AS soon as he had finished reading the chapter, Uncle John went to a cabinet and took out a box in which were a number of flint arrow-heads of different shapes and sizes. Some were not longer than one’s finger-nail, and some were two or three inches in length, long enough to be used as heads for a javelin, such as Goba gave to Tig. Some were oval in shape like the leaf of a privet bush, others were shaped like the ace of diamonds; some had barbs at each side, and some a tang between the barbs for fixing the head to the shaft of the arrow.
Uncle John asked David if he could tell why some of the arrows were barbed and some not. Joe said that perhaps only the cleverest men could make the barbed arrows; the others were easier to make.
“No doubt that was so,” said Uncle John, “but all the same, they made a great many of both kinds.”
Dick said perhaps the plain arrows were for shooting at a target, but the barbed ones for killing things.
“I expect,” said Uncle John, “that the barbed arrows were used in battle. A barbed arrow cannot be plucked out of a wound, and so it is more deadly than the other. The plain arrows were generally used in hunting. When a man had shot a deer or a hare, he wanted to be able to pull out his arrow at once and use it again, but a barbed arrow sticks in the wound and cannot be pulled out.”
Dick wanted to know if one of these little arrow-heads would really kill a big animal like a deer. David said, “Yes, of course it would. It is as big as a rifle bullet.”
“But it wasn’t shot as hard as a rifle bullet is,” Dick said.
“However, these arrows were shot quite hard enough,” said Uncle John. “Some years ago the skeleton of a man was found in a cave in France. The man had evidently been killed in battle in the old times that we have been reading about, for sticking in his backbone was the head of a flint arrow, which had been shot at the man with such force that it had pierced his clothing and his body, and had half buried itself in his spine.”
Then Uncle John opened another drawer in his cabinet, and took out a stone axe-head, beautifully ground and polished, shaped to a cutting edge both back and front, and with a hole drilled through for the shaft. The boys all looked at it and handled it, and Joe said: