Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1953 by The Last Mammoth (v1.1) Page A

in a corner, and selected a big splinter, nearly a foot
and a half long. Squatting, Otter examined the splinter carefully. He tapped it
experimentally with a stone the size of his fist, then rubbed at it as though to smooth its roughness.
                “What are you making?” asked Sam.
                “I do not know yet,” said Otter, all
his attention on his work.
                Sam went outside and picked up one
of the severed legs of the deer killed yesterday. With his knife he chopped off
the hoof, stripped away the skin and flesh, and cleaned the larger shin bone.
He brought it back and jammed one end of it into the empty back projection of
the tomahawk, which was cool enough to handle.
                “Brother,” he said to Otter, “if you
are not too busy, help me again.”
                Otter laid aside the stone splinter
he was shaping and took his post at the bellows. The bone-held tomahawk made
two trips to the fire and back, and its shape had changed somewhat under Sam’s
pounding, before the bone crumbled with the heat. Again Sam groaned dolefully,
and again Otter returned to fashioning his stone.
                This time Sam cut a thigh bone from
a haunch of venison. It was larger and more massive than the shin bone. He
whittled the lumpy end, rubbed it with a coarse stone, and worked for an hour
before he shaped it to his liking. The tip of it he wedged into the back of the
tomahawk and returned to the fire.
                Otter worked the bellows. The thigh
bone bravely resisted the heat. The tomahawk had been heated red and pounded
three times before it fell from the burned tip. Sam gazed down at it with an
expression of woeful disappointment.
                Otter picked up his stone splinter
once more. While Sam had labored on the bones, Otter had shaped the splinter to
his own liking. Sam watched while Otter lashed it in the cleft end of a stout
pole, like the blade of a spear. He tested its firmness, put out his hand, and
took one of the tomahawk blades. Thrusting the point of the stone into the open
back of the blade, he pushed and turned it strongly to wedge it in place. Then
he held out the pole to Sam.
                “I did not say what I was doing,” he
explained politely, “because it was your medicine and not mine.
                But stone will not burn. It is slow
to get hot in fire. You can hold the tomahawk where the fire makes it red, and
the fire will not strike through the stone, to make the wood break off.”
                “It is as you say!” cried Sam
joyfully. “You are wiser at this work than I am.”
                “I watched what you did,” said
Otter. “I thought, and made a plan. I learned from you, and used my own
thoughts too. I made something that will hold the tomahawk and not drop it.”
                He spoke with quiet pride, as when
he had told of saving Sam from Giluhda.
                “It is as you said yesterday,” Sam
praised him. “Two brothers do something together. Each can think with the
wisdom of both, and fight with the strength of both. It is good.”
                He held the tomahawk into the forge
fire at the end of the wedged stone point, while Otter worked the bellows. He
took it out, hammered it, heated it as before, and hammered again. Little by
little he shaped the iron.
                Under his heating and pounding it
changed from the form of a broad, thin-edged hatchet blade to a thicker, curved
bar. For an hour Sam wrought, then cooled the iron in water from the gourd and
pried it carefully from its stone holder. He wedged on the other tomahawk and
fashioned it, with many heatings and poundings, in a somewhat similar way. When
the morning was nearly gone, he made a study of the work’s progress and found
it good.
                The two tomahawk heads had been