modern shooting

  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.
  It was incredible. He was used to weapons he’d made with crude arrows and fire-hardened points, and he was amazed at the difference. The bow was smooth and clean and quiet and the arrows flew with a tight accuracy that at first he couldn’t believe. On the first day he had several shots where he actually hit one arrow with another in the center of the cardboard target.
  To protect his fingers he used a simple leather tab that Blakely had thrown in and he must have shot two hundred times the first day. He didn’t use sights but shot by instinct — let his mind and eye ‘‘feel’’ where the arrow would go as he’d done with his war bow in the woods — and within a week he could consistently hit a six-inch circle in the cardboard from twenty yards.