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Asia has thrown forth great waves of hungry humans from the prehistoric "round-barrow" "broad-heads" who overran Europe and penetrated to Scandinavia and England, down through the hordes of Attila and Tamerlane, to the present immigration of Chinese and Japanese that threatens America. The Phoenicians and the Greeks, with unremembered drifts behind them, colonised the Mediterranean.
In the bottom of your quiver drop a round piece of felt or carpet to prevent the arrow points coming through the hide. If you are not so fortunate as to have deer hide, you may use any stiff leather, or even canvas. This latter can be made stiff by painting or varnishing it. Such a receptacle will hold a dozen broad-heads very comfortably and several more under pressure.
About half of these are good broad-heads and the rest are blunts or odd scraps to be shot away at birds on the wing, at marks, or some are shot in pure exhilaration across deep canyons. As a rule, there are two or three of us in the party, and we hunt together.
It is true that we thought at first of putting poison on our arrows intended for lions, and we did coat some broad-heads with mucilage and powdered strychnine, but we never used them. My physiologic experiments with curare, the South American arrow poison, aconitin, the Japanese Ainu poison, and buffogen, the Central American poison, had convinced me that strychnine was more deadly.
He knew long ago that the Kadiac bear was no more formidable than the grizzlies we had slain and he only undertook this adventure for show purposes. Moreover though he used his heavy osage orange bow and usual broad-heads, he declares that he believes he can kill the largest bear in Alaska with a fifty pound weapon and proportionately adjusted arrows.
We much prefer the bright, clean knife-blade of our broad-heads to any other missile. The principles involved in seeking game with the bow and arrow are those of the still hunt, only more refined. An archer's striking distance extends from ten to one hundred yards. For small animals it lies between ten and forty; for large game from forty to eighty or a hundred.
This advantage is undoubtedly due to the concoidal edge of the flaked glass operating upon the same principle that fluted-edged bread and bandage knives cut better than ordinary knives. In the same way we discovered that steel broad-heads sharpened by filing have a better meat-cutting edge than when ground on a stone.
And here we may close our enumeration of the earliest known branches of our family tree, since the coming of the broad-heads pertains to the history of the Bronze Age, and hence falls outside the scope of the present survey. Now what is the bearing of these somewhat scanty data on the question of progress?
Both Young and I are convinced of the necessity of very sharp broad-heads, and trust more to a keen blade and a quick flight than to power. During his Alaskan travels Art preferred his Osage bows to the yew. They stood being dragged over rocks and falling down mountain sides better than the softer yew wood.
This latter consisted of two bows apiece and a carrying case containing one hundred and forty-four broad-heads, the finest assembly of bows and arrows since the battle of Crecy. Young had one newly made bow weighing eighty-five pounds and his well-tried companion of many hunts, Old Grizzly, weighing seventy-five pounds.
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