A chilip friend, Nathan, and I tried archery today in his backyard. I needed to ‘tie’ the ends of my string first, which was done by copying his. Someone else had tied his by untwisting the strands of the bite of the string and threading the tail through it – and repeating a few times. When I went to string the bow, Nathan stopped me saying that he’d made the same mistake. I was bending the bow the way it went itself, when I should have been going the other way to get more strength. Not that I needed it. My bow was twice as stiff as his and it was almost impossible to pull. When I did, the string snapped.
That left us both using his bow and even that didn’t last long. We put each arrow into the dirt, only to find that the dirt ate our metal tips. I’d superglued mine on as instructed (Nathan just pressed his into place) but that was no help. And digging didn’t help. It’s possible that the tips fell off during the flight, but we found no sign in the grass either. So we gave up and had lunch.