only five had been killed in the fight and seven wounded. And they
sought out the bodies of their enemies that were fallen, and took their
weapons and their necklaces and cut off their heads; and Garff cut off
the head of the chief, and took his necklace of amber and his famous
bronze axe, Skull-pecker; and so they all marched back in triumph,
carrying their spoils and the heads of their enemies, to their own
villages.
[Illustration]
_Chapter the Thirty-first_
_DICK AND HIS FRIENDS: How they dug out the Barrow_
“I AM afraid,” said Uncle John, when the chapter was finished, “that
we shall not be able to have any more reading these holidays; for
to-morrow and the next day I shall be away from home. There is one day
left after that, as you know, but instead of the story I have planned
an outing for us, which I have been trying to arrange ever since we
read about the burial of the Old Chief. My plan is this. Up on the
moor, beyond the place where we found the pit-dwellings, there is a
barrow, as it is called, the burial mound of one of the old chiefs of
the time that we have been reading about. The owner of the land, who
is a friend of mine, intends to open the barrow; the work is to be
begun to-morrow, and he has invited us to go and see what there is to
be seen.”
So on the next day they all set off to the moor with a big hamper of
provisions and a tea-kettle and a spade each. There were several mounds
and barrows on the high parts of the moor, and in one place there were
three huge standing stones marking what had once been a whole circle of
stones.
They walked over the moor until they found the squire and his men. The
men were already at work with picks and shovels, and had made a deep
cutting in the side of the barrow. At first they had dug through a
quantity of the heathery soil and gravel, but after a while they came
to large stones; and digging these out and carrying them back out of
the way was very hard work.
Uncle John rolled one aside and said to the boys:
“Can any of you find me another stone like this one anywhere on the
moor round about?”
They looked at the stone, which was a smooth rounded boulder, and then
searched the ground round about. But the only stones that were there
were small and rough. “This one came from the bed of the stream down
below there,” said Uncle John, “don’t you see it is water-worn. The men
who built this barrow carried that stone and these others like it all
the way up here on their shoulders.”
After they had had lunch, the work was begun again, the men pulling out
the big stones one after another. At last they came to where several
large flat stones were set on edge, leaning one against another. These
were pulled away, and then there was discovered a little chamber right
in the centre of the barrow, walled in with flat stones; and in the
midst of this little chamber a large urn of baked earthenware. Before
anything was moved, Uncle John brought the boys to look, and showed
them how the floor of the little chamber had been strewn with fine
white sand upon which the urn was set. Beside it were three smaller
vessels all empty, and lying beside them were two flint arrow-heads, a
small stone axe, and a hammer made out of the thick end of a red deer’s
antler bored with a hole to fit a handle into. Uncle John lifted the
urn carefully out and they all looked inside it. It was full of dust
and ashes, and some bits of charred bone, and some chips and splinters
of flint that had also been burned. These relics were all gathered
carefully together to be taken to the squire’s house, and the workmen
began to put away their tools.
As Uncle John and the boys walked home, Dick asked: “Did those people
burn every one who died?”
“Perhaps not every one, but they did it very often.”
“Why did they?”
“That is a hard question for me to answer--it was part of their
religion, I suppose; anyway perhaps they thought it the safest thing to
do.”
“Did they always kill a man’s dog, too?”
“That I don’t know. In many cases no doubt they did, because dog’s
bones have been found in the barrows; sometimes horses’ bones have been
found too, showing that people thought their horses could follow them
to the spirit-world, and sometimes, it is thought, that a man’s slaves
and even his wife were taken to the grave and killed, so that their
spirits might attend his after death.”
“How did they bore the holes in their axes and things?” David asked.
“The hole in that hammer was as smooth as if it had been drilled.”
“I daresay it was drilled,” said Uncle John. “Not with a flint tool,
perhaps, but most likely with quite a different thing--a hollow stick,
like a tube, with the boring end wetted and dipped in sand. With a
tool of that sort you can bore a hole in any stone, if you keep on at
it long enough, just as you can fine down wood or metal with sandpaper.”
“I suppose you would twirl the stick between your hands and press hard
on the top of it,” said David. “And if the stone were hard you would
want fine, sharp sand,” said Dick.
“Is there any more about Tig in the book?” Joe asked.
“Yes, I believe there is more--he lived to be a very old man and became
Chief in his time, and to him Garff bequeathed the wonderful bronze
axe, Skull-pecker. He had much fighting to do; but he beat back his
enemies and kept his people’s hunting-grounds and their cattle safe, as
long as he lived.”
On the evening of the last day of the holidays Uncle John took the
boys into his study and opened the drawer in the cabinet where his
arrow-heads were.
“Now,” he said, “I want each of you to choose a flint out of this lot,
and keep it as a reminder of what we have been reading about. Each
one can have his pick in turn--Dick first, because he was here first,
and Joe next and then David, as that is the order in which we met one
another.” There were plenty to choose from, and they each chose one of
the barbed war-arrows. Then Uncle John said:
“When I was a boy I used to know an old gentleman who had a flint
arrow-head, and I used to wish he would give it to me. But no--he set
great store by it and wore it on his watch-chain, mounted as a charm.
He called it a fairy-bolt, because he said that it had been made and
shot away by the fairies; and he thought it would bring him good luck
all his life. I hope you are all pleased with your flints; and though,
perhaps, they can’t bring you any good luck, at any rate you have
learned something about them, and about the people who made and used
them long ago, in this same country in which we live and now call
England.”
[Illustration]
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been retained. Differences in
chapter titles between the table of contents and individual chapter
headings for Chapters V, X, XV, XVIII, XXI, XXVI, and XXVII are
preserved here.
The following apparent typographical errors were corrected:
Page 86, “villge” changed to “village.” (before anyone else in the
village was born)
Page 126, “firtree” changed to “fir tree.” (sticks and pieces of dried
fir tree wood)
Page 127, “it” changed to “if.” (if she did not want to use them all)