Traditional Bowhunting Mentors

By Manuel S. Cervantes

What is a mentor? According to the Webster dictionary, a mentor is a trusted counselor or guide. Now let me give you my own definition: Someone you have a lot of respect for, who not only will guide you, but will look after you and take care of you. Someone who knows better, who has wisdom. Generally a mentor will be someone much older than you, who has experience doing what you are trying to do. Also one who is willing to share knowledge, time and even resources with you, without limitations. Let me go so far as to say that your mentor will be willing to sacrifice a little of his very dearest self to get you through and teach you. A teacher, a master professor willing to do just about anything to help you get moving forward.

My Dad was a firearms hunter, and he certainly has his place as a hunting mentor. He taught us the love of the outdoors. He was very ethical, and possessed unequaled woodsmanship. He gave me a hard time when I started bowhunting exclusively, because I came back from my hunting adventures empty-handed all the time.

We all needed mentors in traditional bowhunting; especially if you started bowhunting in the late 70s and early 80s. There was not a whole lot going on out there regarding traditional bowhunting. It was hard to even find an archery shop, let alone one that carried traditional bows of any kind, where the owner knew anything about recurves and longbows.

As a kid back in Mexico, during the summers my brother Luis and I would go to the river in Los Sauces, on my Granddad's ranch in northern Jalisco, and collect river cane for arrows. We made our bows out of any branch that was half straight by making some grooves on the tips and stringing it with cotton yarn. The bow did not matter that much, but the arrows had to be semi-straight in order to get them to shoot well. We hunted for frogs and played with our rudimentary bows and arrow and had great times all those years. Those were my first adventures with the bow and arrow. We had no archery mentors, it was just the two of us, and our instincts.

Back in 1979, as a junior in college, I attended Truman University in Northeast Missouri where I was the No. 1 tennis player on the varsity tennis team. Our college vice president, Dale Schatz, had a party for the tennis team out at his house one Saturday afternoon. As we walked in, my eyes immediately caught the two recurve bows hanging across the top of the chimney in his living room. Curiosity and awe got a hold of me. As I was closely inspecting the two beautiful recurves, he approached and, taking one of them down, he said to me "This is what you need if you want to hunt the hard way." He strung it and we went out to his back yard and shot a few arrows. The seed that was already there had been fertilized and watered in my brain. I was 19 years old. You can say Dale Schatz was my first archery mentor, even if it was only for a few minutes.

A few years later, in 1983, I was living in El Paso, Texas, going to graduate school. Out of I nowhere I had the vision that I needed to get into bowhunting. My girlfriend and I found a closed down archery shop in West El Paso--the owner had recently passed away--but there was nothing else. So, I went to the only place I thought there might be someone who would help me find what I needed, The El Paso Gun Exchange Store. They sold mainly guns, but they had some compound bows as well. As I walked in there, the owner immediately tried to sell me a compound, but I had the vision of those recurves on top of the chimney at Mr. Dale Schatz's house. Somewhere I had either heard or read something about Fred Bear and Howard Hill. So I asked the owner about recurve bows or longbows. He said he knew Fred Bear personally. He said Fred was in good health but getting older and still bowhunting. He pulled out a Bear Catalog, which I still have somewhere in my files, and handed it to me. We opened it up and he showed me the beautiful recurve bows.

It was not difficult for me to decide what I wanted. Obviously, it would have to be a Bear Super Kodiak. The Super Kodiaks jumped off the page as if they were real, or as if I possessed it already. So that was the bow we ordered, and it would take them a few weeks to get it. I went for the highest poundage they offered. Obviously, I did not know what I was getting myself into. There was no one to ask back then. The price was about $130. "That was not too bad," I thought.

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