Making a Bow from Scratch | Live Free or Die

I think I see one right through H. Close call there, just not shooting fast enough. I'm not being very productive and getting small game, but I need the food, so it's pretty important that I'm able to do some successful rabbit hunting if I'm going to stay in this area. Super high in protein, vitamins, and minerals, rabbit meat became popular during the Great Depression when American families began raising their own meat to survive these lean years.

Today, commercially sold rabbit goes for about $6 a pound, about four times the price of chicken. I feel like I'm more accurate with a bow and arrow, so if I can get a bow made, maybe that'll give me an edge that will let me make those difficult shots. Basically, just using a hatchet and a knife, and so not having modern tools does make it more challenging.

There it goes. This is going to be a pretty basic, simple bow, and I'm just trying to get something that's functional. It looks pretty good for coming out of a log. Earlier, I have more invested in this bow working than just going out to shoot at a target for fun, so I'm really trying to do everything I know how to do to make sure that it's successful.

I've got this string that I've carried with me this whole way. I'm going to call that good for now; hopefully, as it dries out, it'll stiffen up a little bit. I need to make some arrows. This is the arrow shafts I harvested the other day. I think I'm going to try to do three feather fletching on the arrow. The three feathers seem to fly a little better, so it's not too pretty but I got them on there.

I'm going to use some pine pitch glue to kind of cement the ends down, help it stay in place. Looks pretty good; we'll see how it flies. Time to go hunting.