The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [194]
Not long afterward he began the construction of his bow and his arrows. He fashioned the four-foot bow from a long stave of Osage orange, or bois d’arc (the same words from which “Ozark” derives), and the arrowshafts he made from willow. For three nights, in the lingering light after supper, he slowly trimmed and shaped the bow, careful not to whittle it with his knife but just to scrape it into shape. He had saved all the sinew from each animal he’d eaten, rabbits and squirrels alike, and had carefully dried and twisted it into a long bowstring. Leftover sinew went into wrapping the nock ends of the arrows and into tying the arrowheads to the foreshafts. For fletching, he used the feathers of a wild turkey he had surprised with his digging-stick used as a spear, having given up any attempt to hit a quail or partridge, both abundant but elusive.
When he had finished the construction of his bow and arrow, he spent an entire day practicing with it, slowed down on his hike by the necessity to stop and take aim and experiment with ways of holding his bow and his arrows and crouching in a shooting position.
The number of miles he covered each day diminished as the terrain became rougher and steeper: he had reached the Ozarks, and the uplifts had risen; some folks say everything above the village of Jerusalem is technically in the Ozarks; beyond that point he would certainly encounter no more flat plains. Between practicing with his bow and arrow, actually hunting with it, and struggling with the rugged inclines of Van Buren County, his progress slowed to no more than fifteen miles a day. His shoes had begun to fall apart, and he resewed them with sinew and a needle made from one of the fishhooks straightened; they still gave him blisters.
But with his new weapon he was able to kill anything alive and edible that crossed his path, or whose path he crossed: a raccoon, a pheasant, and even, while fording a stream, a large bass. He did not want for food, and he used the pheasant feathers to fletch more arrows and made himself a cap from the raccoon’s fur: although the heat of summer made a fur cap unnecessary, his still-bare scalp was often chilly, and he feared getting sunstroke while walking in the broiling sunshine at midday without a head-covering. But the pheasant and the coon had been small game; he did not feel that his marksmanship with the bow and arrow were yet sufficient to risk an encounter with a buck deer or a bear. He saw plenty of the tracks of both, and once he even saw a mother bear with her cubs, at some distance, upwind, and avoided them. Crossing over into Pope County from Van Buren County, into the wilderness near New Hope, he encountered an entire family of deer and crept up on them, upwind, and took careful aim at the buck from not more than twenty paces; he missed it with two arrows but hit it with the third, right behind the shoulder, wounding it enough to catch it and finish it off with the hunting-knife. It was a seven-point buck. He butchered it of its haunches and stuffed himself on spit-roasted venison, and then, too full to move for many hours, used the time of digestion to carefully skin the animal and prepare its hide for some future use. He carried the deerskin wrapped around his neck like a big cape thereafter, transferring it to his waist as the heat of each day came on, while he gained the headwaters of Illinois Bayou, a trackless wilderness of forest that left him feeling like a pioneer.
I have not been able to find out how the mountain settlement of Nogo got its name. I’m sure there are legends, or apocryphal attributions to some settler who penetrated as deep into the wilderness as the wilderness would