“Rabbits that eat your garden are not the same as endangered birds,” he retorted.
“I’m not going to debate you on the point, since I realize that you choosing to thin the rabbit herd on your land is your own business.”
“That’s the ticket,” he said, totally ignoring my comments to clap his giant hand on my shoulder. “I knew you’d be up for the job. I’ll just go pay the lady with her arm in a sling, and then you can take me out to the fields, and we’ll do a little shooting.”
“I just said I wasn’t going to shoot any animals—,” I called after him as he strode away.
He raised a hand to show he heard me, and a few minutes later, over my continued protests that all I would do was teach him how to shoot stationary objects, he carried two of the student bows, a stack of paper targets, and two quivers full of arrows. I had my borrowed bow, and spent the time it took walking out to the far pasture quizzing him about his experience with archery.
“Did it as a child, of course,” he said, tacking one of the targets onto a tree stump that sat just outside the pasture, on the fringe of a small wood that divided Alden’s land from the next fields. “Da used to say I had a right eye for it, but of course, a shotgun is more efficient, so once I learned to shoot a proper weapon, I didn’t go back to this.”
I said nothing other than to give him basic instruction on how to hold the bow, notch the arrow, and aim at the target.
“You certainly didn’t lie about your eye,” I told him a half hour later, collecting the remains of seven paper targets. We’d scattered them around the edge of the small wood, taping them to a fallen tree, a couple of low-hanging branches, and a small clump of shrubs. “You have the makings of a very good archer.”
“Aye, but these are just static targets,” he said, waving one of the bows toward the woods. “It’s a world of difference hitting a moving one.”
“Very true, and that, as I explained numerous times, is not something I’m prepared to teach you.”
He eyed me speculatively. “I bet you could do it.”
“Yes, but I’ve had training in moving targets. My college used to have competitions where we had to do all sorts of crazy shots, including through small objects like oranges and grapefruit, and hitting the bull’s-eye paintedon a dummy on a pulley that was jerked across our line of vision. The best, though, was what we used to call our spy missions. Our instructor would go out into a local forest, and hang a shirt with a heart painted on it from high up in a tree. We had to hunt down the target, and then hit it in the heart, if we could. It was great fun, and I won that particular contest three months in a row.”
“Now, then,” he said in a warm, approving voice. “That must have been something to see.”
“It was kind of fun,” I admitted, glancing around to make sure we’d picked up all the bits of paper.
“What say we have a wee competition ourselves?” Barry suggested.
“For what?” I asked, taking a peek at my watch. Barry had paid double the normal fee to do this spontaneous shooting, so I felt obligated to give him his full hour, but at the same time, I very much wanted to get back to the others. It wasn’t that he made me feel uncomfortable... I simply did not enjoy being alone with him.
“Well, if you want a prize of some sort,” he said slowly.
“No, no, I meant what sort of competition did you have in mind?”
He thought for a moment, then gestured at a group of somewhat stunted fir trees. They were about twelve feet tall, and clustered together tightly, too tightly to allow any one of them to grow to its proper size. Beyond them, I knew from rambles with Alden, was a rocky outcropping that dropped down into a small ravine ending in the pasture of a sheep farmer who was his neighbor. “What say we each take a turn playing your spy game? I’ll hide a target for you, and you can hide one for me, and whoever wins will buy the other a pint at the local.”
“All right,” I said, willing to do just about anything to finish up our hour and get back to the Hard Day’s Knights area. “What do you want to use for a target? I’m afraid we’re out of paper ones.”
“Anything wrong with my shirt?”
He was wearing a blue checked short-sleeved shirt.
“You’ll ruin it,” I said, eyeing him warily as he started to unbutton his shirt. To my relief, he had a tank top under it.
“I’ll tell you a secret,” he said, pulling the shirt off, and giving me a big wink. “I never liked this shirt. My wife bought it for me at a jumble sale. Now, then, you take half, and I’ll take half.”
With a loud ripping noise, he tore the shirt in half as easily as I’d have torn a piece of toast. “We don’t have anything to paint a heart on it,” I said, holding his shirt with the very tips of my fingers.
“Let’s just say we have to hit the center of the target. Now, you go that way—” He pointed to the right, where the clump of firs gently swayed in a light afternoon breeze. “And I’ll go through to the other side of the copse. Shall we meet back here in five minutes?”
“All right.” I trotted off in the direction he pointed, choosing what I thought would be a difficult spot for him to shoot (into the sun), and tied the shirt around the trunk of the spindliest of the trees.
“I set you a right challenge, I did,” Barry said as we rendezvoused. “I’m thinking you won’t be claiming this win.”
I smiled politely, not really giving a damn whether I did or not. “Good luck with yours.”
“Aye, same to you, same to you.”
