BOWS AND ARROWS 151 



me as being one of the most primitive scenes I had ever 

 witnessed, really a glimpse of the Stone Age. 



The bows of the Mimika natives are about five feet 

 long and are made of a simple straight piece of a very hard 

 wood (usually a species of pandamis), tapering towards 

 the ends, which are sometimes ornamented with the claw 

 of a cassowary or a tuft of feathers and shells or the 

 claw of a crab. The " string " is a piece of rattan and it 

 requires a strong arm to bend the bow. The arrows are 

 of various types (see illustration p. 150) ; they are all 

 made of reed stems, and none are ever feathered nor have 

 they nocks. They vary only in their points, which are 

 sometimes merely the sharpened end of the reeds them- 

 selves and sometimes a plain sharpened tip of hard wood 

 or bamboo. Some are tipped with the sharpened claw of 

 a cassowary or with the spine that lies along the back 

 of the Sting Ray, and the arrows used for shooting fish 

 have often three points of sharp bamboo. 



Most people have the idea that the savage man 

 performs prodigies of skill with his bow and arrows, but 

 whenever I saw the Papuans shooting, they made 

 astonishingly bad practice. I remember seeing two 

 Papuans trying to kill an iguana in a tree not more than 

 twenty feet above the ground ; they shot arrow after 

 arrow at it, but the creature, which was as long and 

 almost as thick as a man's arm, climbed slowly up from 

 branch to branch until it was lost to view. 



The hunting spears are of two kinds, a plain straight 

 shaft of heavy wood, very sharp and hardened by fire at 

 the tip ; and a straight shaft of a lighter wood, to the end 

 of which is fixed part of a straight bone (generally the 



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