The wooden shaft flew true and the ridged edges of the stone head cut cleanly through the chest of the antelope. An hour later I was back in the cave knowing that for the first time in weeks, we would all go to bed with full bellies.
“That thing is going to get you killed in the streets,” said a voice from back in the shadows.
“We don’t have any streets yet. What thing?”
“That stupid thing you call a spear. We hunt and fight with clubs, everybody knows that. You bash them over the head, that’s how it’s done. Rocks worked for years, but these days we all have mil-spec clubs in our carry rotation. My father ran a club he called Glock because of the noise it made when he hit an enemy with it. He carried it all his life and he lived to be 26, so that’s good enough for me. This sharp stick you throw through the air will get someone killed.”
“Exactly, it killed those two guys from across the river who tried to take my women last week with their clubs. Well, to be honest, one had a club, the other was old school and brought a rock hidden inside his ‘whack me first’ concealment loincloth. I took them both out before they could get close enough to hit me with anything.”
“We spent millions of years building the muscle memory needed to fight with a club. Switching platforms will get you killed when something happens and you lose your fine motor skills,” he said.
“That also wasn’t the case a month ago when we cornered a mastodon against the big cliff and Thag and Urgh both got stomped trying to club it. I came in under him, through its back legs where he couldn’t see me, and I used this spear to stick him in the heart. As I keep telling you, it’s all about placement. But you wouldn’t know about any of that because you were off ‘finding yourself’ and not around to help. Now I have to feed Thag and Urgh’s women.”
“Hey, I have issues and I am working through them, OK? Back off.”
Before I could say anything he ran back to the fire yelling at me and waving something in his hand.
“What is this thing?”
“I call it a bow.”
“What’s it do?”
“It flings those little spears over there in that hollowed-out mastodon bone. I call them arrows.”
I took the bow from him and fired three arrows rapid-fire into one of the sabertooth-tiger-skin targets.
“You are a witch,” he screamed. “What sort of blasphemy is this?”
“Well, to be clear, blasphemy hasn’t been invented yet, either. Or witches, for that matter. But to your point, this is for fighting off roving gangs of ninjas. Or pirates. Although neither ninjas nor pirates have been invented yet. Clearly, we have a lot of work to do. The thing is, this bow will be handy when the guys across the river come all at once. My spears are heavy, so I can only carry seven or eight at a time. If I get attacked by too many guys at once, I might run out of spears. With this bow thing, I have lots more options. I am working on this technique I call spray and pray. Nobody gets it yet because we haven’t invented praying, but we will.”
“How many of those arrow things does that bone hold?” He asked me. “I tried to count and failed.”
“It holds as many as I have fingers and toes, which I call 20. You failed because of the fingers that got bit off after you tried to hit that giant, short-nose bear with your club.”
“I did hit him! Right in his groin.”
“Yeah, how did that work out for you? You really should have listened to me about placement.”
“Missing fingers are a sign of courage in battle.”
“It’s a sign of getting your butt kicked. They are missing because that’s how the guys across the river mark you after they defeat you and your clubs. As I recall, they used to just kill the young guys who tried to steal their women, but they almost ran out of young guys and would have had nobody left to fight with.
“You changed the subject again. Back to that thing in your hands, Nobody needs that many ‘arrows’ and besides, you should not be allowed to have something that shoots that fast. All these fancy new weapons are bad news. You are going to find out.”
“In that case,” I said. “I won’t bother to show you this thing I call an atlatl.”
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