As bowyer Bear Brooks gently shaves away yellowed strips from a length of old osage orange wood and works his way around a knot, his flat metal tool cuts across the supple length of what will soon become a traditional longbow.
“You have to treat a knot in a piece of bow wood just like you would a rock in a stream,” Brooks says later. He explains that you have to flow with the grain of the wood, moving your tool around and over the knot to work the bow down into the proper shape and weight without it being weakened.
The Knoxville, Tenn., native’s head is shaved save for a feather-adorned lock at the base of his skull, and he works his craft dressed in simple clothing decked with tribal necklaces by a lean-to set up at Chattanooga’s Pow Wow on the River.
For Brooks, who has been working his trade for 20 years, his role is as much educator as it is craftsman. “There are lots of bowyers out there,” he said, “but not many demonstrate how to make a bow or talk about the process.”
He works gently, shaving away the belly wood of the bow evenly and pausing at intervals to test how it bends by placing the end against his foot and pushing as it flexes inward. Occasionally he will attach a string and hook the piece around the top of his workbench to measure the weight it would take to draw the bow at that stage.