He placed the steel-shod tip of one of the poles on the floor, threw his weight against the top end. It flexed. Gary grunted in satisfaction.
"A bow?" asked Caroline.
He nodded. "Not too good a one. Not too accurate. Maybe not too strong.
When I was a kid I used to go out into the woods and whack me off a sapling. No curve, no nothing. Bigger at one end than the other. But it worked as a bow, after a fashion. Used reeds for arrows. Killed one of my mother's chickens with one once. She whaled me good and proper.”
"It's getting warm in here," Caroline told him. "We can't waste any time.”
He grinned at her, exuberant now that there was something to do.
"Hunt up some cord," he told her. "Any kind of cord. If it's not strong enough, we'll twist several strands together.”
Whistling under his breath, he got to work, tearing the flag off the end of one of the more supple poles, notching either end to hold the cord.
From another stick he split long wands off the straight-grained wood, fashioning them into arrows. There'd be no time for feathering… in fact, there were no feathers in the ship, but that was a refinement that would not be needed. He would be using the bow at close range.
But he did have arrowheads. With snippers, he clipped off the sharp tips with which the poles had been shod, drove them into the head of each arrow.