The Junior Classics, Volume 8: Animal and Nature Stories
General
The Junior Classics, Volume 8: Animal and Nature Stories
Children's literature
No red man would ever deign to use such an insignificant looking
axe, and so we must suppose it to have been a toy hatchet for some
little fellow that chopped away at saplings, or, perhaps knocked
over some poor squirrel or rabbit; for our good old Moravian
friend, the missionary, also tells us that "the boys learn to climb
trees when very young, both to catch birds and to exercise their
sight, which by this method is rendered so quick that in hunting
they see objects at an amazing distance." Their play, then, became
an excellent schooling for them; and if they did nothing but play
it was not a loss of time.
Several little arrow-points I also found in the valley. The axe 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.
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 pen-knife, 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, which
was doubtless a piece of flint chipped into a shape that 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.
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. There is a big
canoe in one of the Government buildings that is sixty feet long.
That boat 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 certain pieces of the same form, had
been found off in Norway; and Professor Nilsson, who has carefully
studied the whole subject, says they are fish-hooks made of flint,
the largest being bone. Hooks of exactly the same pattern as these
really have been found within half a mile of the little valley I
worked in that afternoon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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