Scott Swanson
Lonnie Horner’s first experience with bow hunting was not epic.
He’d grown up in Sweet Home, hunting and fishing with his family. When he was in his mid-20s, he decided to borrow his brother’s Golden Eagle bow and try hunting with it.
“I had a chance at a big buck,” recalled Horner, now 62. “I shot right through the middle of its horns and missed it. I quit for about 20 years after that.”
Then his brother gave him a Martin bow as a present and Horner participated in a few Wapiti Bowmen shoots in the Lacomb area. He got hooked.
“I started hunting and I’ve never looked back,” he said. “It’s such a challenging sport. It’s every bit as technical as golf. The first animal you tag, it’s elation because of all the work you put into it. I was like 10 times happier with the first elk I got with a bow than I was with a rifle.”
Horner has come a long way from those days. He and his wife Debbi, who “likes doing what I do” just finished their second year running Horners Bow Shoot in the Fun Forest off Upper Berlin Drive, a weekend shoot open to the public from the first Saturday of April to the third Saturday in August.
The course, which this year featured 23 Rinehart 3-D animal targets, included a shooting range and various games, such as Money Dot targets in which shooters pay $5 for two shots at an orange dot about the size of a 50-cent piece on a Rinehart target from about 60 yards away.
“No rangefinders allowed, so they have to guess the distance,” Horner said. “Depending on how long it goes, how many guys shoot, the pots get pretty big. If it gets to $150 and nobody hits it, I draw three names and split the money.”
Horner said he changes the layout each day, keeping it around 60 yards, “give or take.”
“A lot of people couldn’t hit that with a pistol. It’ll amaze you how close they’ll come. I wouldn’t want to be an elk standing in front of one of those guys.”
Mark Dodge of Sweet Home proved it during the Saturday, Aug. 16 shoot, putting an arrow right on the edge of the dot from a stake slightly uphill from the target.
“These newer compound bows, a lot of those guys can shoot 100 yards,” Horner said. “I don’t know anybody who can do a 10-inch group at 100 yards, but they’re sneaking up on it.”
Dodge, 33, who has been bowhunting since he was 8, said he likes Horner’s layout, which is entirely in natural forest settings.
“It’s a great place to go out and practice with your bow, shoot as many times as you want,” he said. “Lonnie’s done a great job of setting up the targets, too.”
Nathan Jones, 22, of Scio, said he appreciates the variety and freshness of the targets Horner uses.
“Wapiti’s only open three times during the summer,” he said. “And this is in the trees. That makes a difference.”
Horner said he was shooting at a local bow club when the thought hit him: “Why couldn’t one person do this?”
He told Debbi about his idea and she bought in. They set up the course, Debbi fixed some refreshments and they opened for business.
“This is our second year,” he said. “I plan to improve it for next year, expand it with better backstops and get some extra targets.”
Shooters said they also like the price, which was $12 per day this year. It will increase to $14 next year.
Response has been “really good,” Horner said, especially in recent weeks.
“Everybody is waking up to the fact that deer season is coming around.”
The turnout has been better than last year and Horner said he enjoys the folks who have shown up to shoot.
“It’s a great bunch of people,” he said. “They’re just out there to have fun, enjoy the woods. It’s a family sport. You can bring everybody from toddlers to teenagers to Grandma and Grandpa. Everybody can do it. That’s the exciting thing for me.”
During the 16 weekends they’ve been open this year, he said the shoot has averaged about 25 to 30 participants per day.
The family emphasis was evident as at least a third of the participants on Aug. 16 were early teens or below and there were plenty of wives and girlfriends.
Horner said one of the things that prompted him to start his bow shoot was a surge of interest following the “Hunger Games” movies, which feature a heroine who is an expert archer.
“I could see a trend there from movie,” he said. “I’ve seen more girls this year than last year. I had one girl out there who shot the course, so pregnant that she had had labor pains the night before. She came out to see if she could get the baby going. I told her husband to hold her hand because of some steep parts in trail.”
It takes over an hour for most people to complete the course, he said.
“Some guys do three circuits in a day. They come back really sweaty.”
The trail winds through approximately 40 acres and shooters are at right angles to anyone approaching.
“When they leave a target, they yell ‘clear!’ and the next group can shoot through,” Horner said. “That’s the etiquette. There’s really not a whole lot of rules. Everybody knows how it goes. Be safe and have fun. The shoot is laid out in such a manner that no arrows fly out. People get out of the target areas pretty quickly and safely.”
He said he prefers big game targets, of which he already has “a whole gamut” of North American animals – deer, elk, bears, wolves, bobcats, cougars and more.
His emphasis is fun. “I don’t subscribe to the national 3-D shoot,” he said. “I’m more into the family thing.”
He said he plans to expand the target selection next year, but the ones he had this year provided some challenges.
Horner said he tries to set up targets in natural environments. At some locations, he has predators attacking prey, such as a cougar on a turkey.
“A lot of the shots, where I place the stake (marking where the shooter should be), I’ll purposely place it so they have to shoot over some brush with the arc of the arrow, or place an obstacle close to the deer so you have to squat or get down on your knees to make the shoot. You never know when that deer steps in front of you what position you’re going to be in. It helps to practice shooting kneeling, standing, or any other way – bent over.”
One target, a bear visible through standing timber, created the type of challenging shot that hunters may find themselves facing in the woods.
Horner also has “novelty targets,” one in which shooters attempt to hit a soccer ball-shaped target behind a swinging box, and another in which shooters can send a deer running down hill through the brush via a pulley system.
“People either love those, or they hate them,” Horner said. “Guys seem to like challenging shots to test themselves – just like a par 4 with a water hazard and sand traps in golf.”
It’s that technical challenge that he and others like about the sport, he said.
Even with the multitude of high-tech accessories and aids available today – counter balancers, fallaway sights that disappear as soon as an archer lets go of an arrow, new technology that makes it easier to get more power from a bow with less effort, etc. – it’s still a demanding sport, he said.
“I think what a lot of people get out of it, it’s so hard to be consistent with shots. The form is so critical. If you get one little bad habit going, you’re 6-8-10 inches off every time. It drives you crazy.”