Adventures in Arrow-Space

My brother, Matt, recently took up the study of Native Americans, formerly and inaccurately called Indians. Over the last months he has carted home from the fine, new Newport Beach Public Library cartloads of books on the subject. Over meals and beers and ballgames, I’ve heard his stories about the Shawnee prophet, the raiding techniques of the Apache, the quail-noosing skills of the Cahuilla, the Trail of Tears.

For Christmas, he got me Robbie Robertson’s “The Native Americans” tape, which is really good, considering that most original Native American music was not digitally mastered and the Stratocaster hadn’t been invented yet.

So when Matt’s birthday arrived late last month, I decided to get him a bow and some arrows. It seemed like an appropriate gift. I remembered Dad showing us how to shoot when we were kids, in the back yard in Tustin, using hay bales as backstops for the flimsy arrows we arched through space. I remembered Mom shooting too and the way she stood erect and strong with the bowstring caught between her first two fingers. I remembered Dad letting fly with his 70-pound re-curve and wondering if the arrows would bother to stop for the bales before penetrating neighboring houses (they did).

First, I went to Turner’s in Fountain Valley, a store known for its shooting and fishing gear, but they no longer carry archery equipment. However, a helpful salesman guided me to Arrow Manufacturing in Costa Mesa, where, he assured me, I’d find a complete line of bows and arrows.

Arrow Manufacturing is kind of hidden in an industrial/commercial section of the city, a few blocks off Harbor. The first room is small, with a rack of used compound bows to your left and a desk to your right. A sign directs you to a back room.

This room is larger but by no means large. It is lit but by no means brightly so. It is clean and neat and crowded with archery equipment the way golf shops are with clubs or tennis shops are with racquets. It has an air of specificity and dedication about it, and that air is pleasant. It is a room without retail gimmickry or the pretense of offering something for everybody.

I browsed the used-bow rack, hoping to find something with Native American overtones and keep within budget (the bows at Arrow range from about $80 to $895). I immediately dismissed the compound bows as too technical--you know, the ones with all the pulleys and strings and U-joints--and obviously not something a Comanche would have used to sneak over a hillock with the first light of morning to get a deer. On the other hand, none of the bows had feathers or were made from unfinished tree branches or came with arrows poisoned by spoiled deer liver.

I decided on something in-between: the re-curve bow, which curves gracefully away from the shooter at each end and delivers more power than the more primitive long bow of Robin Hood renown. Because none of these bows was strung (prolonged tension can warp the bow), I couldn’t just lift one off the rack and dry-fire it (hard on a bow, also).

To my rescue came Philip Cotton, who, along with his parents-in-law, runs Arrow Manufacturing. He is an amiable young man with the patience of a teacher and the enthusiasm of an expert. I explained my mission, and he asked a few questions.

“How tall is he?”

“6 foot 5.”

“Strong?”

“Pretty much so.”

He told me a little bit about the compounds, but I told him something old-fashioned would be better. He ran down the re-curves with me, from the most expensive on down to the cheapest. I settled on a used Ben Pearson, liking the name “Ben” and admiring the smooth blond wood. It featured a mere 20 pounds of pull, and he told me it would be a little weak, but for our purposes--back-yard plinking--OK.

Next, he took me over to the arrow section and helped me choose a dozen arrows that were long enough and light enough for the Ben Pearson. He recommended the white shaft with orange feathers for easy visibility in the brush. This implied that we would miss a lot, though I said nothing.

I also got a good-sized target with a stand called the Dead-Stop 4000, a quiver big enough for 24 arrows, a new string, a forearm guard, finger tab and wax for the new string.

Matt liked it right off. I strung it up with some difficulty because the easy step-through method that Phil had shown me in the store slipped my mind as Matt raced outside to set up the target and the dogs bellowed at the human excitement that dogs so quickly register.

Moments later arrows were slapping into the Dead-Stop 4000, careening into the hillsides, spiraling into outer space.

If you ever decide to shoot arrows around retrievers, I can tell you right now to forget it. The dogs, Cassius and Sadie, came racing down the mountain with arrows in their mouths but refused to hand them over because the feathers taste good. Then they discovered the joy of just snapping the arrows in half so each could have more items, and we had to lock them behind the fence where they wailed like souls confined to hell.

At any rate, we practiced both the conventional method of bow-shooting and one that Phil mentioned, called the “snap shoot.” To snap shoot, you set the arrow and draw the string with the bow held down, then raise it into shooting position and let the arrow fly without really aiming, trusting the body’s natural eye-hand coordination to guide the shaft straight to the target rather than somewhere else. Arrows whizzed toward Riverside County. The dogs shrieked and crashed against the fence.

Eventually we got the hang of it and started blistering the Dead-Stop 4000.

The only problem was that a 20-pound bow is geared for, say, a 10-year-old, and the arrows don’t really go into the target as often as they just thwack against the outer cover and bounce off. There’s something profoundly unsatisfying about launching an arrow straight into the bull’s-eye, then watching it grunt to a stop and fall to the ground.

Based on his reading, Matt claimed that the Apaches used to hold their bows horizontally rather than vertically. We jumped right in, and this wrinkle provided some light moments as more arrows vanished into space. The dogs broke through the wooden fence, thundered into the hillsides and returned with broken shafts and unglued-feathers dangling from their jowls.

“You can shoot Cassius if you want,” I offered.

“It’d just bounce off him.”

“True. Well, happy birthday, brother.”