Chapter 13: The Bow Answers

The bow misbehaved long before it ever answered, and Jim found that almost a comfort — a thing that refused him at first was a thing he could learn, and learning was the only god he had left that had never once lied to him.

It was Oheo's idea, and it came up out of the boy's hungry, restless pride where all the best ideas in the valley seemed to come. The hunting bands had gone out against the frost and come back with less than they had hoped, and the young men were talking too loudly about the deer in the far wood and doing too little to feed it to the town. Oheo, who had watched a sharpened axe cut a clean line for four days straight, came to Jim with a sapling across his shoulders and asked, in the whole language of his eager face before the few words caught up, whether the stranger could put into a bow what he had put into an edge.

Jim had handled bows. He had lectured on them, drawn them in museum quiet, argued about draw-weight and tiller with colleagues over coffee no more honest than the river. But he had not built one, not by hand, not in a country where a man's whole supper could ride on whether he got the point of balance right, and standing in the leaf-light with a child's offering of ash in his hand, he discovered that the theory was a thin, clean, useless thing next to the wood.

The wood taught him differently from the way the books had. The books had told him about poundage and brace height in numbers as clean as the sanded page. The wood told him, in the slow language of split and grain, about a particular tree's stubbornness, its memory of the wind it had grown against, the pale, dense heartwood that wanted to bend and the wet, whippy sapwood that wanted to break. He laid the sapling on the frost-hardened ground and he burned off the bark and he began, over three patient days, to tiller the bow the way the old craftsmen must have taught their sons — not from numbers, but from the eye, bending the stave gently against his knee, feeling for the station where it eased, scraping a whisper of wood from here and there and testing again until the whole length answered with one smooth, even spring.

Oheo sat with him through all of it, silent and goggle-eyed, handing him tools he did not ask for, absorbing the tree's lesson with the same devotion a boy gives any secret he is being taught to keep. Jim strung the bow at dusk of the third day and drew it back half-way and let it down, and the bow answered with a clean, willing note, whole along its length, no weak place to betray it.

"Now the arrow is the harder part," Jim said, and was surprised by how much he meant it.

For an arrow is a straightness and a flight and a voice, and Jim's hands had been stranger to arrows than to any edge he had ever made. He split the straight cane, he scraped the shafts true, he taught Oheo to listen for the song of a straight arrow in the air — the tick, the hiss, the clean whistle of a good one versus the fluttering, wrong-note flutter of a shaft with a warp in it. They fletched with the tail-feathers of a hawk that had died of the cold and were given honor for the using. They knapped broad heads of flint, and here Jim let Oheo take his turn at the striking, and watched the boy's quick hands learn the click and reward of a good flake.

They did not hunt the first day or the second. Oheo burned with the want of it, but Jim held him at the low hump of earth behind the granary, at a bundled decoy of brush and hide, sending arrow after arrow into it from a growing distance, watching the boy's string-hand tick like a girl's wrist and correcting it with patience and the edge of two words. And on the third morning, in the grey-blue before the sun had fully committed, Jim sent the boy out alone through the frosted wood with the new bow and three straightened arrows, and waited with his heart in his throat the way a man waits who has staked something careless on a child's uncertain hands.

He need not have. Oheo came back before the morning was old, not with the deer of the campfire talk but with something better, cleaner, more true to the moment — a fat, foolish, standing-still bird that a boy with a grown hunter's draw had taken at thirty paces, and the boy's face as he laid it at Jim's feet was so bright with the revelation of what his own two hands could do that Jim felt his chest tighten with a pride that was not entirely wise.

"The bow answers you," Jim said, and meant it wryly, "because you asked it right." He stood up and took the strung bow into his own hand, drew it full against his chest, held the weight at the anchor the way he had once held a hundred such moments in a museum's dry dark, and let the string down smooth. "Now we ask it for a man's meat, and see if it loves us."

The hunt came proof rather than miracle, and that was what Jim valued. He and Oheo and the two older hunters who had chosen to trust the stranger's hand went out past the far wood into the thin, mean country where the frost had driven the deer into the sheltered swales, and Jim read the ground the way reading had come to him here — patient, knee in the cold, translating the bent stem and the soft print and the low, sheltered run of water into the path a hungry animal takes. They found where the herd had browsed and where they had bedded. They found the crossing, the funnel where the sheltering hills said a deer must come down.

And they waited, still as the waiting land, until the does came stepping out of the brush at the edge of the light, and Jim weighed the new bow, drew full, and let the arrow go clean.

It struck true — through the near shoulder and into the heart, the way a good arrow and a waiting man and a well-kept bow will, and the doeling went down almost before the sound of it, and there was a silence on the funnel that was not grief. Oheo let out a short, shaking shout and broke the stillness running, and the older hunters came out of their hides with their eyes gone wide and their mouths working, and they stood over the dead thing and then over the stranger's bow and did not know which to ask first.

It was the first deer of the shared autumn, brought down by a hand the valley had only recently stopped calling the god on the altar, and the meat came in over the shoulders of two proud men, and the whole town turned out at the sound of the coming-in to see what the young stranger and the boy had carried home. Jim did not need to tell them a word. The blood was the story, and the bow was the evidence, and the way Oheo kept looking at his own hands as though they had been lent to him by some generous other proved the rest.

And yet the lesson the day had for them both ran deeper than any single kill, and Jim let it be taught rather than spoken. On the way home through the thin wood, Oheo in his fever of pride had sent an arrow after a startled, too-far doe and watched it drop short and skitter off into the brush, and grief had flattened the boy's face for a hundred paces before Jim said anything. "The bow answered the doe nothing," Jim said, waiting until Oheo would meet his eye. "Because you asked it for more than it could give from where you stood. A bow is as honest as the man who draws it. Do not beg a bird for the flight of a deer and call it hunger." And he saw the boy take the rebuke into himself the way you take a splinter, to work out on its own in time.

They stopped in the wood and marked the short arrow where it lay, and on the way back Jim set the boy to naming the range of every tree they passed — how far a bow's full answer ran, where the arrow died into a falling thing and could not be trusted. It was patient work, and dull beside the triumph of the carry, and it was the greater part of the teaching; by the time the wood thinned toward the town, Oheo's pride had bent into the older, harder thing of knowing how far his own strength truly reached, and Jim watched it settle in the boy's shoulders like a good draw coming home.

He did not tell the boy that this was the part of the craft the valley would not see, or reward, or gather around a fire for. He only knew that a man who teaches a boy the true range of his own hand hands him a thing heavier and rarer than any carried deer, and that it would be waiting for the wood when the triumph was a memory in everyone else's mouth.

That evening, at the common fire, Jim sat with the strung bow across his knees and turned it in the firelight, and he felt, for the first time since the iron had come up out of the mud and hidden itself in his keeping, a quiet, whole, unborrowed satisfaction. The bow was not the iron and it would never be the iron, but it had answered his hands in a way that belonged, and the town had eaten fat from his labor, and Oheo had looked at his hands the way Jim had once looked at the first sharp edge he had ever trusted. It was a small, clean, honest thing, a bow that answered, and for a night it was enough.

He watched Wren across the fire, turning a length of roast on a green stick, and watched her glance up and meet his eye with the small, knowing warmth that had grown between them through the digging and the keeping, and he let himself, for a single full breath, want this place — want the frost and the fire and the boy and the woman and the valley's whole hard, feeding, ordinary grip on a man's life.

Then the boy came and sat beside him, shy in the wake of the great thing he had done, and Oheo looked at the bow and then at the stranger's face and asked the question, low, the way a boy asks the one thing he is afraid to know.

"Can you teach me," Oheo said, "to make a bow that answers the way this one does? Not to borrow it — to make it. To know the wood the way you know it."

Jim looked at the boy's eager, upturned, entirely hopeful face, and he understood that he was being asked to give away the thing that had just earned him his keep, and there was a moment in which a man could be careful, could hoard his small advantage, could hold the secret of the answering bow close so that he alone could be fed by it.

And then he remembered the seed of the granary, the shared vessel, the town's keeping, and he heard his own voice answering the boy the way the bow had answered him, clean and whole and willing along its length.

"Yes," Jim said. "I can teach you that." And he set the bow across the boy's knees and watched Oheo's hands close on it with the reverence of a hand closing on a future, and he felt the small, good weight of the giving settle in him.

Outside the fire's reach, in the cold dark beyond the ring of the light, a man could not see the shape of what had just been set in motion — the sharpened edges, the shared keeping, the answering bow, the boy who would one day know the wood — but Jim felt it run through him like the grain of a good stave, whole and true and waiting to be drawn.

He had come to this valley to earn his survival with his hands. He was beginning to understand that a man who teaches what he knows no longer owns it, and that this, and not the triumph of the hunt, was the first thing here that had ever felt like home.