Dating During Lockdown - Love Under Lockdown

The range was one of only a few of my regular haunts still open during the crisis, and that not without serious alterations to the business plan. Only one shooter was allowed at a time, and you had to book well in advance to make sure there were no unfortunate overlaps.

I hadn’t spent long with Brigid and Polly, but it was enough that I nearly missed my start time. Not that it wouldn’t have been well worth it. It had been a long time since I had encountered a woman who had intrigued me as much as Brigid had.

Even our names were of a similar wild flavor. I had also meant most of what I had said about Polly, although the zoo-keeper line was very much a joke.

Most shooters at the range went for carbon compound bows. Huge, unwieldy things with more protrusions than a musket. One of the major areas in which I was a traditionalist was archery. Wood, leather, and string for me; and I damn well loaded from a back quiver. As Tolkien intended.

Hand-carved stone heads pounded straight and true into the targets with resounding punctuation. I was nearly at the farthest distance. My ultimate goal was to be able to split an apple in the tree that marked the end of the range with a no-look shot. The slices still weren’t quite even.

I possessed thirty arrows in all. All hand-crafted with the best materials I could find. It had taken weeks to fashion them all, and weeks longer to finally finish the bow to my liking.

I had seen a video, online ironically, demonstrating in great detail how to craft a Norse bow from scratch, starting with little more than a thick stick. That gathering run was a fun ride back from upstate.

The target looked like a porcupine. The arrows on the fringes had been intended to gauge the new distance or were the result of misguided, but fun, triple loads, which tended to go all over the place. Down to my last shot, I decided to have a bit of fun and split the previous bullseye Robin Hood-style.

I could always mend the shaft later, since a split going clean up the grain would leave the head, which was the real bugger to make, wholly intact. Then came the really fun part: pulling them all out and getting them back into the quiver. At least I was able to go right up to the target for this part, as being alone on the range meant the risk of getting shot in the back by another archer was reduced to nil.

“All done?” Lucy, the owner of the place, asked, her voice muffled slightly by the mask.

“Indeed, I am, Lucy,” I said, sliding the tag through the little slot in the protective window.

Both these precautions were in place even before the outbreak. Just in case someone snapped and decided to go all Hunger Games in the range.

“Any big plans coming up?” she inquired.

“Not tonight but soon; very, very soon.”

“What’s her name?”

“Brigid.”

“Bridget?”

“No, Brigid, with a ‘d’.”

“Oh, like the Irish goddess of fire.”

“Among other things.”

“Cool.”

“No argument here,” I said with a playful wink.

I’d known Lucy since we were kids. We had bonded over archery at camp one year and had kept in touch ever since. It was odd not to be able to see her smile due to the mask she was wearing, but it was just the way things had to be.

I got my ID back, turning in my bow and quiver in return. Even a place as open to quirkiness as the city of New York had some qualms with open-carry bowmen. Particularly with one as skilled as I was and after 9/11.

It is a little-known fact, at least among people who see archery as kind of a joke compared to firearms, if not to the cops, that a bolt fired straight and true from a longbow can punch straight through plate armor. Something that many a soldier found out the hard way on battlefields of the past.

Next on the agenda, written out plain and neat in the pre-yellowed pages of my trusty notebook, was a visit to the Crow’s Nest. Somewhat ironically named, the store was at the bottom of a nearly vertical set of fairly rickety stairs, several feet below street level.

Part of the reason it wasn’t shut during the lockdown was how few people actually knew it was there. Still, the owner, Ola Hallegrim, a recent émigré from Norway, wasn’t anyone’s fool, and had positioned boxes of masks and gloves on a table next to the door. God help the smartass who tried to enter the premises, more than big enough to keep six feet apart, without these protections.

“God dag, soster.”

“Od du, bror,” Ola replied, the two of us tapping elbows in lieu of our usual complex handshake.