January, 1921 
FOREST AND STREAM 
11 
or a trident, but for certain classes of 
fishing only the detachable head scheme, 
which has various modifications and va- 
rieties, will do. 
Arrows warp pretty badly on occa- 
sion. The writer is reminded of a story 
he read as a boy in which a Mexican 
Indian shot at a turkey and missed it 
and then exclaimed, “I missed because 
I forgot to straighten my arrows after 
they had been wet!” Whoever wrote 
that corking good story, “Juan and 
Juanita” knew something about archery 
for certain it is that arrows sometimes 
need straightening. For this purpose 
some Indians used a flat piece of wood 
with a hole through it somewhat larger 
than the arrow shaft. The shaft was 
poked through the hole and pressure 
applied to it as necessary. Small 
grooves were sometimes cut along the 
sides of a shaft which may have had a 
tendency to prevent its warping, certain 
it is that they could have had very little 
effect in letting blood out, and Indians 
say they were not for that purpose. 
War arrows, being intended naturally 
to injure the enemy as much as possible 
were frequently made with barbed 
heads which would pull off easily and 
remain in the wound, or the shaft was 
weakened near the head so that it would 
tend to break there, which accomplished 
the same result. Game arrows were 
generally intended to be extracted from 
the slain game and used again and were 
designed with this end in view; but 
war arrows had a different purpose. 
The poisoning of arrows was a natural 
step in an attempt to make them more 
deadly and it was quite a common cus- 
tom. Such arrow poisons varied from 
simple copper points intentionally cor- 
t roded, to complicated and deadly mix- 
tures, compounded of snake venom and 
vegetable and other poisons, the exact 
details of which the writer will not 
attempt to discuss in. a general article. 
One of the most noted of these poisons 
is that known as Wourali, Curari, or 
Oorara and is made and used to-day by 
our own Central and South American 
Indians. The writer has talked with 
men who have seen these poisoned 
arrows used in actual game killing, and 
they describe the action of the poison as 
! being very rapid, though it is certain 
i that the speed of its effect is greatly 
exaggerated in the popular mind. It 
has to be carried by the blood, and that 
takes time. This type of poison does 
not render inedible the meat of animals 
killed with it. Whether it could ever be 
used to advantage in game shooting 
with a rifle is questionable, but think of 
the possibility of hitting a deer almost 
anywhere with a .22 short poisoned 
l with Wourali and have it drop within a 
hundred yards! ! 
Let us, however, consider the bow as 
a weapon for the modern hunter. 
A GOOD bow is nothing to be 
laughed at; in skillful hands it is 
a dangerous and deadly weapon 
as the early settlers, from the standpoint 
of the men being shot at, had good rea- 
son to know. The best results in arch- 
ery have, so far as records show, been 
accomplished with the regular long bow 
of the accepted pattern with arrows to 
match, the sort of equipment turned 
out by the best makers of this class of 
goods. Such equipment has in it the 
design and experience gained by centu- 
ries of experiment; and it probably 
cannot be surpassed, certainly it is far 
superior to that of savage peoples. It 
is not particularly expensive, reminding 
one of the cost of .22 rifles before the 
war. The best men’s bows, priced in 
New York City in 1919 cost, for exam- 
ple, $6.50. Arrows came rather high, 
ranging around ten dollars a dozen, the 
cheaper sort are mere toys, and the 
natural inclination would be to buy a 
few for samples for length and dimen- 
sions and make the rest at home. 
The classical rule as to the length of 
bow is that it be the same as the height 
of user. A bow of about six feet in 
length (total length of bow unstrung) 
Correct way to pull the bow 
is best suited to the average man and 
the “weight” or strength of the bow 
will vary from thirty to fifty pounds 
or more. The writer shoots a sixty- 
pound bow. The “weight” is the force 
necessary to pull the arrow back to its 
head, and can be measured by a spring 
scales. More powerful bows than this 
are used, sometimes requiring a pull of 
seventy, eighty or even ninety pounds to 
draw, but it takes an old-timer at the 
game and a powerful man to use these. 
The strength of a bow’s shooting or its 
accuracy is by no means to be gauged 
entirely by the amount of bull strength 
required to draw the arrow to its head, 
for the elasticity and “kick” or “cast” 
in a bow, due to the skill with which it is 
built, have a considerable bearing in the 
matter. A well-built fifty pound bow 
will often send an arrow further than 
one requiring more strength to draw it, 
but less skillfully made. 
A FEW words as to handling the 
bow to the best advantage. There 
are a number of ways but the best 
shooting is done after the fashion of the 
old English archers, probably the best 
bowmen the world has ever known, and 
the American sportsman is certainly 
safe in using the method they have de- 
veloped as a starting pc at. It is the 
one generally used by modern archers. 
The illustrations show the system per- 
fectly. The bow is grasped firmly with 
the left hand and held vertically or 
nearly so. The arrow goes on the left 
side of the bow and above the hand, but 
the shaft of the arrow touches the bow 
midway between its ends for the left 
hand grasps the bow intentionally just 
a little below its center to allow for 
this. Factory-made bows have a hand- 
grasp placed in the proper position 
slightly off center and one tip of the 
bow is usually made different from the 
other, so there is no difficulty in keeping 
the bow always right end up. The bow- 
string is also marked in the center so 
that the arrow is always placed in ex- 
actly the same position. 
Pull the string back by the tips of the 
first, second and third fingers of the 
right hand, the end of the arrow being 
between the first and second fingers. The 
natural inclination will be to hold the 
bow and arrow at such a height that 
when the right hand is drawn back the 
fingers will be on a level with the chin 
and just under the right eye, and this is 
the proper position. Draw the arrow 
clear back to the head. The hold on the 
bow-cord and arrow just described is a 
little difficult and seemingly unnatural 
to a beginner but it is the one with 
which the best work has always been 
done and one should learn it in the first 
place. Releasing the arrow with this 
hold is simply a case of letting the cord 
slip off the fingers. 
The most natural hold is the “pinch 
grip,” which is the thing one would in- 
stinctively do, that is, to take the ar- 
row’s end between tip of thumb and tip 
of forefinger, pull back and “let her go.” 
This answers for a weak bow but no 
strong bow can be bent this way to the 
necessary extent. A somewhat better 
way practised by many Indian tribes 
was to close the forefinger and grasp the 
arrow between the middle joint of it and 
the thumb. Some Indians even made a 
sort of bulbous enlargement on the 
string end of the arrow to prevent its 
slipping when used with a pinch grip. 
Some of the Chinese had a radically 
different, though efficient way of draw- 
ing the bow; and this - method was prac- 
tised by several of the allied races. 
John Chinaman put the bowstring be- 
tween the thumb and forefinger at the 
root of the thumb, turned the thumb in 
as far as it would go and hooked the 
forefinger around the end of the thumb 
to hold it that way. The arrow lay 
above the thumb, simply resting on it. 
A wide ring of metal or jade was usu- 
ally worn on the middle joint of the 
thumb which prevented the bowstring 
from cutting into it. The whole idea 
was on the principle by which the Amer- 
ican boy “shoots” marbles with his 
thumb, except that the marble is ahead 
(continued on page 38) 
