Late in the morning, Dad dropped some of us off at an archery range close to our house. It was the off-season, so the archery range’s small shed was unattended. We knocked on the door of the companion restaurant (everything in Austria comes with a companion restaurant) and the gracious owner soon appeared to show us what we needed.
We each borrowed a wooden bow, a
leather arm guard, and four arrows. We proved ourselves by shooting at practice
targets, and the owner set us loose on the range.
We split into three groups: Peter
and Nick went first with Rob and T. Rex to make sure they both had help. Sam
and I went second. Mom, Uncle Reagan, and Monga were the last group. They were
better than all of us, even though Monga had just learned. We’d all forgotten
Mom used to be a camp counselor.
The archery range ran along the
side of a mountain. There were 28 stations total, spread out in a large loop.
We shot at sturdy foam animal targets, climbed through to retrieve our arrows,
then continued along the path until we came to the next set of targets.
The forest was beautiful and very
wet. It reminded me a lot of the forests back in East Tennessee. After we’d
spent a while on the course, we realized the hike was more difficult than the
archery challenges were. Except for the thin paths and foam targets, the forest
was largely untouched. Soil was loose and rocky, and the path was steep.
I didn’t get to see the other
groups shoot their arrows, but I had a great time with Sam. Here he is with one
of his bullseye shots.
Sam was a little forest
arrow-spirit. Every time he walked behind a target to collect our stray arrows,
all the arrows of days past would abandon their hiding places and appear right
in front of Sam’s feet. I kept hearing the phrase “Oh hey, look at this cool
arrow I found.”
At one point, I lost a thin metal
arrowhead. A wayward arrow hit the soil and when we took it out, the tip was
missing. Sam and I decided to dig for it so we could fit it back onto the
shaft. The arrow had been shallow, and the soil was loose. We pushed our
fingers into the mossy turf, turned over a half-inch of soil, and gaped. There,
where we’d hoped to see our arrowhead, sat the greenest earthworm we had ever
seen in our lives. We set it on top of the nearby foam deer to take some
pictures.
When we’d shot at about 20
stations, we decided to walk the rest of the course. We’d had a VERY good time
and were amazed at how many stations there were.
The youngest two were completely
worn out by the time we turned in our gear, so most of our party remained at
the restaurant. Sam, Peter, Uncle Reagan and I set off to fetch Dad and the
van. We took a paved sidewalk that ran along the river all the way back to our
rental house. We did not meander.
There were lots of slugs along
the path: long black ones that stayed close to the edges of the concrete. When
we were quite close to our house, Sam and I looked down and noticed the biggest
slug we had ever seen. The king of all slugs. It was about five inches long and
one inch thick. We stopped in our tracks and looked at it with amazement and
horror. Peter was approaching from behind, so we called to him to come check it
out. He looked down without changing pace. With one square step, he brought the
king of all slugs to an end.
Thus ends my account of the day.
We reached the house in good time and Dad drove to the range and brought back
the rest of our group.
