By Dave Hurteau

I just got done testing four new compound bows that retail for under $550 each for an article that will run in the August issue. Two were purdy darn good. A third was very good. And my favorite, the PSE X-Force Drive ($500), was dazzlingly good—truly outstanding for the price, which comes in at about $400 less that your typically flagship model.

With an IBO of 326 fps, the Drive is somewhat slower than PSE’s top models, but it’s plenty fast enough, is wonderfully smooth shooting, exceptionally quiet, and it’s a shooter—or at least it is for me. The fit and finish is right there with any of the higher-priced X-Force models. Bottom line: It’s a killer deal.

By Scott Bestul

All else being equal, the hunter with the most experience usually has the best shot at bagging a good buck. And when that Experience comes in the form of a great bow built by Bowtech, the odds are even better. Hurteau and I (along with test team members Will Brantley and Danny Hinton) recently put the Bowtech Experience through its paces in our annual Best of the Best bow test, and while I can’t reveal exactly where it placed in a field of hot shooters, rest assured it ranked high enough that I know this to be a very cool prize indeed.

By Scott Bestul

When European settlers reached North America, the American chestnut was arguably the most important tree in the country. From the Adirondacks to southern Appalachia, chestnuts fed people, livestock, and wildlife. The tree produced lumber of both high quality and tremendous volume. Then, in 1904, a single tree arrived in New York City that carried a blight lethal to chestnuts. The disease tore through the eastern United States like a tsunami, and by the early 1950’s, the American chestnut was nearly extinct.

By Dave Hurteau

On a recent turkey hunt at Dos Plumas Hunting Ranch in northwestern Nebraska, Tim Kent of Theory 13 Creative introduced F&S contributor Jace Bauserman and me to Flextone’s newest Thunder Series turkey calls. On the first evening, someone—I’m not saying who—took one out of the packaging, started calling, and sounded exactly like this poor, terrified cat.

“Oh well,” I figured, “just another bad-sounding, gimmicky turkey call.” Turns out, it was just the caller, not the call, and he recovered right quickly, because like the Thunder Gobble, introduced last spring, the new Thunder hen calls are extremely easy to learn how to blow, and once you get the hang of them, they sound pretty darn good—certainly good enough to fool a gobbler.