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CHAPTER V
THE CAVE AND THE FISH
A cold wind blew through the valley where the Ape-Men lived, and the trees and bushes were brown and bare of fruit. The rays of the Sun, which used to come down straight and hot all day, now shone slantwise, because the Earth had been tipped over, and they seemed to have very little warmth. The days, too, were shorter, and the nights were longer, and cold. All the Ape-Men were obliged to huddle together in their beds of grass to keep warm. They did not know that Mother Nature had tipped over the Earth to make Winter and Summer, but they were very uncomfortable, and they did not like it.
But the worst thing of all was, that there was almost nothing to eat. Always before there had been some kind of fruit, or berries, all the year round. Now they were able to find only a few nuts, and the sweet bulbs which grew at the roots of certain plants, and the smaller animals got most of these. Even the nesting birds they sometimes caught and ate had gone where it was warmer. Pretty soon there was nothing to eat at all, and the Ape-Men were starving.
Adh, who had begun to think a little, puzzled about this for a long time, but could not understand it. Of course, if the Ape-People had stored up food, during the Summer, they would have had something to eat, when the cold weather came, but they had never thought of doing such a thing, because there had usually been enough to eat, before. Now they did not know what to do, and as they could no longer find any food in the valley, they gradually wandered off, down toward the low, hot jungle-lands from which they had come. Here they found things to eat, but they also found lions and great sabre-toothed tigers and other fierce beasts to eat them, and as they had long ago forgotten their old trick of living and sleeping and seeking safety from their enemies in the tree-tops, it was not long before they were all eaten up.
When the Sun saw this, he was very much surprised.
"Look, Mother Nature," he said. "Your Ape-People have all been eaten up."
"You are wrong, Sun," replied Mother Nature. "Adh and the ape woman he has taken for his wife are still in the valley. He was the only one who had learned to think, so the others were of no use and I had to get rid of them. Before long the children of Adh and his wife will fill the valley with a race of Men, and from there they will spread all over the Earth."
Adh did not go with the others for two reasons. The first was that they did not like him, because he made them afraid of him, and so they went away without him. The second reason was, that Adh's wife had a tiny baby boy to nurse and take care of, and it was easier, to stay where they were, than to wander off through the jungles. Now that all the others had gone, Adh managed to find enough roots and nuts to keep himself and his little family alive.
Soon after the others had left, it began to rain, and every day the cold rain beat down on Adh and his family and drenched them. Even their grass nest under the boughs of a thick tree, was turned into a pool of mud and water, on which the sun never shone to dry it and keep it warm. Cold and Rain were making the new Ape-Man suffer, as Mother Nature had told them to do. Adh, as he wandered about the valley hunting for a little food, tried very hard to think of a way to keep himself and his family comfortable, but no new ideas came to him. Occasionally he managed to catch a young bird, which he greedily devoured, but they were very scarce and hard to find.
"Look at the stupid creature," laughed the Sun, peeping for a moment through the heavy rain-clouds. "He hasn't sense enough to find a hole in the rocks, where he would be dry and warm."
Mother Nature did not answer. Instead, she waited until she saw Adh climbing over the rocks at the upper end of the valley, searching for the nests of wild birds he sometimes found there. Then she called Cold to her.
"Blow your hardest for a few moments, Cold," she said.
Cold puffed out his cheeks and blew a freezing blast down the valley, and all the falling drops of Rain turned to bits of ice, like hail, which cut Adh's shoulders and arms and back, and hurt him, in spite of his thick coat of hair. To escape from the storm, he ran beneath some overhanging rocks, and suddenly found himself in a little cave, its floor covered with soft dry moss. Here he was quite safe from the hail and rain, and he was very much pleased.
While he was standing in the cave, Adh suddenly had another thought. He wished that his wife and child were with him. And no sooner had he thought of them than he dashed out of the cave, and forgetting all about the hail and rain, he ran to the nest in the grass where they lay trying to keep warm, and brought them as fast as he could back to the nice dry cave. And this cave was Man's very first home.
"You see," said Mother Nature to the Sun, "whenever I want my new Man to think, I send him some kind of trouble. If I hadn't made him hungry, he would never have got the idea of pulling the bunch of fruit out of the tree with his stick, and now, because I made him cold and wet, he has found himself a home."
"What are you going to make him do next?" asked the Sun.
"Wait and see," said Mother Nature. "But don't forget that I have given him a wife and child to think about, now, and he will do more, on their account, than he would ever do, alone, for in his simple way, he loves them."
"What is Love?" asked the Sun.
"It is one of the great laws of the Universe, that God has made, a feeling, or instinct, that causes all His creatures to want a mate to live with, and thus have children. If it were not for this law, there would never be any children, and all the living creatures on the Earth would disappear in a very little while."
"This Love must be a very queer thing," said the Sun. "I do not understand it."
"And yet, Sun, you will see, some day, that it is the most wonderful law that God has made. Without it, Man would never amount to anything at all. From now on my creature Adh is going to think of doing a great many things, because of his wife and child, that he would not think of doing without them."
When Adh got his wife and child into the cave, they were no longer cold and wet, but they were still very hungry, and all day long the Ape-Man wandered through the valley, looking for something to eat. Sometimes, when all he could find was a few dried berries, or a handful of little grains from the tall grasses that grew here and there, he would carry them back to his wife, instead of eating them himself. In the past, before he had any wife, he would never have thought of such a thing as going hungry for the sake of some one else, but now it was different; he thought of his wife and child.
At last there came a day when from morning to night he could not find a single scrap of food. Everything was gone, and he was weak from hunger. He went down to the shore of the little lake that lay in the bottom of the valley, and throwing himself on the ground, drank as much water as he could, to fill his empty stomach. Then he sat up and stared at the cold, grey sky, not knowing what to do. Presently he saw a great bird, like a fish-hawk, swoop down to the surface of the lake, and rise a moment later with a shining fish in its claws. Then, as Adh watched, another hawk flew up and tried to take the fish away from the first one. The two birds screamed and tore at each other, and as they fought, the fish the first one had been carrying fell to the ground close to where Adh was sitting.
He walked over to where it lay, and picked it up, more from curiosity than anything else, for he had never thought of such a thing as eating a fish. For thousands of years his parents before him had eaten nothing but fruit, and roots, and nuts, with occasionally an egg or a young bird, and he had always done just as they had done. He did not know that the flesh of fish, or animals, was good to eat.
As he held the fish in his hands, he smelt the fresh blood from the wound made by the claws of the fish-hawk and it made him hungrier than ever. Half starved as he was, he could have eaten anything, and without thinking any more about it, he tore the fish apart and put a piece of it in his mouth. It tasted strange to him, and he did not like it, but his stomach was very empty, and almost before he knew what he was about, he had eaten the whole fish.
After that, he felt better, and sat on the edge of the lake for a long time, watching the fish swimming about in the shallow water. Then he thought of his wife. She would want something to eat, too. How could he get another fish? He tried for a long time to catch one in his hands, but they were too quick for him.
Then he thought of his club, and taking it in his hands, he did his best to hit one of the fish with it, but every time he failed. Once he struck so hard that the club was splintered against a rock, and the heavy end of it broken off. Adh looked at the piece left in his hands and felt sad, for he loved his club, and always carried it about with him. Pretty soon he noticed, as he felt the broken and splintered end of the stick, that it was very sharp, and he thought to himself, why could he not drive the sharp end into the back of one of the fish, as it lay in the mud. It took him a long time to do this, but by lying among the rushes, and keeping very quiet, he finally succeeded. Reaching down, he seized the fish he had speared in his hands.
"Look!" said Mother Nature to the Sun. "My new Man has made himself a spear."
When Adh gave the fish to his wife, she did not understand what he wanted her to do with it, but finally, by chattering, and making signs, he got her to eat a little of it. The new kind of food made her rather sick, at first, but after a while, as there was nothing else to eat, she made a meal of it, and from then on Adh went to the lake every day and speared a fish or two for their dinner. By the time the cold rainy season was over, and the warm weather had come again, he and his wife had grown quite used to eating fish, and had even got to like it.
Mother Nature watched all this and smiled to herself.
"See how quickly my Ape-Man is learning to think," she said to the Sun. "Already he has found a home, and taught himself to get food from the rivers and lakes, instead of from the trees and bushes, and he has made himself a spear. I knew he was not going to let himself starve."
"What is he going to do next?" asked the Sun, who was getting very much interested in the funny little Ape-Man.
"I think I shall teach him to fight," Mother Nature said.
"To fight? What for?"
"So that he can protect himself against his enemies. When I took away his tail, you said he would either starve, or be eaten up. Well, he hasn't starved, and I can't let him be eaten up. He will have plenty of enemies, before he gets through, and if he doesn't know how to fight, they will destroy him."
"Will this thing you call Love help him to fight?" asked the Sun.
"Yes. He will fight twice as hard, because of his love for his wife and child. If you don't believe it, just wait and see."
CHAPTER VI
ADH'S FIRST FIGHT
Wherever he went, Adh carried about with him a club. He had found himself a new one, now that his first was broken, and this new club was short and heavy, with a great hard knob on the end of it, as big as his two fists. He had broken it from the limb of a tree, and rubbed and polished it on the rocky floor of the cave until it was hard and smooth. Besides the club, he had made himself a long straight spear, with the end of it rubbed to a point against the rocks. He used the spear for getting fish, and had become so skilful that he hardly ever missed them.
One night, when the cold rains were over, and the trees in the valley were covered with fresh new leaves, Adh was sitting on a flat rock in front of his cave, eating a large fish.
He was not thinking of anything, except how good the fish tasted, when suddenly his quick ears heard a sound, and looking up he saw a great beast, like a bear, covered with hair, making its way slowly up the rocky hillside toward him.
It was a huge, clumsy animal, much larger than himself, but it walked on all fours, snuffing the air as though it smelt the fish Adh had been eating. The Ape-Man had never seen such a creature before.
The hair on Adh's neck stood straight up, for he was very much frightened, and his first thought was to run away as fast as his legs would carry him. Then he remembered his wife and child, lying asleep inside the cave, and instead of running away, he picked up some heavy stones and threw them at the oncoming enemy.
One of the stones hit the beast on the shoulder, but instead of stopping, it gave a grunt of rage and came on faster than ever, straight toward the cave.
Adh picked up his club from where it lay on the rock beside him and stood before the door of the cave, chattering and screaming with anger and fear. His wife, awakened by the noise, came out of the cave and stood just behind him, holding the young one in her arms, and also uttering shrill cries.
The creature's black snout, with small fiery red eyes, came slowly forward until Adh could feel its breath on his face. Then, just as the beast started to rear up on its hind legs, Adh raised his club, and springing forward, struck the animal across the nose with all his might.
The Ape-Man was very strong, and his blow was a terrible one. The great beast gave a howl of pain, and rearing up, tried to reach Adh with its huge claws. But Adh's fear had all left him, now. His eyes gleamed, and his mouth foamed with rage. Raising his club he struck again and again, until the beast, with blood streaming from its crushed snout, turned tail and ran away down the rocky hillside. There was a great deep wound in Adh's breast, where the claws of the beast had torn him, but he hardly knew it, in his joy at winning the fight. He pounded his clenched fist on his chest until the sound echoed through the valley, and uttered shrill cries of defiance.
His wife came up to him and stroked and patted him proudly, chattering all the time with pleasure. This made Adh feel very happy, and he pounded his club on the rocks and grunted with delight. He had made this great beast fear him, and the thought filled him with pride.
That night, as he lay on the floor of the cave, a terrible fear came over him. What if the creature should come back again, while he was asleep, and carry him off. He got up, and crouched for a long time in the door of the cave, his club ready in his hands. After a while he grew sleepy and wished that there were something across the cave door to keep the beast out, in case he came back. The thought worried him so much that at last he went out, and getting four or five large stones, rolled them to the mouth of the cave, and after crawling inside, fixed them so that the hole by which he crept in and out was almost blocked. After that he went to sleep without feeling afraid.
The next morning he followed the bloody trail of the beast over the rocks, but lost it far down the valley. The creature had disappeared. Adh went on spearing fish and forgot all about his enemy. From that time on, Adh often had to fight for his life and that of his wife and child, but he was not afraid.
As the years went by, his boy grew up to be strong like his father, and very smart and quick, and when he was old enough, Adh got into the habit of taking him along when he went down the valley after fish, or to gather fruit or nuts. The boy carried a spear, like his father, and used it very skilfully, so that the little family never wanted for food. There were other children, now, and later on, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and Adh had made the cave bigger, by scraping away the soft rock of the walls. Each year, with the coming of the warm Spring, the rains ceased, and all the trees and bushes in the valley were soon covered with bright new leaves, and later, with blossoms and fruit. Adh and his family were very happy.
The oldest boy they called Kee, because when he was very young he always said "Kee-Kee" when anything pleased him. And before long the cries or grunts they used for the things they saw about them, such as fruit, or fish, or the Sun, the Rain, or the cave, came to be used over and over, and in this way they began to have words for things. There were not many words at first, but Man had invented speech, which was something none of the animals had ever done.
Mother Nature watched the progress of her children with a smile.
"Just see," she said to the Sun, "how quickly they are learning. Did I not tell you that Love would teach my Ape-Man many things? If he had not loved his wife and child, he would have run away when the bear came to attack him, but because of them he stayed, and fought. And he has made a door to his cave, to keep his enemies away, during the night."
"What are those strange grunts and cries I hear them using?" the Sun asked.
"They are beginning to make a language," Mother Nature replied. "Before long, they will be able to say many things to each other, and be understood. They are certainly doing very well. I hope nothing happens to them."
"It seems to me they are awfully slow," said the Sun.
"Not at all. Think how many thousands of years they have ahead of them. There is no hurry, you know. The Earth is only a hundred million years old. They have plenty of time. I think I shall go away now, and take a look at another sun I am making, many times bigger than you are. I shan't be back for several thousand years. Good-bye."
"Good-bye," said the Sun, in a surly voice, for it made him very angry to think that there were any suns in the Universe bigger than he was.
CHAPTER VII
RA MAKES A NEW SPEAR
Adh had been dead a long time, now, and Ra was his great-great-great-great-grandson. He was called Ra because that was the word the Ape-Men used to mean big, or strong, and Ra was the strongest boy in the valley.
He lived with his mother and father and several brothers and sisters in a cave high up among the rocks, and because his father was lame, Ra had to do most of the work for the family. He knew how to say a number of words, queer little cries and grunts that meant things, and the hair on his body was not as thick and shaggy as Adh's had been. The Ape-People had been living in caves, protected from the weather, for a long time now, and as they did not need so much hair to keep them warm, the great law of Nature we have heard about before, had begun to take their hair away from them. But it was not until Man began to wear clothes that he really lost his coat of hair.
There were many Ape-Men in the valley now, descendants of Adh and his wife, and they had hollowed other caves in the soft rock and earth of the hillsides at the upper end of the valley, digging with sharp-pointed sticks and stones. They lived on raw fish, and fruits, roots and nuts, just as Adh and his family had done before them, and the eggs of wild birds, and the young fledglings, which they found in nests among the trees and rocks. They carried long wooden spears, and clubs, and were quick and strong. And because there were plenty of fish in the stream, and in the lake at the lower end of the valley, even during the cold rainy season, they had never thought of storing up food for the Winter. Of such things as clothes, or fire, they knew nothing at all.
There were high, rough hills, covered with thick forests, all about the valley, except at its lower end, where the great lake spread out, pouring its waters into the country below through a narrow gorge between two hills. Because the valley was protected in this way, few enemies came into it to attack the cave men. When one appeared, as sometimes happened, the hunters, with their clubs and spears, would attack it in a body, and while it often happened that some of them were killed, they usually were able to overcome the intruder in the end, or drive him from the valley. The most terrible of these enemies was the sabre-toothed tiger, larger than any tiger you have seen in the circus, with two long sharp teeth or fangs, curving down like sabres from his upper jaw. When this terrible beast appeared, the cave men usually hid in their caves, afraid.
Once, when Ra was about twenty years old, a huge beast like an elephant, with long shaggy hair and great curving tusks came splashing up along the marshy shores of the lake, and began to strip and eat the tender leaves and fruit from the young bushes and trees.
Ra, who was spearing fish at the upper end of the lake, had never seen such a creature before, and when he caught sight of it coming towards him he was very much frightened.
He quickly gave the alarm, and soon twenty or more of the cave men ran up, and surrounding the huge creature, began to attack it by throwing stones at it, at the same time making a loud noise, hoping to scare it away.
The great creature did not mind the stones, at first, for he scarcely felt them, as they bounced from his thick, hairy sides, but soon one of the stones struck him near the eye and hurt him, and he turned on the cave men with a snort of pain, waving his long trunk about in the air.
When the cave men saw him coming they did their best to get out of the way, at the same time striking with all their might at his huge sides with their spears. The spears, however, with their wooden points, while strong enough to pierce a fish, were of no use against the elephant's tough hide, and fell back blunted or broken. Ra, as he saw the great beast coming toward him, its little red eyes gleaming, its long trunk swinging to and fro, drove his spear with all his might at its flank but the point was splintered from the blow and he barely escaped with his life. Three of his companions were trampled to death by the savage creature as they tried to escape, and two more were seized in its great trunk and crushed. The cave men, frightened, ran back to their caves and sat there, helpless, until the animal, unable to find them, had eaten his fill of the leaves and fruit, and gone away, leaving a trail of stripped and broken bushes and trees behind him.
Ra worried a great deal about this fight. He was very angry with the beast because it had killed one of his brothers, and he could not understand why his spear had failed to pierce the elephant's hide. Its point, rubbed sharp on a rock, had always been strong enough to kill the largest fish, but now it was blunt and broken, and Ra did not like it any more.
As he sat in the sun before the cave, trying to cut a new point to his spear with a stone, an idea came into his head. Why could he not in some way fasten the stone to the end of his spear? The stone, he knew, was hard enough not to break against the toughest hide. It was a large and clumsy stone, however, and Ra soon saw that he could do nothing with it.
The thought pleased him, but he said nothing to any of his friends about it. Instead, he hurried off to a place on the shore of the lake where a few days before he had seen some very sharp flat stones, quite different from the clumsy bit of rock he had found near the cave.
He gathered several pieces of this stone, and amused himself by striking them against each other and breaking them. At last he got what he wanted, a flat, narrow piece, shaped something like the leaf of a tree, and about as long as his hand. The stone was very hard, and it took him hours to chip and rub it down until it had a sharp point. When at last it was done, he had another thing to think about. How was he to fasten the stone to the end of the spear?
He took the spear and looked at it. The blow he had struck against the elephant's side had split the end of it. After a great deal of trouble Ra managed to force the thin flat stone into the split end of the spear. It looked very well, he thought, but he knew it would not stay there unless it were fastened in some way. Glancing about, he saw some of the long, tough marsh grasses that he had often used to string his fish together, when carrying them home. He took some strands of this grass and wrapped them around the end of the spear in such a way that the stone point was held tightly in place. It was a clumsy piece of work, for Ra had never used the grasses in such a way before, but it was strong, as he found out by spearing several fish in the shallow water of the marsh. When he went home, he was very proud of what he had done, and showed the new spear to his father, and to some of his brothers.
His father did not think much of it, and said wooden-pointed spears were good enough for anybody, but his brothers chattered with pleasure, and got Ra to show them where he had found the white stone, and how he had chipped the spear point into shape, and fastened it on. Before long, they too had stone-pointed spears, and as they made more and more of them they made them stronger and better, using the twisted entrails or guts of fish to bind the points in place, instead of the marsh grasses. Soon all the men in the valley were armed with stone-pointed spears, and some of them, taking Ra's idea, fixed stones in the ends of their heavy clubs, and with the making of these stone-pointed spears and axes, Man had begun what is known as the Stone Age.
Ra's invention was a great blessing to the cave men, for now they were able to fight their enemies on much more even terms. This gave them new courage, and they became very fierce and bold. But it was not only for making weapons that they began to use the hard, sharp bits of flint Ha had discovered. They soon found them useful for many other things. It was easier, to cut a fish to pieces, with a sharp-edged stone, than to tear it to bits with their fingers, so they began the use of flint knives, and later on they made all sorts of tools out of stone, which helped them very much in their daily lives. But these things came later.
"My new people have learned a great deal, since I have been away," said Mother Nature to the Sun. "Now I am going to teach them to eat meat."
"How will you do that?" the Sun asked.
"By taking away their fish, so that when the Winter comes, they will be hungry."
"How can you take away their fish?" said the Sun.
"By taking away their lake," replied Mother Nature, "and for that I shall need Wind and Rain."
So she called Wind and Rain to her.
"Wind and Rain," she said, "I want you to blow up a great storm, and turn the little stream in the valley into a mighty torrent, and when the torrent is strong enough, it will wash away the banks that dam up the lake at the lower end of the valley, and carry the lake, and all the fish in it, right down through the low country into the Ocean."
So Wind and Rain made a terrible storm, and the Lightning flashed, and the Thunder roared, and all the cave men crept into their holes in the rocks, afraid. For three days the storm swept through the valley, tearing down the trees, stripping them of their fruit, and turning the stream into a raging muddy torrent, that tore along in its course like a flood.
When the Sun at last shone again, and the cave men came out of their holes to see what had happened, their lake was gone, and in the foaming yellow torrent that poured through the valley there was not a single fish.
Of course there was some food remaining, fruit, and nuts, and eggs, but with so many to feed it did not last long, and as the cold rainy weather came on, the cave men, without any fish to eat, were soon very hungry. Once more Mother Nature was about to teach them something new by means of suffering and pain.
