Compton had worked in the shop of Barnes, the bowmaker of Forest Grove, Oregon, and later he went into the Cascade Mountains and cut yew staves with an idea of selling them to the English bowyers. The Great War of 1914 prevented this, and so we had an unlimited supply of yew wood for use.
We three gravitated together and shot with Ishi until his last sickness and departure. Then our serious work began. We found it not only a delightful way of hunting, but a trio makes success more certain in the field.
In California there is an abundance of game; small animals exist everywhere and there is no better training than to stalk the wary ground squirrel or the alert cottontail. These every archer should school himself to hit before he ventures after larger beasts.
Infinite patience and practice are needed to make a hunter. He must earn his right to take life by the painful effort of constant shooting.
We shot together, and many are the bags of game we filled. We discovered in the humble ground squirrel a delectable morsel more palatable than chicken; re-discovered it, we may say, because the Indian knew it first. In killing these little pests we take to the open fields, approach a burrow by creeping up a gully or dip in the land, rise up and shoot at such distances as we can. I recall one day when Young and I got twenty-four squirrels with the bow. Upon another occasion Young by himself secured seventeen in one morning; the last five were killed with five successive arrows, the last squirrel being forty-two paces away.
Rabbits are best hunted in company. Here the startled rodent skips briskly off, down his accustomed run, only to meet another archer standing motionless, ready with his arrow.
It seems legitimate with this rudimentary weapon to shoot animals on the stand, or set, a sporting permit not granted to the devotee of the shotgun, who has a hundred chances to our one.
We found from the very first that the arrow was more humane than the gun. Counting all hunters, for every animal brought home with the gun, whether duck, quail, or deer, at least two are hit and die in pain in the brush.
Just to illustrate this, Mr. Young reported to me the results of his shooting with a small rifle at ground squirrels. So expert is he that to hit a squirrel in any spot but the head is quite unusual. In one day's shooting between himself and his young son, they hit thirty-six animals, sixteen of these escaped and disappeared down their burrows, there to die later of their wounds.
