I'm All a Quiver

So, a couple of years ago I traded a knife repair for a tanned deer hide. As I put a new handle on the knife (buffalo horn, turned out pretty nice!) I was imagining all of the things I could do with a tanned deer hide. Leggings, maybe. No, no! A shirt! Yeah a buckskin shirt would be fun! Maybe some knife sheaths, too.

So when the hide arrived, I was a little taken aback when it had the hair still on it. It was nicely tanned, but had a few too many holes to make clothes out of. I'm not too sure what a hair on shirt would have looked like anyway. I had no idea what to do with it, so I folded it up and stored it until an idea would come.

Fast forward a year and as I was driving home after a night shift, I saw a little red fox that had been hit by a car and was quite deceased laying half in and half out of the road. I stopped to toss it into the ditch so no other critters who might want to dine on it would meet the same fate, and noticed that it was still warm and not too damaged. I have a friend at work who tans skins of all sorts and thought he might like a nice fresh fox, so I went home, grabbed some trash bags and went back to collect the fox. I called my friend, who gave me advice for keeping it on ice until I could get it to him, and worked out a deal to trade a knife that I built for the tanned fox hide.  This time I knew the hair would be on, and when the fox skin arrived, it was really quite pretty. But I again had no idea what I would use a fox skin for. A hat maybe? I even tossed around the idea of a sporran for my kilt.  But the fox got rolled up and put with the deer hide...

Fast forward to this fall. The Boyo has taken to archery, and we've had about a half dozen good afternoons of ploinking away at the Halloween pumpkins with our bows.

The one on the left is my oak longbow, the one on the right is my first laminated recurve bow that I built as a test. It only has a draw weight of about 15 pounds, so I gave it to the Boyo to use. It shoots pretty well, and he seems to like it a lot!

So after our first few times shooting my old Boy Scout Arrow of Light arrows, I went and bought us each new arrows so I could retire the AoL's.  On the plus side, we now had more arrows to shoot at the pumpkins! On the down side, we had nothing to carry them in. I sat down a few nights ago thinking 'If only I had some leather or something that I could whip up a couple of quivers with.'

It seemed that finally I had a notion of what to do with those tanned hides! So after some fussing and measuring and research and tinkering, I built myself a quiver from the deer hide. It has a broken arrow inside as a stiffener that also serves as a place to attach a carabiner to make it a hip quiver...

And I built the Boyo a quiver out of the fox...

Originally it had the legs and head attached, but it looked like a dead fox hanging from his back. I clipped those off, but left the tail. I think the look is much better.  He insisted in having a back quiver, because that's how Robin Hood does it, and he is convinced that is how the Lakota used to do it, too when they hunted deer and buffalo. So we ran over to Fleet Farm and he picked out a belt, and I made it into a back quiver for him. It can be easily converted to a hip quiver when he gets older if he wants.

Anyway, we've been out shooting with them twice now, and they seem to work very well. I'm going to add a few embellishments to mine, but overall I'm quite pleased with the results!

More Later