THE WESTERN DENES. 



XTI. 



139 



The only pursuit for which our Dene may be said to have been 

 ^mply provided with home-made implements was war and its allied 

 occupation, hunting. The offensive weapons in use among them were 

 arrows, spears, lances and casse-tetes. 



Their arrows were of two kinds : bone and flint. The first were 

 made of the front teeth of the beaver reduced by scraping to the 

 required shape. They were reputed the most effective. Figure 10 

 represents flint arrow heads of different sizes, forms and material. 

 They are produced here for the sake of comparison with those used 

 by the mound-builders of Illinois and other States of the American 

 .Union with which they will be found identical in shape and material, 

 though a distance of at least two thousand miles separates the 

 aborigines who made them. These arrow points are all drawn to the 

 natural size and they are therefore somewhat smaller than those of 

 the mound-builders. The two marked A and B may be described as 

 the typical arrow-heads of the Western Denes and are of the blackish 

 resonant flint generally used in the fabrication of aboriginal weapons. 

 C and D are composed of a semi-translucent bluish variety of sil- 

 iceous stone not so common and consequently more prized than the 

 ordinary arrow flint. E represents the most beautiful of all the 

 Dene arrow-heads in my possession. It has been ingeniously chipped 

 from a hard crystalline species of flint, and its form and finish display 

 evidences of, I should say, exceptionally good workmanship. Some 

 are also formed of a whitish siliceous pebble ; but the points made 

 thei'ewith are, as a rule, of a rather rough description. 



The Denes likewise used another sort of offensive weapon which 

 they called Lhthiladinla, that is, " fixed at the end of the bow." Its 

 name explains its nature. It was of common flint chipped to the 

 shape of figure 11 and sometimes of figure 12. They In-ought it 

 into requisition when too closely pressed by the enemy to shoot, and 

 used it as a spear. Besides, they possessed also the I'egiilar spear or 

 lance of which figure 12 is a reduced representation. 



All these weapons were obtained by chipping the flint with a moose 

 molar tooth without any previous blocking. As a rule, these abori- 



