DICK AND HIS FRIENDS: The Boys’ Bows and Arrows

WHEN the boys went out after this reading, they got their bows and arrows. By this time the bows were finished. Dick had given to each of the others two arrows out of his set that came from London. These were well made with blunt metal heads fitting like caps. Besides these Joe had made himself six arrows, and the other two four each. For heads they had nails, filed down flat on two sides to make them fit into the shaft, and sharpened at the point. The great difficulty had been to get straight sticks, and though they agreed that it was not a real hunter’s way of doing it, they had cut lengths from a thin piece of hard-wood board, with a fine saw, and then trimmed and sand-papered these to make them round and smooth. To fix in the heads they made a cut, deep enough to take the nail, and then wrapped it with fine string and glued this well over. When they had fixed the feathers, the arrows were complete, and each marked his own. Dick had a V for his mark, Joe a cut between two dots, and David a dot between two cuts. The gardener made them a target out of bands of straw, and they practised at it a good deal. But one day they made up their minds to try to shoot something that might be called “game,” and they went off to the heath. Each took a different way, but they agreed to meet at the hut afterwards, with whatever they should have bagged.

Joe went off to a place near the edge of the wood, where there were generally rabbits playing about, and his plan was to creep up near enough to get a shot at once, if he could do so without scaring them, but if not, to hide among the bushes and wait for them coming out of their burrows.

David crept through the furze looking out for birds. He saw an old blackbird hopping about under the bushes, and he shot at it; but it flew away with a great deal of noise, as if laughing at David, who had to spend a long time getting back his arrow from among a lot of prickly brambles. There were numbers of yellow-hammers perching about on the furze bushes and crying out: A very, very little bit of bread and no chee-e-e-ese, and a pair of bold little stone-chats that kept flying round calling a-tick, a-tick, but David did not want to shoot at them. Then a family of green woodpeckers, father and mother and four young ones, came flying across from the woods; and David was so keen on watching them that he forgot he was a hunter; so when he got to the hut he was empty-handed. He was the first in, but after a while Joe came, and he also had got nothing.

“I nearly shot a starling,” he said; “there was a flock of them running about on the grass, and I shot right into the middle of them. I wish I had got one, for it says in that book of mine that a starling is the best bird to get when you are learning to stuff, as it is easy to skin—I say, it would be fun to shoot a rabbit and skin it, and try to cure the skin!”

Just then Dick came in. He had his pockets stuffed out, and the others wanted to know what he had got. He said they were to make a fire and then he would show them; so they went out and collected sticks and made a fire in the fireplace outside the hut. Then Dick brought out of his pocket six potatoes, and said that was all his game. “I never saw anything to shoot at,” he said, “but the men in a field over there are taking up potatoes and they gave me these for twopence, and would have let me have more if I could have stowed them away. I thought we could roast them in the ashes.”

But Dick had something else to show. He had found some pieces of wool, torn off sheep’s fleeces, hanging to the thorn bushes on the heath, and had gathered them all up.

“To-morrow I shall go and try to get some more,” he said, “and when I have got enough, I shall make a spindle, if I can find out exactly what it ought to be like, and see if I can spin some yarn: and if I can spin the yarn, I shall rig up a loom and have a try at weaving a piece of cloth. There isn’t much chance of being able to do it right, of course, but it is good fun trying.”