George Stewart - Earth Abides

“Why don’t you come to my place.” George said, “and use a vise and my spoke-shave? You could work a lot faster.”

Ish thanked him, but continued to work with the knife, even though his hand was getting sore. Nevertheless he thought that he would do all this work with the simplest implements.

By the end of the afternoon his hand was beginning to blister where he held the knife, but he judged that the work was done. A four-foot length of the lemon-shoot was now symmetrically tapered toward both ends. He set one end of it against the ground, pressed it to a half circle, and felt it spring back sharply into straightness. Satisfied, he cut notches close to each end, and gladly put the knife away.

The next morning he continued the work. There was plenty of stout string available, and he considered taking some nylon fish line and braiding it into the proper size.

“No,” he thought, “I’ll work from things they can always get for themselves.”

He found the skin of a recently killed calf. From it he cut a long thong of rawhide. The work went slowly, but he had plenty of time. He shaved the hair from the strip, and shaved the strip itself until it was no larger than a small cord. Then he braided three strips together to make a heavy cord, and estimating the proper length, he tied each end into a little loop.

He held the lemon-shoot in one hand and the braided thong in the other, and looked at them. Either by itself amounted to little. Then, bending the shoot, he hooked the loops of the thong into the notches at the ends of the shoot, and the two became one. Since the thong was shorter, the tapered shoot now bent in a clean symmetrical arc. The thong itself cut strait across between the points of the arc. Stick and cord, joined, had suddenly become something new.

He looked at the bow, and knew that creative force had again returned to the world. He could have gone to any sporting-goods store, and picked out a much better bow—a sixfoot toy for archery. But he had not done so. He had made himself a bow from the wood itself carved with the simplest of implements, and a string from the hide of a new-killed calf.

He plucked at the thong. It scarcely twanged, but it gave forth a satisfactory dull throbbing vibration. He considered that his work for the day was finished. He unstrung the bow.

The next day, for an arrow, he cut himself a straight branch of a pine tree. The soft green wood cut easily, and he had shaped the arrow and notched it in half an hour. When he had finished it, he called for the children. Walt and Josey came, and Weston with them. “Let’s see how she works,” Ish said.

He drew the arrow back, and loosed it. Unfeathered, it flew with a wobbly flight, but he had pointed it at a high angle, and it covered fifty feet before it struck, by chance, pointing upward from the ground.

Instantly he knew that he had won success. The three children had never seen anything like this before, and they stood wide-eyed for a moment, then with shouts they broke into a run, and went to retrieve the arrow. Ish shot it for them, again and again.

At last came the inevitable request for which Ish had been waiting.

“Let me try it, Daddy,” said Walt.

Walt’s first shot wobbled a bare twenty feet, but he was pleased. Then Josey tried it, and then Weston.

Before dinner-time, every child in The Tribe was busy at work whittling on a bow of his own.

Everything worked even better than Ish had dared to hope. Within a week the air around the houses seemed to be full of badly shot arrows. Mothers began to worry about lost eyesight, and two children came in crying after having received arrows in various parts of their anatomies. But since the arrows were headless and shot from weak bows, no real harm resulted.

Rules had to be established. “You mustn’t shoot in the direction of anyone. You mustn’t shoot close to the houses.”

Competition developed. Having learned the trick from the older boys who shot from rifles, children began to hold contests against a mark. They experimented with different lengths and types of bows. When Josey complained that Walt always beat her at shooting, Ish subtly made the suggestion that she might try fixing some quail pinions to the butt-end of her arrow. She did so, and beat Walt, and then suddenly all the arrows had quail pinions at one end, and they were flying farther and truer. Even the older boys became interested, and some of them made bows although they were allowed to use rifles. But archery still continued to flourish chiefly among the ones who were too young for rifles.

Ish bided his time. The early rains had sprouted the grass seed, and now the land was green. At evening the sun set behind the hills to the south of the Golden Gate.

Walt and Weston, the twelve-year-olds, were now deep in some kind of boyish plot. They worked hard with bows and arrows, shaping and perfecting them. They were gone long hours during the day.

Then one day toward evening Ish heard the sound of excited boys’ feet running up the steps outside. Walt and Weston burst into the room.

“Look Daddy,” Walt cried, and he held up for Ish the pathetic-looking body of a big rabbit pierced through the side with a headless wooden arrow.

“Look!” Walt cried again. “I hid behind a bush, and waited till he hopped up close to me, and then I shot him right through.”

Ish, as he looked, felt a sympathy and pity for the poor dangling body, even though he knew that it was a symbol of his triumph. Too bad, he thought, that even creation must make use of death also.

“That’s fine!” he said. “That’s fine, Walt! That was a good shot!”

Day after day still, the sun set in the cloudless sky farther to the south. Now it was very close to its turning. The clear weather still held.

One day, so suddenly that you might almost say just at that particular moment it happened, the children became tired of playing with bows and arrows, and went off on some new enthusiasm. Ish did not worry. He knew that after the ways of children they would come back again, perhaps at the same time of year. The making of bows and the shooting of arrows would not be forgotten. During twenty years, during one hundred years if need were, the bow might remain a children’s plaything. In the end, after the ammunition had failed, it would still be there. It was the greatest weapon that primitive man had ever known and the most difficult to invent. If he had saved that for the future, he had saved much. After the rifles were useless, his great-grandchildren would not have to meet the bear’s rush empty-handed or starve in the midst of the cattle herds. His great-grandchildren would never know civilization, but at least they would not be groveling half-apes, but would walk erect as freemen, bow in hand. Even if they should no longer have metal knives, they could still scrape out bows with sharp stones.

He planned one more experiment, but he was in no hurry. Now that they had bows he could make a bow-drill and teach the children its use. Then after the matches were exhausted, The Tribe would still know how to kindle fire.

Yet, as with the children, his own enthusiasm too grew cool through the passing of the weeks. He thought less upon his own triumph in inventing the bow and tricking the children into enjoying it. He thought rather upon all the disasters of the year. Joey was gone, and that loss could never be redeemed.

Also a kind of fresh innocence had faded from the world when the four of them had written that word upon their ballots. And also a great confidence and trust had gone from himself when he had realized at last that he must give up his dream of re-establishing the ways of civilization.

Now the sun was so near the limit of its southern course that a day or two would bring its turning. Everyone was making ready for the holiday, and the carving of the number in the rock and the naming of the year. This was their great holiday of all, combining as it did, both Christmas and New Years of the Old Times, and yet including along with those two something of their individual own. Like so much else the holidays had suffered strange transitions in the passage of one world to the other. They still observed Thanksgiving Day with a big dinner, but the Fourth of July and all the other patriotic holidays had lapsed. George, who was a traditionalist and had been a good union man, always knocked off whatever he was doing and wore his best clothes when he judged it should be Labor Day. But no one else celebrated it with him. Curiously, or perhaps rather it was natural enough, the old folk-holidays survived better than those established by law. The children still celebrated April Fool’s Day and Halloween with great enthusiasm and with much of the traditional ceremony, although they had to learn such things from their fathers and mothers. Also six weeks after the winter solstice, they talked about Ground-squirrel Day and whether the squirrel could see his shadow, for there were no ground-hogs in this area and they had substituted the ground-squirrel instead. Yet all these were nothing, compared with their own great festival when they cut the number in the rock and named the year.