience under his belt, hunting elk and deer and whatnot, but still ...

Big bears have a strange way of turning even the most experienced bowhunter’s knees to jelly, and you want to make sure that everything with your gear is just right. So I set the target up, he walked back to the 30-yard line, got on his knees — a good thing to practice — and let a few arrows fly.

Yikes. He grouped them into a circle about 6 inches in diameter, the center of the group being about 4 inches left and 4 inches high. “Maybe we need to adjust the sight a bit,” I suggested.

“Man, I hate messing with my sight,” he replied. So he shot a few more arrows, with the same results.

“Sure you don’t want to make an adjustment?” I asked.

“Man, I don’t know what’s wrong,” he said. “I must just be pulling them, or something.”

“I have a saying when I’m dialing in my bows,” I said. “Don’t fight the sight. It’s telling you what you need to do.”

And so we skiffed back to the big boat to get his Allen wrenches, made some adjustments, and his groups — though still pretty large — finally centered over the bull’s-eye. It was a good thing we did, because when the time came, he used his 40-yard pin on a bear that was 28 yards away. The broadhead hit directly under the bruin’s spine, but sliced the top of the liver, and the 750-pound bear was stunned enough that he was able to shoot him again, this time in the right place. Had we not moved the sight, the shot would have been too far back.

One of the problems here may have been the fact that the client had purchased a new compound for this hunt to replace a bow he’d been shooting for many years. He was intimate with his old bow, but the new model — and it was one of 2018’s top new compound bows — simply felt differently. I’m not sure he had spent enough time shooting it prior to the hunt so that it felt like an old friend.

The “I’m good” thing has always baffled me. I’ve seen it countless times in hunting camps all around the world, and I just don’t get it. Personally, I love shooting my bow so much that when I get to camp one of my first questions is always, “Where can I shoot a few arrows?” Over the years I’ve learned that to be the best bow shot you can be is kind of like the tortoise and the hare: slow but steady — not an all-out sprint — wins the race.

The slow-but-steady approach, shooting a few arrows a day or two a week versus shooting a lot of arrows a couple times a month, has many advantages. It keeps your bow shooting muscles strong, and alerts you to those small changes in your setup that can affect accuracy. It also helps you avoid fatigue, which leads to poor shooting form, which leads to inconsistency. As legendary Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi once said, “Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.”

As ethical bowhunters, we owe it to the magnificent animals we hunt to do everything in our power to make sure we can make a killing shot the first time. That means taking the time to get our bow-and-arrow setup tuned perfectly and our sight pins set precisely. It also means making a commitment to practicing regularly and learning what our personal limitations are so that we stay within ourselves in the field.

How about you? How often do you practice your shooting? What’s your routine? Drop me a note at editor@grandviewoutdoors.com and let me know.