“Still, it is very skilfully done.”
“That may be–Look out for the edge! It’d do to shave. No more bamboo splinters for me–dull when you hit a piece of bone. I’m ready now to skin a rhinoceros.”
“If you can catch one!”
“Guess we could find enough of them around here, all right. But we’ll start in on some of Win’s sheep and cattle.”
“Oh, do! One grows tired of eggs, and all these sea-birds are so tough and fishy, no matter how I cook them.”
“We’ll sneak down to the pool, and make a try with the bows this evening. I’ll give odds, though, that we draw a blank. Win’s got the aim, but no drive; I’ve got the drive, but no aim. Even if I hit an antelope, I don’t think a bamboo-pointed arrow would bother him much.”
“Don’t the savages kill game without iron weapons?”
“Sure; but a lot have flint points, and a lot of others use poison. I know that the Apaches and some of those other Southern Indians used to fix their arrows with rattlesnake poison.”
“How horrible!”
“Well, that depends on how you look at it. I guess they thought guns more horrible when they tackled the whites and got the daylight let through ’em. At any rate, they swapped arrows for rifles mighty quick, and any one who knows Apaches will tell you it wasn’t because they thought bullets would do less damage.”