Arrow Making

At first, I had begun to run around once again looking for any type of berry I could find to try and see if any produced a substance that could be used as a sort of adhesive to help better stick the rope and the arrowhead, plus also the feathers I would soon acquire.

But as I have mentioned before, no tree sap or honey, so that dream was pretty much dead unless I could find a berry juice substitute that worker, which I could not find after a couple of hours of searching.

And while I certainly could have just continued searching for another couple of hours, I decided to simply focus on collecting the feathers first before going back to looking for berries or most likely simply try and find another solution.

Finding Birds in the amazon was no problem since they often frequented the Suri bug farm and were occasionally fed seeds from fruit people found nearby or very rarely given some Suri. Hence, the real question was what bird I should choose rather than where to find one.

There was certainly a big difference in size, with there even occasionally being chicken-like birds approaching and leaving into the wilderness; in the end, though, I opted for parrot feathers since they were the best sized for the type of arrow I was making.

And while I would have opted to collect some feathers that just naturally fell off from the birds that visited, the parrots hadn't dropped any on the ground, meaning that I would have to take some from them by force; therefore, I would have to trap them in order to collect them.

This was thankfully surprisingly easy since none of them had become accustomed to buildings and the fact that they could be trapped inside if the windows and doors were closed, so all I had to do was just put some Suri inside a house and then wait.

They fell for the bait almost immediately, and I closed the door. Why didn't they just go to the Suri farm? The Suri in the house was undefended, while the Suri farm was constantly protected from them (plus there was currently no live Suri inside), so they took what they could.

Seemingly as though unaware that they were traped, the parrots were pretty calm, making it easy for me to enter the house. Once inside, I ruffled their feathers to their slight discontent, managing to get a total of 9 feathers that had apparently 'fallen off' and been stuck in with the rest, meaning that thankfully I didn't have to force any off of their skin.

Since I had gotten what I needed from them, I opened the door and let them go, which they did immediately since they had gotten everything they had come for. So now, having secured the feathers, I grabbed two and split them in half to collect the four half feathers I needed.

From there, since I had no glue just to apply to the feathers to stick them onto the arrow, I decided to use the copper arrow point that I had taken off of the front and caved small holes on four sides of the arrow wide enough for the tip of the feather to fit it.

After making sure that the feathers were straight and in place, I decided to grab a small amount of wet clay and filled in the small amount of empty space caused by the cylindrical shaper formed at the end of the parrot's feather.

It was then that I suddenly had the idea just to use clay to keep the arrowhead in place. However, to do that, I would have to make it so that the arrowhead would have a hole that the clay could go through to hold the arrow in place still even when it dried like the feathers at the back of the arrow.

So, knowing that copper annealing would no longer do the trick, I decided to just switch to making bronze arrowheads so that way I could get the shape I wanted while also getting a stronger and more durable arrowhead down the road.

Therefore, I grabbed some of the charcoal I had made in mass when I produced the bronze daggers and created a mold for the arrow, adding a triangular opening to better grip the crack between the wood to be placed in.

Even though I had been doing this for about a month, everyone in the new settlement (where the draft furnace and mine were located) seemed to be really interested in the process of making bronze weapons, probably because I had not let any of them try to make one.

I was not planning to do so anytime soon either, as we had no sort of protective gear whatsoever. Unlike the bronze dagger, which at the very least gave them a chance at survival, I am pretty sure 3rd-degree burns would just be the most torturous slow death method I could think of, with what was available right now, that is.

So, once the arrowhead was ready, I recarved the arrow slightly shorter this time, making it so that the head consists of two empty spaces the clay could cling on when it dried and a slightly deeper triangular hole in the middle for the back of the arrow point to be put into.

Once that was done, I added an extra layer of support for both the feathers at the back and the bronze tip by tying them with the rope I had made. Although it was certainly not what I was expecting when I started, I was sort of proud of it.

So, having what would hopefully not just be a prototype and a final product, I shot the arrow at an orange I had set in between the branches of a tree. And even though I ended up missing by a little bit, it was still a lot better than any of my shots before, plus the arrow was basically unharmed when I went to pick it up with the bronze tip still being sharp despite hitting a tree branch head-on.