Arrow tattoo down the spine

The gale took the lamp room shutters last Tuesday, so you'll forgive the smudges. Mr Pascoe came across on the supply boat with a sack of linen and a bundle of ash shafts wrapped in oilcloth, and he asked where he might set up his bench. I told him the boathouse. He said a bowyer needs north light and a bit of wind to test a string, and this island has plenty of both.

He is a quiet man, the way people are when they have spent years getting one thing exactly straight. Each evening he balanced a shaft across two fingers and sighted down it toward the lantern like a man checking a plumb line. He said a true arrow must sit level on the point of a finger before it will fly true, and that most failures are made in the wood long before the head is fitted.

On the last night of the month the mist rolled in thick off the Shoal and the foghorn stuck. He stood with me on the gallery and took out a finished arrow, the head filed to a clean point, the feathers bound in dark thread. He let fly into the grey toward the rocks where the bell buoy was ringing. We heard nothing strike, only a small sound as it dropped into the water. Then the foghorn came back, the mist thinned on the far side, and the bell buoy seemed to answer from the very place he had aimed.

He left on the morning boat without his tools. They are still in the boathouse, wrapped in oilcloth, with one shaft lying on the bench, straight as a rule. I have not touched it. I think he wanted someone here to know which way the light is pointing.

Yours, Tom