I have retrieved thousands of arrows from battlefields and, along the way, made some good friends. I have gathered arrows that were loose on the ground, pulled them from dead soldiers and horses, and even removed one from a mouse. (The mouse lived!)
My father, a rich landowner, didn't want me to become an arrow retriever. He wanted me to become a barrister. I thought he meant "bannister.""I don't want children sliding down on me!" I would yell. Finally, he relented and hired me an arrow-retrieval tutor.
When I finished my studies, I thought I knew everything there was to know about arrow retrieval. But I was young and naïve. I soon came to realize that finding an arrow on the battlefield is very different from finding one on a manicured lawn, with a servant pointing at it. And pulling an arrow out of a month-old corpse, provided by grave robbers, is much easier than pulling one out of a burly, muscular Viking-especially if he's still alive!
Using my father's connections, I joined the army of Hendric the Pecked. I had to start out as an apprentice retriever. That meant scaling tall oak trees, where you could be hit by falling acorns, or wading into bogs, where you could be bitten by salamanders.
This story is from the May 13, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.
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This story is from the May 13, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.
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