The old crafts
By Joey Berlin
Originally published 12:56 p.m., April 10, 2008
Updated 12:56 p.m., April 10, 2008
Photo by Carly Pearson
Priest plays drums he has made for his collection.
Eric Priest is a craftsman, and a big part of his craftsmanship involves finding prime road kill.
That’s right — road kill.
The Native American-style hunting bows that the retired Emporian makes contain such materials as snakeskin and deer sinew — like one bow covered with skin from the body of a dead snake he picked up off Highway 99. The animal pieces aren’t just decorative — they become part of Indian bow-making for practical reasons, and Priest said he’s always on the lookout for useful corpses of animals flattened on the road.
“I’m afraid so,” he said, laughing. “My wife gets disgusted.”
Priest got into making Native American-style bows and arrows in the mid-1990s while living in the Oklahoma panhandle, when someone he knew who was half-Cherokee got him interested in it. An avid hunter and fisherman, he uses the bows he makes to hunt deer and also makes his own arrows, as well as American Indian-style drums.
Photo by Carly Pearson
A tomahawk Priest made has a snake skin handle.
Most of Priest’s bows are made out of Osage Orange wood taken from trees that Priest cuts down himself. After some pre-treatment that includes taking off the bark, Priest has to let a slab of wood dry for a period of months before continuing the bow-making process. A slab he got several weeks ago will be drying until fall before he proceeds.
“They dry faster in the summertime,” he said. “So if you cut it in the late fall, you’ve really gotta dry it for at least year ... because they don’t dry that much in the wintertime — high humidity.”
When the wood is dry, Priest said, it takes 80 to 100 hours of work before a bow is finished. He does paint and decorate his bows, but he considers them tools and himself a craftsman, rather than an artist.
The dearly departed animals he finds serve the purpose of making the bow stronger. He said both Native Americans and bow-makers worldwide used animals parts for that purpose, as well as for camouflage. Priest uses glue to attach deer fibers particularly on shorter bows.
“They’re susceptible to breaking ’cause they’re so short,” he said. “So I’ll back ’em with sinews” out of a deer’s back or leg, which can be separated and made finer and finer before being glued to the bow.
Photo by Carly Pearson
Eric Priest poses with Native American items he has made himself.
“And they stretch and make the bow stronger, and also keep it from splitting it out from the edges,” he said.
Priest said using his more primitive bows would be seen as a disadvantage by most bow hunters, who prefer the modern compound bow used by the likes of Rambo.
“People were hunting with bows like this for thousands and thousands of years,” he said. “And this was the weapon for self-defense and for hunting for eight or nine thousand years. And then gunpowder was invented.”
Priest’s family does have some Native American heritage — his great-grandmother was a full-blooded Iroquois named Fleet of Foot.
“So I guess there’s some vestiges of that,” he said. “But with me, it’s just more about nature and craft.”
He said he’ll make bows for family members, but he doesn’t have any desire to sell any of his work; he thinks making the items would become a job at that point.
“And if you don’t appreciate the usage of a bow, and hunting with it,” he said, “it’s real hard for somebody to do well with it.”
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