Interesting story indeed. Spent a whole 3 days learning how to shoot a long bow. Like I said, interesting. Wonder how much is literary license. On the first bear, the arrow dropped, while on the second one it hit exactly where he wanted. Ahh - re-read it and see he did a lot more than those 3 days practice.
Good point and arrow weight, however I did not see a bow weight listed.

My bro 'took' a 6 1/2' black bear with his 64# Howard Hill longbow a bunch of years back, using a shaft he split from a fir round, with grey-barred turkey feathers, moose sinue'd on and a 1" wide "spear" point for an arrow head, also sinue attached, he'd napped out of a flint nodule. He's been making "points" of obsidian and flint & chert for 50 years or more. The shot was at 12 yards, perfectly broadside and the point stuck out the offside, about 6" or more. Buddy Len was videotaping the incident from the other side of the bear. The blood instantly followed the arrow head in a rope of blood a good 2" in diameter - just poured out. The bear lurched forward on the log it was standing on, breaking the fletched end of the arrow shaft off on an aspen tree - SNAP, bear stopped, looked at the tree then dropped down off the 4'dia. log and kept going into a pile - dead-right-there. At that point, the video was sky, trees, ground - as Len was trying to get his .300 mag off his shoulder as the bear was headed in his direction, but collapsed as he hit the ground.
I had that point for the longest time, but it disappeared over the years.
About 3 weeks after I saw the VHS video, Taylor's kids erased it because they wanted to tape a comic kid's show from the TV. LOL