Bow and Arrow by Offer R (best classic books .TXT) 📕

Jangili slowed her breath, taking careful aim. Her target was small, well-hidden. There was but the thinnest, narrowest line of sight connecting between them, and making the shot very nearly impossible. The precision required was complete, and the margin for error was needle-wide. Suffice there be a slight shift in the light breeze and the resulting minute skew in the arrow's route would condemn the shot to failure. But for the tribe's finest archer, impossible was nothing more than a challenge, adverse circumstances a foundation for growth. And challenges were deeply embedded in her everyday life as well as the desire to grow. She whispered a chant to the Gods, invoking their guidance of the arrow that was about to fly from her bow. She always did this before a crucial shot, and this shot was a crucial one since it promised to set her on the path to fame and glory among the tribe. She would become a legend among her people, second in importance only to the Chief. And from there the way to becoming the tribe's youngest chief was short- shorter than the journey that awaited her arrow through the thicket.

'Miungu huruma juu, Nipe nguvu

Basi mshale wangu mgomo, Na kunipa utukufu'

She chanted as she drew the bow string further back, increasing the tension on the ends of the bow. Her target was precisely in her crosshairs. It was about to have an arrow shot right through its heart, and it didn't even know it. Stealth was one of Jangili's favorite elements in the hunt. One of many.

            'That's it', she thought. 'I've got you.' Then she shifted her whole upper body ever-so-subtly, a hair's breadth to the right, adjusting the usual skew of her aim. Finally, in one swift motion she released her grip of the string, keeping the rest of the bow remained utterly still. And the arrow flew ahead. Under the branch, between the leaves, through the bush, against the wind, cutting through the air at a perfect pace, following the only route that could bring it to its destination. It cleared every one of the obstacles on its way, and then, finally-

            Miss!

            It appeared the Gods had deemed her target, not Jangili, worthy of their auspices, and in the final moment that separated life from death she came on to her hind legs, changing the position of her body. Both archer and target growled as the arrow drove itself into the bear's side. The bear- for the sudden pain that shot through her side; Jangili- for the deflection of her perfect shot. For her a shot that left her target alive was a miss. That's why she never carried more than a single arrow in her quiver. And now her quiver was empty, and her only arrow was lodged in the bear's side. Luckily, her own groan had been drowned out by the bear's so that the bear was still haplessly oblivious of the position of its huntress. The cover of the vegetation was thick and it hid Jangili well, and she fearlessly observed her target though she was unarmed. The bear struggled with the arrow but every time she tried to yank it out it increased the pain in her wound, so she finally reluctantly decided to leave it dangling from her side. Jangili could tell from the bear's clumsy movements that the arrow had caused a serious injury. In a moment of characteristic boldness she lunged forward, abandoning her cover, and charged at the weakened bear. Finally catching wind of her attacker, the bear turned to face Jangili, limping on her compromised right side. She looked twice as large, thrice as strong, and four times as fierce from up close, when there was no cover to hide behind and no arrows with which to attack. No hunter or huntress would dare confront a grown bear this way- none but the young, audacious tribeswoman. She didn't even start when the mighty bear took to her hind legs and grew to twice her normal height. She could detect the bear's weakness even in this most menacing, imposing of stances, and she held her ground in front of the brown, raging beast. Jangili kept her composure and spoke calmly to her quarry:

'Growl and fight, beast, as you ache,

But me you shall not scare;

With patience life you shall forsake,

And glory will be my share.'

            What made Jangili such a fearsome huntress wasn't merely her precision with an arrow or her boldness where others cowered, but her command, as that of all great hunters, of the virtue of patience. It was a lesson her father had worked long and hard to teach her.

'A well-aimed arrow will kill a man, they say,

For a true archer's arrow will not bend;

But not a hundred arrows will keep your enemies at bay,

T'is patience without end.'

            And yet it was a very narrow area in which to maneuver that was governed by both patience and boldness, and whenever she overstepped the boundaries of that area, it was into the territory of the latter. A more prudent hunter would've taken advantage of the bear's considerable physical impairment and followed her to her lair. Then they would quickly return to the village for a weapon and complete the hunt. But Jangili correctly assessed that in her current state the bear would hardly, if at all, triumph in a physical struggle between the two. Equally importantly, the quarry would be afraid to so engage her huntress after the latter had demonstrated her capacity to inflict harm. Therefore she decided in favor of a direct confrontation- one that would irate her father and exacerbate the condition of her ailing mother, should news of it find its way to their ears. Courage, she thought she knew, was the lot of the young.

'Wisdom, prudence, intuition,

At old age are the truth;

But courage, liveliness, ambition,

Are the fortune of sweet youth.'

            And so there she stood, rejoicing at her fortune, and waiting not for the bear's display to end but for it to expose a certain point of vulnerability that would tip the scales in her favor. Indeed it was in the throes of her ostentatious spectacle that the bear left her side unguarded and the arrow hanging as accessibly as Jangili could hope to have it. With characteristic agility she lunged forward and snatched the blunt, harmless end of her very deadly weapon. Then she yanked it out of her quarry's side; the whole audacious operation endured a fraction of a second. But the bear, her senses sharpened by her mortal distress, was also quick- surprisingly so for a beast of her size. Before Jangili could make a clean break and wrench the arrow free, a wide, heavy paw armed with five knife-sharp claws bore down on her face. She had to twist to avoid it, and as she did so, since the arrow was gripped tightly in her hand, it twisted with her and broke free. The bear growled in pain, her wound no doubt burning with the arrow's forceful change of position in her flesh. Jangili shuffled her feet and dragged herself backward, away from her stubborn quarry. Distance favored her once more now, as the trajectory of her arrow required… She gawked at her right hand in dismay, realizing that what she'd pulled out of the bear's side wasn't an arrow but a splintered stick. Her irregular and involuntary movement had apparently broken the arrow near the head. Her arrow was of the highest quality- she knew this for, dexterous fletcher that she was, she had made it herself- but it was designed to sustain linear, horizontal pressure during its flight and not vertical pressure as she'd just applied to it. She couldn't reuse it as an arrow, but luckily the tip had broken off just so, that the tapering edge could still serve to penetrate the bear's flesh and deliver a fatal wound if manually employed.

'Kubeba' (thus she called her prey),

'You're a lucky one, the Gods to you are kind;

But death you shan't escape today,

With arrow, spear, or my bare hands- tonight glory will be mine.'

            Distance no lingered agreed with Jangili, as her remodeled arrow was too light to be effectively flung as a spear. She had to come up close to her quarry and drive it into her flesh in full contact. Hardly was there anything more ill-advised for a hunter than to come in direct contact with a living, struggling quarry when bereft of the reinforcement of a viable weapon. But Jangili had her own set of rules, the most rigorous of which stated that there was no greater disgrace, and consequently nothing to be more tenaciously avoided, than a failed hunt. The definition of a failed hunt in this sense was that the quarry was possessed of life when the hunt came to an end. Not once was she tainted by such disgrace since she'd begun to hunt on her own, and she would allow neither the danger posed by a threatened bear nor the unwritten rules drawn up by the tribe's elderly to occasion a blemish in her spotless record.

            Alas the bear, having received a second taste of her huntress's sinister intent, adhered to and consequently was constrained by no rule but one. It was the same rule that governed the behavior and determined the mental state, and had done so since the beginning of time, of every quarry anywhere: survival. In keep with this one single all-important objective, and the inferior size and strength of her huntress notwithstanding, the bear ceased her void display of power and took to flight. On three good paws and a fourth limp one she ran faster than her huntress, who followed her to heel, but the pain in her side soon become insufferable. Once they'd cleared the thicket and converged on open grassland- the forest was a place of no one kind of landscape- she realized that safety, albeit temporary, lay not ahead but above. Of the various physical advantages bears hold over humans, perhaps none is more salient than the ability to climb trees. Our bear didn't linger and climbed up the trunk of a wide, majestic baobab tree just in time to stay beyond the reach of Jangili's stick. She found a branch thick enough to sustain her weight, which requirement the vast majority of the baobab's branches fulfilled, and settled on it, viewing her huntress from the safety of height.

'Oh bear, oh bear, a tree you climb,

How cunning, how crafty, how sly;

But on my side is my friend, Time,

Your grim fate shan't be denied.'

            Indeed, such a petty obstacle as two or three meters of height wouldn't serve the bear, nor would it serve an item of prey half as valuable as the furry beast, to deter the skilled huntress from pursuing her target. It did, however, require an adjustment in her modus operandi: her reach fell well short of jabbing her modified weapon at the airborne bear, while flinging it as she would a spear was no more practicable than it had been before; climbing the tree, a feat whose practicability was in itself doubtful, suitable more for a skilled climber than a master archer, would render her defenseless against any offensive that might be launched by her wary prey, which would instantly turn predator; and surely returning to the tribe for an uncorrupted arrow, although as swiftly as her nimble legs would transport her, would provide the bear ample opportunity to descend from her shelter and vanish into the forest. And so once again the circumstances begged her to employ the virtue of patience and wait. Only through one of two means would the stalemate between hunter and hunted be broken: either, hopefully the sooner to occur, a fellow tribesman would appear