Indian implements

When I was ten or so Ralph Steinmetz,
my friend's dad who was a collector,
gave me some Indian implements:
a hide skinner, arrow points, a spear head
and something that for years I thought was a tomahawk.
Where the grove is, to apply the handle, it is thick;
I wondered about that, because it would take a large branch to make a handle.

Recently I saw an identical stone at the Norwalk Firelands Museum,
the oldest operating museum in Ohio, with one of the states
largest collections of Indian artifacts -
I learned the stone looks like a tomahawk
but was used with a line of gut or leather tied around it,
swung in a circle, then struck as a weapon.

I always thought the Indian stones were a few hundred years old;
but they made them long before the cowboys arrived,
this one is dated from eight thousand years ago.

Time flies, and we keep learning
Good holidays and the best to you in 2016