The shed sits at the lower edge of the Irati, the second-largest beech forest in Europe, where Navarre runs up against the French border. The walls are dry stone, the roof is slate, and the door is a single slab of chestnut hung on iron pintles.

Iker Etxeberria, forty-six, has made bows here for nineteen years. Before that he worked in a kitchen in San Sebastián and made bows on the weekends. His grandfather, who taught him, made bows for sixty-one years and sold the last one at ninety-three.

His wood is yew, cut from the high pastures above Ochagavía. He selects standing trees in late autumn, marks them with a band of red tape, and returns with a neighbour and a chainsaw in February when the sap is down.

A yew tree suitable for bowmaking takes a hundred and fifty years to grow. Etxeberria cuts perhaps two in a good year. He pays the commons authority a small fee and a larger one in the form of cleared brush.

The trunks are cut into staves with wedges and a maul. A stave is about two metres long, four centimetres wide, and follows the grain of the tree. The split surface, never sawn, preserves the long fibres on which the bow's strength depends.

Staves are sealed at the ends with beeswax and left to season under the shed's eaves for between three and seven years. Etxeberria has staves in his rack cut by his grandfather in 1998. He uses them sparingly.

Roughing out begins with a hatchet. He marks the bow's outline in chalk on the stave, then chops away the waste, leaving about a centimetre of margin on each side. The hatchet is small, single-bevel, ground on a foot-treadle wheel.

“He marks the bow's outline in chalk on the stave, then chops away the waste, leaving about a centimetre of margin on each side.”

Then comes the drawknife. He clamps the stave to a low shaving horse, sits astride it, and pulls the drawknife in long strokes from the centre toward each tip. The shavings curl and fall to the floor in pale ribbons that smell of green tea and resin.

The bow is shaped with the sapwood on the back and the heartwood on the belly. This is the structural principle: sapwood resists stretching, heartwood resists compression. The boundary between them is followed exactly, no matter how the tree grew.

Tillering is the long part. The bow is fitted with a temporary string and drawn against a wooden frame called a tillering tree, which holds the bow vertical while Etxeberria steps back to look.

He looks for symmetry, for an even arc, for any stiff section that does not bend with the rest. Where he finds one, he removes wood from the belly with a cabinet scraper, two or three strokes at a time, then draws the bow again.

A bow takes between forty and a hundred tillering sessions to reach its final draw weight. The sessions are spread over weeks. Etxeberria does no more than four a day. He says the eye, like the wood, needs to rest.

Final draw weights are between twenty and thirty-two kilograms at seventy centimetres of draw, the range his clients, who hunt wild boar and roe deer in the surrounding mountains, prefer.

The string is made of flemish-twisted linen waxed with a mixture of beeswax and pine pitch. He twists it himself in the long evenings of November, sitting at his kitchen table with a hook screwed into the wall opposite.

The nocks are cut into the tips of the bow and reinforced with small inlays of cow horn, glued with hide glue and pinned with a single brass nail. The arrow rest is a strip of leather glued to the centre of the bow's side.

Finished bows are oiled with a mixture of linseed and walnut oil and rubbed by hand until the heartwood glows a deep orange-brown. Etxeberria signs each bow on the belly, near the grip, with a small pyrography stamp shaped like a beech leaf.

He sells about ten bows a year. Six go to hunters in Navarre and the French Basque country. The remainder go to traditional archers in Germany and the Netherlands who heard of him by word of mouth.

Outside the shed, the beech forest is greening into early summer. The yew staves wait in their rack, the drawknife is hung on its peg, and the tillering tree, scratched with the witness marks of two hundred bows, stands in the corner like a slow, patient instrument.