Eleanor’s Little Book of Interesting Facts, Part 5
I would like to refer the reader to the introduction at the beginning of part one. These “facts” are from memory, told to my daughter as I put her to bed. I make them as accurate as I can without looking up references, but I do not guarantee them.
Hunting requires patience and perseverance, when an Eskimo is hunting seal he lets his dogs smell out a blow hole in the ice, which will be buried by snow. He drives the dogs back and sticks a thin stick through the snow with a feather attached to the top and stands over it, harpoon raised at the ready. When the seal comes to the hole for air it touches the end of the stick and the feather moves and the man plunges the harpoon down. Sometimes he can wait for hours in temperatures as low as minus twenty but when the seal notices the touch of the stick it will panic and dive so he must react instantly.
When he has finished hunting he does a bit of engineering that would be impossible in this bedroom, firstly he skins the seals, guts them and feeds his dogs the offal he does not want. Then he rolls all but one of the pelts up, he will have brought a pair of caribou antler sledge-runners that he will stand up in the snow. The unrolled pelt is cut into strips, some of which he uses as lashings to bind the rolled pelts across the runners to make a bed on which he puts the carcasses. He then throws water over the whole thing, this freezes and binds it all together. Then he cuts traces and harness for his dogs from the remainder of the unrolled pelt, attaches the dogs to the sled he has made and drives them home, here, of course, the whole thing would just be an unpleasant soggy mess.
An Eskimo’s understanding of technology is excellent. When the oil pipeline was being built across Alaska the oil companies were looking for people who could work in sub zero temperatures. They found that if you showed an Eskimo a diesel engine and explained the principles of it he was instantly interested and wanted to take it apart to look at it. Within a few hours would be able to take it apart and reassemble it single handed, these were people with no experience of the modern world.
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The story of the Eskimo hunter standing for hours reminded me of another hunter. This one dates from the nineteen fifties in one of the last Australian aboriginal groups still living in their traditional way. He had found a water hole with emu tracks coming down to it and decided to hunt the bird. He turned up at the water hole just before dawn to be sure he was in place before the bird arrived and took up position beside a large rock which gave him some cover. He fitted his spear into his woomera, positioned himself ready to throw so he would not alarm the bird by moving, and waited. At first, when the sun came up, he was standing in the shade of the rock but as the morning went on and the sun moved round he was in full sunlight for hours, the sort of sunshine that would make full summer seem a bit dull, then when the bird turned up and he threw his spear it snapped in the woomera and he missed.
After he had finished cursing he explained that it was really only his own fault, he had been using a spear he made from Mulga tree wood. He took the anthropologist to see a cousin who was a specialist at making spears. They went into the bush and found a large acacia bush, the cousin walked round the bush snapping twigs until he decided which side of the tree was more supple. Then he examined the ground intently until he found a row of small cracks in the earth. He dug here and found a large root which he excavated for about seven or eight feet, throwing spear length, cut it and lifted it from the ground. The bark was stripped off with his teeth, well maybe it is not called bark on roots but you know what I mean. Then he scraped it down with a splinter of flint.
This left him with a long wobbly stick which he heated at the bends over a small fire. It was completely green and unseasoned, so he was able to bend it by holding it in two places and pushing with his foot between them after he had heated it. He did this repeatedly until he had a dead straight stick. One of those things where the principle is simple but it needs lots of skill and very hard feet. Then he sharpened one end, hardened it off in the fire, cut the other end to fit the woomera, and had a quality new spear.
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Woomera is the aboriginal word for what we call a spear thrower, that’s why it was used to name the rocket testing range in Australia. Primitive people tend not to have single function tools. A woomera is a piece of wood shaped like a trough with narrow ends, one end is for holding the other has a piece of flint embedded in a lump of spinifex resin stuck to it. This would fit into the notch on the spear when you wanted to throw it.
It would also act as a small axe and was a store of spinifex resin which comes from spinifex grass and is the aborigines universal glue and “fixit” agent.
Take the flint out and it could be used as a knife.
If for some reason they lost their fire and had to start another one they would fluff up a bit of dry kangaroo dung (mainly fibre and good tinder) and ram it in the crack of a log, then one either side would each hold an end of the woomera and saw it back and forth on the log generating heat to catch the tinder.
If they found a source of something like berries they would use the trough to collect them.
In the centre section they would paint a depiction of the travels of the God-animals as they created the earth in the dream time. Because this was an ordered story one could use it like a map to suss the relationship between different parts of the story.
So this one tool which we call spear thrower was actually a map, a glue pot, an axe or knife, a bowl and a firelighter, and for all I know other things as well, this is why many anthropologists like to use the native word for things, translations can be restrictive and misleading.
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