The scraping, greasing and suppling of that immense hide was a laborious business, but a labour of love for Dêh-Yān, whose heart was both big and high within her. There was no tribal record, no legend even, of any woman having killed a bear in single fight. Yet she held her tongue, and silently grew in moral stature.
Pŭl-Yūn might sing about his wife's prowess, but he was not to be convinced of the superiority, or even of the use, of her new weapon. He was a spearman. As a spearman, an expert with the assegai, he had won the deputy-chieftainship, the war-chieftainship, of his tribe. What was possible with the spear he could do; but this fiddling with a strung-drill was too novel, too womanish, too uncertain as yet. He would have none of it.
The girl, already convinced and sanguine, wisely desisted from argument. By help of the cord the massive skull was hauled up from below to tell its tale to deaf ears, to be admired, turned over, its death-wound marvelled at and its lesson ignored. The man set himself to dig out the enormous white fangs. He also detached those twenty black curving claws, arranged, studied and pored over them, watched by Dêh-Yān. She knew by intuition what was passing in his mind and waited. This was the critical, the dangerous point of their married life.
Who was to wear those teeth? those claws?
He put the question from him (she had not raised it), it would wait; the trophies were not ready for wearing as yet, they must be drilled before they could be strung. Dêh-Yān saw that her husband needed something but was too sulky to ask, and by a real intuition fetched him the lengths of elder which he required for this new drilling and left him to his work, setting herself to study the properties of her new weapon. There was nothing to take her afield, stacks of frozen bear-meat blocked the cave, she could experiment at her leisure, and had conquered some of the initial difficulties before her man, glumly busy up above, knew anything about them.
Thus, the girl found that assegai-heads were too heavy, and assegai-shafts too stout for successful shooting; terrible at point-blank range, at anything over twenty strides they wobbled and swerved and fell short, and Dêh-Yān, the practical, argued, and argued rightly, that unless her shafts flew farther and straighter and bit deeper than a thrown assegai, she had better keep to the orthodox weapon. She needed chert, or flint, to make for her arrows smaller and lighter heads: but neither chert nor flint was to be found in that valley, nor was it possible for her to adventure the week's journey down-stream to the chalk cliff which was the only source known to her of the tribe's cutting-tools. But, womanlike, she remembered her needles, and in default of chert fell to experimenting with bone tips attached to lighter shafts by rosin and sinew, the hafting method of the Little Moons. She succeeded from the first attempt, settling after many trials to a shaft as long as her own arm: made herself ten upon this pattern and practised sedulously. Skill came apace, far more quickly to this tense-sinewed one-idead savage woman than it would come to a modern, and at the end of three days' constant archery she found herself able to put all ten arrows into a small circle marked out upon a snow-bank at full assegai-range. Beyond this range her missiles disappointed her, they still wobbled. As a practical spear-thrower she knew what was lacking—there was no spin upon them. How could this be remedied?—This question lay down with her at night and arose with her in the morning. She besought her totem for wisdom, but got never a sign. A sacrifice was needed; she vowed to the Moon the first-fruits of her bow, and greatly daring, adventured out into the wintry forest armed with her new weapon and nought else. What would the God send (the moon is a man to the savage), fur or feather? A little hazel-grouse trotted out into the glade; the shot was a difficult one, impossible with spear or throwing-stick, owing to overhanging boughs, but the girl prayed as she drew and brought it off. Her heart filled with gratitude, her totem was still watching over her for good. This should be a whole-burnt offering; a few feathers alone would she retain as her own share of the spoils, the first that ever fell to her bow (the Ghost-Bear always excepted).
Whilst walking caveward, these curving flight-feathers in hand, something in their curvature, their shapes, aroused her superstition. "Moon-feather," she whispered, and attached one of them to one of her shafts. The feather was narrow, stiff and strongly curved, it refused to lie along the shaft, but must needs curl somewhat around it when bound thereto by small sinews at either end. Dêh-Yān's first shot with it at her snow-bank target flooded her bosom with adoring gratitude, for here was the thing she had sought and prayed for, the shaft spun as it flew! Again and again she essayed shots at increasing ranges and still the wonder persisted, at fifty, yes, and at sixty paces the shaft flew straight, swerving neither to left nor right. All her shafts were presently feathered, and, since the principle eluded her, and some behaved better than others, she must practise daily, watch, consider and think, and within a while came to a practical conclusion, to closely imitate the feathering of those which span the best.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] A capacity independent of religious sanctions and of future hopes. What celestial reward did Eucharis expect, the freed-woman of "light life," whose constancy on behalf of her friend, the falsely-accused Octavia, exhausted the infernal ingenuities of Nero?