he had showed me the correct stance and posture, he let me draw the bow - at first without an arrow. I felt that I was fighting against a strong resistance, and as I struggled to bring the string back to my chin with my right hand, the left trembled and the bow wavered. Slowly, I let the string down again.
He corrected my hold on the grip and adjusted the position of my wrist and had me draw the bow again.
“Smoothly,” he said. “You have to draw the bow smoothly, in a single uninterrupted motion. You must understand that you are not fighting the bow. Imagine that you are giving your strength to the bow when you draw it. The bow collects all your strength and focuses it at a single point.”
Again and again I drew the bow until I believed that I had attained a certain smoothness. It seemed that the bow was becoming a little weaker each time I drew it. When I mentioned this to him, he nodded his head. “It’s your muscles which are getting used to the movement.”
He let me nock an arrow and then said: “There is far too little time for a systematic beginning. I’m not a trained coach, and some of what I’m telling you now may be wrong just because it may be too soon for you. But I have to try to make you understand. Everything that you do in archery is in preparation for the shot. You have to do all these things in a certain time interval; stance, posture, drawing the bow, and holding the bow, and everyone does these things a little differently. You need many weeks to get it right.
But the most important thing is the moment in which you let the arrow go – the release. You must try to focus all your concentration on this point. No time should elapse between the decision to shoot and the release of the arrow. When you think ‘now’, the arrow must be on its way. Imagine that all your strength is concentrated in these three fingers of your right hand. Only when you have a very quick release will all of that strength be passed on to the arrow.”
He hadn’t spoken at such length before, and I understood scarcely half of what he said. But I did understand that he considered that moment to be the essential point in archery.
So I nodded in agreement and shot my first arrow at the poly-ethylene foam sheet.
After the first shot, he had me continue to shoot with my eyes closed, so that “I could better concentrate on the release,” as he put it. Twice the bowstring struck my left arm painfully. The second time, he saw it and took the bow from me. The skin was swollen with a blood blister above the bracer. He went into the house and brought back a salve smelling of camphor, which he had me rub on the swelling.
I had lost my pleasure in archery, but I didn’t say anything and watched as he unstrung the bow, collected the arrows, and took the foam sheet back into the shed.
A pair of wild rabbits hopped across the path at the edge of the woods and began to eat the grass. I pointed at them and asked if he had ever hunted them with bow and arrow.
“That’s poaching,” he said slowly. “Have you ever been poaching?” I really wanted to know. He grinned wryly. “You can’t avoid it. Besides, they taste good.”
It didn’t take me long to convince him. When I left, we had made arrangements to get together that afternoon at five o’clock.
I rubbed my left arm, which hurt from the slap of the bow-string, and thought about archery with considerably mixed feelings. But I forgot it all when I got back on the beach again to lie in the sun.
I almost didn’t go back, but just after five I was in front of the house on the hill again. He came to meet me with a thin bundle wrapped in canvas under his arm and we walked down the path toward the woods. We left the path in the depression behind the chain of hills and we prowled north through the tall grass in the flat valley floor. Gradually the hills became lower and finally we climbed over a knoll and down the other side a little and stopped under a round hawthorn bush. He unwrapped his bundle in the shadow of the hawthorn. The grip, the limbs, and the bowstring lay next to each other in a plastic bag. He put the bow together and strung it, pulled two arrows out of a sleeve sewn into the canvas and rolled the bundle up again.
We were sitting a little below the flat crest of one of three hills which surrounded the basin and looked across one end of the basin at an overgrazed pasture. The road to the next village on the island ran along the other side of the pasture parallel to the reeds marking the edge of the bay.
The paved-over dirt road was fringed with bushy old ash trees, and their dark green leaves contrasted with the lighter tones of the meadow and the distant reeds.
I could see about a dozen rabbits in the depression below us and along the edge of the pasture. They had jumped for cover in the tall grass and in among the high stems of the mullein and watched us carefully.
But we crouched motionless beneath the hawthorn, so they came back out and began to feed again.
“Do you see the stone down there?” He pointed at a large boulder that a narrow footpath passed on its way between the two nearby hills.
I nodded. He spoke again, softly. “There are four burrows on that slope”. He pointed at the dark entrance holes to the rabbits’ burrows which showed up on the light yellow sand, a different color from the beach sand. “They are all about the same distance from that stone down below. It’s about thirty meters. Follow me slowly and take cover behind the stone. Clear?”
I nodded again and stood up. He nocked an arrow and stuck the second one in the top of his basketball sneaker. He held the bow low and went slowly down the slope until he reached a point halfway along the footpath. I stayed close behind him and we followed the path down to the stone in single file.
I stepped back behind the stone and looked at the slope. The burrows were about half way up the slope, and I understood what he meant. The rabbits had hopped up the slope through the deep grass and bushy stems, and they now sat in front of three of the four burrows, ready to take cover inside at a moment’s notice. Their ears twitched with a reddish glint as they stared in our direction with heads erect. He slowly raised the bow in the direction of one of them, sitting alone against the yellow sand.
As he drew the bow, the rabbit moved but at the same instant the string sang. I thought I heard the impact of the arrow as the yellow sand spurted up in front of the burrow. After a great deal of movement, everything was quiet. The white feathers on the arrow shaft whipped about in front of the dark hole and then were still.
He lowered the bow slowly and then turned to me.
“Well,” he said. “Just like Robin Hood.”
Slowly we climbed the slope. The rabbit lay in front of his burrow with his head in the hole, but the arrow which had passed through his neck had kept him from going any further. He pulled it out, wiped it clean on a fuzzy, broad mullein leaf, and stuck it in his shoe next to the other one. Then he picked up the rabbit by its hind legs and we went back to the hawthorn bush. The rabbit bled heavily from the neck wound, and he hung it up on a branch of the hawthorn to bleed out. We smoked a cigarette and watched the slope opposite. It wasn’t long before the other rabbits emerged from their burrows, hopped back to the meadow and began to feed again.
I lay in the grass and stared at the cloudless blue sky through the hawthorn’s thick foliage. While he was wrapping up the bow, I sat up. Only then did I notice that the aluminum arrows had a different head than the others which he used for shooting at the target. I picked up one of the arrows to look at it more closely. The massive, cone-shaped point which had the same diameter as the arrow shaft had been slit with a thin saw, and a thin steel blade in the shape of a long triangle had been inserted in the slot. The edges had been honed to the sharpness
