We must compress into three or four pages the labours and results of four busy months, during which by frequent experiment, and incessant practice these two young creatures worked at, and worked out the mechanics of their discovery.
It was an opportunity of almost incalculable infrequency. Consider, I beseech you. Your savage, a man of a hunting tribe, lives normally from hand to mouth. Is game abundant and his hunting successful he gorges to repletion and sleeps long and heavily. Is food scarce he hunts the harder, sleeps lightly, eats sparingly, and has in prosperity no incentive, and in adversity no leisure for protracted and systematic experiment, even if he should find the impulse within himself, and be upheld by the applause and co-operation of his tribe.
It is doubtful if the combination of rare and delicate qualities which go to the making of an inventor present themselves once in a thousand generations of savage men, and how much rarer still must be that general recognition from his fellows without which a savage can effect nothing permanent. Even the privacy, which is hardly less essential than sympathy for a tentative effort, is wanting, for a savage lives in public, and the initial failures of the inventor not seldom in our own times expose him to the pitiless raillery of his contemporaries, a blighting, sterilising ridicule to which the child-nature of primitive man was certainly not less sensitive than are the natures of monkeys, dogs and children.
The steadfast mind that can ignore and outstay the gibes of neighbours is not too common to-day, and was probably very rare indeed in that remote and ancient world of which my tale tells.
That an armourer should work behind locked doors, and that it is folly to show unfinished work to a bairn are excellent adages. But, savages are all bairns; indeed, among primitive peoples the environment is so unfavourable for invention that one might almost say that a savage never invents anything, and even in the case of his stumbling upon a promising novelty, its unfamiliarity condemns it in the eyes of his comrades, if not in his own.
Only in the excessively rare event of a reforming chief can any advance be registered. And how seldom does such a prodigy arise! The stars in their courses fight against such an avatar!—We, the English of the twentieth century, are, take us all round, as open to reason and as receptive to the New Idea as any folk upon this earth, or any that ever trod it; what is more, we are accustomed to reforms, we await them with expectancy if not with equanimity, we know full well that certain of our venerable institutions stand in need of tinkering, but we never dream that the impulse shall come from above. A codifying, or land-transfer-simplifying Lord Chancellor, or a reforming or unifying Archbishop is incredible. The processes by which such men climb to their posts disable their minds from criticising a system which has justified itself in their persons. Nor is it likely that a sachem will be impatient of a state of affairs which has landed him at the summit of his ambitions. A Peter the Great comes but once in an æon.
Here, however, in this snow-bound glen, were just that assemblage of conditions which stimulate and protect the inventor whilst perfecting his invention. The store of frozen bear-meat secured leisure. There had been sufficient initial success to encourage continued experiment. The companionship of two united hearts provided the needful sympathy; nor was the touch of emulation wanting. The august mountains kept the ring, their snowy silence excluding the hee-haws of jealous ignorance.
Heavens, how these children worked!—Size, material, method of use, the best position, trajectories,—everything was an open question; everything had to be mastered by trial, by competition, by comparison. Observe, there was absolutely no past, no tribal lore to handicap or guide. How they chattered! As to arrows, now,—should they head them with bone or with stone?—How fledged?—How straightened?—Of what length?—This brought on the bow, its size, its weight, its parent tree; wych-elm, ash, or cornel?
Pŭl-Yūn leaned to something small and short, handy for wood-work; but after being consistently out-shot by longer weapons of the Master-Girl's choosing, propelled by a longer bow, gave way after some sulking.