Monday, November 12, 2007

www.whiteville.com

By JEFFERSON WEAVER
Staff writer

It was just another rock kicked up out of the ground.

The blessed rains of the previous week had washed away some of the shame of the drought, leaving the ground still thirsty, but at least the dogs no longer kicked up clouds of dust as they joyously ran to greet the morning.

As has always been my habit, I glanced down to see what might have wandered through the yard during the night; one of the late Brother Bare Tail’s progeny had visited the dogs’ breakfast dishes, but aside from the possum tracks and a few worm trails, there was nothing interesting.

Except the rock.

Someone else had obviously been interested in this rock many years ago, and he also picked it up. He shaped it into an irregular diamond now called a Pickwick or New Market. I didn’t know the point was called by those names until about an hour’s worth of research, and even then I couldn’t be sure when it might have been made.

The point was broken off another chunk of rock and carefully chipped and shaped until it was slightly smaller than a man’s thumb. The bottom of the point is fuller than the top, to allow it to be tied onto a spear or carefully fitted into an atlatl, a kind of magnum-force throwing spear (more correctly called a dart) from three dozen centuries ago.

I’ve always been a casual arrowhead hunter, combing freshly-plowed and rained fields, or sifting through handsful of dirt from a construction project. My brother-in-law Gil scored about 100 on the cool meter the day he showed me and his brother Mike how to hunt for arrowheads.

We lived in an area rich with points back then. I didn’t understand about game migrations and the fall line of the Cape Fear, and how so many early Carolinians made semi-permanent homes in that area years before Columbus got around to bumping into the West Indies. I’d never heard of the Green Path, or any of the tribes that supposedly met to trade near our hometown for decades before Amadas and Barlowe and John Smith and John Lawson began researching, trading with, fighting, and in some cases corrupting the Indians of North Carolina.

Everyone in our area knew of the dozens of points and pottery shards found in the earth of a hill outside town, out where a mobile home park sprung up. I heard from a childhood friend a few years ago who said people still gather arrowheads and artifacts from the bottom of that hill after a good rainstorm.

Storms were always our friends when I was a point-hunter; somewhere I have a nearly perfect white quartz bird point, a beautiful piece of detailed work that was designed not for looks, but to bring home supper. Unlike most points, this one is intact; whether it was lost or never fired at a target we’ll never know.

The mud-colored stone point I found the other morning had definitely been fired or thrown or stuck in something.

The tip is broken in the exact spot that a researcher with too much time on his hands discovered 99 percent of all stone spear and dart points would break when thrown.

I have no idea if the point’s previous owner brought down a deer in what’s now my back yard, but it is plausible. It could just as easily have been another animal, a convenient log used as a target – or another human being, since the folks who lived along our ridge by the Cape Fear had a rather direct way of dealing with people they didn’t like.

I have no idea if the prior owner was a good man or bad; I do know he had to patiently, meticulously chip piece after piece of stone off the larger piece, probably using a flattened piece of wood as an anvil, or else a folded piece of deer skin pressed against one knee.

When the work was finished, he lashed it tightly to what had been a largish stick until it, too, was carefully worked down with crude tools to a long narrow shaft. If he was a craftsman, he scraped the shaft until one end was slightly heavier than the other, and incised a small groove for the head.

With the sinew from a deer’s leg or back – or the same tissue from a bear’s lower leg – he wrapped the stone in place, tighter and tighter.

Then he was ready.

Did he creep quietly through the cathedral of the pine forest, stalking closer and closer until he reared back and threw? Did he have to track a wounded deer through the thickets, not out of the ethical sense of a modern sportsman but because that deer was his family’s food?

Or did the point break off in something infinitely larger, a bear or Eastern bison that would provide his family with food, furs, and bone tools, and himself a reputation?

Or was the point broken in a last stand atop the eroded ridge under my home, one last desperate measure to defend himself against an enemy?

Maybe the point was cast aside after a trading session with the odd pale-skinned men from across the ocean, the ones who brought sharp metal points for spears and arrows, points which didn’t break and could be used again and again.

Or was it something far more pedestrian – a clean miss when the wind shifted or the deer jumped or his own arm twitched.

Again, we’ll never know.

Still, finding that point in the yard took me back to when a young soldier took the time to show two boys that we weren’t the first people on this ground. I doubt Gil looks for arrowheads much anymore – there aren’t many good fields in the Louisiana bayous – but Mike still lives where we wandered the fields in search of another lost treasure.

I hope he takes his children out sometimes after a hard rain, and if they can find a plowed field between the subdivisions, they look for the magic that could be found in a field after a rainstorm.