Bow and Arrows

Bow and Arrows is both a practical tool and a long-term inheritance. Ish makes the first bow from a damaged lemon tree and a calf’s hide, then introduces it to children as a plaything. In time, the craft outlasts its novelty: a later generation carries bows instead of relying on rifles, and its arrows have metal heads. The change gives Ish evidence that knowledge can survive through use, adaptation, and materials already at hand.

Making a Bow from Available Materials

Ish begins with a lemon tree that has been crowded by two pines and badly damaged by an earlier frost. Long suckers have grown from its base, some of them dead; avoiding the thorns, he cuts a suitable shoot with his pocketknife. It is nearly as thick as his thumb and seven feet long, but only four feet are straight before branches have bent its course. When Ish leans on it, the wood bends and springs back. He judges that it will serve, though the choice is a compromise: the material is damaged and crooked, not the superior ready-made bow he could have obtained from a sporting-goods store.

Back at the house, Ish cuts away the crooked end and whittles the remaining four feet into a symmetrical taper. The work takes effort: by the end of the afternoon, his hand is blistering. He tests the wood by pressing one end against the ground and bending it into a half circle; it returns sharply to straightness. Notches cut near both ends will hold the string. The sequence makes the bow’s construction legible as a combination of careful shaping and the material’s own spring.

Ish refuses the easier option of using nylon fishing line, reasoning that the children should learn to work with things they can obtain for themselves. He cuts a long thong from the hide of a recently killed calf, shaves away its hair, and pares the strip down to the size of a small cord. Braiding three strips together makes a heavier cord; he ties a loop at each end. When he bends the wooden shoot and hooks those loops into its notches, the shorter thong pulls the tapered wood into a clean arc. Separately, stick and cord amount to little; joined, they form a new implement. For Ish, making it by hand restores the possibility of creative work in a world where ready-made goods remain but their supply cannot be assumed.

First Arrows and a Children’s Practice

The next day Ish cuts a straight pine branch for an arrow. The soft green wood is easy to shape, and he completes the shaft and its notch in half an hour. With Walt, Josey, and Weston watching, he shoots it. The arrow has no feathers and wobbles in flight, but it travels fifty feet before striking the ground. Ish immediately recognizes the trial as a success. The children, who have never seen anything like it, run to retrieve the arrow, and Ish shoots again for them.

The experiment quickly spreads beyond that demonstration. Within a week, children are shooting arrows around the houses. Their poorly aimed shots prompt concern among the mothers, and two children are struck, though the arrows have no heads and the bows are weak enough that no serious harm results. Ish establishes rules against shooting toward people or near the houses. The new skill creates both excitement and a need for shared limits.

Play develops into practice and competition. Children who have learned from older boys accustomed to rifles begin shooting at marks and testing different bow lengths and designs. When Josey complains that Walt consistently beats her, Ish suggests attaching quail pinions to the rear of her arrow. The feathers improve its distance and accuracy; Josey beats Walt, and soon arrows across the group carry pinions. Even some older boys take an interest and make bows despite being permitted to use rifles. Archery remains chiefly the pursuit of those too young to use firearms, but it has become a craft they can refine and pass among themselves.

A Technology That Can Outlast Its First Enthusiasm

The children eventually abandon their bow games for another enthusiasm. Ish does not mistake this temporary loss of interest for the end of the practice. He expects them to return to it, perhaps in another season, and understands that bows may remain toys for twenty years or even a hundred. Their importance lies partly in this quiet persistence: the knowledge need not dominate daily life to remain available to a later generation.

Ish looks beyond the rifles of the present to the time when their ammunition is exhausted. His descendants, he hopes, will not have to face a charging bear empty-handed or go hungry among the cattle. Even without metal knives, they could shape bows with sharp stones. The bow is therefore not just an object he gives the children, but a transferable method: a workable weapon whose basic materials and making do not depend on industrial supply. Ish also plans another experiment, a bow-drill, so that the children might learn to kindle fire when the matches are gone. The plan extends the same principle from hunting to survival skills, although the account records his intention rather than the drill’s later use.

Later Adaptation and Ish’s Reassessment

Much later, Ish encounters a young man of the First Ones carrying a bow rather than a rifle. The young man describes rifles as unreliable: sometimes they fire, but sometimes the trigger produces only a click. The bow, by contrast, is dependable, and shooting it requires strength and skill. In the younger generation’s view, a rifle may be a plaything, while the arrow is the practical choice for hunting. The contrast reverses the older hierarchy in which the firearm represented technological superiority.

The arrows have also changed. The young man says that the First Ones use red and white arrowheads, the red for cattle and lions and the white for deer and other game. He cannot explain why those distinctions hold; to him, they are simply an established practice, as unquestioned as the sun’s apparent course across the sky. Ish’s older rationalism is stirred by the unexplained classification, but the material fact of the arrow itself gives him a different reason to reflect. He had expected that The Tribe might eventually revert to stone arrowheads. Instead, its members have found a shortcut to metal, shaping arrowheads from coins and, if the coins run out, from copper telephone wire. In his reckoning, even a community of a hundred would have access to vast numbers of coins in tills and cash-boxes in that part of the city.

This later form of the bow supports Ish’s cautious hope that his descendants have passed a turning point. They may no longer be forgetting more than they learn; they may be maintaining a stable level of knowledge or gradually securing their lives. His original bow did not preserve civilization intact, nor did it prevent the loss of old technologies. It did something narrower and more durable: it taught a principle of making, and that principle could be altered to meet new conditions. The progression from lemon wood and calf hide, through children’s feathered arrows, to metal arrowheads and a dependable hunting weapon makes the bow an instrument of continuity—one that remains useful precisely because it can be made, learned, and changed.