Ish revives the use of bows and arrows

Ish revives the use of bows and arrows not by recovering a finished weapon from the old world, but by making one from wood and calf hide and drawing the children of The Tribe into the craft. The work begins as a deliberate experiment in self-sufficiency and becomes a practical lesson in how knowledge can outlast manufactured equipment: the children may forget archery for a time, Ish reasons, but the bow itself can remain available when rifles no longer work.

The materials and the decision to begin

Three days of rain give Ish time to consider his plans. When the sky clears and the vegetation dries, he decides that the moment has come to work. He searches deserted, overgrown gardens for wood suitable for a bow. In a garden two blocks from his house, he finds a lemon tree still alive beneath two pines. The tree has suffered from an earlier frost and was never pruned afterward; much of it is damaged, but long shoots have grown from its base.

Ish selects a shoot while avoiding the tree’s thorns and cuts it free with his pocketknife. It is seven feet long, straight for four feet, and crooked beyond that point. The wood is stiff when shaken, yet bends and springs back when he leans on it. That combination makes it usable. His choice of lemon wood is also part of a larger decision: rather than consult books or draw on specialized supplies, he will make the bow by himself from things that can be found and worked with simple tools.

Making a working bow and arrow

Back at the house, Ish cuts away the crooked end, leaving four feet of straight wood. He whittles the remaining length until it tapers symmetrically toward both ends. The knife work takes time and leaves his hand sore and beginning to blister, but he tests the wood by pressing it into a half circle against the ground. It springs back sharply, and he cuts notches near the ends to hold a string.

For that string, Ish rejects nylon fish line, even though he considers it. He wants the children to learn a method that does not depend on materials they might not always have. He takes the skin of a recently killed calf, cuts a long strip of rawhide, shaves away the hair, and reduces the strip to a narrow cord. Braiding three strips together gives him a thicker string; he ties a loop at each end. When he hooks the loops into the notches and bends the tapered wood, stick and cord become a bow. Its parts, which would have been of little use separately, work together as a new tool.

Ish recognizes the result as more than a substitute for a store-bought bow. He could have chosen a better manufactured one, but instead has made this bow from wood shaped with simple implements and string made from a calf’s hide. He plucks the string, hears only a muted vibration, and puts the bow away unstrung for the night. The next day he cuts a straight branch from a pine, shapes and notches it into an arrow, and finishes the work in half an hour.

A craft becomes a children’s practice

Ish calls Walt, Josey, and Weston to see the first trial. The arrow is unfeathered and flies unevenly, but it travels fifty feet before landing. To Ish, that is enough to show that the design works. The children have never seen anything like it; after their first astonishment, they run to retrieve the arrow and ask to see it shot again. Walt’s first attempt travels only twenty feet, but Josey and Weston take their turns as well. Before dinner, every child in The Tribe is whittling a bow of their own.

The sudden popularity brings practical problems. Within a week, poorly aimed arrows are flying around the houses. Mothers worry about the children’s eyes, and two children are upset after being struck by arrows. Because the arrows have no heads and the bows are weak, the accidents cause no serious harm, but they make rules necessary: children must not shoot toward anyone or close to the houses. Archery has become common enough that its dangers, however limited, have to be managed collectively.

The children do not merely copy Ish’s first design. They begin holding contests against a mark, borrowing the idea from the older boys who shoot rifles. They test different bow lengths and types. When Josey complains that Walt beats her, Ish suggests that she attach quail feathers to the back of her arrow. The adjustment helps her shoot more successfully; after she beats Walt, the other arrows acquire feathers too and travel farther and straighter. Even some of the older boys make bows, although they are permitted to use rifles. Archery flourishes most among the children still too young for rifles, giving them a practice and a skill of their own.

From play to the possibility of survival

The children’s work develops while the early rains bring grass seed into growth and the land turns green. Walt and Weston, both twelve, spend long stretches away from the houses, absorbed in their bows and arrows. One evening they return with a large rabbit that Walt has shot through the side with a headless wooden arrow. He had hidden behind a bush and waited until the animal came close. The success is not only a better shot: it is evidence that the children’s handmade weapons can be used to hunt.

Ish congratulates Walt, but his response contains both pride and unease. He sees the rabbit as a sign that his experiment has succeeded, yet feels sympathy for the animal and recognizes that creation, too, makes use of death. The scene brings the project’s two meanings together. Archery is a game the children have embraced, but it is also a means of obtaining food, and learning to use it connects craft with the demands of life beyond play.

The enthusiasm does not last without interruption. One day the children abruptly tire of bows and arrows and turn to another interest. Ish does not take their change of attention as failure. He expects them to return to archery, perhaps in another season, and believes that making bows and shooting arrows will not be forgotten altogether. In his longer view, a bow can survive as a children’s plaything for decades or even a century, waiting to become necessary again.

An inheritance beyond the old weapons

Ish’s horizon extends beyond the children’s immediate pleasure. Rifles depend on ammunition, and he imagines a time when the supply will be exhausted. The bow, by contrast, can still be made from available wood; even without metal knives, his descendants could shape one with sharp stones. He hopes the skill will mean that they need not face a charging bear empty-handed or go hungry among cattle. He acknowledges that his great-grandchildren will not know civilization as he knew it, but he wants them to retain practical capacities rather than be left helpless without manufactured weapons.

The bow-making project also prepares the ground for another skill, though Ish has not yet carried it out. Since the children now have bows, he plans to make a bow-drill and teach them how to use it. When the matches are gone, he hopes, The Tribe will still know how to kindle fire. The plan extends the same principle behind his choice of rawhide over nylon: a durable inheritance is not merely an object, but knowledge of how to make and use what the community can find for itself.

In the weeks that follow, Ish’s own excitement over the bow cools. He thinks less about the triumph of inventing it and more about the losses of the year, including Joey’s death, the change in the community after the vote that condemned Charlie, and his abandonment of the dream of restoring civilization’s old ways. That contrast places the experiment on a modest but consequential scale. It does not rebuild the former world, and the children’s attention moves elsewhere; instead, Ish gives them a tool and a method that may serve a different world, one in which the means to survive will have to be made again.