1. Bow.
2, 7. Wooden fish spears.
3. Plain Wood-pointed Arrow.
4. Notched Wood-pointed Arrow.
5. Arrow tipped with Cassowary claw.
6. Bamboo-pointed Arrow.
8. Hunting Spear, pointed with sharp bone.
BOWS AND ARROWS
The bows of the Mimika natives are about five feet long and are made of a simple straight piece of a very hard wood (usually a species of pandanus), tapering towards the ends, which are sometimes ornamented with the claw of a cassowary or a tuft of feathers and shells or the claw of a crab. The “string” is a piece of rattan and it requires a strong arm to bend the bow. The arrows are of various types (see illustration p. 150); they are all made of reed stems, and none are ever feathered nor have they nocks. They vary only in their points, which are sometimes merely the sharpened end of the reeds themselves and sometimes a plain sharpened tip of hard wood or bamboo. Some are tipped with the sharpened claw of a cassowary or with the spine that lies along the back of the Sting Ray, and the arrows used for shooting fish have often three points of sharp bamboo.
Most people have the idea that the savage man performs prodigies of skill with his bow and arrows, but whenever I saw the Papuans shooting, they made astonishingly bad practice. I remember seeing two Papuans trying to kill an iguana in a tree not more than twenty feet above the ground; they shot arrow after arrow at it, but the creature, which was as long and almost as thick as a man’s arm, climbed slowly up from branch to branch until it was lost to view.