The five little arrow-points figured in the second picture are among those I found in the valley. The ax was not far away, and both it and they may have belonged to the same bold and active young hunter. All of these arrow-points are very neatly made.
ARROW-HEADS
The same missionary tells us that these young red men of the forest "exercise themselves very early with bows and arrows, and in shooting at a mark. As they grow up, they acquire a remarkable dexterity in shooting birds, squirrels, and small game."
Every boy remembers his first penknife, and, whether it had one or three blades, was proud enough of it; but how different the fortune of the stone-age children, in this matter of a pocket-knife! In the third picture is shown a piece of flint that was doubtless chipped into this shape that it might be used as a knife.
I have found scores of such knives in the fields that extend along the little valley, and a few came to light in my search that afternoon in the brook-side sands and gravel. So, if this chipped flint is a knife, then, as in modern times, the children were whittlers.
FLINT KNIFE
Of course, our boys nowadays would be puzzled to cut a willow whistle or mend the baby's go-cart with such a knife as this; but still, it will not do to despise stone cutlery. The big canoe at the Centennial, that took up so much room in the Government Building,—a boat sixty feet long,—was made in quite recent times, and only stone knives and hatchets were used in the process.
I found too, in that afternoon walk, some curiously shaped splinters of jasper, which at first did not seem very well adapted to any purpose; and yet, although mere fragments, they had every appearance of having been purposely shaped, and not of accidental resemblances to a hook or sickle blade. When I got home, I read that perfect specimens, mine being certainly pieces of the same form, had been found away off in Norway; and Professor Nilsson, who has carefully studied the whole subject, says they are fish-hooks.