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This weekend went fairly well for me, despite the unnerving class Saturday. I was really looking forward to President's Day this year, because any time I can get off from work is a good thing. Don't get me wrong, I love my job, but getting time off from work is just naturally good. It's in the same category as having a puppy you've never met randomly come running up to you and ask to play with you. (This is done by lowering the front half of the body and wiggling the butt around in the air while generally looking eager. If you don't know what I mean, watch a couple of dogs sometime, you'll see it eventually.) For me, this is naturally good.
Anyway, I slept way late on Monday, and I got to get some laundry dealt with. I finished watching Mr. Vampire, which is a lovely piece of Chinese horror action comedy dealing with hopping vampires, a lady ghost, two apprentices, and just about the coolest Taoist sifu ever, Master Kou, played by a gentleman named Lam Ching Ying. Trust me on this, it's a cool movie, although it'll help if you do a little research on Chinese undead first. They ain't like Western vampires, and I don't recall seeing these guys in Kindred of the East. After I finished with Mr. Vampire (God bless the DVD drive!), I did some more laundry and some RP, and then decided it was time to get up and go outside. Gorgeous day, if a little on the chilly side; the wind that had prevailed all weekend was dying down, so that meant it was time for one of my hobbies, archery.
I've done archery since I was in college. I took it as a gym class one semester, and managed to bounce an arrow off my head. The lesson there was never to take archery as a winter-semester class in a city where six to eight inches of snow is a normal thing on a regular basis, because bows and baggy-sleeved Shaker sweaters don't mix. (Ouch.) I got back into it some years later when I discovered an archery range near my house; my first bow of my very own was a $120 purchase, the most money I'd spent on anything other than buying a car at the time, and certainly the largest chunk of change I'd ever had for my very own rather than obtained through a credit union loan. I still have that bow, a 20-lb. draw weight Bullseye takedown recurve. Quality Korean workmanship. Since then I've acquired several other bows, two of which don't shoot. It's a real shame, because one is a beautiful lemonwood bow, and it's hard to get those any more in this country. (Lemonwood mostly comes from Cuba.) It's fifty or so years old, though, and the glue that holds the riser on cracked and tried to let go after about a week of shooting, so I regretfully retired that particular York model. It hangs on my wall alongside a reflex-deflex longbow my uncle got at a garage sale, of uncertain poundage but attractive condition. I eventually acquired a 1970's model Hoyt Pro recurve, thirty-nine pounds at 28 inches (more like 41 pounds at my draw, I've got long arms), and I've been shooting with that for a year or two now.
Yeah, archery geekery. Sorry. Either you're looking at this blankly, or you're looking at this and going 'ooo, traditional archery', or you're looking at this and thinking 'aren't these things weapons?'. That last is something I don't think has sunk in with my father yet. Dad, you see, is the one who bought me my limited selection of wooden arrows, and the one who helped me restore the lemonwood York - he's into carpentry, so he's used to dealing with very old wood. It's not his fault the wood glue he tried to use to substitute for the original wasn't strong enough. I really don't think Dad quite realizes that these things are, in fact, weapons. They're not firearms, true, and I keep the arrows in another part of the house, and I keep them unstrung when they're not in use, but... they're still weapons. I've never shot at anything alive, nor have I ever gone hunting, but the potential is there.
Especially in the most recent case. Dad regularly spends a few hours a month rummaging through the local stuff-not-in-Grandma's-will-nobody-wants store, which sells all kinds of stuff ranging from utter crap to high-quality jewelry and ploughs the money into charitable assistance of local elderly people. A while ago he went there and visited their sporting goods section looking for golf clubs. I don't know if he found any, but he came home with a leather quiver, ten wooden arrows in near-perfect condition (right down to the field points and feather fletchings!), and... the bow.
He found an actual longbow at this store, a real longbow, not a plastic kiddy Li'l Injun My First Shooter set. It was black down the front, with a few weird greyish patches, and dark, dark wood in the back. The riser was also dark wood, bound in place with dark brown leather. The label on the belly was in perfect condition, declaring this to be another York bow, and the only other markings it bore were the numbers/letters 'FBH 50'. There was a tiny hole drilled through one tip. I just stared. I couldn't believe it when I saw this thing. I'd wanted a real longbow for a long time, and this... this...
This was beautiful. She looked to be in wonderful condition, given her probable age. I didn't see a single stress crack or fracture anywhere, not even in the weird black fiberglass or paint or whatever it was on the front. I went to the Stickbow, an online site for traditional/primitive archery, and asked about restoration and the markings; the report came back that if it was in good condition I should leave the varnish on, but let the bow get used to a decently warm and humid environment instead of someone's attic before drawing it. Oh, and the markings most likely stood for '50 lb. draw fiber-backed hickory', hickory being an excellent (and resilient!) wood for bows.
I told Dad that if it was shootable he didn't have to get me ANYTHING ELSE for Christmas.
Now, fifty pounds is a heavier bow than I've ever drawn. The lemonwood York was about 42, maybe 45, pounds... okay, quick note to those who aren't archery geeks. Poundage on a bow refers to how much force has to be exerted to get the bow drawn, not how much the bow itself weighs. There is no such thing as a longbow that weighs fifty pounds. Not even Chief AJ, current world record holder for heaviest bow drawn, or Gary Sentman, the record holder before that, has a bow that weighs fifty pounds. Oh, and the force has to be applied across the tips of three fingers, to a string skinnier in diameter than your average pencil, so don't give me any grief for not being able to bench much... Okay, back to the show. Fifty pounds is heavier than I've ever drawn, so this year I started doing push-ups and lifting weights to get in shape for that bow. I've been horribly remiss in the last few weeks, but the relative ease I had in shooting the Hoyt for an hour gave me some confidence that the most important muscles were still quite strong. I got the black bow out yesterday (yeah, it's mostly brown but the black down the front is quite impressive) and took it out onto the porch, along with the stringer. There was NO WAY I was going to try and bend that thing against my foot in order to get the string over the ends. I've dealt with bows that don't want to be strung before. They get nasty. Lose your grip at the wrong moment, or have the stringer slide off at the wrong moment, and the wood springs instantly back into place - which usually means smacking you in a region you don't wanna be smacked, with all the force of a weapon that's legal to use to kill deer in most of the lower 48. AIEEE.
The stringer I have is a big long thick cord with a large leather cup over one end and a very small cup over the other. The big one goes over the end of the bow that's already been strung; the small one goes over the tip of the other end, so that I can apply force to bend the bow and slide the string into its groove without too much trouble. Thing is, if you don't have the string right way around or the cup in exactly the right place, it'll either slide over the string's groove or pop off the end. The stringing process took me half an hour, and the stringer slid off twice, once resulting in me getting smacked HARD, once in only a mild smack. After I got over the panting and google-eyed staring of fear, I gave it one more try, and finally got it strung. I put that, and my Hoyt, into the car and drove to the county archery field. Believe me, I spent most of the ride darting furtive glances over at the bow, half expecting it to snarl and spring loose at me...
It didn't, though. It behaved very nicely. I could feel the tension in it, but it behaved. I set up my target and resolved to test it. The thing with old bows is that you mustn't ask too much of them too quickly. The wood isn't used to bending any more and the fibers will give out in exactly the wrong place if you try too hard. I was worried that even stringing it might have been too much to ask, so I VERY carefully gave it a very small draw. Then I drew it halfway several times, to warm it up. Then I nocked an arrow, just to see if I could, and drew it halfway again. The arrow flew awfully well, so I tried it at 3/4 draw, and WOW did that thing fly. I closed my eyes and prayed to the maiden goddess of the hunt, asking for a sign if I was offending anyone by this, and then looked around... nothing. Just the fat crescent of the moon in the late afternoon sky.
Okay, cool.
I spent the next half hour shooting at 3/4 draw. This was partly to work the bow, and partly because I wasn't strong enough to reach full draw. That's okay, though. Now that I know the bow's a shooter, I have reason to work out. The bow didn't crack. There are no stress marks anywhere on it. My left hand is kind of raw along the part that runs from thumb pocket to index knuckle, because I was shooting with the arrow on that hand on a cold dry windy day. That's fine with me - if that's what it takes to make the bow mine, I'll deal with it. (Next time, however, I'm wearin' a glove on that hand too.) Fingertips on the right hand are still sore-feeling, and I've got one slap mark on the inside of my left upper arm, but you know what? That's cool. It's all good. It's from my new bow, and that's the important thing.
Long ago, not long after I bought the Bullseye, I went to Sports Authority to buy some arrows. On the way out of their parking lot I looked up and saw the gibbous moon. I promised myself I'd have a bow someday and name it Bendis, after the ancient Greek up-country version of Artemis - the scary version of the goddess, the one associated with wild boars and particularly untamable beasts. I felt that if I ever actually went hunting, that would be the bow I'd bring with me. I thought that it would probably be the first bow I made for myself, but that wasn't strictly necessary.
I'm nowhere near being good enough to hunt yet. I won't do it until I can be assured of killing what I shoot at. I figure there is really not much moral difference between killing an animal myself and paying large blood-stained men in Chicago to smack an animal between the eyes with a hammer for me - oh, sure, you could say the animal's already dead when I find the meat in the supermarket and that I don't need to hunt, but seriously. Paying for meat provides a market and support for the institutionalized, impersonal killing of animals. If I'm going to eat meat, I may as well take moral responsibility for it. Hunting, assuming I ever actually go through with it, cuts out the middleman and puts the responsibility in my hands. Better to see and know for myself than to deny the realities of where meat comes from, I figure...
Anyway, if I ever go hunting, I know what bow I'm taking with me.
I have my Bendis.
Today's pulp survival tip is one that has yet to be added: Dead people are supposed to rot. If it's been twenty years or more and they've failed to do so, contact an accredited practitioner of the supernatural arts immediately.
Anyway, I slept way late on Monday, and I got to get some laundry dealt with. I finished watching Mr. Vampire, which is a lovely piece of Chinese horror action comedy dealing with hopping vampires, a lady ghost, two apprentices, and just about the coolest Taoist sifu ever, Master Kou, played by a gentleman named Lam Ching Ying. Trust me on this, it's a cool movie, although it'll help if you do a little research on Chinese undead first. They ain't like Western vampires, and I don't recall seeing these guys in Kindred of the East. After I finished with Mr. Vampire (God bless the DVD drive!), I did some more laundry and some RP, and then decided it was time to get up and go outside. Gorgeous day, if a little on the chilly side; the wind that had prevailed all weekend was dying down, so that meant it was time for one of my hobbies, archery.
I've done archery since I was in college. I took it as a gym class one semester, and managed to bounce an arrow off my head. The lesson there was never to take archery as a winter-semester class in a city where six to eight inches of snow is a normal thing on a regular basis, because bows and baggy-sleeved Shaker sweaters don't mix. (Ouch.) I got back into it some years later when I discovered an archery range near my house; my first bow of my very own was a $120 purchase, the most money I'd spent on anything other than buying a car at the time, and certainly the largest chunk of change I'd ever had for my very own rather than obtained through a credit union loan. I still have that bow, a 20-lb. draw weight Bullseye takedown recurve. Quality Korean workmanship. Since then I've acquired several other bows, two of which don't shoot. It's a real shame, because one is a beautiful lemonwood bow, and it's hard to get those any more in this country. (Lemonwood mostly comes from Cuba.) It's fifty or so years old, though, and the glue that holds the riser on cracked and tried to let go after about a week of shooting, so I regretfully retired that particular York model. It hangs on my wall alongside a reflex-deflex longbow my uncle got at a garage sale, of uncertain poundage but attractive condition. I eventually acquired a 1970's model Hoyt Pro recurve, thirty-nine pounds at 28 inches (more like 41 pounds at my draw, I've got long arms), and I've been shooting with that for a year or two now.
Yeah, archery geekery. Sorry. Either you're looking at this blankly, or you're looking at this and going 'ooo, traditional archery', or you're looking at this and thinking 'aren't these things weapons?'. That last is something I don't think has sunk in with my father yet. Dad, you see, is the one who bought me my limited selection of wooden arrows, and the one who helped me restore the lemonwood York - he's into carpentry, so he's used to dealing with very old wood. It's not his fault the wood glue he tried to use to substitute for the original wasn't strong enough. I really don't think Dad quite realizes that these things are, in fact, weapons. They're not firearms, true, and I keep the arrows in another part of the house, and I keep them unstrung when they're not in use, but... they're still weapons. I've never shot at anything alive, nor have I ever gone hunting, but the potential is there.
Especially in the most recent case. Dad regularly spends a few hours a month rummaging through the local stuff-not-in-Grandma's-will-nobody-wants store, which sells all kinds of stuff ranging from utter crap to high-quality jewelry and ploughs the money into charitable assistance of local elderly people. A while ago he went there and visited their sporting goods section looking for golf clubs. I don't know if he found any, but he came home with a leather quiver, ten wooden arrows in near-perfect condition (right down to the field points and feather fletchings!), and... the bow.
He found an actual longbow at this store, a real longbow, not a plastic kiddy Li'l Injun My First Shooter set. It was black down the front, with a few weird greyish patches, and dark, dark wood in the back. The riser was also dark wood, bound in place with dark brown leather. The label on the belly was in perfect condition, declaring this to be another York bow, and the only other markings it bore were the numbers/letters 'FBH 50'. There was a tiny hole drilled through one tip. I just stared. I couldn't believe it when I saw this thing. I'd wanted a real longbow for a long time, and this... this...
This was beautiful. She looked to be in wonderful condition, given her probable age. I didn't see a single stress crack or fracture anywhere, not even in the weird black fiberglass or paint or whatever it was on the front. I went to the Stickbow, an online site for traditional/primitive archery, and asked about restoration and the markings; the report came back that if it was in good condition I should leave the varnish on, but let the bow get used to a decently warm and humid environment instead of someone's attic before drawing it. Oh, and the markings most likely stood for '50 lb. draw fiber-backed hickory', hickory being an excellent (and resilient!) wood for bows.
I told Dad that if it was shootable he didn't have to get me ANYTHING ELSE for Christmas.
Now, fifty pounds is a heavier bow than I've ever drawn. The lemonwood York was about 42, maybe 45, pounds... okay, quick note to those who aren't archery geeks. Poundage on a bow refers to how much force has to be exerted to get the bow drawn, not how much the bow itself weighs. There is no such thing as a longbow that weighs fifty pounds. Not even Chief AJ, current world record holder for heaviest bow drawn, or Gary Sentman, the record holder before that, has a bow that weighs fifty pounds. Oh, and the force has to be applied across the tips of three fingers, to a string skinnier in diameter than your average pencil, so don't give me any grief for not being able to bench much... Okay, back to the show. Fifty pounds is heavier than I've ever drawn, so this year I started doing push-ups and lifting weights to get in shape for that bow. I've been horribly remiss in the last few weeks, but the relative ease I had in shooting the Hoyt for an hour gave me some confidence that the most important muscles were still quite strong. I got the black bow out yesterday (yeah, it's mostly brown but the black down the front is quite impressive) and took it out onto the porch, along with the stringer. There was NO WAY I was going to try and bend that thing against my foot in order to get the string over the ends. I've dealt with bows that don't want to be strung before. They get nasty. Lose your grip at the wrong moment, or have the stringer slide off at the wrong moment, and the wood springs instantly back into place - which usually means smacking you in a region you don't wanna be smacked, with all the force of a weapon that's legal to use to kill deer in most of the lower 48. AIEEE.
The stringer I have is a big long thick cord with a large leather cup over one end and a very small cup over the other. The big one goes over the end of the bow that's already been strung; the small one goes over the tip of the other end, so that I can apply force to bend the bow and slide the string into its groove without too much trouble. Thing is, if you don't have the string right way around or the cup in exactly the right place, it'll either slide over the string's groove or pop off the end. The stringing process took me half an hour, and the stringer slid off twice, once resulting in me getting smacked HARD, once in only a mild smack. After I got over the panting and google-eyed staring of fear, I gave it one more try, and finally got it strung. I put that, and my Hoyt, into the car and drove to the county archery field. Believe me, I spent most of the ride darting furtive glances over at the bow, half expecting it to snarl and spring loose at me...
It didn't, though. It behaved very nicely. I could feel the tension in it, but it behaved. I set up my target and resolved to test it. The thing with old bows is that you mustn't ask too much of them too quickly. The wood isn't used to bending any more and the fibers will give out in exactly the wrong place if you try too hard. I was worried that even stringing it might have been too much to ask, so I VERY carefully gave it a very small draw. Then I drew it halfway several times, to warm it up. Then I nocked an arrow, just to see if I could, and drew it halfway again. The arrow flew awfully well, so I tried it at 3/4 draw, and WOW did that thing fly. I closed my eyes and prayed to the maiden goddess of the hunt, asking for a sign if I was offending anyone by this, and then looked around... nothing. Just the fat crescent of the moon in the late afternoon sky.
Okay, cool.
I spent the next half hour shooting at 3/4 draw. This was partly to work the bow, and partly because I wasn't strong enough to reach full draw. That's okay, though. Now that I know the bow's a shooter, I have reason to work out. The bow didn't crack. There are no stress marks anywhere on it. My left hand is kind of raw along the part that runs from thumb pocket to index knuckle, because I was shooting with the arrow on that hand on a cold dry windy day. That's fine with me - if that's what it takes to make the bow mine, I'll deal with it. (Next time, however, I'm wearin' a glove on that hand too.) Fingertips on the right hand are still sore-feeling, and I've got one slap mark on the inside of my left upper arm, but you know what? That's cool. It's all good. It's from my new bow, and that's the important thing.
Long ago, not long after I bought the Bullseye, I went to Sports Authority to buy some arrows. On the way out of their parking lot I looked up and saw the gibbous moon. I promised myself I'd have a bow someday and name it Bendis, after the ancient Greek up-country version of Artemis - the scary version of the goddess, the one associated with wild boars and particularly untamable beasts. I felt that if I ever actually went hunting, that would be the bow I'd bring with me. I thought that it would probably be the first bow I made for myself, but that wasn't strictly necessary.
I'm nowhere near being good enough to hunt yet. I won't do it until I can be assured of killing what I shoot at. I figure there is really not much moral difference between killing an animal myself and paying large blood-stained men in Chicago to smack an animal between the eyes with a hammer for me - oh, sure, you could say the animal's already dead when I find the meat in the supermarket and that I don't need to hunt, but seriously. Paying for meat provides a market and support for the institutionalized, impersonal killing of animals. If I'm going to eat meat, I may as well take moral responsibility for it. Hunting, assuming I ever actually go through with it, cuts out the middleman and puts the responsibility in my hands. Better to see and know for myself than to deny the realities of where meat comes from, I figure...
Anyway, if I ever go hunting, I know what bow I'm taking with me.
I have my Bendis.
Today's pulp survival tip is one that has yet to be added: Dead people are supposed to rot. If it's been twenty years or more and they've failed to do so, contact an accredited practitioner of the supernatural arts immediately.
