“I am going away over yonder, to get some arrow-heads from Goba, the
spear-maker; but it is too far for thee to travel. We shall be three
days or more about our journey, and we shall sleep out at night. Thou
art better at home.”
But Tig begged hard; so Garff said he might go, if his mother would let
him; and though his mother said she feared it would be too far for him,
yet he might go, for he was getting a big boy and must learn to march
like a man.
Four or five men of the village were going with Garff, and at last
they set out. They left the open ground where the cattle were feeding,
and made their way into the forest, going downward until they came to
the river. They marched along the river-bank, going up the stream, and
then crossed the water and mounted upward by a track through the thick
forest until they reached the high ground on the other side of the
valley. Here they were on the open moor; and the men began to practise
shooting for a match. One man shot an arrow ahead, and then the others,
each in turn, aimed at the first man’s arrow. Then they walked on, and
as soon as they were near enough to see how the arrows lay, they sent
Tig to pick them up. But Tig did not have to ask whose arrow each one
was, because every man had his own mark on his arrows, and Tig knew the
marks just as well as one of us nowadays knows his own initials on a
pocket-knife.
After sunset they came to a sheltered spot near a clump of oak trees,
and here they camped for the night. Garff and another man then gathered
up dry grass and dead leaves and twigs, and set to work with their
fire-stick to make a fire. This they did by setting the fire-stick
upright, with its end sunk into a hole in a little slab of wood that
they had brought with them. Then one pressed his hand lightly on the
top of the upright stick, while the other brought out a kind of bow
with a loose bow-string, and looped the string around the middle of the
upright stick. Then he worked the bow backward and forward and so made
the fire-stick spin in its socket, which after a while became so hot
that it set fire to the dry leaves and twigs that had been laid around
it.
Meantime the other men had collected dry brushwood and had cut logs,
so that they soon had a good fire. They sat round the fire and ate of
the dried meat and corn-cake that they had with them, and then lay down
to sleep. The men watched by turns to keep the fire up; for so long as
there was a good blaze they need not fear the attack of wild beasts.
Tig lay close beside his father; and when one of the men wakened Garff
to take his turn of the watch, Tig wakened too, and saw the darkness
all about them and the sparks flying upward towards the stars, and he
heard the wind rushing in the tops of the trees around them, and far
away the howling of the wolves hunting through the night.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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