out of the nock in the end of the bow. I got up and looked over at him. “Could I see the bow?” I asked when I saw that he was about to go back in the house. He hesitated and then came down the flagstone path to the opening in the fence between the high bushes. He looked at me, waiting, and as I said nothing, quietly handed me the bow. It was unexpectedly heavy.
The middle section was made of a mahogany-colored wood and had a deeply cut, sculptured grip area with a flat cutout section above it. The bow’s limbs, which were now relaxed, seemed to be whitelacquered and were surprisingly thin. They were the width of the grip at the ends where they were screwed onto the grip with large knurled screws. They tapered in a flat curve toward the other ends. There was a plate of dark, anodized aluminum screwed to the side of the bow toward the back, on which was seated something like a small disk held in place by a small set screw on its side. A narrow strip of Plexiglas emerged from a slit in the disk, in which a circle about the size of a pea was engraved with a black point in the center of the circle. That had to be his sighting device.
I took the bow in my left hand, as I had seen him do. The bow lay heavy in my hand and the form of the grip seemed to be remarkably unsuited to my way of holding the bow. I told him that, and he grinned happily.
“When you draw a bow,” he said, “then you’re not lifting its weight but rather pulling the bowstring which works along a line from the grip to your hand. It is…” He interrupted himself. “Look, this is an experience which is difficult to explain. When you draw a bow properly, then it fits into the movement of your body by way of your hand. This is the only way you can do it.”
I handed the bow back. That was how it had looked when he did it, and I believed that I had felt something of this confident “… This is the only way you can do it.”
“Do you believe that I could draw this bow?” I asked.
He looked at me carefully. Then he said, “If you seriously wanted to.”
I was astonished. “Isn’t it a matter of strength?”
“Strength,” he said, “strength is the least of what you need to shoot with a bow.”
“What do you need for it then?”
He stared at the target on the opposite slope and then after a while said absently, “I don’t know. Except, perhaps the conviction that you’re doing something completely. Exclusively. Perhaps”, he laughed, “perhaps archery is the most important unimportant thing in the world.”
We went to the house where there was a low wooden bench next to the door, and we sat down on it.
I didn’t know what to say. He leaned back against the house and closed his eyes. His face was tanned but his eyelids were very light.
“Do you want to try?” he asked without moving. He stood up without waiting for my answer. “Come back tomorrow morning early,” he said with his hand already on the door. “I’ll have a bow ready for you.” He nodded to me and closed the door behind him.
The first tourists came up the path next to the house with beach towels, bags, and beach umbrellas, on their way to the beach. Slowly I followed them.
So began my acquaintance with this man in whose house I now sat, without any real idea why I was here.
It must have been that same day when I found the piece of amber. I was no diver, and swimming with fins tired me out quickly. But I had discovered how fascinating it could be to float in calm water with face mask and snorkel and observe the sea bottom.
You could only do this rarely on the island – either the seas were too high or the water was too cold. But that day, after the sea wind had calmed down, a warm upper layer of water had formed and it stayed warm in the calm air near the beach. Besides, after two weeks I had grown accustomed to the temperature of the water, and now paddled leisurely along behind the stone wall of undressed granite boulders which had been built to separate the beach zone from the open water and to protect it against storm surges.
The reflection of the sun’s rays was broken up by the tiny waves and flashed across the flat parallel ripples on the sandy bottom. The ground swell had washed out flat ditches behind individual stone blocks which lay in front of the wall, and they were full of the remains of black mussel shells. When I stuck my hand in among them, I raised a cloud of dark particles. Tiny transparent shrimp, as clear as glass, slid away in all directions in convulsive movement, while the suspended material gradually settled back to the bottom. The shaggy manes of a poisonously green algae which had grown on the stones washed gently back and forth in the weak ground swell.
I no longer really noticed the flat artificial taste of the snorkel, as I floated over the level sea bottom. The yelling children on the beach were muted, as I had my head under water and only the dull sound of the water in the gaps of the stones was in my ears.
I was about to shove away from one of the square blocks when I noticed the lump, almost as big as an egg, caught between the twigs of a fascine bundle. Nothing about the round piece indicated amber, and with its dull, lumpy surface it could have been a piece of flint. As I reached for it, I saw a gleam from a fracture in its surface. I sat down on a stone in the shallow water and examined my discovery. First I noticed four small barnacles adhering to the flat underside. The fracture in the surface had broken out in the shape of a shell and was not yet abraded by the sand.
When I held the piece against the sun, it shone with the color of old port wine. It was a marvelous piece; the first that I had ever found.
Those were the final days of my vacation that year. My joy in finding the amber was followed the next day by disappointment with my first lesson in archery.
I arrived at the house on the hill a little bit later than the day before and I found the man in the shed busy making a bow-string. When he saw me, he came to meet me.
“Hello,” he said, hooking his thumbs in the waistband of his jeans and looking at me carefully for a minute. Two leather objects were lying on the bench in front of the house, and he told me they were a bracer and a tab. While I was trying to put on the bracer, he brought a bow out of the house. It was a crude thing like you see in sporting goods stores. A thick middle lamination of clear oak, with bright red fiberglass laminations glued to it.
He saw my disappointed expression and laughed and then took a handful of arrows out of a wicker wastepaper basket which held about two dozen, and went to his shooting position next to the birch. He shot one arrow at the target on the opposite slope. The wooden arrow with the white feathers wobbled a bit and hit in the blue ring on the lower half of the target.
After his first shot, he adjusted the bowsight and then shot three arrows in rapid succession, two hitting in the red and one in the yellow center. He left the arrows sticking in the target and came back to me.
“You can shoot and hit what you’re shooting at, even with a bow like this,” he said. “When you’re just starting, the main thing is to learn to draw the bow. As far as strength and the form of the grip is concerned, this bow is similar in principle to my laminated bow. Right now, we don’t need anything more.”
He put the bow in my hand and then hauled a thick sheet of polyethylene foam about a meter square out from the shed. He hung it on two wooden pegs in the shed wall and had me take up a position
