So began my acquaintance with this man in whose house I now sat, without any real idea why I was here.
It must have been that same day when I found the piece of amber. I was no diver, and swimming with fins tired me out quickly. But I had discovered how fascinating it could be to float in calm water with face mask and snorkel and observe the sea bottom.
You could only do this rarely on the island – either the seas were too high or the water was too cold. But that day, after the sea wind had calmed down, a warm upper layer of water had formed and it stayed warm in the calm air near the beach. Besides, after two weeks I had grown accustomed to the temperature of the water, and now paddled leisurely along behind the stone wall of undressed granite boulders which had been built to separate the beach zone from the open water and to protect it against storm surges.
The reflection of the sun’s rays was broken up by the tiny waves and flashed across the flat parallel ripples on the sandy bottom. The ground swell had washed out flat ditches behind individual stone blocks which lay in front of the wall, and they were full of the remains of black mussel shells. When I stuck my hand in among them, I raised a cloud of dark particles. Tiny transparent shrimp, as clear as glass, slid away in all directions in convulsive movement, while the suspended material gradually settled back to the bottom. The shaggy manes of a poisonously green algae which had grown on the stones washed gently back and forth in the weak ground swell.
I no longer really noticed the flat artificial taste of the snorkel, as I floated over the level sea bottom. The yelling children on the beach were muted, as I had my head under water and only the dull sound of the water in the gaps of the stones was in my ears.
I was about to shove away from one of the square blocks when I noticed the lump, almost as big as an egg, caught between the twigs of a fascine bundle. Nothing about the round piece indicated amber, and with its dull, lumpy surface it could have been a piece of flint. As I reached for it, I saw a gleam from a fracture in its surface. I sat down on a stone in the shallow water and examined my discovery. First I noticed four small barnacles adhering to the flat underside. The fracture in the surface had broken out in the shape of a shell and was not yet abraded by the sand.
When I held the piece against the sun, it shone with the color of old port wine. It was a marvelous piece; the first that I had ever found.
Those were the final days of my vacation that year. My joy in finding the amber was followed the next day by disappointment with my first lesson in archery.
I arrived at the house on the hill a little bit later than the day before and I found the man in the shed busy making a bow-string. When he saw me, he came to meet me.
“Hello,” he said, hooking his thumbs in the waistband of his jeans and looking at me carefully for a minute. Two leather objects were lying on the bench in front of the house, and he told me they were a bracer and a tab. While I was trying to put on the bracer, he brought a bow out of the house. It was a crude thing like you see in sporting goods stores. A thick middle lamination of clear oak, with bright red fiberglass laminations glued to it.
He saw my disappointed expression and laughed and then took a handful of arrows out of a wicker wastepaper basket which held about two dozen, and went to his shooting position next to the birch. He shot one arrow at the target on the opposite slope. The wooden arrow with the white feathers wobbled a bit and hit in the blue ring on the lower half of the target.
After his first shot, he adjusted the bowsight and then shot three arrows in rapid succession, two hitting in the red and one in the yellow center. He left the arrows sticking in the target and came back to me.
“You can shoot and hit what you’re shooting at, even with a bow like this,” he said. “When you’re just starting, the main thing is to learn to draw the bow. As far as strength and the form of the grip is concerned, this bow is similar in principle to my laminated bow. Right now, we don’t need anything more.”
He put the bow in my hand and then hauled a thick sheet of polyethylene foam about a meter square out from the shed. He hung it on two wooden pegs in the shed wall and had me take up a position a couple of paces in front of it.
After he had showed me the correct stance and posture, he let me draw the bow - at first without an arrow. I felt that I was fighting against a strong resistance, and as I struggled to bring the string back to my chin with my right hand, the left trembled and the bow wavered. Slowly, I let the string down again.
He corrected my hold on the grip and adjusted the position of my wrist and had me draw the bow again.
“Smoothly,” he said. “You have to draw the bow smoothly, in a single uninterrupted motion. You must understand that you are not fighting the bow. Imagine that you are giving your strength to the bow when you draw it. The bow collects all your strength and focuses it at a single point.”
Again and again I drew the bow until I believed that I had attained a certain smoothness. It seemed that the bow was becoming a little weaker each time I drew it. When I mentioned this to him, he nodded his head. “It’s your muscles which are getting used to the movement.”
He let me nock an arrow and then said: “There is far too little time for a systematic beginning. I’m not a trained coach, and some of what I’m telling you now may be wrong just because it may be too soon for you. But I have to try to make you understand. Everything that you do in archery is in preparation for the shot. You have to do all these things in a certain time interval; stance, posture, drawing the bow, and holding the bow, and everyone does these things a little differently. You need many weeks to get it right.
But the most important thing is the moment in which you let the arrow go – the release. You must try to focus all your concentration on this point. No time should elapse between the decision to shoot and the release of the arrow. When you think ‘now’, the arrow must be on its way. Imagine that all your strength is concentrated in these three fingers of your right hand. Only when you have a very quick release will all of that strength be passed on to the arrow.”
He hadn’t spoken at such length before, and I understood scarcely half of what he said. But I did understand that he considered that moment to be the essential point in archery.
So I nodded in agreement and shot my first arrow at the poly-ethylene foam sheet.
After the first shot, he had me continue to shoot with my eyes closed, so that “I could better concentrate on the release,” as he put it. Twice the bowstring struck my left arm painfully. The second time, he saw it and took the bow from me. The skin was swollen with a blood blister above the bracer. He went into the house and brought back a salve smelling of camphor, which he had me rub on the swelling.
I had lost my pleasure in archery, but I didn’t say anything and watched as he unstrung the bow, collected the arrows, and took the foam sheet back into the shed.
A pair of wild rabbits hopped across the path at the edge of the woods and began to eat the grass. I pointed at them and asked if he had ever hunted them with bow and arrow.
“That’s poaching,” he said slowly. “Have you ever been poaching?” I really wanted to know. He grinned wryly. “You can’t avoid it. Besides, they taste good.”
It didn’t take me long to convince him. When I left, we had made arrangements to get together that afternoon at five o’clock.
I rubbed my left arm, which hurt from the slap of the bow-string, and thought about archery with considerably mixed feelings. But I forgot it all when I got back on the beach again to lie in the sun.
I almost didn’t go back, but just after five I was in front of the house on the hill again. He came to meet me with a thin bundle wrapped in canvas under his arm and we walked down the path