"Why are my needles clumsy?" she asked humbly, and he showed her that her people's method of boring the eye, a funnel-shaped hole driven from each side and meeting midway, necessitated a broader head than a small true hole drilled straight through at one asking.
"Our holes are big and shallow, yes, like ant-lion pits," she laughed. "That is because our centre-bit wobbles; but how can one help the centre-bit wobbling?"
From the raffle of bones upon the floor (Cave-man was an untidy fellow, or 'tis little we should know about him)—from the remains of his yesterday's dinner Pŭl-Yūn chose a young roe's shin-bone, sawed off the joint with care and sucked out the marrow. "I want," said he, "a small sharp stone, to sit in that hollow: there are such in the bellies of bigger stones,"—he meant quartz crystals, and the Master-Girl nodded; so far his requirements presented no difficulty. "And I must have," he went on, "a couple of smooth rods of rowan or hazel as long as my arm; also an elder-stick as long as my hand."
There was meat in the larder for two days; the nurse was keen to provide play-things for her convalescent, nor was she herself loth or incurious; within the hour she was back with a handful of sparkling gems from the hollow of a big pebble and a pair of rods, one of which she watched her husband bend and string with a thong of deer-skin.
Presently he had found a shard of rock-crystal to his mind, and had hafted it in the hollow bone with a morsel of pitch picked from his axe-head and warmed in the embers. (It is singular, but beyond controversy, that the Old Stone men, who used the drill so adroitly for small work, and could pierce the enamel of a bear's tooth, or the nacre of a sea-shell when a necklace was required, never applied their invention to the hafting of their weapons. An axe was apparently too serious a matter to be bored, nor did the presence of a natural hole in a flint pebble suggest the insertion of a stick, any more than the hole for the handle in a trade hatchet appeals to a South-Sea Islander of one of the more backward races; no, he stops the hole with gum and hafts as his fore-fathers did, and as Pŭl-Yūn and Dêh-Yān did, in a cleft stick).
What next?—Dêh-Yān, still very much in the dark but longing for light, watched her husband with absorbed attention. Now he had laid aside the strung rowan-rod and the armed bone for a moment, and was at work upon the elder-stick, working one end of it to a smooth rounded head, driving into the tough, yielding, pithy hollow of its opposite extremity the sharpened shank of the armed roedeer's bone as far as it would go. He had now to his hand a short, solidly-made dagger, stoutly cylindrical in form, and bearing as its head a glittering morsel of crystal. He next fastened the slip of hare's bone which he proposed to convert to a needle firmly to the handle of his axe, and bound the axe in turn to the thigh of his sound leg, raised his knee, and said—
"Now, I begin!"
"Wah!—this is a wonder! But have a care of thy broken ankle!"
"I will have a care. Give me that strung rowan-rod." He took it from her hand, bent it yet more and looped the slackened thong once around the barrel of his drill, or bit, and then, using his own breast and left hand as bearings for the smooth butt, applied the crystal point to the blind head of the needle and drew the bent rod swiftly from left to right. The drill revolved, its armature began to mark the bone, to penetrate infinitesimally. He reversed the action and again the tool spun and cut. He persisted, it began to excavate. Pŭl-Yūn was no novice at the work, he had an instinctive appreciation of what his tool would bear, he knew to a nicety just what the fragile bone might be trusted to take without splitting.