Palm Tree Island

by Herbert Strang

Billy took upon himself to make some arrows while I made the strings. For this purpose he chose some straight light shoots, about as thick as your finger, peeled off the bark as we did with the saplings, and trimmed them with his axe and other sharp stones, rubbing them also with sand, until they were wonderfully smooth. Billy was more patient in this work than I had ever seen him, and as each shoot was prepared he held it up to his eye and looked along it as if to see whether it were a trifle out of the straight, and if he thought so, he would rub and polish again until he was satisfied. He had near a dozen of these shoots prepared by the time I had finished the strings for our two bows, and he then began to point the heads; but it appeared that he was quite ignorant of the use of feathers, so while he was pointing the shafts I roamed about the woods in search of feathers, and found a good number on the ground, and these we stuck on the tail end of the shafts as I had seen them in pictures, for as for the actual things, I had never had them in my hand. This made me wish, and so did many other matters, that I had given more heed to the construction of things, for barring pottery and rabbit-hutches I was a perfect simpleton in using my hands. Of course, when the first arrow was finished, I tried it with the bow, and found that it did not fly near so well as I hoped; nor did the second and third that we made, which was a great trouble to us. The flight of these arrows was neither far nor steady, and for a long time we could not make out in the least why we had failed. It was Billy that discovered the reason, though I believe it was more by guess than by deduction.

"Why, master," he said, "I do believe 'tis all along o' those silly feathers you've been and gone and stuck in, so that the tail's heavier than the head."

I saw that there might be something in Billy's notion, so we first of all tried the experiment of making one of the arrows taper towards the tail; and when we found that it certainly flew from the bow much better than the others, I thought of improving still further by fitting stone heads to the shafts. We split up some pieces of flint, and using a flat corner of the lava tract as a kind of anvil, Billy chipped away at some of the smaller pieces with a heavy lump of the rock containing iron until we had a little heap of flakes shaped something like a leaf. Some of these we lashed to shallow grooves in our shafts by means of pieces of the string I had made; others we drove into clefts in the top of the shafts; and when we came to try these new-tipped arrows on the bow, we found that they flew very much better than any that we had made before.

By the time we had furnished ourselves with the bows and a dozen arrows our week's holiday was past, and we ought by rights to have gone back to our work on the house. But arrows were not made merely to be looked at, nor to be shot off only for fun, as Billy said, and he was bent on employing our new weapons in the useful work of providing food. We had had nothing but bread-fruit, cocoanuts, and eggs, and pork twice, ever since we had been on the island, which I reckoned to be now a matter of three or four months or so, and I own I agreed with Billy that we should be none the worse of a more frequent change of diet. Of late we had seen very little of the wild pigs, being so much busied with our building work and pottery, and other things; but the dogs were frequent spectators of our proceedings, though not so constantly as at first, finding no profit in them, I suppose. However, we now set off with our bows and arrows, fiercely bent on slaughter.

We tramped for a good long time across the island before we discovered a herd of pigs in a little open space beyond a wood. They were grunting, as pigs do, and poking their snouts into the ground as if in search of food, though I doubted whether they would find anything fit to eat, even for them, which are not particular, as everybody knows. We crept up very stealthily to the edge of the open space, so that they did not perceive us, and then, selecting the two nearest animals, we let fly our shafts both at the same moment. The arrows flew very swiftly from the bows, but clean over the pigs, so that we did not hit one of them, and the twang of the bow-strings being very audible, the pigs instantly took fright, and scampered away, all but one old boar, as he seemed, who stood with his snout lifted, grunting very loud, as if angry with being disturbed.

"I'll have a shot for old father bacon," says Billy, fitting an arrow to the string, and taking aim as well as he could, he shot it; but having seen that his first shot went too high, he aimed the second too low, and it stuck in the ground a yard or so in front of the solitary boar. And then Billy flew into a mighty rage, I assure you, for the boar marched up to the arrow, sticking out of the earth, and sniffed at it with very loud grunts for a moment, and then snapped it up and broke it in two. "There's half-a-day's work spoiled," cried Billy, who was already angry enough at having missed his mark twice, and he rushed out, calling the boar by many very unseemly names. The beast was taken by surprise, and instantly turned tail and scampered after the rest of the herd, with Billy at his heels, and me not far behind, for remembering the scrape that Billy had fallen into once before, I did not like to let him go out of my sight. And so we pursued those pigs for above half-an-hour, I should think, and never came within fifty yards of them, nor getting any chance to take a shot at them, because they were never still. We gave it up when we were thoroughly weary, and were going back to our hut, much disappointed of our expected meat, when Billy remembered that we had left two arrows where we had first encountered the pigs.

"We must go back for 'em," says he, shaking his fist in the direction whither the pigs had fled. "They are easier shot than made, and easier broke than shot, drat it; but I'll make 'em porkers pay for leading us this dance, see if I don't."

I agreed that our arrows, made with such toil, were much too precious to be wasted, and we went back to the place where we had shot them, not finding it by any means easy to light on the spot again.