"Easy does it…that's it. He's got your girl. He's headed back to his foul nest. Shoot him now, or you'll never see her again." The old man was clearly drunk, but he knew his stuff.
The boy lined up the arrowhead with the sackcloth dragon's heart. He released the string, sending the arrow flying towards the beast. The boy had aimed true, for the sackcloth dragon now had an arrow in his heart.
The old man took a huge swig from his mug. Learning to kill dragons was hard. Living with the old man was harder. He told constant stories of the dragons he had killed, drank constantly, and never failed to criticize his pupil. Yet, when the boy was old and ready to pass on his secrets, he would be doing the same things.
He turned back to the dummy dragon, walking up to it to retrieve his arrow and the watermelon the dragon had been clutching. This was harder than it looked. Dragonkilling involved complex ideas and processes, none of which the hunter's son understood. He had grown up knowing that to hunt any animal, one searched for signs of its prescence. The old man told him in the first week that he was wrong.
The boy walked back to his starting position and made ready to shoot the beast again.


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