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Chapter 61: Hardening up
With belts around the middle of straw-filled sacks, the cats prepare to practice.
“Hang these from the rafters so they don’t interfere with each other as they swing. Now we’ll have four ropes with a cat on the end of each. You actors, line up here for rapid-fire down-trou practice. It may be a bit of a shambles, but it’s a good simulation of battle,” says Lucky.
* * *
Billy, in king-hit camp, observes to Stanley, “Learning to make a sharp, clean connection without jarring yourself – these straw bales are pretty good for it. Judging the distance is the key. Of course it’s not easy with a moving target, but then these men won’t be solid like a tight bale. Let’s use the arrangement we tried earlier, of a goat hitting from the front or side, while the tag-team partner dog hits behind the knees. It’s a sound way of disabling a man… Hey that’s good, look at the bales tumbling around like ninepins.”
“But it’s a bit static,” says Stanley. “Hey Terror, did you hear the cats have organized a number of straw men on ropes? They can make them shift imitating the randomness of movement we’ll meet for real. What say we ask them if we can use their training set-up too? On the island in the heat of battle we were moving in a confined space. We’re out in the open this time, and there’ll be pursuit, so it’s a different scene to prepare a plan of attack, or as we say make a ‘bundobust’ for. Meantime, to the scrum machine everyone; it’s time to work on the hit and shove. Weight for weight we’ll see whether goats or dogs take the ascendancy today.”
* * *
Bella says to Molly, “Ben reckons development of these new longbows is just about finished, and he wants more feedback, particularly on their consistency in rapid fire. They’re fantastic now, and the bows’ performance is not fading with our rather extreme use. It looks like he’s cracked the code. It’s the carbon fibre veneer he’s added I reckon. Anyway, now we’re able to tell the distance an arrow will travel at a particular draw pull. As of an hour ago, everyone’s fitted-out with two bows calibrated for distance, draw and missile weight. Achieving accuracy with a tight grouping of arrows on the target, I reckon that‘s our final training challenge, what do you say Molly?”
“Bella, you’re right, and I figure what’s keeping our accuracy down a little is the fact that the muscles employed to draw a bow aren’t used every day. We’re tiring quickly. Imagine when we’re loosing twelve arrows every sixty seconds. So, my thought is that we must work on getting everyone to pull the bow without an arrow, twenty to thirty times - five times a day. And then pretty soon we’ll be fit for the fray.”
“And Molly, one more thing we must change,” says Bella. “We’re not shooting targets when it comes to the real thing, so we have to practice drawing to the chest rather than to the face. This way there’s no aiming as such, and fortunately we seem to be naturals at rapidly nocking the arrow and firing with considerable accuracy. It’s a darn good sign for the strength of our attack. That is, of course for the long bow, the first wave of engagement. We’ll deal with the crossbow team when they join us tomorrow.”