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Jack London. Before Adam
(1907)
MAP
CHAPTER I
"These are our ancestors, and their history is our
history.
Remember that as surely as we one day
swung down out of the trees and walked upright,
just as surely, on a far earlier day,
did we crawl up out of the sea
and achieve our first adventure on land."
Pictures! Pictures! Pictures! Often, before I learned, did
I wonder whence came the multitudes of pictures that thronged
my dreams; for they were pictures the like of which I had never
seen in real wake-a-day life. They tormented my childhood,
making of my dreams a procession of nightmares and a little
later convincing me that I was different from my kind, a
creature unnatural and accursed.
In my days only did I attain any measure of happiness. My
nights marked the reign of fear--and such fear! I make bold to
state that no man of all the men who walk the earth with me
ever suffer fear of like kind and degree. For my fear is the
fear of long ago, the fear that was rampant in the Younger
World, and in the youth of the Younger World. In short, the
fear that reigned supreme in that period known as the
Mid-Pleistocene.
What do I mean? I see explanation is necessary before I
can tell you of the substance of my dreams. Otherwise, little
could you know of the meaning of the things I know so well. As
I write this, all the beings and happenings of that other world
rise up before me in vast phantasmagoria, and I know that to
you they would be rhymeless and reasonless.
What to you the friendship of Lop-Ear, the warm lure of
the Swift One, the lust and the atavism of Red-Eye? A screaming
incoherence and no more. And a screaming incoherence, likewise,
the doings of the Fire People and the Tree People, and the
gibbering councils of the horde. For you know not the peace of
the cool caves in the cliffs, the circus of the drinking-places
at the end of the day. You have never felt the bite of the
morning wind in the tree-tops, nor is the taste of young bark
sweet in your mouth.
It would be better, I dare say, for you to make your
approach, as I made mine, through my childhood. As a boy I was
very like other boys--in my waking hours. It was in my sleep
that I was different. From my earliest recollection my sleep
was a period of terror. Rarely were my dreams tinctured with
happiness. As a rule, they were stuffed with fear--and with a
fear so strange and alien that it had no ponderable quality. No
fear that I experienced in my waking life resembled the fear
that possessed me in my sleep. It was of a quality and kind
that transcended all my experiences.
For instance, I was a city boy, a city child, rather, to
whom the country was an unexplored domain. Yet I never dreamed
of cities; nor did a house ever occur in any of my dreams. Nor,
for that matter, did any of my human kind ever break through
the wall of my sleep. I, who had seen trees only in parks and
illustrated books, wandered in my sleep through interminable
forests. And further, these dream trees were not a mere blur on
my vision. They were sharp and distinct. I was on terms of
practised intimacy with them. I saw every branch and twig; I
saw and knew every different leaf.
Well do I remember the first time in my waking life that I
saw an oak tree. As I looked at the leaves and branches and
gnarls, it came to me with distressing vividness that I had
seen that same kind of tree many and countless times n my
sleep. So I was not surprised, still later on in my life, to
recognize instantly, the first time I saw them, trees such as
the spruce, the yew, the birch, and the laurel. I had seen them
all before, and was seeing them even then, every night, in my
sleep.
This, as you have already discerned, violates the first
law of dreaming, namely, that in one's dreams one sees only
what he has seen in his waking life, or combinations of the
things he has seen in his waking life. But all my dreams
violated this law. In my dreams I never saw ANYTHING of which I
had knowledge in my waking life. My dream life and my waking
life were lives apart, with not one thing in common save
myself. I was the connecting link that somehow lived both
lives.
Early in my childhood I learned that nuts came from the
grocer, berries from the fruit man; but before ever that
knowledge was mine, in my dreams I picked nuts from trees, or
gathered them and ate them from the ground underneath trees,
and in the same way I ate berries from vines and bushes. This
was beyond any experience of mine.
I shall never forget the first time I saw blueberries
served on the table. I had never seen blueberries before, and
yet, at the sight of them, there leaped up in my mind memories
of dreams wherein I had wandered through swampy land eating my
fill of them. My mother set before me a dish of the berries. I
filled my spoon, but before I raised it to my mouth I knew just
how they would taste. Nor was I disappointed. It was the same
tang that I had tasted a thousand times in my sleep.
Snakes? Long before I had heard of the existence of
snakes, I was tormented by them in my sleep. They lurked for me
in the forest glades; leaped up, striking, under my feet;
squirmed off through the dry grass or across naked patches of
rock; or pursued me into the tree-tops, encircling the trunks
with their great shining bodies, driving me higher and higher
or farther and farther out on swaying and crackling branches,
the ground a dizzy distance beneath me. Snakes!--with their
forked tongues, their beady eyes and glittering scales, their
hissing and their rattling--did I not already know them far too
well on that day of my first circus when I saw the
snake-charmer lift them up? They were old friends of mine,
enemies rather, that peopled my nights with fear.
Ah, those endless forests, and their horror-haunted gloom!
For what eternities have I wandered through them, a timid,
hunted creature, starting at the least sound, frightened of my
own shadow, keyed-up, ever alert and vigilant, ready on the
instant to dash away in mad flight for my life. For I was the
prey of all manner of fierce life that dwelt in the forest, and
it was in ecstasies of fear that I fled before the hunting
monsters.
When I was five years old I went to my first circus. I
came home from it sick--but not from peanuts and pink lemonade.
Let me tell you. As we entered the animal tent, a hoarse
roaring shook the air. I tore my hand loose from my father's
and dashed wildly back through the entrance. I collided with
people, fell down; and all the time I was screaming with
terror. My father caught me and soothed me. He pointed to the
crowd of people, all careless of the roaring, and cheered me
with assurances of safety.
Nevertheless, it was in fear and trembling, and with much
encouragement on his part, that I at last approached the lion's
cage. Ah, I knew him on the instant. The beast! The terrible
one! And on my inner vision flashed the memories of my
dreams,--the midday sun shining on tall grass, the wild bull
grazing quietly, the sudden parting of the grass before the
swift rush of the tawny one, his leap to the bull's back, the
crashing and the bellowing, and the crunch crunch of bones; or
again, the cool quiet of the water-hole, the wild horse up to
his knees and drinking softly, and then the tawny one--always
the tawny one!-- the leap, the screaming and the splashing of
the horse, and the crunch crunch of bones; and yet again, the
sombre twilight and the sad silence of the end of day, and then
the great full-throated roar, sudden, like a trump of doom, and
swift upon it the insane shrieking and chattering among the
trees, and I, too, am trembling with fear and am one of the
many shrieking and chattering among the trees.
At the sight of him, helpless, within the bars of his
cage, I became enraged. I gritted my teeth at him, danced up
and down, screaming an incoherent mockery and making antic
faces. He responded, rushing against the bars and roaring back
at me his impotent wrath. Ah, he knew me, too, and the sounds I
made were the sounds of old time and intelligible to him.
My parents were frightened. "The child is ill," said my
mother. "He is hysterical," said my father. I never told them,
and they never knew. Already had I developed reticence
concerning this quality of mine, this semi-disassociation of
personality as I think I am justified in calling it.
I saw the snake-charmer, and no more of the circus did I
see that night. I was taken home, nervous and overwrought, sick
with the invasion of my real life by that other life of my
dreams.
I have mentioned my reticence. Only once did I confide the
strangeness of it all to another. He was a boy--my chum; and we
were eight years old. From my dreams I reconstructed for him
pictures of that vanished world in which I do believe I once
lived. I told him of the terrors of that early time, of Lop-Ear
and the pranks we played, of the gibbering councils, and of the
Fire People and their squatting places.
He laughed at me, and jeered, and told me tales of ghosts
and of the dead that walk at night. But mostly did he laugh at
my feeble fancy. I told him more, and he laughed the harder. I
swore in all earnestness that these things were so, and he
began to look upon me queerly. Also, he gave amazing garblings
of my tales to our playmates, until all began to look upon me
queerly.
It was a bitter experience, but I learned my lesson. I was
different from my kind. I was abnormal with something they
could not understand, and the telling of which would cause only
misunderstanding. When the stories of ghosts and goblins went
around, I kept quiet. I smiled grimly to myself. I thought of
my nights of fear, and knew that mine were the real
things--real as life itself, not attenuated vapors and surmised
shadows.
For me no terrors resided in the thought of bugaboos and
wicked ogres. The fall through leafy branches and the dizzy
heights; the snakes that struck at me as I dodged and leaped
away in chattering flight; the wild dogs that hunted me across
the open spaces to the timber--these were terrors concrete and
actual, happenings and not imaginings, things of the living
flesh and of sweat and blood. Ogres and bugaboos and I had been
happy bed-fellows, compared with these terrors that made their
bed with me throughout my childhood, and that still bed with
me, now, as I write this, full of years.
CHAPTER II
I have said that in my dreams I never saw a human being.
Of this fact I became aware very early, and felt poignantly the
lack of my own kind. As a very little child, even, I had a
feeling, in the midst of the horror of my dreaming, that if I
could find but one man, only one human, I should be saved from
my dreaming, that I should be surrounded no more by haunting
terrors. This thought obsessed me every night of my life for
years--if only I could find that one human and be saved!
I must iterate that I had this thought in the midst of my
dreaming, and I take it as an evidence of the merging of my two
personalities, as evidence of a point of contact between the
two disassociated parts of me. My dream personality lived in
the long ago, before ever man, as we know him, came to be; and
my other and wake-a-day personality projected itself, to the
extent of the knowledge of man's existence, into the substance
of my dreams.
Perhaps the psychologists of the book will find fault with
my way of using the phrase, "disassociation of personality." I
know their use of it, yet am compelled to use it in my own way
in default of a better phrase. I take shelter behind the
inadequacy of the English language. And now to the explanation
of my use, or misuse, of the phrase.
It was not till I was a young man, at college, that I got
any clew to the significance of my dreams, and to the cause of
them. Up to that time they had been meaningless and without
apparent causation. But at college I discovered evolution and
psychology, and learned the explanation of various strange
mental states and experiences. For instance, there was the
falling-through-space dream--the commonest dream experience,
one practically known, by first-hand experience, to all men.
This, my professor told me, was a racial memory. It dated
back to our remote ancestors who lived in trees. With them,
being tree-dwellers, the liability of falling was an
ever-present menace. Many lost their lives that way; all of
them experienced terrible falls, saving themselves by clutching
branches as they fell toward the ground.
Now a terrible fall, averted in such fashion, was
productive of shock. Such shock was productive of molecular
changes in the cerebral cells. These molecular changes were
transmitted to the cerebral cells of progeny, became, in short,
racial memories. Thus, when you and I, asleep or dozing off to
sleep, fall through space and awake to sickening consciousness
just before we strike, we are merely remembering what happened
to our arboreal ancestors, and which has been stamped by
cerebral changes into the heredity of the race.
There is nothing strange in this, any more than there is
anything strange in an instinct. An instinct is merely a habit
that is stamped into the stuff of our heredity, that is all. It
will be noted, in passing, that in this falling dream which is
so familiar to you and me and all of us, we never strike
bottom. To strike bottom would be destruction. Those of our
arboreal ancestors who struck bottom died forthwith. True, the
shock of their fall was communicated to the cerebral cells, but
they died immediately, before they could have progeny. You and
I are descended from those that did not strike bottom; that is
why you and I, in our dreams, never strike bottom.
And now we come to disassociation of personality. We never
have this sense of falling when we are wide awake. Our
wake-a-day personality has no experience of it. Then--and here
the argument is irresistible--it must be another and distinct
personality that falls when we are asleep, and that has had
experience of such falling--that has, in short, a memory of
past-day race experiences, just as our wake-a-day personality
has a memory of our wake-a-day experiences.
It was at this stage in my reasoning that I began to see
the light. And quickly the light burst upon me with dazzling
brightness, illuminating and explaining all that had been weird
and uncanny and unnaturally impossible in my dream experiences.
In my sleep it was not my wake-a-day personality that took
charge of me; it was another and distinct personality,
possessing a new and totally different fund of experiences,
and, to the point of my dreaming, possessing memories of those
totally different experiences.
What was this personality? When had it itself lived a
wake-a-day life on this planet in order to collect this fund of
strange experiences? These were questions that my dreams
themselves answered. He lived in the long ago, when the world
was young, in that period that we call the Mid-Pleistocene. He
fell from the trees but did not strike bottom. He gibbered with
fear at the roaring of the lions. He was pursued by beasts of
prey, struck at by deadly snakes. He chattered with his kind in
council, and he received rough usage at the hands of the Fire
People in the day that he fled before them.
But, I hear you objecting, why is it that these racial
memories are not ours as well, seeing that we have a vague
other-personality that falls through space while we sleep?
And I may answer with another question. Why is a
two-headed calf? And my own answer to this is that it is a
freak. And so I answer your question. I have this
other-personality and these complete racial memories because I
am a freak.
But let me be more explicit.
The commonest race memory we have is the
falling-through-space dream. This other-personality is very
vague. About the only memory it has is that of falling. But
many of us have sharper, more distinct other-personalities.
Many of us have the flying dream, the pursuing-monster dream,
color dreams, suffocation dreams, and the reptile and vermin
dreams. In short, while this other-personality is vestigial in
all of us, in some of us it is almost obliterated, while in
others of us it is more pronounced. Some of us have stronger
and completer race memories than others.
It is all a question of varying degree of possession of
the other-personality. In myself, the degree of possession is
enormous. My other-personality is almost equal in power with my
own personality. And in this matter I am, as I said, a freak--a
freak of heredity.
I do believe that it is the possession of this
other-personality--but not so strong a one as mine--that has in
some few others given rise to belief in personal reincarnation
experiences. It is very plausible to such people, a most
convincing hypothesis. When they have visions of scenes they
have never seen in the flesh, memories of acts and events
dating back in time, the simplest explanation is that they have
lived before.
But they make the mistake of ignoring their own duality.
They do not recognize their other-personality. They think it is
their own personality, that they have only one personality; and
from such a premise they can conclude only that they have lived
previous lives.
But they are wrong. It is not reincarnation. I have
visions of myself roaming through the forests of the Younger
World; and yet it is not myself that I see but one that is only
remotely a part of me, as my father and my grandfather are
parts of me less remote. This other-self of mine is an
ancestor, a progenitor of my progenitors in the early line of
my race, himself the progeny of a line that long before his
time developed fingers and toes and climbed up into the trees.
I must again, at the risk of boring, repeat that I am, in
this one thing, to be considered a freak. Not alone do I
possess racial memory to an enormous extent, but I possess the
memories of one particular and far-removed progenitor. And yet,
while this is most unusual, there is nothing over-remarkable
about it.
Follow my reasoning. An instinct is a racial memory. Very
good. Then you and I and all of us receive these memories from
our fathers and mothers, as they received them from their
fathers and mothers. Therefore there must be a medium whereby
these memories are transmitted from generation to generation.
This medium is what Weismann terms the "germplasm." It carries
the memories of the whole evolution of the race. These memories
are dim and confused, and many of them are lost. But some
strains of germplasm carry an excessive freightage of
memories--are, to be scientific, more atavistic than other
strains; and such a strain is mine. I am a freak of heredity,
an atavistic nightmare--call me what you will; but here I am,
real and alive, eating three hearty meals a day, and what are
you going to do about it?
And now, before I take up my tale, I want to anticipate
the doubting Thomases of psychology, who are prone to scoff,
and who would otherwise surely say that the coherence of my
dreams is due to overstudy and the subconscious projection of
my knowledge of evolution into my dreams. In the first place, I
have never been a zealous student. I graduated last of my
class. I cared more for athletics, and--there is no reason I
should not confess it--more for billiards.
Further, I had no knowledge of evolution until I was at
college, whereas in my childhood
and youth I had already lived in my dreams all the
details of that other, long-ago life. I
will say, however, that these details were mixed and
incoherent until I came to know the
science of evolution. Evolution was the key. It gave the
explanation, gave sanity to the
pranks of this atavistic brain of mine that, modern and
normal, harked back to a past
so remote as to be contemporaneous with the raw
beginnings of mankind.
For in this past I know of, man, as we to-day know him,
did not exist. It was in the period of his becoming that I must
have lived and had my being.
CHAPTER III
The commonest dream of my early childhood was something
like this: It seemed that I was very small and that I lay
curled up in a sort of nest of twigs and boughs. Sometimes I
was lying on my back. In this position it seemed that I spent
many hours, watching the play of sunlight on the foliage and
the stirring of the leaves by the wind. Often the nest itself
moved back and forth when the wind was strong.
But always, while so lying in the nest, I was mastered as
of tremendous space beneath me. I never saw it, I never peered
over the edge of the nest to see; but I KNEW and feared that
space that lurked just beneath me and that ever threatened me
like a maw of some all-devouring monster.
This dream, in which I was quiescent and which was more
like a condition than an experience of action, I dreamed very
often in my early childhood. But suddenly, there would rush
into the very midst of it strange forms and ferocious
happenings, the thunder and crashing of storm, or unfamiliar
landscapes such as in my wake-a-day life I had never seen. The
result was confusion and nightmare. I could comprehend nothing
of it. There was no logic of sequence.
You see, I did not dream consecutively. One moment I was a
wee babe of the Younger World lying in my tree nest; the next
moment I was a grown man of the Younger World locked in combat
with the hideous Red-Eye; and the next moment I was creeping
carefully down to the water-hole in the heat of the day.
Events, years apart in their occurrence in the Younger World,
occurred with me within the space of several minutes, or
seconds.
It was all a jumble, but this jumble I shall not inflict
upon you. It was not until I was a young man and had dreamed
many thousand times, that everything straightened out and
became clear and plain. Then it was that I got the clew of
time, and was able to piece together events and actions in
their proper order. Thus was I able to reconstruct the vanished
Younger World as it was at the time I lived in it--or at the
time my other-self lived in it. The distinction does not
matter; for I, too, the modern man, have gone back and lived
that early life in the company of my other-self.
For your convenience, since this is to be no sociological
screed, I shall frame together the different events into a
comprehensive story. For there is a certain thread of
continuity and happening that runs through all the dreams.
There is my friendship with Lop-Ear, for instance. Also, there
is the enmity of Red-Eye, and the love of the Swift One. Taking
it all in all, a fairly coherent and interesting story I am
sure you will agree.
I do not remember much of my mother. Possibly the earliest
recollection I have of her--and certainly the sharpest--is the
following: It seemed I was lying on the ground. I was somewhat
older than during the nest days, but still helpless. I rolled
about in the dry leaves, playing with them and making crooning,
rasping noises in my throat. The sun shone warmly and I was
happy, and comfortable. I was in a little open space. Around
me, on all sides, were bushes and fern-like growths, and
overhead and all about were the trunks and branches of forest
trees.
Suddenly I heard a sound. I sat upright and listened. I
made no movement. The little noises died down in my throat, and
I sat as one petrified. The sound drew closer. It was like the
grunt of a pig. Then I began to hear the sounds caused by the
moving of a body through the brush. Next I saw the ferns
agitated by the passage of the body. Then the ferns parted, and
I saw gleaming eyes, a long snout, and white tusks.
It was a wild boar. He peered at me curiously. He grunted
once or twice and shifted his weight from one foreleg to the
other, at the same time moving his head from side to side and
swaying the ferns. Still I sat as one petrified, my eyes
unblinking as I stared at him, fear eating at my heart.
It seemed that this movelessness and silence on my part
was what was expected of me. I was not to cry out in the face
of fear. It was a dictate of instinct. And so I sat there and
waited for I knew not what. The boar thrust the ferns aside and
stepped into the open. The curiosity went out of his eyes, and
they gleamed cruelly. He tossed his head at me threateningly
and advanced a step. This he did again, and yet again.
Then I screamed...or shrieked--I cannot describe it, but
it was a shrill and terrible cry. And it seems that it, too, at
this stage of the proceedings, was the thing expected of me.
From not far away came an answering cry. My sounds seemed
momentarily to disconcert the boar, and while he halted and
shifted his weight with indecision, an apparition burst upon
us.
She was like a large orangutan, my mother, or like a
chimpanzee, and yet, in sharp and definite ways, quite
different. She was heavier of build than they, and had less
hair. Her arms were not so long, and her legs were stouter. She
wore no clothes--only her natural hair. And I can tell you she
was a fury when she was excited.
And like a fury she dashed upon the scene. She was
gritting her teeth, making frightful grimaces, snarling,
uttering sharp and continuous cries that sounded like "kh-ah!
kh-ah!" So sudden and formidable was her appearance that the
boar involuntarily bunched himself together on the defensive
and bristled as she swerved toward him. Then she swerved toward
me. She had quite taken the breath out of him. I knew just what
to do in that moment of time she had gained. I leaped to meet
her, catching her about the waist and holding on hand and
foot--yes, by my feet; I could hold on by them as readily as by
my hands. I could feel in my tense grip the pull of the hair as
her skin and her muscles moved beneath with her efforts.
As I say, I leaped to meet her, and on the instant she
leaped straight up into the air, catching an overhanging branch
with her hands. The next instant, with clashing tusks, the boar
drove past underneath. He had recovered from his surprise and
sprung forward, emitting a squeal that was almost a trumpeting.
At any rate it was a call, for it was followed by the rushing
of bodies through the ferns and brush from all directions.
From every side wild hogs dashed into the open space--a
score of them. But my mother swung over the top of a thick
limb, a dozen feet from the ground, and, still holding on to
her, we perched there in safety. She was very excited. She
chattered and screamed, and scolded down at the bristling,
tooth-gnashing circle that had gathered beneath. I, too,
trembling, peered down at the angry beasts and did my best to
imitate my mother's cries.
From the distance came similar cries, only pitched deeper,
into a sort of roaring bass. These grew momentarily louder, and
soon I saw him approaching, my father--at least, by all the
evidence of the times, I am driven to conclude that he was my
father.
He was not an extremely prepossessing father, as fathers
go. He seemed half man, and half ape, and yet not ape, and not
yet man. I fail to describe him. There is nothing like him
to-day on the earth, under the earth, nor in the earth. He was
a large man in his day, and he must have weighed all of a
hundred and thirty pounds. His face was broad and flat, and the
eyebrows over-hung the eyes. The eyes themselves were small,
deep-set, and close together. He had practically no nose at
all. It was squat and broad, apparently with-out any bridge,
while the nostrils were like two holes in the face, opening
outward instead of down.
The forehead slanted back from the eyes, and the hair
began right at the eyes and ran up over the head. The head
itself was preposterously small and was supported on an equally
preposterous, thick, short neck.
There was an elemental economy about his body--as was
there about all our bodies. The chest was deep, it is true,
cavernously deep; but there were no full-swelling muscles, no
wide-spreading shoulders, no clean-limbed straightness, no
generous symmetry of outline. It represented strength, that
body of my father's, strength without beauty; ferocious,
primordial strength, made to clutch and gripe and rend and
destroy.
His hips were thin; and the legs, lean and hairy, were
crooked and stringy-muscled. In fact, my father's legs were
more like arms. They were twisted and gnarly, and with scarcely
the semblance of the full meaty calf such as graces your leg
and mine. I remember he could not walk on the flat of his foot.
This was because it was a prehensile foot, more like a hand
than a foot. The great toe, instead of being in line with the
other toes, opposed them, like a thumb, and its opposition to
the other toes was what enabled him to get a grip with his
foot. This was why he could not walk on the flat of his foot.
But his appearance was no more unusual than the manner of
his coming, there to my mother and me as we perched above the
angry wild pigs. He came through the trees, leaping from limb
to limb and from tree to tree; and he came swiftly. I can see
him now, in my wake-a-day life, as I write this, swinging along
through the trees, a four-handed, hairy creature, howling with
rage, pausing now and again to beat his chest with his clenched
fist, leaping ten-and-fifteen-foot gaps, catching a branch with
one hand and swinging on across another gap to catch with his
other hand and go on, never hesitating, never at a loss as to
how to proceed on his arboreal way.
And as I watched him I felt in my own being, in my very
muscles themselves, the surge and thrill of desire to go
leaping from bough to bough; and I felt also the guarantee of
the latent power in that being and in those muscles of mine.
And why not? Little boys watch their fathers swing axes and
fell trees, and feel in themselves that some day they, too,
will swing axes and fell trees. And so with me. The life that
was in me was constituted to do what my father did, and it
whispered to me secretly and ambitiously of aerial paths and
forest flights.
At last my father joined us. He was extremely angry. I
remember the out-thrust of his protruding underlip as he glared
down at the wild pigs. He snarled something like a dog, and I
remember that his eye-teeth were large, like fangs, and that
they impressed me tremendously.
His conduct served only the more to infuriate the pigs. He
broke off twigs and small branches and flung them down upon our
enemies. He even hung by one hand, tantalizingly just beyond
reach, and mocked them as they gnashed their tusks with
impotent rage. Not content with this, he broke off a stout
branch, and, holding on with one hand and foot, jabbed the
infuriated beasts in the sides and whacked them across their
noses. Needless to state, my mother and I enjoyed the sport.
But one tires of all good things, and in the end, my
father, chuckling maliciously the while, led the way across the
trees. Now it was that my ambitions ebbed away, and I became
timid, holding tightly to my mother as she climbed and swung
through space. I remember when the branch broke with her
weight. She had made a wide leap, and with the snap of the wood
I was overwhelmed with the sickening consciousness of falling
through space, the pair of us. The forest and the sunshine on
the rustling leaves vanished from my eyes. I had a fading
glimpse of my father abruptly arresting his progress to look,
and then all was blackness.
The next moment I was awake, in my sheeted bed, sweating,
trembling, nauseated. The window was up, and a cool air was
blowing through the room. The night-lamp was burning calmly.
And because of this I take it that the wild pigs did not get
us, that we never fetched bottom; else I should not be here
now, a thousand centuries after, to remember the event.
And now put yourself in my place for a moment. Walk with
me a bit in my tender childhood, bed with me a night and
imagine yourself dreaming such incomprehensible horrors.
Remember I was an inexperienced child. I had never seen a wild
boar in my life. For that matter I had never seen a
domesticated pig. The nearest approach to one that I had seen
was breakfast bacon sizzling in its fat. And yet here, real as
life, wild boars dashed through my dreams, and I, with
fantastic parents, swung through the lofty tree-spaces.
Do you wonder that I was frightened and oppressed by my
nightmare-ridden nights? I was accursed. And, worst of all, I
was afraid to tell. I do not know why, except that I had a
feeling of guilt, though I knew no better of what I was guilty.
So it was, through long years, that I suffered in silence,
until I came to man's estate and learned the why and wherefore
of my dreams.
CHAPTER IV
There is one puzzling thing about these prehistoric
memories of mine. It is the vagueness of the time element. I lo
not always know the order of events;--or can I tell, between
some events, whether one, two, or four or five years have
elapsed. I can only roughly tell the passage of time by judging
the changes in the appearance and pursuits of my fellows.
Also, I can apply the logic of events to the various
happenings. For instance, there is no doubt whatever that my
mother and I were treed by the wild pigs and fled and fell in
the days before I made the acquaintance of Lop-Ear, who became
what I may call my boyhood chum. And it is just as conclusive
that between these two periods I must have left my mother.
I have no memory of my father than the one I have given.
Never, in the years that followed, did he reappear. And from my
knowledge of the times, the only explanation possible lies in
that he perished shortly after the adventure with the wild
pigs. That it must have been an untimely end, there is no
discussion. He was in full vigor, and only sudden and violent
death could have taken him off. But I know not the manner of
his going--whether he was drowned in the river, or was
swallowed by a snake, or went into the stomach of old
Saber-Tooth, the tiger, is beyond my knowledge.
For know that I remember only the things I saw myself,
with my own eyes, in those prehistoric days. If my mother knew
my father's end, she never told me. For that matter I doubt if
she had a vocabulary adequate to convey such information.
Perhaps, all told, the Folk in that day had a vocabulary of
thirty or forty sounds.
I call them SOUNDS, rather than WORDS, because sounds they
were primarily. They had no fixed values, to be altered by
adjectives and adverbs. These latter were tools of speech not
yet invented. Instead of qualifying nouns or verbs by the use
of adjectives and adverbs, we qualified sounds by intonation,
by changes in quantity and pitch, by retarding and by
accelerating. The length of time employed in the utterance of a
particular sound shaded its meaning.
We had no conjugation. One judged the tense by the
context. We talked only concrete things because we thought only
concrete things. Also, we depended largely on pantomime. The
simplest abstraction was practically beyond our thinking; and
when one did happen to think one, he was hard put to
communicate it to his fellows. There were no sounds for it. He
was pressing beyond the limits of his vocabulary. If he
invented sounds for it, his fellows did not understand the
sounds. Then it was that he fell back on pantomime,
illustrating the thought wherever possible and at the same time
repeating the new sound over and over again.
Thus language grew. By the few sounds we possessed we were
enabled to think a short distance beyond those sounds; then
came the need for new sounds wherewith to express the new
thought. Sometimes, however, we thought too long a distance in
advance of our sounds, managed to achieve abstractions (dim
ones I grant), which we failed utterly to make known to other
folk. After all, language did not grow fast in that day.
Oh, believe me, we were amazingly simple. But we did know
a lot that is not known to-day. We could twitch our ears, prick
them up and flatten them down at will. And we could scratch
between our shoulders with ease. We could throw stones with our
feet. I have done it many a time. And for that matter, I could
keep my knees straight, bend forward from the hips, and touch,
not the tips of my fingers, but the points of my elbows, to the
ground. And as for bird-nesting--well, I only wish the
twentieth-century boy could see us. But we made no collections
of eggs. We ate them.
I remember--but I out-run my story. First let me tell of
Lop-Ear and our friendship. Very early in my life, I separated
from my mother. Possibly this was because, after the death of
my father, she took to herself a second husband. I have few
recollections of him, and they are not of the best. He was a
light fellow. There was no solidity to him. He was too voluble.
His infernal chattering worries me even now as I think of it.
His mind was too inconsequential to permit him to possess
purpose. Monkeys in their cages always remind me of him. He was
monkeyish. That is the best description I can give of him.
He hated me from the first. And I quickly learned to be
afraid of him and his malicious pranks. Whenever he came in
sight I crept close to my mother and clung to her. But I was
growing older all the time, and it was inevitable that I should
from time to time stray from her, and stray farther and
farther. And these were the opportunities that the Chatterer
waited for. (I may as well explain that we bore no names in
those days; were not known by any name. For the sake of
convenience I have myself given names to the various Folk I was
more closely in contact with, and the "Chatterer" is the most
fitting description I can find for that precious stepfather of
mine. As for me, I have named myself "Big-Tooth." My eye-teeth
were pronouncedly large.)
But to return to the Chatterer. He persistently terrorized
me. He was always pinching me and cuffing me, and on occasion
he was not above biting me. Often my mother interfered, and the
way she made his fur fly was a joy to see. But the result of
all this was a beautiful and unending family quarrel, in which
I was the bone of contention.
No, my home-life was not happy. I smile to myself as I
write the phrase. Home-life! Home! I had no home in the modern
sense of the term. My home was an association, not a
habitation. I lived in my mother's care, not in a house. And my
mother lived anywhere, so long as when night came she was above
the ground.
My mother was old-fashioned. She still clung to her trees.
It is true, the more progressive members of our horde lived in
the caves above the river. But my mother was suspicious and
unprogressive. The trees were good enough for her. Of course,
we had one particular tree in which we usually roosted, though
we often roosted in other trees when nightfall caught us. In a
convenient fork was a sort of rude platform of twigs and
branches and creeping things. It was more like a huge bird-nest
than anything else, though it was a thousand times cruder in
the weaving than any bird-nest. But it had one feature that I
have never seen attached to any bird-nest, namely, a roof.
Oh, not a roof such as modern man makes! Nor a roof such
as is made by the lowest aborigines of to-day. It was
infinitely more clumsy than the clumsiest handiwork of man--of
man as we know him. It was put together in a casual,
helter-skelter sort of way. Above the fork of the tree whereon
we rested was a pile of dead branches and brush. Four or five
adjacent forks held what I may term the various ridge-poles.
These were merely stout sticks an inch or so in diameter. On
them rested the brush and branches. These seemed to have been
tossed on almost aimlessly. There was no attempt at
thatching. And I must confess that the roof leaked
miserably in a heavy rain.
But the Chatterer. He made home-life a burden for both my
mother and me--and by home-life I mean, not the leaky nest in
the tree, but the group-life of the three of us. He was most
malicious in his persecution of me. That was the one purpose to
which he held steadfastly for longer than five minutes. Also,
as time went by, my mother was less eager in her defence of me.
I think, what of the continuous rows raised by the Chatterer,
that I must have become a nuisance to her. At any rate, the
situation went from bad to worse so rapidly that I should soon,
of my own volition, have left home. But the satisfaction of
performing so independent an act was denied me. Before I was
ready to go, I was thrown out. And I mean this literally.
The opportunity came to the Chatterer one day when I was
alone in the nest. My mother and the Chatterer had gone away
together toward the blueberry swamp. He must have planned the
whole thing, for I heard him returning alone through the
forest, roaring with self-induced rage as he came. Like all the
men of our horde, when they were angry or were trying to make
themselves angry, he stopped now and again to hammer on his
chest with his fist.
I realized the helplessness of my situation, and crouched
trembling in the nest. The Chatterer came directly to the
tree--I remember it was an oak tree--and began to climb up. And
he never ceased for a moment from his infernal row. As I have
said, our language was extremely meagre, and he must have
strained it by the variety of ways in which he informed me of
his undying hatred of me and of his intention there and then to
have it out with me.
As he climbed to the fork, I fled out the great horizontal
limb. He followed me, and out I went, farther and farther. At
last I was out amongst the small twigs and leaves. The
Chatterer was ever a coward, and greater always than any anger
he ever worked up was his caution. He was afraid to follow me
out amongst the leaves and twigs. For that matter, his greater
weight would have crashed him through the foliage before he
could have got to me.
But it was not necessary for him to reach me, and well he
knew it, the scoundrel! With a malevolent expression on his
face, his beady eyes gleaming with cruel intelligence, he began
teetering. Teetering!--and with me out on the very edge of the
bough, clutching at the twigs that broke continually with my
weight. Twenty feet beneath me was the earth.
Wildly and more--wildly he teetered, grinning at me his
gloating hatred. Then came the end. All four holds broke at the
same time, and I fell, back-downward, looking up at him, my
hands and feet still clutching the broken twigs. Luckily, there
were no wild pigs under me, and my fall was broken by the tough
and springy bushes.
Usually, my falls destroy my dreams, the nervous shock
being sufficient to bridge the thousand centuries in an instant
and hurl me wide awake into my little bed, where, perchance, I
lie sweating and trembling and hear the cuckoo clock calling
the hour in the hall. But this dream of my leaving home I have
had many times, and never yet have I been awakened by it.
Always do I crash, shrieking, down through the brush and fetch
up with a bump on the ground.
Scratched and bruised and whimpering, I lay where I had
fallen. Peering up through the bushes, I could see the
Chatterer. He had set up a demoniacal chant of joy and was
keeping time to it with his teetering. I quickly hushed my
whimpering. I was no longer in the safety of the trees, and I
knew the danger I ran of bringing upon myself the hunting
animals by too audible an expression of my grief.
I remember, as my sobs died down, that I became interested
in watching the strange light-effects produced by partially
opening and closing my tear-wet eyelids. Then I began to
investigate, and found that I was not so very badly damaged by
my fall. I had lost some hair and hide, here and there; the
sharp and jagged end of a broken branch had thrust fully an
inch into my forearm; and my right hip, which had borne the
brunt of my contact with the ground, was aching intolerably.
But these, after all, were only petty hurts. No bones were
broken, and in those days the flesh of man had finer healing
qualities than it has to-day. Yet it was a severe fall, for I
limped with my injured hip for fully a week afterward.
Next, as I lay in the bushes, there came upon me a feeling
of desolation, a consciousness that I was homeless. I made up
my mind never to return to my mother and the Chatterer. I would
go far away through the terrible forest, and find some tree for
myself in which to roost. As for food, I knew where to find it.
For the last year at least I had not been beholden to my mother
for food. All she had furnished me was protection and guidance.
I crawled softly out through the bushes. Once I looked
back and saw the Chatterer still chanting and teetering. It was
not a pleasant sight. I knew pretty well how to be cautious,
and I was exceedingly careful on this my first journey in the
world.
I gave no thought as to where I was going. I had but one
purpose, and that was to go away beyond the reach of the
Chatterer. I climbed into the trees and wandered on amongst
them for hours, passing from tree to tree and never touching
the ground. But I did not go in any particular direction, nor
did I travel steadily. It was my nature, as it was the nature
of all my folk, to be inconsequential. Besides, I was a mere
child, and I stopped a great deal to play by the way.
The events that befell me on my leaving home are very
vague in my mind. My dreams do not cover them. Much has my
other-self forgotten, and particularly at this very period. Nor
have I been able to frame up the various dreams so as to bridge
the gap between my leaving the home-tree and my arrival at the
caves.
I remember that several times I came to open spaces. These
I crossed in great trepidation, descending to the ground and
running at the top of my speed. I remember that there were days
of rain and days of sunshine, so that I must have wandered
alone for quite a time. I especially dream of my misery in the
rain, and of my sufferings from hunger and how I appeased it.
One very strong impression is of hunting little lizards on the
rocky top of an open knoll. They ran under the rocks, and most
of them escaped; but occasionally I turned over a stone and
caught one. I was frightened away from this knoll by snakes.
They did not pursue me. They were merely basking on flat rocks
in the sun. But such was my inherited fear of them that I fled
as fast as if they had been after me.
Then I gnawed bitter bark from young trees. I remember
vaguely the eating of many green nuts, with soft shells and
milky kernels. And I remember most distinctly suffering from a
stomach-ache. It may have been caused by the green nuts, and
maybe by the lizards. I do not know. But I do know that I was
fortunate in not being devoured during the several hours I was
knotted up on the ground with the colic.
CHAPTER V
My vision of the scene came abruptly, as I emerged from
the forest. I found myself on the edge of a large clear space.
On one side of this space rose up high bluffs. On the other
side was the river. The earth bank ran steeply down to the
water, but here and there, in several places, where at some
time slides of earth had occurred, there were run-ways. These
were the drinking-places of the Folk that lived in the caves.
And this was the main abiding-place of the Folk that I had
chanced upon. This was, I may say, by stretching the word, the
village. My mother and the Chatterer and I, and a few other
simple bodies, were what might be termed suburban residents. We
were part of the horde, though we lived a distance away from
it. It was only a short distance, though it had taken me, what
of my wandering, all of a week to arrive. Had I come directly,
I could have covered the trip in an hour.
But to return. From the edge of the forest I saw the caves
in the bluff, the open space, and the run-ways to the
drinking-places. And in the open space I saw many of the Folk.
I had been straying, alone and a child, for a week. During that
time I had seen not one of my kind. I had lived in terror and
desolation. And now, at the sight of my kind, I was overcome
with gladness, and I ran wildly toward them.
Then it was that a strange thing happened. Some one of the
Folk saw me and uttered a warning cry. On the instant, crying
out with fear and panic, the Folk fled away. Leaping and
scrambling over the rocks, they plunged into the mouths of the
caves and disappeared...all but one, a little baby, that had
been dropped in the excitement close to the base of the bluff.
He was wailing dolefully. His mother dashed out; he sprang to
meet her and held on tightly as she scrambled back into the
cave.
I was all alone. The populous open space had of a sudden
become deserted. I sat down forlornly and whimpered. I could
not understand. Why had the Folk run away from me? In later
time, when I came to know their ways, I was to learn. When they
saw me dashing out of the forest at top speed they concluded
that I was being pursued by some hunting animal. By my
unceremonious approach I had stampeded them.
As I sat and watched the cave-mouths I became aware that
the Folk were watching me. Soon they were thrusting their heads
out. A little later they were calling back and forth to one
another. In the hurry and confusion it had happened that all
had not gained their own caves. Some of the young ones had
sought refuge in other caves. The mothers did not call for them
by name, because that was an invention we had not yet made. All
were nameless. The mothers uttered querulous, anxious cries,
which were recognized by the young ones. Thus, had my mother
been there calling to me, I should have recognized her voice
amongst the voices of a thousand mothers, and in the same way
would she have recognized mine amongst a thousand.
This calling back and forth continued for some time, but
they were too cautious to come out of their caves and descend
to the ground. Finally one did come. He was destined to play a
large part in my life, and for that matter he already played a
large part in the lives of all the members of the horde. He it
was whom I shall call Red-Eye in the pages of this history--so
called because of his inflamed eyes, the lids being always red,
and, by the peculiar effect they produced, seeming to advertise
the terrible savagery of him. The color of his soul was red.
He was a monster in all ways. Physically he was a giant.
He must have weighed one hundred and seventy pounds. He was the
largest one of our kind I ever saw. Nor did I ever see one of
the Fire People so large as he, nor one of the Tree People.
Sometimes, when in the newspapers I happen upon descriptions of
our modern bruisers and prizefighters, I wonder what chance the
best of them would have had against him.
I am afraid not much of a chance. With one grip of his
iron fingers and a pull, he could have plucked a muscle, say a
biceps, by the roots, clear out of their bodies. A back-handed,
loose blow of his fist could have smashed their skulls like
egg-shells. With a sweep of his wicked feet (or hind-hands) he
could have disembowelled them. A twist could have broken their
necks, and I know that with a single crunch of his jaws he
could have pierced, at the same moment, the great vein of the
throat in front and the spinal marrow at the back.
He could spring twenty feet horizontally from a sitting
position. He was abominably hairy. It was a matter of pride
with us to be not very hairy. But he was covered with hair all
over, on the inside of the arms as well as the outside, and
even the ears themselves. The only places on him where the hair
did not grow were the soles of his hands and feet and beneath
his eyes. He was frightfully ugly, his ferocious grinning mouth
and huge down-hanging under-lip being but in harmony with his
terrible eyes.
This was Red-Eye. And right gingerly he crept out or his
cave and descended to the ground. Ignoring me, he proceeded to
reconnoitre. He bent forward from the hips as he walked; and so
far forward did he bend, and so long were his arms, that with
every step he touched the knuckles of his hands to the ground
on either side of him. He was awkward in the semi-erect
position of walking that he assumed, and he really touched his
knuckles to the ground in order to balance himself. But oh, I
tell you he could run on all-fours! Now this was something at
which we were particularly awkward. Furthermore, it was a rare
individual among us who balanced himself with his knuckles when
walking. Such an individual was an atavism, and Red-Eye was an
even greater atavism.
That is what he was--an atavism. We were in the process of
changing our tree-life to life on the ground. For many
generations we had been going through this change, and our
bodies and carriage had likewise changed. But Red-Eye had
reverted to the more primitive tree-dwelling type. Perforce,
because he was born in our horde he stayed with us; but in
actuality he was an atavism and his place was elsewhere.
Very circumspect and very alert, he moved here and there
about the open space, peering through the vistas among the
trees and trying to catch a glimpse of the hunting animal that
all suspected had pursued me. And while he did this, taking no
notice of me, the Folk crowded at the cave-mouths and watched.
At last he evidently decided that there was no danger
lurking about. He was returning from the head of the run-way,
from where he had taken a peep down at the drinking-place. His
course brought him near, but still he did not notice me. He
proceeded casually on his way until abreast of me, and then,
without warning and with incredible swiftness, he smote me a
buffet on the head. I was knocked backward fully a dozen feet
before I fetched up against the ground, and I remember,
half-stunned, even as the blow was struck, hearing the wild
uproar of clucking and shrieking laughter that arose from the
caves. It was a great joke--at least in that day; and right
heartily the Folk appreciated it.
Thus was I received into the horde. Red-Eye paid no
further attention to me, and I was at liberty to whimper and
sob to my heart's content. Several of the women gathered
curiously about me, and I recognized them. I had encountered
them the preceding year when my mother had taken me to the
hazelnut canyons.
But they quickly left me alone, being replaced by a dozen
curious and teasing youngsters. They formed a circle around me,
pointing their fingers, making faces, and poking and pinching
me. I was frightened, and for a time I endured them, then anger
got the best of me and I sprang tooth and nail upon the most
audacious one of them--none other than Lop-Ear himself. I have
so named him because he could prick up only one of his ears.
The other ear always hung limp and without movement. Some
accident had injured the muscles and deprived him of the use of
it.
He closed with me, and we went at it for all the world
like a couple of small boys fighting. We scratched and bit,
pulled hair, clinched, and threw each other down. I remember I
succeeded in getting on him what in my college days I learned
was called a half-Nelson. This hold gave me the decided
advantage. But I did not enjoy it long. He twisted up one leg,
and with the foot (or hind-hand) made so savage an onslaught
upon my abdomen as to threaten to disembowel me. I had to
release him in order to save myself, and then we went at it
again.
Lop-Ear was a year older than I, but I was several times
angrier than he, and in the end he took to his heels. I chased
him across the open and down a run-way to the river. But he was
better acquainted with the locality and ran along the edge of
the water and up another run-way. He cut diagonally across the
open space and dashed into a wide-mouthed cave.
Before I knew it, I had plunged after him into the
darkness. The next moment I was badly frightened. I had never
been in a cave before. I began to whimper and cry out. Lop-Ear
chattered mockingly at me, and, springing upon me unseen,
tumbled me over. He did not risk a second encounter, however,
and took himself off. I was between him and the entrance, and
he did not pass me; yet he seemed to have gone away. I
listened, but could get no clew as to where he was. This
puzzled me, and when I regained the outside I sat down to
watch.
He never came out of the entrance, of that I was certain;
yet at the end of several minutes he chuckled at my elbow.
Again I ran after him, and again he ran into the cave; but this
time I stopped at the mouth. I dropped back a short distance
and watched. He did not come out, yet, as before, he chuckled
at my elbow and was chased by me a third time into the cave.
This performance was repeated several times. Then I
followed him into the cave, where I searched vainly for him. I
was curious. I could not understand how he eluded me. Always he
went into the cave, never did he come out of it, yet always did
he arrive there at my elbow and mock me. Thus did our fight
transform itself into a game of hide and seek.
All afternoon, with occasional intervals, we kept it up,
and a playful, friendly spirit arose between us. In the end, he
did not run away from me, and we sat together with our arms
around each other. A little later he disclosed the mystery of
the wide-mouthed cave. Holding me by the hand he led me inside.
It connected by a narrow crevice with another cave, and it was
through this that we regained the open air.
We were now good friends. When the other young ones
gathered around to tease, he joined with me in attacking them;
and so viciously did we behave that before long I was let
alone. Lop-Ear made me acquainted with the village. There was
little that he could tell me of conditions and customs--he had
not the necessary vocabulary; but by observing his actions I
learned much, and also he showed me places and things.
He took me up the open space, between the caves and the
river, and into the forest beyond, where, in a grassy place
among the trees, we made a meal of stringy-rooted carrots.
After that we had a good drink at the river and started up the
run-way to the caves.
It was in the run-way that we came upon Red-Eye again. The
first I knew, Lop-Ear had shrunk away to one side and was
crouching low against the bank. Naturally and involuntarily, I
imitated him. Then it was that I looked to see the cause of his
fear. It was Red-Eye, swaggering down the centre of
the run-way and scowling fiercely with his inflamed eyes.
I noticed that all the youngsters shrank away from him as we
had done, while the grown-ups regarded him with wary eyes when
he drew near, and stepped aside to give him the centre of the
path.
As twilight came on, the open space was deserted. The Folk
were seeking the safety of the caves. Lop-Ear led the way to
bed. High up the bluff we climbed, higher than all the other
caves, to a tiny crevice that could not be seen from the
ground. Into this Lop-Ear squeezed. I followed with difficulty,
so narrow was the entrance, and found myself in a small
rock-chamber. It was very low--not more than a couple of feet
in height, and possibly three feet by four in width and length.
Here, cuddled together in each other's arms, we slept out the
night.
CHAPTER VI
While the more courageous of the youngsters played in and
out of the large-mouthed caves, I early learned that such caves
were unoccupied. No one slept in them at night. Only the
crevice-mouthed caves were used, the narrower the mouth the
better. This was from fear of the preying animals that made
life a burden to us in those days and nights.
The first morning, after my night's sleep with Lop-Ear, I
learned the advantage of the narrow-mouthed caves. It was just
daylight when old Saber-Tooth, the tiger, walked into the open
space. Two of the Folk were already up. They made a rush for
it. Whether they were panic-stricken, or whether he was too
close on their heels for them to attempt to scramble up the
bluff to the crevices, I do not know; but at any rate they
dashed into the wide-mouthed cave wherein Lop-Ear and I had
played the afternoon before.
What happened inside there was no way of telling, but it
is fair to conclude that the two Folk slipped through the
connecting crevice into the other cave. This crevice was too
small to allow for the passage of Saber-Tooth, and he came out
the way he had gone in, unsatisfied and angry. It was evident
that his night's hunting had been unsuccessful and that he had
expected to make a meal off of us. He caught sight of the two
Folk at the other cave-mouth and sprang for them. Of course,
they darted through the passageway into the first cave. He
emerged angrier than ever and snarling.
Pandemonium broke loose amongst the rest of us. All up and
down the great bluff, we crowded the crevices and outside
ledges, and we were all chattering and shrieking in a thousand
keys. And we were all making faces--snarling faces; this was an
instinct with us. We were as angry as Saber-Tooth, though our
anger was allied with fear. I remember that I shrieked and made
faces with the best of them. Not only did they set the example,
but I felt the urge from within me to do the same things they
were doing. My hair was bristling, and I was convulsed with a
fierce, unreasoning rage.
For some time old Saber-Tooth continued dashing in and out
of first the one cave and then the other. But the two Folk
merely slipped back and forth through the connecting crevice
and eluded him. In the meantime the rest of us up the bluff had
proceeded to action. Every time he appeared outside we pelted
him with rocks. At first we merely dropped them on him, but we
soon began to whiz them down with the added force of our
muscles.
This bombardment drew Saber-Tooth's attention to us and
made him angrier than ever. He abandoned his pursuit of the two
Folk and sprang up the bluff toward the rest of us, clawing at
the crumbling rock and snarling as he clawed his upward way. At
this awful sight, the last one of us sought refuge inside our
caves. I know this, because I peeped out and saw the whole
bluff-side deserted, save for Saber-Tooth, who had lost his
footing and was sliding and falling down.
I called out the cry of encouragement, and again the bluff
was covered by the screaming horde and the stones were falling
faster than ever. Saber-Tooth was frantic with rage. Time and
again he assaulted the bluff. Once he even gained the first
crevice-entrances before he fell back, but was unable to force
his way inside. With each upward rush he made, waves of fear
surged over us. At first, at such times, most of us dashed
inside; but some remained outside to hammer him with stones,
and soon all of us remained outside and kept up the fusillade.
Never was so masterly a creature so completely baffled. It
hurt his pride terribly, thus to be outwitted by the small and
tender Folk. He stood on the ground and looked up at us,
snarling, lashing his tail, snapping at the stones that fell
near to him. Once I whizzed down a stone, and just at the right
moment he looked up. It caught him full on the end of his nose,
and he went straight up in the air, all four feet of him,
roaring and caterwauling, what of the hurt and surprise.
He was beaten and he knew it. Recovering his dignity, he
stalked out solemnly from under the rain of stones. He stopped
in the middle of the open space and looked wistfully and
hungrily back at us. He hated to forego the meal, and we were
just so much meat, cornered but inaccessible. This sight of him
started us to laughing. We laughed derisively and uproariously,
all of us. Now animals do not like mockery. To be laughed at
makes them angry. And in such fashion our laughter affected
Saber-Tooth. He turned with a roar and charged the bluff again.
This was what we wanted. The fight had become a game, and we
took huge delight in pelting him.
But this attack did not last long. He quickly recovered
his common sense, and besides, our missiles were shrewd to
hurt. Vividly do I recollect the vision of one bulging eye of
his, swollen almost shut by one of the stones we had thrown.
And vividly do I retain the picture of him as he stood on the
edge of the forest whither he had finally retreated. He was
looking back at us, his writhing lips lifted clear of the very
roots of his huge fangs, his hair bristling and his tail
lashing. He gave one last snarl and slid from view among the
trees.
And then such a chattering as went up. We swarmed out of
our holes, examining the marks his claws had made on the
crumbling rock of the bluff, all of us talking at once. One of
the two Folk who had been caught in the double cave was
part-grown, half child and half youth. They had come out
proudly from their refuge, and we surrounded them in an
admiring crowd. Then the young fellow's mother broke through
and fell upon him in a tremendous rage, boxing his ears,
pulling his hair, and shrieking like a demon. She was a
strapping big woman, very hairy, and the thrashing she gave him
was a delight to the horde. We roared with laughter, holding on
to one another or rolling on the ground in our glee.
In spite of the reign of fear under which we lived, the
Folk were always great laughers. We had the sense of humor. Our
merriment was Gargantuan. It was never restrained. There was
nothing half way about it. When a thing was funny we were
convulsed with appreciation of it, and the simplest, crudest
things were funny to us. Oh, we were great laughers, I can tell
you.
The way we had treated Saber-Tooth was the way we treated
all animals that invaded the village. We kept our run-ways and
drinking-places to ourselves by making life miserable for the
animals that trespassed or strayed upon our immediate
territory. Even the fiercest hunting animals we so bedevilled
that they learned to leave our places alone. We were not
fighters like them; we were cunning and cowardly, and it was
because of our cunning and cowardice, and our inordinate
capacity for fear, that we survived in that frightfully hostile
environment of the Younger World.
Lop-Ear, I figure, was a year older than I. What his past
history was he had no way of telling me, but as I never saw
anything of his mother I believed him to be an orphan. After
all, fathers did not count in our horde. Marriage was as yet in
a rude state, and couples had a way of quarrelling and
separating. Modern man, what of his divorce institution, does
the same thing legally. But we had no laws. Custom was all we
went by, and our custom in this particular matter was rather
promiscuous .
Nevertheless, as this narrative will show later on, we
betrayed glimmering adumbrations of the monogamy that was later
to give power to, and make mighty, such tribes as embraced it.
Furthermore, even at the time I was born, there were several
faithful couples that lived in the trees in the neighborhood of
my mother. Living in the thick of the horde did not conduce to
monogamy. It was for this reason, undoubtedly, that the
faithful couples went away and lived by themselves. Through
many years these couples stayed together, though when the man
or woman died or was eaten the survivor invariably found a new
mate.
There was one thing that greatly puzzled me during the
first days of my residence in the horde. There was a nameless
and incommunicable fear that rested upon all. At first it
appeared to be connected wholly with direction. The horde
feared the northeast. It lived in perpetual apprehension of
that quarter of the compass. And every individual gazed more
frequently and with greater alarm in that direction than in any
other.
When Lop-Ear and I went toward the north-east to eat the
stringy-rooted carrots that at that season were at their best,
he became unusually timid. He was content to eat the leavings,
the big tough carrots and the little ropy ones, rather than to
venture a short distance farther on to where the carrots were
as yet untouched. When I so ventured, he scolded me and
quarrelled with me. He gave me to understand that in that
direction was some horrible danger, but just what the horrible
danger was his paucity of language would not permit him to say.
Many a good meal I got in this fashion, while he scolded
and chattered vainly at me. I could not understand. I kept very
alert, but I could see no danger. I calculated always the
distance between myself and the nearest tree, and knew that to
that haven of refuge I could out-foot the Tawny One, or old
Saber-Tooth, did one or the other suddenly appear.
One late afternoon, in the village, a great uproar arose.
The horde was animated with a single emotion, that of fear. The
bluff-side swarmed with the Folk, all gazing and pointing into
the northeast. I did not know what it was, but I scrambled all
the way up to the safety of my own high little cave before ever
I turned around to see.
And then, across the river, away into the northeast, I saw
for the first time the mystery of smoke. It was the biggest
animal I had ever seen. I thought it was a monster snake,
up-ended, rearing its head high above the trees and swaying
back and forth. And yet, somehow, I seemed to gather from the
conduct of the Folk that the smoke itself was not the danger.
They appeared to fear it as the token of something else. What
this something else was I was unable to guess. Nor could they
tell me. Yet I was soon to know, and I was to know it as a
thing more terrible than the Tawny One, than old Saber-Tooth,
than the snakes themselves, than which it seemed there could be
no things more terrible.
CHAPTER VII
Broken-Tooth was another youngster who lived by himself.
His mother lived in the caves, but two more children had come
after him and he had been thrust out to shift for himself. We
had witnessed the performance during the several preceding
days, and it had given us no little glee. Broken-Tooth did not
want to go, and every time his mother left the cave he sneaked
back into it. When she returned and found him there her rages
were delightful. Half the horde made a practice of watching for
these moments. First, from within the cave, would come her
scolding and shrieking. Then we could hear sounds of the
thrashing and the yelling of Broken-Tooth. About this time the
two younger children joined in. And finally, like the eruption
of a miniature volcano, Broken-Tooth would come flying out.
At the end of several days his leaving home was
accomplished. He wailed his grief, unheeded, from the centre of
the open space, for at least half an hour, and then came to
live with Lop-Ear and me. Our cave was small, but with
squeezing there was room for three. I have no recollection of
Broken-Tooth spending more than one night with us, so the
accident must have happened right away.
It came in the middle of the day. In the morning we had
eaten our fill of the carrots, and then, made heedless by play,
we had ventured on to the big trees just beyond. I cannot
understand how Lop-Ear got over his habitual caution, but it
must have been the play. We were having a great time playing
tree tag. And such tag! We leaped ten or fifteen-foot gaps as a
matter of course. And a twenty or twenty-five foot deliberate
drop clear down to the ground was nothing to us. In fact, I am
almost afraid to say the great distances we dropped. As we grew
older and heavier we found we had to be more cautious in
dropping, but at that age our bodies were all strings and
springs and we could do anything.
Broken-Tooth displayed remarkable agility in the game. He
was "It" less frequently than any of us, and in the course of
the game he discovered one difficult "slip" that neither
Lop-Ear nor I was able to accomplish. To be truthful, we were
afraid to attempt it.
When we were "It," Broken-Tooth always ran out to the end
of a lofty branch in a certain tree. From the end of the branch
to the ground it must have been seventy feet, and nothing
intervened to break a fall. But about twenty feet lower down,
and fully fifteen feet out from the perpendicular, was the
thick branch of another tree.
As we ran out the limb, Broken-Tooth, facing us, would
begin teetering. This naturally impeded our progress; but there
was more in the teetering than that. He teetered with his back
to the jump he was to make. Just as we nearly reached him he
would let go. The teetering branch was like a spring-board. It
threw him far out, backward, as he fell. And as he fell he
turned around sidewise in the air so as to face the other
branch into which he was falling. This branch bent far down
under the impact, and sometimes there was an ominous crackling;
but it never broke, and out of the leaves was always to be seen
the face of Broken-Tooth grinning triumphantly up at us.
I was "It" the last time Broken-Tooth tried this. He had
gained the end of the branch and begun his teetering, and I was
creeping out after him, when suddenly there came a low warning
cry from Lop-Ear. I looked down and saw him in the main fork of
the tree crouching close against the trunk. Instinctively I
crouched down upon the thick limb. Broken-Tooth stopped
teetering, but the branch would not stop, and his body
continued bobbing up and down with the rustling leaves.
I heard the crackle of a dry twig, and looking down saw my
first Fire-Man. He was creeping stealthily along on the ground
and peering up into the tree. At first I thought he was a wild
animal, because he wore around his waist and over his shoulders
a ragged piece of bearskin. And then I saw his hands and feet,
and more clearly his features. He was very much like my kind,
except that he was less hairy and that his feet were less like
hands than ours. In fact, he and his people, as I was later to
know, were far less hairy than we, though we, in turn, were
equally less hairy than the Tree People.
It came to me instantly, as I looked at him. This was the
terror of the northeast, of which the mystery of smoke was a
token. Yet I was puzzled. Certainly he was nothing; of which to
be afraid. Red-Eye or any of our strong men would have been
more than a match for him. He was old, too, wizened with age,
and the hair on his face was gray. Also, he limped badly with
one leg. There was no doubt at all that we could out-run him
and out-climb him. He could never catch us, that was certain.
But he carried something in his hand that I had never seen
before. It was a bow and arrow. But at that time a bow and
arrow had no meaning for me. How was I to know that death
lurked in that bent piece of wood? But Lop-Ear knew. He had
evidently seen the Fire People before and knew something of
their ways. The Fire-Man peered up at him and circled around
the tree. And around the main trunk above the fork Lop-Ear
circled too, keeping always the trunk between himself and the
Fire-Man.
The latter abruptly reversed his circling. Lop-Ear, caught
unawares, also hastily reversed, but did not win the protection
of the trunk until after the Fire-Man had twanged the bow.
I saw the arrow leap up, miss Lop-Ear, glance against a
limb, and fall back to the ground. I danced up and down on my
lofty perch with delight. It was a game! The Fire-Man was
throwing things at Lop-Ear as we sometimes threw things at one
another.
The game continued a little longer, but Lop-Ear did not
expose himself a second time. Then the Fire-Man gave it up. I
leaned far out over my horizontal limb and chattered down at
him. I wanted to play. I wanted to have him try to hit me with
the thing. He saw me, but ignored me, turning his attention to
Broken-Tooth, who was still teetering slightly and
involuntarily on the end of the branch.
The first arrow leaped upward. Broken-Tooth yelled with
fright and pain. It had reached its mark. This put a new
complexion on the matter. I no longer cared to play, but
crouched trembling close to my limb. A second arrow and a third
soared up, missing Broken-Tooth, rustling the leaves as they
passed through, arching in their flight and returning to earth.
The Fire-Man stretched his bow again. He shifted his
position, walking away several steps, then shifted it a second
time. The bow-string twanged, the arrow leaped upward, and
Broken-Tooth, uttering a terrible scream, fell off the branch.
I saw him as he went down, turning over and over, all arms and
legs it seemed, the shaft of the arrow projecting from his
chest and appearing and disappearing with each revolution of
his body.
Sheer down, screaming, seventy feet he fell, smashing to
the earth with an audible thud and crunch, his body rebounding
slightly and settling down again. Still he lived, for he moved
and squirmed, clawing with his hands and feet. I remember the
Fire-Man running forward with a stone and hammering him on the
head...and then I remember no more.
Always, during my childhood, at this stage of the dream,
did I wake up screaming with fright--to find, often, my mother
or nurse, anxious and startled, by my bedside, passing soothing
hands through my hair and telling me that they were there and
that there was nothing to fear.
My next dream, in the order of succession, begins always
with the flight of Lop-Ear and myself through the forest. The
Fire-Man and Broken-Tooth and the tree of the tragedy are gone.
Lop-Ear and I, in a cautious panic, are fleeing through the
trees. In my right leg is a burning pain; and from the flesh,
protruding head and shaft from either side, is an arrow of the
Fire-Man. Not only did the pull and strain of it pain me
severely, but it bothered my movements and made it impossible
for me to keep up with Lop-Ear.
At last I gave up, crouching in the secure fork of a tree.
Lop-Ear went right on. I called to him--most plaintively, I
remember; and he stopped and looked back. Then he returned to
me, climbing into the fork and examining the arrow. He tried to
pull it out, but one way the flesh resisted the barbed lead,
and the other way it resisted the feathered shaft. Also, it
hurt grievously, and I stopped him.
For some time we crouched there, Lop-Ear nervous and
anxious to be gone, perpetually and apprehensively peering this
way and that, and myself whimpering softly and sobbing. Lop-Ear
was plainly in a funk, and yet his conduct in remaining by me,
in spite of his fear, I take as a foreshadowing of the altruism
and comradeship that have helped make man the mightiest of the
animals.
Once again Lop-Ear tried to drag the arrow through the
flesh, and I angrily stopped him. Then he bent down and began
gnawing the shaft of the arrow with his teeth. As he did so he
held the arrow firmly in both hands so that it would not play
about in the wound, and at the same time I held on to him. I
often meditate upon this scene--the two of us, half-grown cubs,
in the childhood of the race, and the one mastering his fear,
beating down his selfish impulse of flight, in order to stand
by and succor the other. And there rises up before me all that
was there foreshadowed, and I see visions of Damon and Pythias,
of life-saving crews and Red Cross nurses, of martyrs and
leaders of forlorn hopes, of Father Damien, and of the Christ
himself, and of all the men of earth, mighty of stature, whose
strength may trace back to the elemental loins of Lop-Ear and
Big-Tooth and other dim denizens of the Younger World.
When Lop-Ear had chewed off the head of the arrow, the
shaft was withdrawn easily enough. I started to go on, but this
time it was he that stopped me. My leg was bleeding profusely.
Some of the smaller veins had doubtless been ruptured. Running
out to the end of a branch, Lop-Ear gathered a handful of green
leaves. These he stuffed into the wound. They accomplished the
purpose, for the bleeding soon stopped. Then we went on
together, back to the safety of the caves.
CHAPTER VIII
Well do I remember that first winter after I left home. I
have long dreams of sitting shivering in the cold. Lop-Ear and
I sit close together, with our arms and legs about each other,
blue-faced and with chattering teeth. It got particularly crisp
along toward morning. In those chill early hours we slept
little, huddling together in numb misery and waiting for the
sunrise in order to get warm.
When we went outside there was a crackle of frost under
foot. One morning we discovered ice on the surface of the quiet
water in the eddy where was the drinking-place, and there was a
great How-do-you-do about it. Old Marrow-Bone was the oldest
member of the horde, and he had never seen anything like it
before. I remember the worried, plaintive look that came into
his eyes as he examined the ice. (This plaintive look always
came into our eyes when we did not understand a thing, or when
we felt the prod of some vague and inexpressible desire.)
Red-Eye, too, when he investigated the ice, looked bleak and
plaintive, and stared across the river into the northeast, as
though in some way he connected the Fire People with this
latest happening.
But we found ice only on that one morning, and that was
the coldest winter we experienced. I have no memory of other
winters when it was so cold. I have often thought that that
cold winter was a fore-runner of the countless cold winters to
come, as the ice-sheet from farther north crept down over the
face of the land. But we never saw that ice-sheet. Many
generations must have passed away before the descendants of the
horde migrated south, or remained and adapted themselves to the
changed conditions.
Life was hit or miss and happy-go-lucky with us. Little
was ever planned, and less was executed. We ate when we were
hungry, drank when we were thirsty, avoided our carnivorous
enemies, took shelter in the caves at night, and for the rest
just sort of played along through life.
We were very curious, easily amused, and full of tricks
and pranks. There was no seriousness about us, except when we
were in danger or were angry, in which cases the one was
quickly forgotten and the other as quickly got over.
We were inconsecutive, illogical, and inconsequential. We
had no steadfastness of purpose, and it was here that the Fire
People were ahead of us. They possessed all these things of
which we possessed so little. Occasionally, however, especially
in the realm of the emotions, we were capable of long-cherished
purpose. The faithfulness of the monogamic couples I have
referred to may be explained as a matter of habit; but my long
desire for the Swift One cannot be so explained, any more than
can be explained the undying enmity between me and Red-Eye.
But it was our inconsequentiality and stupidity that
especially distresses me when I look back upon that life in the
long ago. Once I found a broken gourd which happened to lie
right side up and which had been filled with the rain. The
water was sweet, and I drank it. I even took the gourd down to
the stream and filled it with more water, some of which I drank
and some of which I poured over Lop-Ear. And then I threw the
gourd away. It never entered my head to fill the gourd with
water and carry it into my cave. Yet often I was thirsty at
night, especially after eating wild onions and watercress, and
no one ever dared leave the caves at night for a drink.
Another time I found a dry; gourd, inside of which the
seeds rattled. I had fun with it for a while. But it was a play
thing, nothing more. And yet, it was not long after this that
the using of gourds for storing water became the general
practice of the horde. But I was not the inventor. The honor
was due to old Marrow-Bone, and it is fair to assume that it
was the necessity of his great age that brought about the
innovation.
At any rate, the first member of the horde to use gourds
was Marrow-Bone. He kept a supply of drinking-water in his
cave, which cave belonged to his son, the Hairless One, who
permitted him to occupy a corner of it. We used to see
Marrow-Bone filling his gourd at the drinking-place and
carrying it carefully up to his cave. Imitation was strong in
the Folk, and first one, and then another and another, procured
a gourd and used it in similar fashion, until it was a general
practice with all of us so to store water.
Sometimes old Marrow-Bone had sick spells and was unable
to leave the cave. Then it was that the Hairless One filled the
gourd for him. A little later, the Hairless One deputed the
task to Long-Lip, his son. And after that, even when
Marrow-Bone was well again, Long-Lip continued carrying water
for him. By and by, except on unusual occasions, the men never
carried any water at all, leaving the task to the women and
larger children. Lop-Ear and I were independent. We carried
water only for ourselves, and we often mocked the young
water-carriers when they were called away from play to fill the
gourds.
Progress was slow with us. We played through life, even
the adults, much in the same way that children play, and we
played as none of the other animals played. What little we
learned, was usually in the course of play, and was due to our
curiosity and keenness of appreciation. For that matter, the
one big invention of the horde, during the time I lived with
it, was the use of gourds. At first we stored only water in the
gourds--in imitation of old Marrow-Bone.
But one day some one of the women--I do not know which
one--filled a gourd with black-berries and carried it to her
cave. In no time all the women were carrying berries and nuts
and roots in the gourds. The idea, once started, had to go on.
Another evolution of the carrying-receptacle was due to the
women. Without doubt, some woman's gourd was too small, or else
she had forgotten her gourd; but be that as it may, she bent
two great leaves together, pinning the seams with twigs, and
carried home a bigger quantity of berries than could have been
contained in the largest gourd.
So far we got, and no farther, in the transportation of
supplies during the years I lived with the Folk. It never
entered anybody's head to weave a basket out of willow-withes.
Sometimes the men and women tied tough vines about the bundles
of ferns and branches that they carried to the caves to sleep
upon. Possibly in ten or twenty generations we might have
worked up to the weaving of baskets. And of this, one thing is
sure: if once we wove withes into baskets, the next and
inevitable step would have been the weaving of cloth. Clothes
would have followed, and with covering our nakedness would have
come modesty.
Thus was momentum gained in the Younger World. But we were
without this momentum. We were just getting started, and we
could not go far in a single generation. We were without
weapons, without fire, and in the raw beginnings of speech. The
device of writing lay so far in the future that I am appalled
when I think of it.
Even I was once on the verge of a great discovery. To show
you how fortuitous was development in those days let me state
that had it not been for the gluttony of Lop-Ear I might have
brought about the domestication of the dog. And this was
something that the Fire People who lived to the northeast had
not yet achieved. They were without dogs; this I knew from
observation. But let me tell you how Lop-Ear's gluttony
possibly set back our social development many generations.
Well to the west of our caves was a great swamp, but to
the south lay a stretch of low, rocky hills. These were little
frequented for two reasons. First of all, there was no food
there of the kind we ate; and next, those rocky hills were
filled with the lairs of carnivorous beasts.
But Lop-Ear and I strayed over to the hills one day. We
would not have strayed had we not been teasing a tiger. Please
do not laugh. It was old Saber-Tooth himself. We were perfectly
safe. We chanced upon him in the forest, early in the morning,
and from the safety of the branches overhead we chattered down
at him our dislike and hatred. And from branch to branch, and
from tree to tree, we followed overhead, making an infernal row
and warning all the forest-dwellers that old Saber-Tooth was
coming.
We spoiled his hunting for him, anyway. And we made him
good and angry. He snarled at us and lashed his tail, and
sometimes he paused and stared up at us quietly for a long
time, as if debating in his mind some way by which he could get
hold of us. But we only laughed and pelted him with twigs and
the ends of branches.
This tiger-baiting was common sport among the folk.
Sometimes half the horde would follow from overhead a tiger or
lion that had ventured out in the daytime. It was our revenge;
for more than one member of the horde, caught unexpectedly, had
gone the way of the tiger's belly or the lion's. Also, by such
ordeals of helplessness and shame, we taught the hunting
animals to some extent to keep out of our territory. And then
it was funny. It was a great game.
And so Lop-Ear and I had chased Saber-Tooth across three
miles of forest. Toward the last he put his tail between his
legs and fled from our gibing like a beaten cur. We did our
best to keep up with him; but when we reached the edge of the
forest he was no more than a streak in the distance.
I don't know what prompted us, unless it was curiosity;
but after playing around awhile, Lop-Ear and I ventured across
the open ground to the edge of the rocky hills. We did not go
far. Possibly at no time were we more than a hundred yards from
the trees. Coming around a sharp corner of rock (we went very
carefully, because we did not know what we might encounter), we
came upon three puppies playing in the sun.
They did not see us, and we watched them for some time.
They were wild dogs. In the rock-wall was a horizontal
fissure--evidently the lair where their mother had left them,
and where they should have remained had they been obedient. But
the growing life, that in Lop-Ear and me had impelled us to
venture away from the forest, had driven the puppies out of the
cave to frolic. I know how their mother would have punished
them had she caught them.
But it was Lop-Ear and I who caught them. He looked at me,
and then we made a dash for it. The puppies knew no place to
run except into the lair, and we headed them off. One rushed
between my legs. I squatted and grabbed him. He sank his sharp
little teeth into my arm, and I dropped him in the suddenness
of the hurt and surprise. The next moment he had scurried
inside.
Lop-Ear, struggling with the second puppy, scowled at me
and intimated by a variety of sounds the different kinds of a
fool and a bungler that I was. This made me ashamed and spurred
me to valor. I grabbed the remaining puppy by the tail. He got
his teeth into me once, and then I got him by the nape of the
neck. Lop-Ear and I sat down, and held the puppies up, and
looked at them, and laughed.
They were snarling and yelping and crying. Lop-Ear started
suddenly. He thought he had heard something. We looked at each
other in fear, realizing the danger of our position. The one
thing that made animals raging demons was tampering with their
young. And these puppies that made such a racket belonged to
the wild dogs. Well we knew them, running in packs, the terror
of the grass-eating animals. We had watched them following the
herds of cattle and bison and dragging down the calves, the
aged, and the sick. We had been chased by them ourselves, more
than once. I had seen one of the Folk, a woman, run down by
them and caught just as she reached the shelter of the woods.
Had she not been tired out by the run, she might have made it
into a tree. She tried, and slipped, and fell back. They made
short work of her.
We did not stare at each other longer than a moment.
Keeping tight hold of our prizes, we ran for the woods. Once in
the security of a tall tree, we held up the puppies and laughed
again. You see, we had to have our laugh out, no matter what
happened.
And then began one of the hardest tasks I ever attempted.
We started to carry the puppies to our cave. Instead of using
our hands for climbing, most of the time they were occupied
with holding our squirming captives. Once we tried to walk on
the ground, but were treed by a miserable hyena, who followed
along underneath. He was a wise hyena.
Lop-Ear got an idea. He remembered how we tied up bundles
of leaves to carry home for beds. Breaking off some tough
vines, he tied his puppy's legs together, and then, with
another piece of vine passed around his neck, slung the puppy
on his back. This left him with hands and feet free to climb.
He was jubilant, and did not wait for me to finish tying my
puppy's legs, but started on. There was one difficulty,
however. The puppy wouldn't stay slung on Lop-Ear's back. It
swung around to the side and then on in front. Its teeth were
not tied, and the next thing it did was to sink its teeth into
Lop-Ear's soft
and unprotected stomach. He let out a scream, nearly
fell, and clutched a branch violently with both hands to save
himself. The vine around his neck broke, and the puppy, its
four legs still tied, dropped to the ground. The hyena
proceeded to dine.
Lop-Ear was disgusted and angry. He abused the hyena, and
then went off alone through the trees. I had no reason that I
knew for wanting to carry the puppy to the cave, except that I
WANTED to; and I stayed by my task. I made the work a great
deal easier by elaborating on Lop-Ear's idea. Not only did I
tie the puppy's legs, but I thrust a stick through his jaws and
tied them together securely.
At last I got the puppy home. I imagine I had more
pertinacity than the average Folk, or else I should not have
succeeded. They laughed at me when they saw me lugging the
puppy up to my high little cave, but I did not mind. Success
crowned my efforts, and there was the puppy. He was a plaything
such as none of the Folk possessed. He learned rapidly. When I
played with him and he bit me, I boxed his ears, and then he
did not try again to bite for a long time.
I was quite taken up with him. He was something new, and
it was a characteristic of the Folk to like new things. When I
saw that he refused fruits and vegetables, I caught birds for
him and squirrels and young rabbits. (We Folk were meat-eaters,
as well as vegetarians, and we were adept at catching small
game.) The puppy ate the meat and thrived. As well as I can
estimate, I must have had him over a week. And then, coming
back to the cave one day with a nestful of young-hatched
pheasants, I found Lop-Ear had killed the puppy and was just
beginning to eat him. I sprang for Lop-Ear,--the cave was
small,--and we went at it tooth and nail.
And thus, in a fight, ended one of the earliest attempts
to domesticate the dog. We pulled hair out in handfuls, and
scratched and bit and gouged. Then we sulked and made up. After
that we ate the puppy. Raw? Yes. We had not yet discovered
fire. Our evolution into cooking animals lay in the
tight-rolled scroll of the future.
CHAPTER IX
Red-Eye was an atavism. He was the great discordant
element in our horde. He was more primitive than any of us. He
did not belong with us, yet we were still so primitive
ourselves that we were incapable of a cooperative effort strong
enough to kill him or cast him out. Rude as was our social
organization, he was, nevertheless, too rude to live in it. He
tended always to destroy the horde by his unsocial acts. He was
really a reversion to an earlier type, and his place was with
the Tree People rather than with us who were in the process of
becoming men.
He was a monster of cruelty, which is saying a great deal
in that day. He beat his wives--not that he ever had more than
one wife at a time, but that he was married many times. It was
impossible for any woman to live with him, and yet they did
live with him, out of compulsion. There was no gainsaying him.
No man was strong enough to stand against him.
Often do I have visions of the quiet hour before the
twilight. From drinking-place and carrot patch and berry swamp
the Folk are trooping into the open space before the caves.
They dare linger no later than this, for the dreadful darkness
is approaching, in which the world is given over to the carnage
of the hunting animals, while the fore-runners of man hide
tremblingly in their holes.
There yet remain to us a few minutes before we climb to
our caves. We are tired from the play of the day, and the
sounds we make are subdued. Even the cubs, still greedy for fun
and antics, play with restraint. The wind from the sea has died
down, and the shadows are lengthening with the last of the
sun's descent. And then, suddenly, from Red-Eye's cave, breaks
a wild screaming and the sound of blows. He is beating his
wife.
At first an awed silence comes upon us. But as the blows
and screams continue we break out into an insane gibbering of
helpless rage. It is plain that the men resent Red-Eye's
actions, but they are too afraid of him. The blows cease, and a
low groaning dies away, while we chatter among ourselves and
the sad twilight creeps upon us.
We, to whom most happenings were jokes, never laughed
during Red-Eye's wife-beatings. We knew too well the tragedy of
them. On more than one morning, at the base of the cliff, did
we find the body of his latest wife. He had tossed her there,
after she had died, from his cave-mouth. He never buried his
dead. The task of carrying away the bodies, that else would
have polluted our abiding-place, he left to the horde. We
usually flung them into the river below the last
drinking-place.
Not alone did Red-Eye murder his wives, but he also
murdered for his wives, in order to get them. When he wanted a
new wife and selected the wife of another man, he promptly
killed that man. Two of these murders I saw myself. The whole
horde knew, but could do nothing. We had not yet developed any
government, to speak of, inside the horde. We had certain
customs and visited our wrath upon the unlucky ones who
violated those customs. Thus, for example, the individual who
defiled a drinking-place would be attacked by every onlooker,
while one who deliberately gave a false alarm was the recipient
of much rough usage at our hands. But Red-Eye walked rough-shod
over all our customs, and we so feared him that we were
incapable of the collective action necessary to punish him.
It was during the sixth winter in our cave that Lop-Ear
and I discovered that we were really growing up. From the first
it had been a squeeze to get in through the entrance-crevice.
This had had its advantages, however. It had prevented the
larger Folk from taking our cave away from us. And it was a
most desirable cave, the highest on the bluff, the safest, and
in winter the smallest and warmest.
To show the stage of the mental development of the Folk, I
may state that it would have been a simple thing for some of
them to have driven us out and enlarged the crevice-opening.
But they never thought of it. Lop-Ear and I did not think of it
either until our increasing size compelled us to make an
enlargement. This occurred when summer was well along and we
were fat with better forage. We worked at the crevice in
spells, when the fancy struck us.
At first we dug the crumbling rocks away with our fingers,
until our nails got sore, when I accidentally stumbled upon the
idea of using a piece of wood on the rock. This worked well.
Also it worked woe. One morning early, we had scratched out of
the wall quite a heap of fragments. I gave the heap a shove
over the lip of the entrance. The next moment there came up
from below a howl of rage. There was no need to look. We knew
the voice only too well. The rubbish had descended upon
Red-Eye.
We crouched down in the cave in consternation. A minute
later he was at the entrance, peering in at us with his
inflamed eyes and raging like a demon. But he was too large. He
could not get in to us. Suddenly he went away. This was
suspicious. By all we knew of Folk nature he should have
remained and had out his rage. I crept to the entrance and
peeped down. I could see him just beginning to mount the bluff
again. In one hand he carried a long stick. Before I could
divine his plan, he was back at the entrance and savagely
jabbing the stick in at us.
His thrusts were prodigious. They could have disembowelled
us. We shrank back against the side-walls, where we were almost
out of range. But by industrious poking he got us now and
again--cruel, scraping jabs with the end of the stick that
raked off the hide and hair. When we screamed with the hurt, he
roared his satisfaction and jabbed the harder.
I began to grow angry. I had a temper of my own in those
days, and pretty considerable courage, too, albeit it was
largely the courage of the cornered rat. I caught hold of the
stick with my hands, but such was his strength that he jerked
me into the crevice. He reached for me with his long arm, and
his nails tore my flesh as I leaped back from the clutch and
gained the comparative safety of the side-wall.
He began poking again, and caught me a painful blow on the
shoulder. Beyond shivering with fright and yelling when he was
hit, Lop-Ear did nothing. I looked for a stick with which to
jab back, but found only the end of a branch, an inch through
and a foot long. I threw this at Red-Eye. It did no damage,
though he howled with a sudden increase of rage at my daring to
strike back. He began jabbing furiously. I found a fragment of
rock and threw it at him, striking him on the chest.
This emboldened me, and, besides, I was now as angry as
he, and had lost all fear. I ripped fragment of rock from the
wall. The piece must have weighed two or threepounds. With my
strength I slammed it full into Red-Eye's face. It nearly
finished him. He staggered backward, dropping his stick, and
almost fell off the cliff.
He was a ferocious sight. His face was covered with blood,
and he was snarling and gnashing his fangs like a wild boar. He
wiped the blood from his eyes, caught sight of me, and roared
with fury. His stick was gone, so he began ripping out chunks
of crumbling rock and throwing them in at me. This supplied me
with ammunition. I gave him as good as he sent, and better; for
he presented a good target, while he caught only glimpses of me
as I snuggled against the side-wall.
Suddenly he disappeared again. From the lip of the cave I
saw him descending. All the horde had gathered outside and in
awed silence was looking on. As he descended, the more timid
ones scurried for their caves. I could see old Marrow-Bone
tottering along as fast as he could. Red-Eye sprang out from
the wall and finished the last twenty feet through the air. He
landed alongside a mother who was just beginning the ascent.
She screamed with fear, and the two-year-old child that was
clinging to her released its grip and rolled at Red-Eye's feet.
Both he and the mother reached for it, and he got it. The next
moment the frail little body had whirled through the air and
shattered against the wall. The mother ran to it, caught it up
in her arms, and crouched over it crying.
Red-Eye started over to pick up the stick. Old Marrow-Bone
had tottered into his way. Red-Eye's great hand shot out and
clutched the old man by the back of the neck. I looked to see
his neck broken. His body went limp as he surrendered himself
to his fate.
Red-Eye hesitated a moment, and Marrow-Bone, shivering
terribly, bowed his head and covered his face with his crossed
arms. Then Red-Eye slammed him face-downward to the ground. Old
Marrow-Bone did not struggle. He lay there crying with the fear
of death. I saw the Hairless One, out in the open space,
beating his chest and bristling, but afraid to come forward.
And then, in obedience to some whim of his erratic spirit,
Red-Eye let the old man alone and passed on and recovered the
stick.
He returned to the wall and began to climb up. Lop-Ear,
who was shivering and peeping alongside of me, scrambled back
into the cave. It was plain that Red-Eye was bent upon murder.
I was desperate and angry and fairly cool. Running back and
forth along the neighboring ledges, I gathered a heap of rocks
at the cave-entrance. Red-Eye was now several yards beneath me,
concealed for the moment by an out-jut of the cliff. As he
climbed, his head came into view, and I banged a rock down. It
missed, striking the wall and shattering; but the flying dust
and grit filled his eyes and he drew back out of view.
A chuckling and chattering arose from the horde, that
played the part of audience. At last there was one of the Folk
who dared to face Red-Eye. As their approval and acclamation
arose on the air, Red-Eye snarled down at them, and on the
instant they were subdued to silence. Encouraged by this
evidence of his power, he thrust his head into view, and by
scowling and snarling and gnashing his fangs tried to
intimidate me. He scowled horribly, contracting the scalp
strongly over the brows and bringing the hair down from the top
of the head until each hair stood apart and pointed straight
forward.
The sight chilled me, but I mastered my fear, and, with a
stone poised in my hand, threatened him back. He still tried to
advance. I drove the stone down at him and made a sheer miss.
The next shot was a success. The stone struck him on the neck.
He slipped back out of sight, but as he disappeared I could see
him clutching for a grip on the wall with one hand, and with
the other clutching at his throat. The stick fell clattering to
the ground.
I could not see him any more, though I could hear him
choking and strangling and coughing. The audience kept a
death-like silence. I crouched on the lip of the entrance and
waited. The strangling and coughing died down, and I could hear
him now and again clearing his throat. A little later he began
to climb down. He went very quietly, pausing every moment or so
to stretch his neck or to feel it with his hand.
At the sight of him descending, the whole horde, with wild
screams and yells, stampeded for the woods. Old Marrow-Bone,
hobbling and tottering, followed behind. Red-Eye took no notice
of the flight. When he reached the ground he skirted the base
of the bluff and climbed up and into his own cave. He did not
look around once.
I stared at Lop-Ear, and he stared back. We understood
each other. Immediately, and with great caution and quietness,
we began climbing up the cliff. When we reached the top we
looked back. The abiding-place was deserted, Red-Eye remained
in his cave, and the horde had disappeared in the depths of the
forest.
We turned and ran. We dashed across the open spaces and
down the slopes unmindful of possible snakes in the grass,
until we reached the woods. Up into the trees we went, and on
and on, swinging our arboreal flight until we had put miles
between us and the caves. And then, and not till then, in the
security of a great fork, we paused, looked at each other, and
began to laugh. We held on to each other, arms and legs, our
eyes streaming tears, our ,sides aching, and laughed and
laughed and laughed.
CHAPTER X
After we had had out our laugh, Lop-Ear and I curved back
in our flight and got breakfast in the blueberry swamp. It was
the same swamp to which I had made my first journeys in the
world, years before, accompanied by my mother. I had seen
little of her in the intervening time. Usually, when she
visited the horde at the caves, I was away in the forest. I had
once or twice caught glimpses of the Chatterer in the open
space, and had had the pleasure of making faces at him and
angering him from the mouth of my cave. Beyond such amenities I
had left my family severely alone. I was not much interested in
it, and anyway I was doing very well by myself.
After eating our fill of berries, with two nestfuls of
partly hatched quail-eggs for dessert, Lop-Ear and I wandered
circumspectly into the woods toward the river. Here was where
stood my old home-tree, out of which I had been thrown by the
Chatterer. It was still occupied. There had been increase in
the family. Clinging tight to my mother was a little baby.
Also, there was a girl, partly grown, who cautiously regarded
us from one of the lower branches. She was evidently my sister,
or half-sister, rather.
My mother recognized me, but she warned me away when I
started to climb into the tree. Lop-Ear, who was more cautious
by far than I, beat a retreat, nor could I persuade him to
return. Later in the day, however, my sister came down to the
ground, and there and in neighboring trees we romped and played
all afternoon. And then came trouble. She was my sister, but
that did not prevent her from treating me abominably, for she
had inherited all the viciousness of the Chatterer. She turned
upon me suddenly, in a petty rage, and scratched me, tore my
hair, and sank her sharp little teeth deep into my forearm. I
lost my temper. I did not injure her, but it was undoubtedly
the soundest spanking she had received up to that time.
How she yelled and squalled. The Chatterer, who had been
away all day and who was only then returning, heard the noise
and rushed for the spot. My mother also rushed, but he got
there first. Lop-Ear and I did not wait his coming. We were off
and away, and the Chatterer gave us the chase of our lives
through the trees.
After the chase was over, and Lop-Ear and I had had out
our laugh, we discovered that twilight was falling. Here was
night with all its terrors upon us, and to return to the caves
was out of the question. Red-Eye made that impossible. We took
refuge in a tree that stood apart from other trees, and high up
in a fork we passed the night. It was a miserable night. For
the first few hours it rained heavily, then it turned cold and
a chill wind blew upon us. Soaked through, with shivering
bodies and chattering teeth, we huddled in each other's arms.
We missed the snug, dry cave that so quickly warmed with the
heat of our bodies.
Morning found us wretched and resolved. We would not spend
another such night. Remembering the tree-shelters of our
elders, we set to work to make one for ourselves. We built the
framework of a rough nest, and on higher forks overhead even
got in several ridge-poles for the roof. Then the sun came out,
and under its benign influence we forgot the hardships of the
night and went off in search of breakfast. After that, to show
the inconsequentiality of life in those days, we fell to
playing. It must have taken us all of a month, working
intermittently, to make our tree-house; and then, when it was
completed, we never used it again.
But I run ahead of my story. When we fell to playing,
after breakfast, on the second day away from the caves, Lop-Ear
led me a chase through the trees and down to the river. We came
out upon it where a large slough entered from the blueberry
swamp. The mouth of this slough was wide, while the slough
itself was practically without a current. In the dead water,
just inside its mouth, lay a tangled mass of tree trunks. Some
of these, what of the wear and tear of freshets and of being
stranded long summers on sand-bars, were seasoned and dry and
without branches. They floated high in the water, and bobbed up
and down or rolled over when we put our weight upon them.
Here and there between the trunks were water-cracks, and
through them we could see schools of small fish, like minnows,
darting back and forth. Lop-Ear and I became fishermen at once.
Lying flat on the logs, keeping perfectly quiet, waiting till
the minnows came close, we would make swift passes with our
hands. Our prizes we ate on the spot, wriggling and moist. We
did not notice the lack of salt.
The mouth of the slough became our favorite playground.
Here we spent many hours each day, catching fish and playing on
the logs, and here, one day, we learned our first lessons in
navigation. The log on which Lop-Ear was lying got adrift. He
was curled up on his side, asleep. A light fan of air slowly
drifted the log away from the shore, and when I noticed his
predicament the distance was already too great for him to leap.
At first the episode seemed merely funny to me. But when
one of the vagrant impulses of fear, common in that age of
perpetual insecurity, moved within me, I was struck with my own
loneliness. I was made suddenly aware of Lop-Ear's remoteness
out there on that alien element a few feet away. I called
loudly to him a warning cry. He awoke frightened, and shifted
his weight rashly on the log. It turned over, sousing him
under. Three times again it soused him under as he tried to
climb out upon it. Then he succeeded, crouching upon it and
chattering with fear.
I could do nothing. Nor could he. Swimming was something
of which we knew nothing. We were already too far removed from
the lower life-forms to have the instinct for swimming, and we
had not yet become sufficiently man-like to undertake it as the
working out of a problem. I roamed disconsolately up and down
the bank, keeping as close to him in his involuntary travels as
I could, while he wailed and cried till it was a wonder that he
did not bring down upon us every hunting animal within a mile.
The hours passed. The sun climbed overhead and began its
descent to the west. The light wind died down and left Lop-Ear
on his log floating around a hundred feet away. And then,
somehow, I know not how, Lop-Ear made the great discovery. He
began paddling with his hands. At first his progress was slow
and erratic. Then he straightened out and began laboriously to
paddle nearer and nearer. I could not understand. I sat down
and watched and waited until he gained the shore.
But he had learned something, which was more than I had
done. Later in the afternoon, he deliberately launched out from
shore on the log. Still later he persuaded me to join him, and
I, too, learned the trick of paddling. For the next several
days we could not tear ourselves away from the slough. So
absorbed were we in our new game that we almost neglected to
eat. We even roosted in a nearby tree at night. And we forgot
that Red-Eye existed.
We were always trying new logs, and we learned that the
smaller the log the faster we could make it go. Also, we
learned that the smaller the log the more liable it was to roll
over and give us a ducking. Still another thing about small
logs we learned. One day we paddled our individual logs
alongside each other. And then, quite by accident, in the
course of play, we discovered that when each, with one hand and
foot, held on to the other's log, the logs were steadied and
did not turn over. Lying side by side in this position, our
outside hands and feet were left free for paddling. Our final
discovery was that this arrangement enabled us to use still
smaller logs and thereby gain greater speed. And there our
discoveries ended. We had invented the most primitive
catamaran, and we did not have sense enough to know it. It
never entered our heads to lash the logs together with tough
vines or stringy roots. We were content to hold the logs
together with our hands and feet.
It was not until we got over our first enthusiasm for
navigation and had begun to return to our tree-shelter to sleep
at night, that we found the Swift One. I saw her first,
gathering young acorns from the branches of a large oak near
our tree. She was very timid. At first, she kept very still;
but when she saw that she was discovered she dropped to the
ground and dashed wildly away. We caught occasional glimpses of
her from day to day, and came to look for her when we travelled
back and forth between our tree and the mouth of the slough.
And then, one day, she did not run away. She waited our
coming, and made soft peace-sounds. We could not get very near,
however. When we seemed to approach too close, she darted
suddenly away and from a safe distance uttered the soft sounds
again. This continued for some days. It took a long while to
get acquainted with her, but finally it was accomplished and
she joined us sometimes in our play.
I liked her from the first. She was of most pleasing
appearance. She was very mild. Her eyes were the mildest I had
ever seen. In this she was quite unlike the rest of the girls
and women of the Folk, who were born viragos. She never made
harsh, angry cries, and it seemed to be her nature to flee away
from trouble rather than to remain and fight.
The mildness I have mentioned seemed to emanate from her
whole being. Her bodily as well as facial appearance was the
cause of this. Her eyes were larger than most of her kind, and
they were not so deep-set, while the lashes were longer and
more regular. Nor was her nose so thick and squat. It had quite
a bridge, and the nostrils opened downward. Her incisors were
not large, nor was her upper lip long and down-hanging, nor her
lower lip protruding. She was not very hairy, except on the
outsides of arms and legs and across the shoulders; and while
she was thin-hipped, her calves were not twisted and gnarly.
I have often wondered, looking back upon her from the
twentieth century through the medium of my dreams, and it has
always occurred to me that possibly she may have been related
to the Fire People. Her father, or mother, might well have come
from that higher stock. While such things were not common,
still they did occur, and I have seen the proof of them with my
own eyes, even to the extent of members of the horde turning
renegade and going to live with the Tree People.
All of which is neither here nor there. The Swift One was
radically different from any of the females of the horde, and I
had a liking for her from the first. Her mildness and
gentleness attracted me. She was never rough, and she never
fought. She always ran away, and right here may be noted the
significance of the naming of her. She was a better climber
than Lop-Ear or I. When we played tag we could never catch her
except by accident, while she could catch us at will. She was
remarkably swift in all her movements, and she had a genius for
judging distances that was equalled only by her daring.
Excessively timid in all other matters, she was without fear
when it came to climbing or running through the trees, and
Lop-Ear and I were awkward and lumbering and cowardly in
comparison.
She was an orphan. We never saw her with any one, and
there was no telling how long she had lived alone in the world.
She must have learned early in her helpless childhood that
safety lay only in flight. She was very wise and very discreet.
It became a sort of game with Lop-Ear and me to try to find
where she lived. It was certain that she had a tree-shelter
somewhere, and not very far away; but trail her as we would, we
could never find it. She was willing enough to join with us at
play in the day-time, but the secret of her abiding-place she
guarded jealously.
CHAPTER XI
It must be remembered that the description I have just
given of the Swift One is not the description that would have
been given by Big-Tooth, my other self of my dreams, my
prehistoric ancestor. It is by the medium of my dreams that I,
the modern man, look through the eyes of Big-Tooth and see.
And so it is with much that I narrate of the events of
that far-off time. There is a duality about my impressions that
is too confusing to inflict upon my readers. I shall merely
pause here in my narrative to indicate this duality, this
perplexing mixing of personality. It is I, the modern, who look
back across the centuries and weigh and analyze the emotions
and motives of Big-Tooth, my other self. He did not bother to
weigh and analyze. He was simplicity itself. He just lived
events, without ever pondering why he lived them in his
particular and often erratic way.
As I, my real self, grew older, I entered more and more
into the substance of my dreams. One may dream, and even in the
midst of the dream be aware that he is dreaming, and if the
dream be bad, comfort himself with the thought that it is only
a dream. This is a common experience with all of us. And so it
was that I, the modern, often entered into my dreaming, and in
the consequent strange dual personality was both actor and
spectator. And right often have I, the modern, been perturbed
and vexed by the foolishness, illogic, obtuseness, and general
all-round stupendous stupidity of myself, the primitive.
And one thing more, before I end this digression. Have you
ever dreamed that you dreamed? Dogs dream, horses dream, all
animals dream. In Big-Tooth's day the half-men dreamed, and
when the dreams were bad they howled in their sleep. Now I, the
modern, have lain down with Big-Tooth and dreamed his dreams.
This is getting almost beyond the grip of the intellect, I
know; but I do know that I have done this thing. And let me
tell you that the flying and crawling dreams of Big-Tooth were
as vivid to him as the falling-through-space dream is to you.
For Big-Tooth also had an other-self, and when he slept
that other-self dreamed back into the past, back to the winged
reptiles and the clash and the onset of dragons, and beyond
that to the scurrying, rodent-like life of the tiny mammals,
and far remoter still, to the shore-slime of the primeval sea.
I cannot, I dare not, say more. It is all too vague and
complicated and awful. I can only hint of those vast and
terrific vistas through which I have peered hazily at the
progression of life, not upward from the ape to man, but upward
from the worm.
And now to return to my tale. I, Big-Tooth, knew not the
Swift One as a creature of finer facial and bodily symmetry,
with long-lashed eyes and a bridge to her nose and down-opening
nostrils that made toward beauty. I knew her only as the
mild-eyed young female who made soft sounds and did not fight.
I liked to play with her, I knew not why, to seek food in her
company, and to go bird-nesting with her. And I must confess
she taught me things about tree-climbing. She was very wise,
very strong, and no clinging skirts impeded her movements.
It was about this time that a slight defection arose on
the part of Lop-Ear. He got into the habit of wandering off in
the direction of the tree where my mother lived. He had taken a
liking to my vicious sister, and the Chatterer had come to
tolerate him. Also, there were several other young people,
progeny of the monogamic couples that lived in the
neighborhood, and Lop-Ear played with these young people.
I could never get the Swift One to join with them.
Whenever I visited them she dropped behind and disappeared. I
remember once making a strong effort to persuade her. But she
cast backward, anxious glances, then retreated, calling to me
from a tree. So it was that I did not make a practice of
accompanying Lop-Ear when he went to visit his new friends. The
Swift One and I were good comrades, but, try as I would, I
could never find her tree-shelter. Undoubtedly, had nothing
happened, we would have soon mated, for our liking was mutual;
but the something did happen.
One morning, the Swift One not having put in an
appearance, Lop-Ear and I were down at the mouth of the slough
playing on the logs. We had scarcely got out on the water, when
we were startled by a roar of rage. It was Red-Eye. He was
crouching on the edge of the timber jam and glowering his
hatred at us. We were badly frightened, for here was no
narrow-mouthed cave for refuge. But the twenty feet of water
that intervened gave us temporary safety, and we plucked up
courage.
Red-Eye stood up erect and began beating his hairy chest
with his fist. Our two logs were side by side, and we sat on
them and laughed at him. At first our laughter was
half-hearted, tinged with fear, but as we became convinced of
his impotence we waxed uproarious. He raged and raged at us,
and ground his teeth in helpless fury. And in our fancied
security we mocked and mocked him. We were ever short-sighted,
we Folk.
Red-Eye abruptly ceased his breast-beating and
tooth-grinding, and ran across the timber-jam to the shore. And
just as abruptly our merriment gave way to consternation. It
was not Red-Eye's way to forego revenge so easily. We waited in
fear and trembling for whatever was to happen. It never struck
us to paddle away. He came back with great leaps across the
jam, one huge hand filled with round, water-washed pebbles. I
am glad that he was unable to find larger missiles, say stones
weighing two or three pounds, for we were no more than a score
of feet away, and he surely would have killed us.
As it was, we were in no small danger. Zip! A tiny pebble
whirred past with the force almost of a bullet. Lop-Ear and I
began paddling frantically. Whiz-zip-bang ! Lop-Ear screamed
with sudden anguish. The pebble had struck him between the
shoulders. Then I got one and yelled. The only thing that saved
us was the exhausting of Red-Eye's ammunition. He dashed back
to the gravel-bed for more, while Lop-Ear and I paddled away.
Gradually we drew out of range, though Red-Eye continued
making trips for more ammunition and the pebbles continued to
whiz about us. Out in the centre of the slough there was a
slight current, and in our excitement we failed to notice that
it was drifting us into the river. We paddled, and Red-Eye kept
as close as he could to us by following along the shore. Then
he discovered larger rocks. Such ammunition increased his
range. One fragment, fully five pounds in weight, crashed on
the log
alongside of me, and such was its impact that it drove a
score of splinters, like fiery needles, into my leg. Had it
struck me it would have killed me.
And then the river current caught us. So wildly were we
paddling that Red-Eye was the first to notice it, and our first
warning was his yell of triumph. Where the edge of the current
struck the slough-water was a series of eddies or small
whirlpools. These caught our clumsy logs and whirled them end
for end, back and forth and around. We quit paddling and
devoted our whole energy to holding the logs together alongside
each other. In the meanwhile Red-Eye continued to bombard us,
the rock fragments falling about us, splashing water on us, and
menacing our lives. At the same time he gloated over us, wildly
and vociferously.
It happened that there was a sharp turn in the river at
the point where the slough entered, and the whole main current
of the river was deflected to the other bank. And toward that
bank, which was the north bank, we drifted rapidly, at the same
time going down-stream. This quickly took us out of range of
Red-Eye, and the last we saw of him was far out on a point of
land, where he was jumping up and down and chanting a paean of
victory.
Beyond holding the two logs together, Lop-Ear and I did
nothing. We were resigned to our fate, and we remained resigned
until we aroused to the fact that we were drifting along the
north shore not a hundred feet away. We began to paddle for it.
Here the main force of the current was flung back toward the
south shore, and the result of our paddling was that we crossed
the current where it was swiftest and narrowest. Before we were
aware, we were out of it and in a quiet eddy.
Our logs drifted slowly and at last grounded gently on the
bank. Lop-Ear and I crept ashore.The logs drifted on out of the
eddy and swept away down the stream. We looked at each other,
but we did not laugh. We were in a strange land, and it did not
enter our minds that we could return to our own land in the
same manner that we had come.
We had learned how to cross a river, though we did not
know it. And this was something that no one else of the Folk
had ever done. We were the first of the Folk to set foot on the
north bank of the river, and, for that matter, I believe the
last. That they would have done so in the time to come is
undoubted; but the migration of the Fire People, and the
consequent migration of the survivors of the Folk, set back our
evolution for centuries.
Indeed, there is no telling how disastrous was to be the
outcome of the Fire People's migration. Personally, I am prone
to believe that it brought about the destruction of the Folk;
that we, a branch of lower life budding toward the human, were
nipped short off and perished down by the roaring surf where
the river entered the sea. Of course, in such an eventuality, I
remain to be accounted for; but I outrun my story, and such
accounting will be made before I am done.
CHAPTER XII
I have no idea how long Lop-Ear and I wandered in the land
north of the river. We were like mariners wrecked on a desert
isle, so far as concerned the likelihood of our getting home
again. We turned our backs upon the river, and for weeks and
months adventured in that wilderness where there were no Folk.
It is very difficult for me to reconstruct our journeying, and
impossible to do it from day to day. Most of it is hazy and
indistinct, though here and there I have vivid recollections of
things that happened.
Especially do I remember the hunger we endured on the
mountains between Long Lake and Far Lake, and the calf we
caught sleeping in the thicket. Also, there are the Tree People
who dwelt in the forest between Long Lake and the mountains. It
was they who chased us into the mountains and compelled us to
travel on to Far Lake.
First, after we left the river, we worked toward the west
till we came to a small stream that flowed through marshlands.
Here we turned away toward the north, skirting the marshes and
after several days arriving at what I have called Long Lake. We
spent some time around its upper end, where we found food in
plenty; and then, one day, in the forest, we ran foul of the
Tree People. These creatures were ferocious apes, nothing more.
And yet they were not so different from us. They were more
hairy, it is true; their legs were a trifle more twisted and
gnarly, their eyes a bit smaller, their necks a bit thicker and
shorter, and their nostrils slightly more like orifices in a
sunken surface; but they had no hair on their faces and
on the palms of their hands and the soles of their feet, and
they made sounds similar to ours with somewhat similar
meanings. After all, the Tree People and the Folk were not so
unlike.
I found him first, a little withered, dried-up old fellow,
wrinkled-faced and bleary-eyed and tottery. He was legitimate
prey. In our world there was no sympathy between the kinds, and
he was not our kind. He was a Tree-Man, and he was very old. He
was sitting at the foot of a tree--evidently his tree, for we
could see the tattered nest in the branches, in which he slept
at night.
I pointed him out to Lop-Ear, and we made a rush for him.
He started to climb, but was too slow. I caught him by the leg
and dragged him back. Then we had fun. We pinched him, pulled
his hair, tweaked his ears, and poked twigs into him, and all
the while we laughed with streaming eyes. His futile anger was
most absurd. He was a comical sight, striving to fan into flame
the cold ashes of his youth, to resurrect his strength dead and
gone through the oozing of the years--making woful faces in
place of the ferocious ones he intended, grinding his worn
teeth together, beating his meagre chest with feeble fists.
Also, he had a cough, and he gasped and hacked and
spluttered prodigiously. Every time he tried to climb the tree
we pulled him back, until at last he surrendered to his
weakness and did no more than sit and weep. And Lop-Ear and I
sat with him, our arms around each other, and laughed at his
wretchedness.
From weeping he went to whining, and from whining to
wailing, until at last he achieved a scream. This alarmed us,
but the more we tried to make him cease, the louder he
screamed. And then, from not far away in the forest, came a
"Goek! Goek!" to our ears. To this there were answering cries,
several of them, and from very far off we could hear a big,
bass "Goek! Goek! Goek!" Also, the "Whoo-whoo !" call was
rising in the forest all around us.
Then came the chase. It seemed it never would end. They
raced us through the trees, the whole tribe of them, and nearly
caught us. We were forced to take to the ground, and here we
had the advantage, for they were truly the Tree People, and
while they out-climbed us we out-footed them on the ground. We
broke away toward the north, the tribe howling on our track.
Across the open spaces we gained, and in the brush they caught
up with us, and more than once it was nip and tuck. And as the
chase continued, we realized that we were not their kind,
either, and that the bonds between us were anything but
sympathetic.
They ran us for hours. The forest seemed interminable. We
kept to the glades as much as possible, but they always ended
in more thick forest. Sometimes we thought we had escaped, and
sat down to rest; but always, before we could recover our
breath, we would hear the hateful "Whoo-whoo!" cries and the
terrible "Goek! Goek! Goek!" This latter sometimes terminated
in a savage "Ha ha ha ha haaaaa!!!"
And in this fashion were we hunted through the forest by
the exasperated Tree People. At last, by mid-afternoon, the
slopes began rising higher and higher and the trees were
becoming smaller. Then we came out on the grassy flanks of the
mountains. Here was where we could make time, and here the Tree
People gave up and returned to their forest.
The mountains were bleak and inhospitable, and three times
that afternoon we tried to regain the woods. But the Tree
People were lying in wait, and they drove us back. Lop-Ear and
I slept that night in a dwarf tree, no larger than a bush. Here
was no security, and we would have been easy prey for any
hunting animal that chanced along.
In the morning, what of our new-gained respect for the
Tree People, we faced into the mountains. That we had no
definite plan, or even idea, I am confident. We were merely
driven on by the danger we had escaped. Of our wanderings
through the mountains I have only misty memories. We were in
that bleak region many days, and we suffered much, especially
from fear, it was all so new and strange. Also, we suffered
from the cold, and later from hunger.
It--was a desolate land of rocks and foaming streams and
clattering cataracts. We climbed and descended mighty canyons
and gorges; and ever, from every view point, there spread out
before us, in all directions, range upon range, the unceasing
mountains. We slept at night in holes and crevices, and on one
cold night we perched on top a slender pinnacle of rock that
was almost like a tree.
And then, at last, one hot midday, dizzy with hunger, we
gained the divide. From this high backbone of earth, to the
north, across the diminishing, down-falling ranges, we caught a
glimpse of a far lake. The sun shone upon it, and about it were
open, level grass-lands, while to the eastward we saw the dark
line of a wide-stretching forest.
We were two days in gaining the lake, and we were weak
with hunger; but on its shore, sleeping snugly in a thicket, we
found a part-grown calf. It gave us much trouble, for we knew
no other way to kill than with our hands. When we had gorged
our fill, we carried the remainder of the meat to the eastward
forest and hid it in a tree. We never returned to that tree,
for the shore of the stream that drained Far Lake was packed
thick with salmon that had come up from the sea to spawn.
Westward from the lake stretched the grass-lands, and here
were multitudes of bison and wild cattle. Also were there many
packs of wild dogs, and as there were no trees it was not a
safe place for us. We followed north along the stream for days.
Then, and for what reason I do not know, we abruptly left the
stream and swung to the east, and then to the southeast,
through a great forest. I shall not bore you with our journey.
I but indicate it to show how we finally arrived at the Fire
People's country.
We came out upon the river, but we did not know it for our
river. We had been lost so long that we had come to accept the
condition of being lost as habitual. As I look back I see
clearly how our lives and destinies are shaped by the merest
chance. We did not know it was our river--there was no way of
telling; and if we had never crossed it we would most probably
have never returned to the horde; and I, the modern, the
thousand centuries yet to be born, would never have been born .
And yet Lop-Ear and I wanted greatly to return. We had
experienced homesickness on our journey, the yearning for our
own kind and land; and often had I had recollections of the
Swift One, the young female who made soft sounds, whom it was
good to be with, and who lived by herself nobody knew where. My
recollections of her were accompanied by sensations of hunger,
and these I felt when I was not hungry and when I had just
eaten.
But to come back to the river. Food was plentiful,
principally berries and succulent roots, and on the river bank
we played and lingered for days. And then the idea came to
Lop-Ear. It was a visible process, the coming of the idea. I
saw it. The expression in his eyes became plaintive and
querulous, and he was greatly perturbed. Then his eyes went
muddy, as if he had lost his grip on the inchoate thought. This
was followed by the plaintive, querulous expression as the idea
persisted and he clutched it anew. He looked at me, and at the
river and the far shore. He tried to speak, but had no sounds
with which to express the idea. The result was a gibberish that
made me laugh. This angered him, and he grabbed me suddenly and
threw me on my back. Of course we fought, and in the end I
chased him up a tree, where he secured a long branch and poked
me every time I tried to get at him.
And the idea had gone glimmering. I did not know, and he
had forgotten. But the next morning it awoke in him again.
Perhaps it was the homing instinct in him asserting itself that
made the idea persist. At any rate it was there, and clearer
than before. He led me down to the water, where a log had
grounded in an eddy. I thought he was minded to play, as we had
played in the mouth of the slough. Nor did I change my mind as
I watched him tow up a second log from farther down the shore.
It was not until we were on the logs, side by side and
holding them together, and had paddled out into the current,
that I learned his intention. He paused to point at the far
shore, and resumed his paddling, at the same time uttering loud
and encouraging cries. I understood, and we paddled
energetically. The swift current caught us, flung us toward the
south shore, but before we could make a landing flung us back
toward the north shore.
Here arose dissension. Seeing the north shore so near, I
began to paddle for it. Lop-Ear tried to paddle for the south
shore. The logs swung around in circles, and we got nowhere,
and all the time the forest was flashing past as we drifted
down the stream. We could not fight. We knew better than to let
go the grips of hands and feet that held the logs together. But
we chattered and abused each other with our tongues until the
current flung us toward the south bank again. That was now the
nearest goal, and together and amicably we paddled for it. We
landed in an eddy, and climbed directly into the trees to
reconnoitre.
CHAPTER XIII
It was not until the night of our first day on the south
bank of the river that we discovered the Fire People. What must
have been a band of wandering hunters went into camp not far
from the tree in which Lop-Ear and I had elected to roost for
the night. The voices of the Fire People at first alarmed us,
but later, when darkness had come, we were attracted by the
fire. We crept cautiously and silently from tree to tree till
we got a good view of the scene.
In an open space among the trees, near to the river, the
fire was burning. About it were half a dozen Fire-Men. Lop-Ear
clutched me suddenly, and I could feel him tremble. I looked
more closely, and saw the wizened little old hunter who had
shot Broken-Tooth out of the tree years before. When he got up
and walked about, throwing fresh wood upon the fire, I saw that
he limped with his crippled leg. Whatever it was, it was a
permanent injury. He seemed more dried up and wizened than
ever, and the hair on his face was quite gray.
The other hunters were young men. I noted, lying near them
on the ground, their bows and arrows, and I knew the weapons
for what they were. The Fire-Men wore animal skins around their
waists and across their shoulders. Their arms and legs,
however, were bare, and they wore no footgear. As I have said
before, they were not quite so hairy as we of the Folk. They
did not have large heads, and between them and the Folk there
was very little difference in the degree of the slant of the
head back from the eyes.
They were less stooped than we, less springy in their
movements. Their backbones and hips and knee-joints seemed more
rigid. Their arms were not so long as ours either, and I did
not notice that they ever balanced themselves when they walked,
by touching the ground on either side with their hands. Also,
their muscles were more rounded and symmetrical than ours, and
their faces were more pleasing. Their nose orifices opened
downward; likewise the bridges of their noses were more
developed, did not look so squat nor crushed as ours. Their
lips were less flabby and pendent, and their eye-teeth did not
look so much like fangs. However, they were quite as
thin-hipped as we, and did not weigh much more. Take it all in
all, they were less different from us than were we from the
Tree People. Certainly, all three kinds were related, and not
so remotely related at that.
The fire around which they sat was especially attractive.
Lop-Ear and I sat for hours, watching the flames and smoke. It
was most fascinating when fresh fuel was thrown on and showers
of sparks went flying upward. I wanted to come closer and look
at the fire, but there was no way. We were crouching in the
forks of a tree on the edge of the open space, and we did not
dare run the risk of being discovered.
The Fire-Men squatted around the fire and slept with their
heads bowed forward on their knees. They did not sleep soundly.
Their ears twitched in their sleep, and they were restless.
Every little while one or another got up and threw more wood
upon the fire. About the circle of light in the forest, in the
darkness beyond, roamed hunting animals. Lop-Ear and I could
tell them by their sounds. There were wild dogs and a hyena,
and for a time there was a great yelping and snarling that
awakened on the instant the whole circle of sleeping Fire-Men.
Once a lion and a lioness stood beneath our tree and gazed
out with bristling hair and blinking eyes. The lion licked his
chops and was nervous with eagerness, as if he wanted to go
forward and make a meal. But the lioness was more cautious. It
was she that discovered us, and the pair stood and looked up at
us, silently, with twitching, scenting nostrils. Then they
growled, looked once again at the fire, and turned away into
the forest.
For a much longer time Lop-Ear and I remained and watched.
Now and again we could hear the crashing of heavy bodies in the
thickets and underbrush, and from the darkness of the other
side, across the circle, we could see eyes gleaming in the
firelight. In the distance we heard a lion roar, and from far
off came the scream of some stricken animal, splashing and
floundering in a drinking-place. Also, from the river, came a
great grunting of rhinoceroses.
In the morning, after having had our sleep, we crept back
to the fire. It was still smouldering, and the Fire-Men were
gone. We made a circle through the forest to make sure, and
then we ran to the fire. I wanted to see what it was like, and
between thumb and finger I picked up a glowing coal. My cry of
pain and fear, as I dropped it, stampeded Lop-Ear into the
trees, and his flight frightened me after him.
The next time we came back more cautiously, and we avoided
the glowing coals. We fell to imitating the Fire-Men. We
squatted down by the fire, and with heads bent forward on our
knees, made believe to sleep. Then we mimicked their speech,
talking to each other in their fashion and making a great
gibberish. I remembered seeing the wizened old hunter poke the
fire with a stick. I poked the fire with a stick, turning up
masses of live coals and clouds of white ashes. This was great
sport, and soon we were coated white with the ashes.
It was inevitable that we should imitate the Fire-Men in
replenishing the fire. We tried it first with small pieces of
wood. It was a success. The wood flamed up and crackled, and we
danced and gibbered with delight. Then we began to throw on
larger pieces of wood. We put on more and more, until we had a
mighty fire. We dashed excitedly back and forth, dragging dead
limbs and branches from out the forest. The flames soared
higher and higher, and the smoke-column out-towered the trees.
There was a tremendous snapping and crackling and roaring. It
was the most monumental work we had ever effected with our
hands, and we were proud of it. We, too, were Fire-Men, we
thought, as we danced there, white gnomes in the conflagration.
The dried grass and underbrush caught fire, but we did not
notice it. Suddenly a great tree on the edge of the open space
burst into flames.
We looked at it with startled eyes. The heat of it drove
us back. Another tree caught, and another, and then half a
dozen. We were frightened. The monster had broken loose. We
crouched down in fear, while the fire ate around the circle and
hemmed us in. Into Lop-Ear's eyes came the plaintive look that
always accompanied incomprehension, and I know that in my eyes
must have been the same look. We huddled, with our arms around
each other, until the heat began to reach us and the odor of
burning hair was in our nostrils. Then we made a dash of it,
and fled away westward through the forest, looking back and
laughing as we ran.
By the middle of the day we came to a neck of land, made,
as we afterward discovered, by a great curve of the river that
almost completed a circle. Right across the neck lay bunched
several low and partly wooded hills. Over these we climbed,
looking backward at the forest which had become a sea of flame
that swept eastward before a rising wind. We continued to the
west, following the river bank, and before we knew it we were
in the midst of the abiding-place of the Fire People.
This abiding-place was a splendid strategic selection. It
was a peninsula, protected on three sides by the curving river.
On only one side was it accessible by land. This was the narrow
neck of the peninsula, and here the several low hills were a
natural obstacle. Practically isolated from the rest of the
world, the Fire People must have here lived and prospered for a
long time. In fact, I think it was their prosperity that was
responsible for the subsequent migration that worked such
calamity upon the Folk. The Fire People must have increased in
numbers until they pressed uncomfortably against the bounds of
their habitat. They were expanding, and in the course of their
expanding they drove the Folk before them, and settled down
themselves in the caves and occupied the territory that we had
occupied.
But Lop-Ear and I little dreamed of all this when we found
ourselves in the Fire People's stronghold. We had but one idea,
and that was to get away, though we could not forbear humoring
our curiosity by peeping out upon the village. For the first
time we saw the women and children of the Fire People. The
latter ran for the most part naked, though the former wore
skins of wild animals.
The Fire People, like ourselves, lived in caves. The open
space in front of the caves sloped down to the river, and in
the open space burned many small fires. But whether or not the
Fire People cooked their food, I do not know. Lop-Ear and I did
not see them cook. Yet it is my opinion that they surely must
have performed some sort of rude cookery. Like us, they carried
water in gourds from the river. There was much coming and
going, and loud cries made by the women and children. The
latter played about and cut up antics quite in the same way as
did the children of the Folk, and they more nearly resembled
the children of the Folk than did the grown Fire People
resemble the grown Folk.
Lop-Ear and I did not linger long. We saw some of the
part-grown boys shooting with bow and arrow, and we sneaked
back into the thicker forest and made our way to the river. And
there we found a catamaran, a real catamaran, one evidently
made by some Fire-Man. The two logs were small and straight,
and were lashed together by means of tough roots and
crosspieces of wood.
This time the idea occurred simultaneously to us. We were
trying to escape out of the Fire People's territory. What
better way than by crossing the river on these logs? We climbed
on board and shoved off. A sudden something gripped the
catamaran and flung it downstream violently against the bank.
The abrupt stoppage almost whipped us off into the water. The
catamaran was tied to a tree by a rope of twisted roots. This
we untied before shoving off again.
By the time we had paddled well out into the current, we
had drifted so far downstream that we were in full view of the
Fire People's abiding-place. So occupied were we with our
paddling, our eyes fixed upon the other bank, that we knew
nothing until aroused by a yell from the shore. We looked
around. There were the Fire People, many of them, looking at us
and pointing at us, and more were crawling out of the caves. We
sat up to watch, and forgot all about paddling. There was a
great hullabaloo on the shore. Some of the Fire-Men discharged
their bows at us, and a few of the arrows fell near us, but the
range was too great.
It was a great day for Lop-Ear and me. To the east the
conflagration we had started was filling half the sky with
smoke. And here we were, perfectly safe in the middle of the
river, encircling the Fire People's stronghold. We sat and
laughed at them as we dashed by, swinging south, and southeast
to east, and even to northeast, and then east again, southeast
and south and on around to the west, a great double curve where
the river nearly tied a knot in itself.
As we swept on to the west, the Fire People far behind, a
familiar scene flashed upon our eyes. It was the great
drinking-place, where we had wandered once or twice to watch
the circus of the animals when they came down to drink. Beyond
it, we knew, was the carrot patch, and beyond that the caves
and the abiding-place of the horde. We began to paddle for the
bank that slid swiftly past, and before we knew it we were down
upon the drinking-places used by the horde. There were the
women and children, the water carriers, a number of them,
filling their gourds. At sight of us they stampeded madly up
the run-ways, leaving behind them a trail of gourds they had
dropped.
We landed, and of course we neglected to tie up the
catamaran, which floated off down the river. Right cautiously
we crept up a run-way. The Folk had all disappeared into their
holes, though here and there we could see a face peering out at
us. There was no sign of Red-Eye. We were home again. And that
night we slept in our own little cave high up on the cliff,
though first we had to evict a couple of pugnacious youngsters
who had taken possession.
CHAPTER XIV
The months came and went. The drama and tragedy of the
future were yet to come upon the stage, and in the meantime we
pounded nuts and lived. It--vas a good year, I remember, for
nuts. We used to fill gourds with nuts and carry them to the
pounding-places. We placed them in depressions in the rock,
and, with a piece of rock in our hands, we cracked them and ate
them as we cracked.
It was the fall of the year when Lop-Ear and I returned
from our long adventure-journey, and the winter that followed
was mild. I made frequent trips to the neighborhood of my old
home-tree, and frequently I searched the whole territory that
lay between the blueberry swamp and the mouth of the slough
where Lop-Ear and I had learned navigation, but no clew could I
get of the Swift One. She had disappeared. And I wanted her. I
was impelled by that hunger which I have mentioned, and which
was akin to physical hunger, albeit it came often upon me when
my stomach was full. But all my search was vain.
Life was not monotonous at the caves, however. There was
Red-Eye to be considered. Lop-Ear and I never knew a moment's
peace except when we were in our own little cave. In spite of
the enlargement of the entrance we had made, it was still a
tight squeeze for us to get in. And though from time to time we
continued to enlarge, it was still too small for Red-Eye's
monstrous body. But he never stormed our cave again. He had
learned the lesson well, and he carried on his neck a bulging
lump to show where I had hit him with the rock. This lump never
went away, and it was prominent enough to be seen at a
distance. I often took great delight in watching that evidence
of my handiwork; and sometimes, when I was myself assuredly
safe, the sight of it caused me to laugh.
While the other Folk would not have come to our rescue had
Red-Eye proceeded to tear Lop-Ear and me to pieces before their
eyes, nevertheless they sympathized with us. Possibly it was
not sympathy but the way they expressed their hatred for
Red-Eye; at any rate they always warned us of his approach.
Whether in the forest, at the drinking-places, or in the open
space before the caves, they were always quick to warn us. Thus
we had the advantage of many eyes in our feud with Red-Eye, the
atavism.
Once he nearly got me. It was early in the morning, and
the Folk were not yet up. The surprise was complete. I was cut
off from the way up the cliff to my cave. Before I knew it I
had dashed into the double-cave,--the cave where Lop-Ear had
first eluded me long years before, and where old Saber-Tooth
had come to discomfiture when he pursued the two Folk. By the
time I had got through the connecting passage between the two
caves, I discovered that Red-Eye was not following me. The next
moment he charged into the cave from the outside. I slipped
back through the passage, and he charged out and around and in
upon me again. I merely repeated my performance of slipping
through the passage.
He kept me there half a day before he gave up. After that,
when Lop-Ear and I were reasonably sure of gaining the
double-cave, we did not retreat up the cliff to our own cave
when Red-Eye came upon the scene. All we did was to keep an eye
on him and see that he did not cut across our line of retreat.
It was during this winter that Red-Eye killed his latest
wife with abuse and repeated beatings. I have called him an
atavism, but in this he was worse than an atavism, for the
males of the lower animals do not maltreat and murder their
mates. In this I take it that Red-Eye, in spite of his
tremendous atavistic tendencies, foreshadowed the coming of
man, for it is the males of the human species only that murder
their mates.
As was to be expected, with the doing away of one wife
Red-Eye proceeded to get another. He decided upon the Singing
One. She was the granddaughter of old Marrow-Bone, and the
daughter of the Hairless One. She was a young thing, greatly
given to singing at the mouth of her cave in the twilight, and
she had but recently mated with Crooked-Leg. He was a quiet
individual, molesting no one and not given to bickering with
his fellows. He was no fighter anyway. He was small and lean,
and not so active on his legs as the rest of us.
Red-Eye never committed a more outrageous deed. It was in
the quiet at the end of the day, when we began to congregate in
the open space before climbing into our caves. Suddenly the
Singing One dashed up a run-way from a drinking-place, pursued
by Red-Eye. She ran to her husband. Poor little Crooked-Leg was
terribly scared. But he was a hero. He knew that death was upon
him, yet he did not run away. He stood up, and chattered,
bristled, and showed his teeth.
Red-Eye roared with rage. It was an offence to him that
any of the Folk should dare to withstand him. His hand shot out
and clutched Crooked-Leg by the neck. The latter sank his teeth
into Red-Eye's arm; but the next moment, with a broken neck,
Crooked-Leg was floundering and squirming on the ground. The
Singing One screeched and gibbered. Red-Eye seized her by the
hair of her head and dragged her toward his cave. He handled
her roughly when the climb began, and he dragged and hauled her
up into the cave.
We were very angry, insanely, vociferously angry. Beating
our chests, bristling, and gnashing our teeth, we gathered
together in our rage. We felt the prod of gregarious instinct,
the drawing together as though for united action, the impulse
toward cooperation. In dim ways this need for united action was
impressed upon us. But there was no way to achieve it because
there was no way to express it. We did not turn to, all of us,
and destroy Red-Eye, because we lacked a vocabulary. We were
vaguely thinking thoughts for which there were no
thought-symbols. These thought-symbols were yet to be slowly
and painfully invented.
We tried to freight sound with the vague thoughts that
flitted like shadows through our consciousness. The Hairless
One began to chatter loudly. By his noises he expressed anger
against Red-Eye and desire to hurt Red-Eye. Thus far he got,
and thus far we understood. But when he tried to express the
cooperative impulse that stirred within him, his noises became
gibberish. Then Big-Face, with brow-bristling and
chest-pounding, began to chatter. One after another of us
joined in the orgy of rage, until even old Marrow-Bone was
mumbling and spluttering with his cracked voice and withered
lips. Some one seized a stick and began pounding a log. In a
moment he had struck a rhythm. Unconsciously, our yells and
exclamations yielded to this rhythm. It had a soothing effect
upon us; and before we knew it, our rage forgotten, we were in
the full swing of a hee-hee council.
These hee-hee councils splendidly illustrate the
inconsecutiveness and inconsequentiality of the Folk. Here were
we, drawn together by mutual rage and the impulse toward
cooperation, led off into forgetfulness by the establishment of
a rude rhythm. We were sociable and gregarious, and these
singing and laughing councils satisfied us. In ways the hee-hee
council was an adumbration of the councils of primitive man,
and of the great national assemblies and international
conventions of latter-day man. But we Folk of the Younger World
lacked speech, and whenever we were so drawn together we
precipitated babel, out of which arose a unanimity of rhythm
that contained within itself the essentials of art yet to come.
It was art nascent.
There was nothing long-continued about these rhythms that
we struck. A rhythm was soon lost, and pandemonium reigned
until we could find the rhythm again or start a new one.
Sometimes half a dozen rhythms would be swinging
simultaneously, each rhythm backed by a group that strove
ardently to drown out the other rhythms.
In the intervals of pandemonium, each chattered, cut up,
hooted, screeched, and danced, himself sufficient unto himself,
filled with his own ideas and volitions to the exclusion of all
others, a veritable centre of the universe, divorced for the
time being from any unanimity with the other universe-centres
leaping and yelling around him. Then would come the rhythm--a
clapping of hands; the beating of a stick upon a log; the
example of one that leaped with repetitions; or the chanting of
one that uttered, explosively and regularly, with inflection
that rose and fell, "A-bang, a-bang! A-bang, a-bang!" One after
another of the self-centred Folk would yield to it, and soon
all would be dancing or chanting in chorus. "Ha-ah, ha-ah,
ha-ah-ha!" was one of our favorite choruses, and another was,
"Eh-wah, eh-wah, eh-wah-hah!"
And so, with mad antics, leaping, reeling, and
over-balancing, we danced and sang in the sombre twilight of
the primeval world, inducing forgetfulness, achieving
unanimity, and working ourselves up into sensuous frenzy. And
so it was that our rage against Red-Eye was soothed away by
art, and we screamed the wild choruses of the hee-hee council
until the night warned us of its terrors, and we crept away to
our holes in the rocks, calling softly to one another, while
the stars came out and darkness settled down.
We were afraid only of the dark. We had no germs of
religion, no conceptions of an unseen world. We knew only the
real world, and the things we feared were the real things, the
concrete dangers, the flesh-and-blood animals that preyed. It
was they that made us afraid of the dark, for darkness was the
time of the hunting animals. It was then that they came out of
their lairs and pounced upon one from the dark wherein they
lurked invisible.
Possibly it was out of this fear of the real denizens of
the dark that the fear of the unreal denizens was later to
develop and to culminate in a whole and mighty unseen world. As
imagination grew it is likely that the fear of death increased
until the Folk that were to come projected this fear into the
dark and peopled it with spirits. I think the Fire People had
already begun to be afraid of the dark in this fashion; but the
reasons we Folk had for breaking up our hee-hee councils and
fleeing to our holes were old Saber-Tooth, the lions and the
jackals, the wild dogs and the wolves, and all the hungry,
meat-eating breeds.
CHAPTER XV
Lop-Ear got married. It was the second winter after our
adventure-journey, and it was most unexpected. He gave me no
warning. The first I knew was one twilight when I climbed the
cliff to our cave. I squeezed into the entrance and there I
stopped. There was no room for me. Lop-Ear and his mate were in
possession, and she was none other than my sister, the daughter
of my step-father, the Chatterer.
I tried to force my way in. There was space only for two,
and that space was already occupied. Also, they had me at a
disadvantage, and, what of the scratching and hair-pulling I
received, I was glad to retreat. I slept that night, and for
many nights, in the connecting passage of the double-cave. From
my experience it seemed reasonably safe. As the two Folk had
dodged old Saber-Tooth, and as I had dodged Red-Eye, so it
seemed to me that I could dodge the hunting animals by going
back and forth between the two caves.
I had forgotten the wild dogs. They were small enough to
go through any passage that I could squeeze through. One night
they nosed me out. Had they entered both caves at the same time
they would have got me. As it was, followed by some of them
through the passage, I dashed out the mouth of the other cave.
Outside were the rest of the wild dogs. They sprang for me as I
sprang for the cliff-wall and began to climb. One of them, a
lean and hungry brute, caught me in mid-leap. His teeth sank
into my thigh-muscles, and he nearly dragged me back. He held
on, but I made no effort to dislodge him, devoting my whole
effort to climbing out of reach of the rest of the brutes.
Not until I was safe from them did I turn my attention to
that live agony on my thigh. And then, a dozen feet above the
snapping pack that leaped and scrambled against the wall and
fell back, I got the dog by the throat and slowly throttled
him. I was a long time doing it. He clawed and ripped my hair
and hide with his hind-paws, and ever he jerked and lunged with
his weight to drag me from the wall.
At last his teeth opened and released my torn flesh. I
carried his body up the cliff with me, and perched out the
night in the entrance of my old cave, wherein were Lop-Ear and
my sister. But first I had to endure a storm of abuse from the
aroused horde for being the cause of the disturbance. I had my
revenge. From time to time, as the noise of the pack below
eased down, I dropped a rock and started it up again.
Whereupon, from all around, the abuse of the exasperated Folk
began afresh. In the morning I shared the dog with Lop-Ear and
his wife, and for several days the three of us were neither
vegetarians nor fruitarians.
Lop-Ear's marriage was not a happy one, and the
consolation about it is that it did not last very long. Neither
he nor I was happy during that period. I was lonely. I suffered
the inconvenience of being cast out of my safe little cave, and
somehow I did not make it up with any other of the young males.
I suppose my long-continued chumming with Lop-Ear had become a
habit.
I might have married, it is true; and most likely I should
have married had it not been for the dearth of females in the
horde. This dearth, it is fair to assume, was caused by the
exorbitance of Red-Eye, and it illustrates the menace he was to
the existence of the horde. Then there was the Swift One, whom
I had not forgotten.
At any rate, during the period of Lop-Ear's marriage I
knocked about from pillar to post, in danger every night that I
slept, and never comfortable. One of the Folk died, and his
widow was taken into the cave of another one of the Folk. I
took possession of the abandoned cave, but it was wide-mouthed,
and after Red-Eye nearly trapped me in it one day, I returned
to sleeping in the passage of the double-cave. During the
summer, however, I used to stay away from the caves for weeks,
sleeping in a tree-shelter I made near the mouth of the slough.
I have said that Lop-Ear was not happy. My sister was the
daughter of the Chatterer, and she made Lop-Ear's life
miserable for him. In no other cave was there so much
squabbling and bickering. If Red-Eye was a Bluebeard, Lop-Ear
was hen-pecked; and I imagine that Red-Eye was too shrewd ever
to covet Lop-Ear's wife.
Fortunately for Lop-Ear, she died. An unusual thing
happened that summer. Late, almost at the end of it, a second
crop of the stringy-rooted carrots sprang up. These unexpected
second-crop roots were young and juicy and tender, and for some
time the carrot-patch was the favorite feeding-place of the
horde. One morning, early, several score of us were there
making our breakfast. On one side of me was the Hairless One.
Beyond him were his father and son, old Marrow-Bone and
Long-Lip. On the other side of me were my sister and Lop-Ear,
she being next to me.
There was no warning. On the sudden, both the Hairless One
and my sister sprang and screamed. At the same instant I heard
the thud of the arrows that transfixed them. The next instant
they were down on the ground, floundering and gasping, and the
rest of us were stampeding for the trees. An arrow drove past
me and entered the ground, its feathered shaft vibrating and
oscillating from the impact of its arrested flight. I remember
clearly how I swerved as I ran, to go past it, and that I gave
it a needlessly wide berth. I must have shied at it as a horse
shies at an object it fears.
Lop-Ear took a smashing fall as he ran beside me. An arrow
had driven through the calf of his leg and tripped him. He
tried to run, but was tripped and thrown by it a second time.
He sat up, crouching, trembling with fear, and called to me
pleadingly. I dashed back. He showed me the arrow. I caught
hold of it to pull it out, but the consequent hurt made him
seize my hand and stop me. A flying arrow passed between us.
Another struck a rock, splintered, and fell to the ground. This
was too much. I pulled, suddenly, with all my might. Lop-Ear
screamed as the arrow came out, and struck at me angrily. But
the next moment we were in full flight again.
I looked back. Old Marrow-Bone, deserted and far behind,
was tottering silently along in his handicapped race with
death. Sometimes he almost fell, and once he did fall; but no
more arrows were coming. He scrambled weakly to his feet. Age
burdened him heavily, but he did not want to die. The three
Fire-Men, who were now running forward from their forest
ambush, could easily have got him, but they did not try.
Perhaps he was too old and tough. But they did want the
Hairless One and my sister, for as I looked back from the trees
I could see the Fire-Men beating in their heads with rocks. One
of the Fire-Men was the wizened old hunter who limped.
We went on through the trees toward the caves--an excited
and disorderly mob that drove before it to their holes all the
small life of the forest, and that set the blue-jays screaming
impudently. Now that there was no immediate danger, Long-Lip
waited for his grand-father, Marrow-Bone; and with the gap of a
generation between them, the old fellow and the youth brought
up our rear.
And so it was that Lop-Ear became a bachelor once more.
That night I slept with him in the old cave, and our old life
of chumming began again. The loss of his mate seemed to cause
him no grief. At least he showed no signs of it, nor of need
for her. It was the wound in his leg that seemed to bother him,
and it was all of a week before he got back again to his old
spryness.
Marrow-Bone was the only old member in the horde.
Sometimes, on looking back upon him, when the vision of him is
most clear, I note a striking resemblance between him and the
father of my father's gardener. The gardener's father was very
old, very wrinkled and withered; and for all the world, when he
peered through his tiny, bleary eyes and mumbled with his
toothless gums, he looked and acted like old Marrow-Bone. This
resemblance, as a child, used to frighten me. I always ran when
I saw the old man tottering along on his two canes. Old
Marrow-Bone even had a bit of sparse and straggly white beard
that seemed identical with the whiskers of the old man.
As I have said, Marrow-Bone was the only old member of the
horde. He was an exception. The Folk never lived to old age.
Middle age was fairly rare. Death by violence was the common
way of death. They died as my father had died, as Broken-Tooth
had died, as my sister and the Hairless One had just
died--abruptly and brutally, in the full possession of their
faculties, in the full swing and rush of life. Natural death?
To die violently was the natural way of dying in those days.
No one died of old age among the Folk. I never knew of a
case. Even Marrow-Bone did not die that way, and he was the
only one in my generation who had the chance. A bad rippling,
any serious accidental or temporary impairment of the
faculties, meant swift death. As a rule, these deaths were not
witnessed.
Members of the horde simply dropped out of sight. They
left the caves in the morning, and they never came back. They
disappeared--into the ravenous maws of the hunting creatures.
This inroad of the Fire People on the carrot-patch was the
beginning of the end, though we did not know it. The hunters of
the Fire People began to appear more frequently as the time
went by. They came in twos and threes, creeping silently
through the forest, with their flying arrows able to annihilate
distance and bring down prey from the top of the loftiest tree
without themselves climbing into it. The bow and arrow was like
an enormous extension of their leaping and striking muscles, so
that, virtually, they could leap and kill at a hundred feet and
more. This made them far more terrible than Saber-Tooth
himself. And then they were very wise. They had speech that
enabled them more effectively to reason, and in addition they
understood cooperation.
We Folk came to be very circumspect when we were in the
forest. We were more alert and vigilant and timid. No longer
were the trees a protection to be relied upon. No longer could
we perch on a branch and laugh down at our carnivorous enemies
on the ground. The Fire People were carnivorous, with claws and
fangs a hundred feet long, the most terrible of all the hunting
animals that ranged the primeval world.
One morning, before the Folk had dispersed to the forest,
there was a panic among the water-carriers and those who had
gone down to the river to drink. The whole horde fled to the
caves. It was our habit, at such times, to flee first and
investigate afterward. We waited in the mouths of our caves and
watched. After some time a Fire-Man stepped cautiously into the
open space. It was the little wizened old hunter. He stood for
a long time and watched us, looking our caves and the
cliff-wall up and down. He descended one of the run-ways to a
drinking-place, returning a few minutes later by another
run-way. Again he stood and watched us carefully, for a long
time. Then he turned on his heel and limped into the forest,
leaving us calling querulously and plaintively to one another
from the cave-mouths.
CHAPTER XVI
I found her down in the old neighborhood near the
blueberry swamp, where my mother lived and where Lop-Ear and I
had built our first tree-shelter. It was unexpected. As I came
under the tree I heard the familiar soft sound and looked up.
There she was, the Swift One, sitting on a limb and swinging
her legs back and forth as she looked at me.
I stood still for some time. The sight of her had made me
very happy. And then an unrest and a pain began to creep in on
this happiness. I started to climb the tree after her, and she
retreated slowly out the limb. Just as I reached for her, she
sprang through the air and landed in the branches of the next
tree. From amid the rustling leaves she peeped out at me and
made soft sounds. I leaped straight for her, and after an
exciting chase the situation was duplicated, for there she was,
making soft sounds and peeping out from the leaves of a third
tree.
It was borne in upon me that somehow it was different now
from the old days before Lop-Ear and I had gone on our
adventure-journey. I wanted her, and I knew that I wanted her.
And she knew it, too. That was why she would not let me come
near her. I forgot that she was truly the Swift One, and that
in the art of climbing she had been my teacher. I pursued her
from tree to tree, and ever she eluded me, peeping back at me
with kindly eyes, making soft sounds, and dancing and leaping
and teetering before me just out of reach. The more she eluded
me, the more I wanted to catch her, and the lengthening shadows
of the afternoon bore witness to the futility of my effort.
As I pursued her, or sometimes rested in an adjoining tree
and watched her, I noticed the change in her. She was larger,
heavier, more grown-up. Her lines were rounder, her muscles
fuller, and there was about her that indefinite something of
maturity that was new to her and that incited me on. Three
years she had been gone--three years at the very least, and the
change in her was marked. I say three years; it is as near as I
can measure the time. A fourth year may have elapsed, which I
have confused with the happenings of the other three years. The
more I think of it, the more confident I am that it must be
four years that she was away.
Where she went, why she went, and what happened to her
during that time, I do not know. There was no way for her to
tell me, any more than there was a way for Lop-Ear and me to
tell the Folk what we had seen when we were away. Like us, the
chance is she had gone off on an adventure-journey, and by
herself. On the other hand, it is possible that Red-Eye may
have been the cause of her going. It is quite certain that he
must have come upon her from time to time, wandering in the
woods; and if he had pursued her there is no question but that
it would have been sufficient to drive her away. From
subsequent events, I am led to believe that she must have
travelled far to the south, across a range of mountains and
down to the banks of a strange river, away from any of her
kind. Many Tree People lived down there, and I think it must
have been they who finally drove her back to the horde and to
me. My reasons for this I shall explain later.
The shadows grew longer, and I pursued more ardently than
ever, and still I could not catch her. She made believe that
she was trying desperately to escape me, and all the time she
managed to keep just beyond reach. I forgot everything--time,
the oncoming of night, and my meat-eating enemies. I was insane
with love of her, and with--anger, too, because she would not
let me come up with her. It was strange how this anger against
her seemed to be part of my desire for her.
As I have said, I forgot everything. In racing across an
open space I ran full tilt upon a colony of snakes. They did
not deter me. I was mad. They struck at me, but I ducked and
dodged and ran on. Then there was a python that ordinarily
would have sent me screeching to a tree-top. He did run me into
a tree; but the Swift One was going out of sight, and I sprang
back to the ground and went on. It was a close shave. Then
there was my old enemy, the hyena. From my conduct he was sure
something was going to happen, and he followed me for an hour.
Once we exasperated a band of wild pigs, and they took after
us. The Swift One dared a wide leap between trees that was too
much for me. I had to take to the ground. There were the pigs.
I didn't care. I struck the earth within a yard of the nearest
one. They flanked me as I ran, and chased me into two different
trees out of the line of my pursuit of the Swift One. I
ventured the ground again, doubled back, and crossed a wide
open space, with the whole band grunting, bristling, and
tusk-gnashing at my heels.
If I had tripped or stumbled in that open space, there
would have been no chance for me. But I didn't. And I didn't
care whether I did or not. I was in such mood that I would have
faced old Saber-Tooth himself, or a score of arrow-shooting
Fire People. Such was the madness of love...with me. With the
Swift One it was different. She was very wise. She did not take
any real risks, and I remember, on looking back across the
centuries to that wild love-chase, that when the pigs delayed
me she did not run away very fast, but waited, rather, for me
to take up the pursuit again. Also, she directed her retreat
before me, going always in the direction she wanted to go.
At last came the dark. She led me around the mossy
shoulder of a canyon wall that out-jutted among the trees.
After that we penetrated a dense mass of underbrush that
scraped and ripped me in passing. But she never ruffled a hair.
She knew the way. In the midst of the thicket was a large oak.
I was very close to her when she climbed it; and in the forks,
in the nest-shelter I had sought so long and vainly, I caught
her.
The hyena had taken our trail again, and he now sat down
on the ground and made hungry noises. But we did not mind, and
we laughed at him when he snarled and went away through the
thicket. It was the spring-time, and the night noises were many
and varied. As was the custom at that time of the year, there
was much fighting among the animals. From the nest we could
hear the squealing and neighing of wild horses, the trumpeting
of elephants, and the roaring of lions. But the moon came out,
and the air was warm, and we laughed and were unafraid.
I remember, next morning, that we came upon two ruffled
cock-birds that fought so ardently that I went right up to them
and caught them by their necks. Thus did the Swift One and I
get our wedding breakfast. They were delicious. It was easy to
catch birds in the spring of the year. There was one night that
year when two elk fought in the moonlight, while the Swift One
and I watched from the trees; and we saw a lion and lioness
crawl up to them unheeded, and kill them as they fought.
There is no telling how long we might have lived in the
Swift One's tree-shelter. But one day, while we were away, the
tree was struck by lightning. Great limbs were riven, and the
nest was demolished. I started to rebuild, but the Swift One
would have nothing to do with it. As I was to learn, she was
greatly afraid of lightning, and I could not persuade her back
into the tree. So it came about, our honeymoon over, that we
went to the caves to live. As Lop-Ear had evicted me from the
cave when he got married, I now evicted him; and the Swift One
and I settled down in it, while he slept at night in the
connecting passage of the double cave.
And with our coming to live with the horde came trouble.
Red-Eye had had I don't know how many wives since the Singing
One. She had gone the way of the rest. At present he had a
little, soft, spiritless thing that whimpered and wept all the
time, whether he beat her or not; and her passing was a
question of very little time. Before she passed, even, Red-Eye
set his eyes on the Swift One; and when she passed, the
persecution of the Swift One began.
Well for her that she was the Swift One, that she had that
amazing aptitude for swift flight through the trees. She needed
all her wisdom and daring in order to keep out of the clutches
of Red-Eye. I could not help her. He was so powerful a monster
that he could have torn me limb from limb. As it was, to my
death I carried an injured shoulder that ached and went lame in
rainy weather and that was a mark of is handiwork.
The Swift One was sick at the time I received this injury.
It must have been a touch of the malaria from which we
sometimes suffered; but whatever it was, it made her dull and
heavy. She did not have the accustomed spring to her muscles,
and was indeed in poor shape for flight when Red-Eye cornered
her near the lair of the wild dogs, several miles south from
the caves. Usually, she would have circled around him, beaten
him in the straight-away, and gained the protection of our
small-mouthed cave. But she could not circle him. She was too
dull and slow. Each time he headed her off, until she gave over
the attempt and devoted her energies wholly to keeping out of
his clutches.
Had she not been sick it would have been child's play for
her to elude him; but as it was, it required all her caution
and cunning. It was to her advantage that she could travel on
thinner branches than he, and make wider leaps. Also, she was
an unerring judge of distance, and she had an instinct for
knowing the strength of twigs, branches, and rotten limbs.
It was an interminable chase. Round and round and back and
forth for long stretches through the forest they dashed. There
was great excitement among the other Folk. They set up a wild
chattering, that was loudest when Red-Eye was at a distance,
and that hushed when the chase led him near. They were impotent
onlookers. The females screeched and gibbered, and the males
beat their chests in helpless rage. Big Face was especially
angry, and though he hushed his racket when Red-Eye drew near,
he did not hush it to the extent the others did.
As for me, I played no brave part. I know I was anything
but a hero. Besides, of what use would it have been for me to
encounter Red-Eye? He was the mighty monster, the abysmal
brute, and there was no hope for me in a conflict of strength.
He would have killed me, and the situation would have remained
unchanged. He would have caught the Swift One before she could
have gained the cave. As it was, I could only look on in
helpless fury, and dodge out of the way and cease my raging
when he came too near.
The hours passed. It was late afternoon. And still the
chase went on. Red-Eye was bent upon exhausting the Swift One.
He deliberately ran her down. After a long time she began to
tire and could no longer maintain her headlong flight. Then it
was that she began going far out on the thinnest branches,
where he could not follow. Thus she might have got a breathing
spell, but Red-Eye was fiendish. Unable to follow her, he
dislodged her by shaking her off. With all his strength and
weight, he would shake the branch back and forth until he
snapped her off as one would snap a fly from a whip-lash. The
first time, she saved herself by falling into branches lower
down. Another time, though they did not save her from the
ground, they broke her fall. Still another time, so fiercely
did he snap her from the branch, she was flung clear across a
gap into another tree. It was remarkable, the way she gripped
and saved herself. Only when driven to it did she seek the
temporary safety of the thin branches. But she was so tired
that she could not otherwise avoid him, and time after time she
was compelled to take to the thin branches.
Still the chase went on, and still the Folk screeched,
beat their chests, and gnashed their teeth. Then came the end.
It was almost twilight. Trembling, panting, struggling for
breath, the Swift One clung pitiably to a high thin branch. It
was thirty feet to the ground, and nothing intervened. Red-Eye
swung back and forth on the branch farther down. It became a
pendulum, swinging wider and wider with every lunge of his
weight. Then he reversed suddenly, just before the downward
swing was completed. Her grips were torn loose, and, screaming,
she was hurled toward the ground.
But she righted herself in mid-air and descended feet
first. Ordinarily, from such a height, the spring in her legs
would have eased the shock of impact with the ground. But she
was exhausted. She could not exercise this spring. Her legs
gave under her, having only partly met the shock, and she
crashed on over on her side. This, as it turned out, did not
injure her, but it did knock the breath from her lungs. She lay
helpless and struggling for air.
Red-Eye rushed upon her and seized her. With his gnarly
fingers twisted into the hair of her head, he stood up and
roared in triumph and defiance at the awed Folk that watched
from the trees. Then it was that I went mad. Caution was thrown
to the winds; forgotten was the will to live of my flesh. Even
as Red-Eye roared, from behind I dashed upon him. So unexpected
was my charge that I knocked him off his feet. I twined my arms
and legs around him and strove to hold him down. This would
have been impossible to accomplish had he not held tightly with
one hand to the Swift One's hair.
Encouraged by my conduct, Big-Face became a sudden ally.
He charged in, sank his teeth in Red-Eye's arm, and ripped and
tore at his face. This was the time for the rest of the Folk to
have joined in. It was the chance to do for Red-Eye for all
time. But they remained afraid in the trees.
It was inevitable that Red-Eye should win in the struggle
against the two of us. The reason he did not finish us off
immediately was that the Swift One clogged his movements. She
had regained her breath and was beginning to resist. He would
not release his clutch on her hair, and this handicapped him.
He got a grip on my arm. It was the beginning of the end for
me. He began to draw me toward him into a position where he
could sink his teeth into my throat. His mouth was open, and he
was grinning. And yet, though he had just begun to exert his
strength, in that moment he wrenched my shoulder so that I
suffered from it for the remainder of my life.
And in that moment something happened. There was no
warning. A great body smashed down upon the four of us locked
together. We were driven violently apart and rolled over and
over, and in the suddenness of surprise we released our holds
on one another. At the moment of the shock, Big-Face screamed
terribly. I did not know what had happened, though I smelled
tiger and caught a glimpse of striped fur as I sprang for a
tree.
It was old Saber-Tooth. Aroused in his lair by the noise
we had made, he had crept upon us unnoticed. The Swift One
gained the next tree to mine, and I immediately joined her. I
put my arms around her and held her close to me while she
whimpered and cried softly. From the ground came a snarling,
and crunching of bones. It was Saber-Tooth making his supper
off of what had been Big-Face. From beyond, with inflamed rims
and eyes, Red-Eye peered down. Here was a monster mightier than
he. The Swift One and I turned and went away quietly through
the trees toward the cave, while the Folk gathered overhead and
showered down abuse and twigs and branches upon their ancient
enemy. He lashed his tail and snarled, but went on eating.
And in such fashion were we saved. It was a mere
accident--the sheerest accident. Else would I have died, there
in Red-Eye's clutch, and there would have been no bridging of
time to the tune of a thousand centuries down to a progeny that
reads newspapers and rides on electric cars--ay, and that
writes narratives of bygone happenings even as this is written.
CHAPTER XVII
It was in the early fall of the following year that it
happened. After his failure to get the Swift One, Red-Eye had
taken another wife; and, strange to relate, she was still
alive. Stranger still, they had a baby several months
old--Red-Eye's first child. His previous wives had never lived
long enough to bear him children. The year had gone well for
all of us. The weather had been exceptionally mild and food
plentiful. I remember especially the turnips of that year. The
nut crop was also very heavy, and the wild plums were larger
and sweeter than usual.
In short, it was a golden year. And then it happened. It
was in the early morning, and we were surprised in our caves.
In the chill gray light we awoke from sleep, most of us, to
encounter death. The Swift One and I were aroused by a
pandemonium of screeching and gibbering. Our cave was the
highest of all on the cliff, and we crept to the mouth and
peered down. The open space was filled with the Fire People.
Their cries and yells were added to the clamor, but they had
order and plan, while we Folk had none. Each one of us fought
and acted for himself, and no one of us knew the extent of the
calamity that was befalling us.
By the time we got to stone-throwing, the Fire People had
massed thick at the base of the cliff. Our first volley must
have mashed some heads, for when they swerved back from the
cliff three of their number were left upon the ground. These
were struggling and floundering, and one was trying to crawl
away. But we fixed them. By this time we males
were roaring with rage, and we rained rocks upon the
three men that were down. Several of the Fire-Men returned to
drag them into safety, but our rocks drove the rescuers back.
The Fire People became enraged. Also, they became
cautious. In spite of their angry yells, they kept at a
distance and sent flights of arrows against us. This put an end
to the rock-throwing. By the time half a dozen of us had been
killed and a score injured, the rest of us
retreated inside our caves. I was not out of range in my
lofty cave, but the distance was great enough to spoil
effective shooting, and the Fire People did not waste many
arrows on me. Furthermore, I was curious. I wanted to see.
While the Swift One remained well inside the cave, trembling
with fear and making low wailing sounds because I would not
come in, I crouched at the entrance and watched.
The fighting had now become intermittent. It was a sort of
deadlock. We were in the caves, and the question with the Fire
People was how to get us out. They did not dare come in after
us, and in general we would not expose ourselves to their
arrows. Occasionally, when one of them drew in close to the
base of the cliff, one or another of the Folk would smash a
rock down. In return, he would be transfixed by half a dozen
arrows. This ruse worked well for some time, but finally the
Folk no longer were inveigled into showing themselves. The
deadlock was complete.
Behind the Fire People I could see the little wizened old
hunter directing it all. They obeyed him, and went here and
there at his commands. Some of them went into the forest and
returned with loads of dry wood, leaves, and grass. All the
Fire People drew in closer. While most of them stood by with
bows and arrows, ready to shoot any of the Folk that exposed
themselves, several of the Fire-Men heaped the dry grass and
wood at the mouths of the lower tier of caves. Out of these
heaps they conjured the monster we feared--FIRE. At first,
wisps of smoke arose and curled up the cliff. Then I could see
the red-tongued flames darting in and out through the wood like
tiny snakes. The smoke grew thicker and thicker, at times
shrouding the whole face of the cliff. But I was high up and it
did not bother me much, though it stung my eyes and I rubbed
them with my knuckles.
Old Marrow-Bone was the first to be smoked out. A light
fan of air drifted the smoke away at the time so that I saw
clearly. He broke out through the smoke, stepping on a burning
coal and screaming with the sudden hurt of it, and essayed to
climb up the cliff. The arrows showered about him. He came to a
pause on a ledge, clutching a knob of rock for support, gasping
and sneezing and shaking his head. He swayed back and forth.
The feathered ends of a dozen arrows were sticking out of him.
He was an old man, and he did not want to die. He swayed wider
and wider, his knees giving under him, and as he swayed he
wailed most plaintively. His hand released its grip and he
lurched outward to the fall. His old bones must have been sadly
broken. He groaned and strove feebly to rise, but a Fire-Man
rushed in upon him and brained him with a club.
And as it happened with Marrow-Bone, so it happened with
many of the Folk. Unable to endure the smoke-suffocation, they
rushed out to fall beneath the arrows. Some of the women and
children remained in the caves to strangle to death, but the
majority met death outside.
When the Fire-Men had in this fashion cleared the first
tier of caves, they began making arrangements to duplicate the
operation on the second tier of caves. It was while they were
climbing up with their grass and wood, that Red-Eye, followed
by his wife, with the baby holding to her tightly, made a
successful flight up the cliff. The Fire-Men must have
concluded that in the interval between the smoking-out
operations we would remain in our caves; so that they were
unprepared, and their arrows did not begin to fly till Red-Eye
and his wife were well up the wall. When he reached the top, he
turned about and glared down at them, roaring and beating his
chest. They arched their arrows at him, and though he was
untouched he fled on.
I watched a third tier smoked out, and a fourth. A few of
the Folk escaped up the cliff, but most of them were shot off
the face of it as they strove to climb. I remember Long-Lip. He
got as far as my ledge, crying piteously, an arrow clear
through his chest, the feathered shaft sticking out behind, the
bone head sticking out before, shot through the back as he
climbed. He sank down on my ledge bleeding profusely at the
mouth.
It was about this time that the upper tiers seemed to
empty themselves spontaneously. Nearly all the Folk not yet
smoked out stampeded up the cliff at the same time. This was
the saving of many. The Fire People could not shoot arrows fast
enough. They filled the air with arrows, and scores of the
stricken Folk came tumbling down; but still there were a few
who reached the top and got away.
The impulse of flight was now stronger in me than
curiosity. The arrows had ceased flying. The last of the Folk
seemed gone, though there may have been a few still hiding in
the upper caves. The Swift One and I started to make a scramble
for the cliff-top. At sight of us a great cry went up from the
Fire People. This was not caused by me, but by the Swift One.
They were chattering excitedly and pointing her out to one
another. They did not try to shoot her. Not an arrow was
discharged. They began calling softly and coaxingly. I stopped
and looked down. She was afraid, and whimpered and urged me on.
So we went up over the top and plunged into the trees.
This event has often caused me to wonder and speculate. If
she were really of their kind, she must have been lost from
them at a time when she was too young to remember, else would
she not have been afraid of them. On the other hand, it may
well have been that while she was their kind she had never been
lost from them; that she had been born in the wild forest far
from their haunts, her father maybe a renegade Fire-Man, her
mother maybe one of my own kind, one of the Folk. But who shall
say? These things are beyond me, and the Swift One knew no more
about them than did I.
We lived through a day of terror. Most of the survivors
fled toward the blueberry swamp and took refuge in the forest
in that neighborhood. And all day hunting parties of the Fire
People ranged the forest, killing us wherever they found us. It
must have been a deliberately executed plan. Increasing beyond
the limits of their own territory, they had decided on making a
conquest of ours. Sorry the conquest! We had no chance against
them. It was slaughter, indiscriminate slaughter, for they
spared none, killing old and young, effectively ridding the
land of our presence.
It was like the end of the world to us. We fled to the
trees as a last refuge, only to be surrounded and killed,
family by family. We saw much of this during that day, and
besides, I wanted to see. The Swift One and I never remained
long in one tree, and so escaped being surrounded. But there
seemed no place to go. The Fire-Men were everywhere, bent on
their task of extermination. Every way we turned we encountered
them, and because of this we saw much of their handiwork.
I did not see what became of my mother, but I did see the
Chatterer shot down out of the old home-tree. And I am afraid
that at the sight I did a bit of joyous teetering. Before I
leave this portion of my narrative, I must tell of Red-Eye. He
was caught with his wife in a tree down by the blueberry swamp.
The Swift One and I stopped long enough in our flight to see.
The Fire-Men were too intent upon their work to notice us, and,
furthermore, we were well screened by the thicket in which we
crouched.
Fully a score of the hunters were under the tree,
discharging arrows into it. They always picked up their arrows
when they fell back to earth. I could not see Red-Eye, but I
could hear him howling from somewhere in the tree.
After a short interval his howling grew muffled. He must
have crawled into a hollow in the trunk. But his wife did not
win this shelter. An arrow brought her to the ground. She was
severely hurt, for she made no effort to get away. She crouched
in a sheltering way over her baby (which clung tightly to her),
and made pleading signs and sounds to the Fire-Men. They
gathered about her and laughed at her--even as Lop-Ear and I
had laughed at the old Tree-Man. And even as we had poked him
with twigs and sticks, so did the Fire-Men with Red-Eye's wife.
They poked her with the ends of their bows, and prodded her in
the ribs. But she was poor fun. She would not fight. Nor, for
that matter, would she get angry. She continued to crouch over
her baby and to plead. One of the Fire-Men stepped close to
her. In his hand was a club. She saw and understood, but she
made only the pleading sounds until the blow fell.
Red-Eye, in the hollow of the trunk, was safe from their
arrows. They stood together and debated for a while, then one
of them climbed into the tree. What happened up there I could
not tell, but I heard him yell and saw the excitement of those
that remained beneath. After several minutes his body crashed
down to the ground. He did not move. They looked at him and
raised his head, but it fell back limply when they let go.
Red-Eye had accounted for himself.
They were very angry. There was an opening into the trunk
close to the ground. They gathered wood and grass and built a
fire. The Swift One and I, our arms around each other, waited
and watched in the thicket. Sometimes they threw upon the fire
green branches with many leaves, whereupon the smoke became
very thick.
We saw them suddenly swerve back from the tree. They were
not quick enough. Red-Eye's flying body landed in the midst of
them.
He was in a frightful rage, smashing about with his long
arms right and left. He pulled the face off one of them,
literally pulled it off with those gnarly fingers of his and
those tremendous muscles. He bit another through the neck. The
Fire-Men fell back with wild fierce yells, then rushed upon
him. He managed to get hold of a club and began crushing heads
like eggshells. He was too much for them, and they were
compelled to fall back again. This was his chance, and he
turned his back upon them and ran for it, still howling
wrathfully. A few arrows sped after him, but he plunged into a
thicket and was gone.
The Swift One and I crept quietly away, only to run foul
of another party of Fire-Men. They chased us into the blueberry
swamp, but we knew the tree-paths across the farther morasses
where they could not follow on the ground, and so we escaped.
We came out on the other side into a narrow strip of forest
that separated the blueberry swamp from the great swamp that
extended westward. Here we met Lop-Ear. How he had escaped I
cannot imagine, unless he had not slept the preceding night at
the caves.
Here, in the strip of forest, we might have built
tree-shelters and settled down; but the Fire People were
performing their work of extermination thoroughly. In the
afternoon, Hair-Face and his wife fled out from among the trees
to the east, passed us, and were gone. They fled silently and
swiftly, with alarm in their faces. In the direction from which
they had come we heard the cries and yells of the hunters, and
the screeching of some one of the Folk. The Fire People had
found their way across the swamp.
The Swift One, Lop-Ear, and I followed on the heels of
Hair-Face and his wife. When we came to the edge of the great
swamp, we stopped. We did not know its paths. It was outside
our territory, and it had been always avoided by the Folk. None
had ever gone into it--at least, to return. In our minds it
represented mystery and fear, the terrible unknown. As I say,
we stopped at the edge of it. We were afraid. The cries of the
Fire-Men were drawing nearer. We looked at one another.
Hair-Face ran out on the quaking morass and gained the firmer
footing of a grass-hummock a dozen yards away.
His wife did not follow. She tried to, but shrank back
from the treacherous surface and cowered down.
The Swift One did not wait for me, nor did she pause till
she had passed beyond Hair-Face a hundred yards and gained a
much larger hummock. By the time Lop-Ear and I had caught up
with her, the Fire-Men appeared among the trees. Hair-Face's
wife, driven by them into panic terror, dashed after us. But
she ran blindly, without caution, and broke through the crust.
We turned and watched, and saw them shoot her with arrows as
she sank down in the mud. The arrows began falling about us.
Hair-Face had now joined us, and the four of us plunged on, we
knew not whither, deeper and deeper into the swamp.
CHAPTER XVIII
Of our wanderings in the great swamp I have no clear
knowledge. When I strive to remember, I have a riot of
unrelated impressions and a loss of time-value. I have no idea
of how long we were in that vast everglade, but it must have
been for weeks. My memories of what occurred invariably take
the form of nightmare. For untold ages, oppressed by protean
fear, I am aware of wandering, endlessly wandering, through a
dank and soggy wilderness, where poisonous snakes struck at us,
and animals roared around us, and the mud quaked under us and
sucked at our heels.
I know that we were turned from our course countless times
by streams and lakes and slimy seas. Then there were storms and
risings of the water over great areas of the low-lying lands;
and there were periods of hunger and misery when we were kept
prisoners in the trees for days and days by these transient
floods.
Very strong upon me is one picture. Large trees are about
us, and from their branches hang gray filaments of moss, while
great creepers, like monstrous serpents, curl around the trunks
and writhe in tangles through the air. And all about is the
mud, soft mud, that bubbles forth gases, and that heaves and
sighs with internal agitations. And in the midst of all this
are a dozen of us. We are lean and wretched, and our bones show
through our tight-stretched skins. We do not sing and chatter
and laugh. We play no pranks. For once our volatile and
exuberant spirits are hopelessly subdued. We make plaintive,
querulous noises, look at one another, and cluster close
together. It is like the meeting of the handful of survivors
after the day of the end of the world.
This event is without connection with the other events in
the swamp. How we ever managed to cross it, I do not know, but
at last we came out where a low range of hills ran down to the
bank of the river. It was our river emerging like ourselves
from the great swamp. On the south bank, where the river had
broken its way through the hills, we found many sand-stone
caves. Beyond, toward the west, the ocean boomed on the bar
that lay across the river's mouth. And here, in the caves, we
settled down in our abiding-place by the sea.
There were not many of us. From time to time, as the days
went by, more of the Folk appeared. They dragged themselves
from the swamp singly, and in twos and threes, more dead than
alive, mere perambulating skeletons, until at last there were
thirty of us. Then no more came from the swamp, and Red-Eye was
not among us. It was noticeable that no children had survived
the frightful journey.
I shall not tell in detail of the years we lived by the
sea. It was not a happy abiding-place. The air was raw and
chill, and we suffered continually from coughing and colds. We
could not survive in such an environment. True, we had
children; but they had little hold on life and died early,
while we died faster than new ones were born. Our number
steadily diminished.
Then the radical change in our diet was not good for us.
We got few vegetables and fruits, and became fish-eaters. There
were mussels and abalones and clams and rock-oysters, and great
ocean-crabs that were thrown upon the beaches in stormy
weather. Also, we found several kinds of seaweed that were good
to eat. But the change in diet caused us stomach troubles, and
none of us ever waxed fat. We were all lean and
dyspeptic-looking. It was in getting the big abalones that
Lop-Ear was lost. One of them closed upon his fingers at
low-tide, and then the flood-tide came in and drowned him. We
found his body the next day, and it was a lesson to us. Not
another one of us was ever caught in the closing shell of an
abalone.
The Swift One and I managed to bring up one child, a
boy--at least we managed to bring him along for several years.
But I am quite confident he could never have survived that
terrible climate. And then, one day, the Fire People appeared
again. They had come down the river, not on a catamaran, but in
a rude dug-out. There were three of them that paddled in it,
and one of them was the little wizened old hunter. They landed
on our beach, and he limped across the sand and examined our
caves.
They went away in a few minutes, but the Swift One was
badly scared. We were all frightened, but none of us to the
extent that she was. She whimpered and cried and was restless
all that night. In the morning she took the child in her arms,
and by sharp cries, gestures, and example, started me on our
second long flight. There were eight of the Folk (all that was
left of the horde) that remained behind in the caves. There was
no hope for them. Without doubt, even if the Fire People did
not return, they must soon have perished. It was a bad climate
down there by the sea. The Folk were not constituted for the
coast-dwelling life.
We travelled south, for days skirting the great swamp but
never venturing into it. Once we broke back to the westward,
crossing a range of mountains and coming down to the coast. But
it was no place for us. There were no trees--only bleak
headlands, a thundering surf, and strong winds that seemed
never to cease from blowing. We turned back across the
mountains, travelling east and south, until we came in touch
with the great swamp again.
Soon we gained the southern extremity of the swamp, and we
continued our course south and east. It was a pleasant land.
The air was warm, and we were again in the forest. Later on we
crossed a low-lying range of hills and found ourselves in an
even better forest country. The farther we penetrated from the
coast the warmer we found it, and we went on and on until we
came to a large river that seemed familiar to the Swift One. It
was where she must have come during the four years' absence
from the harde. This river we crossed on logs, landing on side
at the large bluff. High up on the bluff we found our new home
most difficult of access and quite hidden from any eye beneath.
There is little more of my tale to tell. Here the Swift
One and I lived and reared our family. And here my memories
end. We never made another migration. I never dream beyond our
high, inaccessible cave. And here must have been born the child
that inherited the stuff of my dreams, that had moulded into
its being all the impressions of my life--or of the life of
Big-Tooth, rather, who is my other-self, and not my real self,
but who is so real to me that often I am unable to tell what
age I am living in.
I often wonder about this line of descent. I, the modern,
am incontestably a man; yet I, Big-Tooth, the primitive, am not
a man. Somewhere, and by straight line of descent, these two
parties to my dual personality were connected. Were the Folk,
before their destruction, in the process of becoming men? And
did I and mine carry through this process? On the other hand,
may not some descendant of mine have gone in to the Fire People
and become one of them? I do not know. There is no way of
learning. One thing only is certain, and that is that Big-Tooth
did stamp into the cerebral constitution of one of his progeny
all the impressions of his life, and stamped them in so
indelibly that the hosts of intervening generations have failed
to obliterate them.
There is one other thing of which I must speak before I
close. It is a dream that I dream often, and in point of time
the real event must have occurred during the period of my
living in the high, inaccessible cave. I remember that I
wandered far in the forest toward the east. There I came upon a
tribe of Tree People. I crouched in a thicket and watched them
at play. They were holding a laughing council, jumping up and
down and screeching rude choruses.
Suddenly they hushed their noise and ceased their
capering. They shrank down in fear, and quested anxiously about
with their eyes for a way of retreat. Then Red-Eye walked in
among them. They cowered away from him. All were frightened.
But he made no attempt to hurt them. He was one of them. At his
heels, on stringy bended legs, supporting herself with knuckles
to the ground on either side, walked an old female of the Tree
People, his latest wife. He sat down in the midst of the
circle. I can see him now, as I write this, scowling, his eyes
inflamed, as he peers about him at the circle of the Tree
People. And as he peers he crooks one monstrous leg and with
his gnarly toes scratches himself on the stomach. He is
Red-Eye, the atavism.
Last-modified: Thu, 31 Jul 1997 06:09:59 GMT
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