DICK AND HIS FRIENDS: A Talk about Stone Weapons

AS soon as he had finished reading the chapter, Uncle John went to a cabinet and took out a box in which were a number of flint arrow-heads of different shapes and sizes. Some were not longer than one’s finger-nail, and some were two or three inches in length, long enough to be used as heads for a javelin, such as Goba gave to Tig. Some were oval in shape like the leaf of a privet bush, others were shaped like the ace of diamonds; some had barbs at each side, and some a tang between the barbs for fixing the head to the shaft of the arrow.

Uncle John asked David if he could tell why some of the arrows were barbed and some not. Joe said that perhaps only the cleverest men could make the barbed arrows; the others were easier to make.

“No doubt that was so,” said Uncle John, “but all the same, they made a great many of both kinds.”

Dick said perhaps the plain arrows were for shooting at a target, but the barbed ones for killing things.

“I expect,” said Uncle John, “that the barbed arrows were used in battle. A barbed arrow cannot be plucked out of a wound, and so it is more deadly than the other. The plain arrows were generally used in hunting. When a man had shot a deer or a hare, he wanted to be able to pull out his arrow at once and use it again, but a barbed arrow sticks in the wound and cannot be pulled out.”

Dick wanted to know if one of these little arrow-heads would really kill a big animal like a deer. David said, “Yes, of course it would. It is as big as a rifle bullet.”

“But it wasn’t shot as hard as a rifle bullet is,” Dick said.

“However, these arrows were shot quite hard enough,” said Uncle John. “Some years ago the skeleton of a man was found in a cave in France. The man had evidently been killed in battle in the old times that we have been reading about, for sticking in his backbone was the head of a flint arrow, which had been shot at the man with such force that it had pierced his clothing and his body, and had half buried itself in his spine.”

Then Uncle John opened another drawer in his cabinet, and took out a stone axe-head, beautifully ground and polished, shaped to a cutting edge both back and front, and with a hole drilled through for the shaft. The boys all looked at it and handled it, and Joe said:

“How could men cut down trees with an axe like that? It would never be sharp enough to cut wood with, surely.”

“I think this one was a battle-axe,” Uncle John answered, “because it is small and very carefully finished, as you see, and ornamented with these lines at the top. Axes for cutting wood were larger and plainer, I daresay. But even then, of course, they weren’t such useful tools as our steel axes that we use nowadays. Has anyone of you ever heard what else the men of those old times used, when they wanted to fell a big tree?—Why, fire! They lighted a fire at the foot of the tree, and when it was burnt out, they hacked away the charred wood and lighted the fire again—and so on, until they got the tree down. Then they had to chop and chop with their axes to trim the trunk; so it was a long business. But they managed it all the same; for they needed hewn wood for many purposes, of which, no doubt, the book will tell us later on.”

The next day, out on the heath, the boys gathered flint stones and tried to make some arrow-heads. They found it very hard work. It was easy to knock off pieces that had a cutting edge or a sharp point; but it was very hard to chip these flakes into anything like the proper shape. They all tried for a long while, and banged and cut their fingers, without producing a single good specimen; and this they found a little disappointing. But, as Uncle John reminded them, Goba and his men were old hands at the business, and no doubt they had had to spend a long time learning and practising it before they could do it well. “And even then,” said Uncle John, “how long do you think it would take a skilled man to make a single arrow-head?” The boys all guessed about an hour or two. “Well, of course, we don’t know,” said Uncle John. “But I can tell you this. Some years ago two Englishmen, who were travelling in the wild parts of North America, came across a tribe of Red Indians who had nothing but stone weapons. And the Indians told them that even the cleverest workman of the tribe could not make more than one arrow-head in a whole day’s work. So a dagger, or a long spear or a stone axe, especially of the sort that was ground to an edge at both ends and polished all over, must have taken weeks or even months to make.

“In the British Museum,” Uncle John went on, “there is a large collection of very wonderful flint weapons. Some day we will all go to London, and Dick shall take us to the Museum to see them; and besides these we shall see the hammer-stones that were used for chipping flints with, and the grinding stones on which the stone axes were rubbed and ground to an edge.”