My weapons shared the boat, with a gourd of water and a tin of bread and dried bosk meat. I had the Gorean short sword in its scabbard, my shield and helmet, and, wrapped in leather, a Gorean long bow of supple Ka-la-na wood, from the yellow wine trees of Gor, tipped with notched bosk horn at each end, loose strung with help and whipped with silk, and a roll of sheaf and flight arrows. The bow is not commonly favored by Gorean warriors, but all must respect it. It is the height of a tall; its back, away from the bowman, is flat; its belly, facing the bowman, is half-rounded; it is something lika an inch and a half wide and an inch and a quarter thick in the center; it has considerable force and requires considerable strength to draw; many men, incidentally, even some warriors, cannot draw the bowy; nine of the arrrows can be fired aloft before the first falls again to the earth; at point-blank range it can be fired completely through a four-inch beam; at two hundered yards it can pin a man to a wall; at four hundred yards it can kill the huge, shambling bosk; its rate of fire is nineteen arrows in a Gorean Ehn, about eighty Earth seconds; and a skilled bowman, but not an extradordinary one, is expected to be able to place these nineteen arrows in on Ehn into a target, the size of a man, each a hit, at a range of some two hundred and fifty yards. Yet, as a weapon, it has serious disadvantages, and on Gor the crossbow, inferior in accuracy, range and rate of fire, with its heavy cable and its leaves of steel, tends to be generally favored. The long bow cannot well be used except in a standing, or at least kneeling, position, thus making more of a target of the archer; the long bow