modern bow

  He worked the list endlessly in his mind, improving it, changing it and, finally, writing it down on the list. He carried it in a notebook wherever he went, making changes as they came to him, meticulously noting each detail of each item.
  I have become truly anal, he thought once when he changed the kind of arrowheads from the fancy new razor heads to the old-fashioned MA-3s — three-bladed army-issue arrowheads that needed sharpening but were so strong you could hit a rock without hurting them.
  But it was more than just being picky. In the end he was keeping his sanity, arranging his life. At first the List was a guide from the dream to reality but when he had perfected the List he started to gather the items on it, ordering from catalogs in the backs of hunting and fishing magazines. His mother knew he was ordering but she was involved in other things and left him mostly to himself, and as he received items he put them in his room and she didn’t question him.
  The first thing to come was a bow. He did not want to get too complicated and stayed away from the compound bows with wheels and pulleys. They were more accurate, maybe, and far easier to pull, but he sensed they would break with rough use. Instead he wrote to Blakely, a man who made longbows and shorter recurved bows and ordered what Blakely called a short longbow. True longbows were fine but very long, as the name implied, and Brian knew that in brush they would hang up on branches and be hard to use. He ordered a shorter version with forty-five-pound pull at twenty-six inches. He hadn’t been sure of the pull weight, but he told Blakely his size and what he wanted to use it for— general hunting — and Blakely told him to keep it low. Blakely made bows with up to 120 pounds pull, but they were brutal and, he wrote, ‘‘If the arrowhead is sharp it will penetrate from a softer bow as well as a hard one.’’
  The bow was beautiful, a mix of ironwood and rosewood laminated in thin strips with fiberglass on the front and back. Blakely included four extra strings. He also sold arrows so Brian bought a hundred Port Orford cedar shafts and all the tools and precut feathers and nocks he would need to make his own arrows. Blakely also sent along fifty of the MA-3 broadheads and field points for the arrows so he could practice without using the MA-3s. Brian had never made arrows before but there were full instructions with the equipment and Brian found it easy to do. He went to a garden store and brought home three hay bales. He put them up in the backyard and put a cardboard target in front. When he had six arrows finished he started shooting each day.