________________________________________________
_ 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. _
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