I awoke lying on a stretch of turf in an angle of the rocks by the river. It was almost midday and it seemed to me that I must have been aroused by the sunshine on my face. I rose to my feet and stretched myself dazedly, for my head hurt me. I reached for the club which lay near me, and examined it curiously. It was not my club at all, and, when I looked about, the rocks and earth and trees appeared as unfamiliar as the weapon. I swung the club joyously, for it was a better one than I had ever seen, strong, well balanced, and heavy at the end. I tried to think, but only mists would come to me. Had I ever another club? Then I perceived that there was something tied around my waist, a broad belt of hyena skin, doubled up on one side into a sort of pocket held together by knotted sinews. In this pocket was a thin flake of flint nearly as broad as my hand and with sharp edges. How came I to have such a thing? And then I noticed, suddenly, and wondered how it was, that the hair all over me was thin and scant. I was frightened, I could not understand it.
I strode out from my place in the rocks and looked across the river. Its banks were new to me. I turned toward the north and there were mountains, though unlike those of old, and when I passed around the ledge, even the forest trees and the rocky passes appeared changed. Had I ever seen other rocks or forests? Then I heard a shout. I turned and saw two great apes—at least I thought them such—each beckoning to me and calling. The cries were followed by loud clucks and gurglings, a kind of talk. And I understood it. How could I do that?
I went toward them slowly, alert and with my club grasped in all readiness, but I was not much alarmed. I felt, but dimly, that the two great creatures were my friends. Each bore a club like mine, but neither lifted it as I advanced. They but pointed up the river and jabbered noisily.
What creatures they were! Almost straight they stood, with no more hair upon their bodies than had I, and their thumbs closed readily and easily upon the fingers, making the grip of their club secure. But it was their faces and the expression upon them which most astonished me. They were quite unlike the dream of apes, still, somehow, with me. They had noses more distinct, their ears were rounded, there was less repellent expanse of jaw and upper lip between the mouth and nostrils, and the teeth, which showed as they chattered, were not so long and sharp. Their eyes, though, were their striking feature, since in them appeared a look of understanding which I recognized. They were of my kind.
I made no answer to them and, as I came near, they looked upon me pityingly, putting their hands to their heads and pointing toward the place where I had awakened. Then, for the first time, I began to realize things. They were saying that I had been hurt. Instinctively I lifted my own hand and there came away a little blood. Who had struck me? I swung my club furiously, but they only chattered the more and made motions, one of them running to the ledge and pointing upward to its top and making a sound which I knew. I had been with them on some sort of an expedition and a stone had rolled down and hurt me as I slept. That was why my head ached and why I could, at first, remember nothing. I was no longer angry. I listened eagerly to what they were trying to tell me.
One of the two, as they pointed up the river, made a repeated bleating, as of an animal in distress, and when he said “Stag,” “Stag,” I knew that there was good hunting close at hand. I shouted and waved my club, and we dashed away together.
The pathway near the river led but a short way before it opened out upon a little low-lying grassy plain extending to the bank, with marshy places here and there, and upon this natural meadow half a score or more great, splendid antlered things were feeding. They grouped near together, with the exception of a single cow, walking round and round one of the marshy pools and bleating piteously at intervals. We shouted when we saw her. We knew that her fawn was mired and helpless and we should kill it and have food.
We entered the tall reeds and grass of the lowland and stooped low, slipping through noiselessly until we were near the distressed mother. Then we uprose and rushed and yelled together. The startled elk leaped and ran swiftly for a distance, then, as there came the sound of struggle and plaintive bleating from the quagmire, she checked herself and turned to charge. There came an awful interjection. There rose from the forest edge, though far away up the river, a roar so fearful and appalling, so dreadful and far-reaching, that all the world seemed dazed from the moment the sound tore across the valley and, even before these echoes died away, the herd of feeding elk leaped forward together in frantic bounds and swept close beside us in their flight, carrying with them the mother cow. The great cave tiger was abroad, though not yet near, and before him all living things must flee. We were shaking ourselves, with fright, but we knew the monster had doubtless just now slain because of the cruel roar which told it, and so we were in no danger for the moment. The elk calf, a great thing nearly a third grown, was standing helpless near the quagmire edge. We ventured in a little way and crushed the thin bones of its head with our hard clubs and, together, dragged it to the firm earth and so, hurriedly, across the valley and up among the rocks. With one on watch, we attacked the body of the calf with our sharp flakes of flint, and with much toil and many strokes made openings in the skin and hacked and hewed and wrenched until we had the beast divided into three parts. Then, each with his burden of skin and flesh upon his back and his club thrust in his belt, we went straining hurriedly across the lowland and up the path among the rocks whence we had come until we were another long distance away, where, climbing upon a huge boulder, we ate ravenously. It was a feast. Very good to eat is the flesh of young stag.
Rested and full of strength, we took up our march again until we turned into the opening of a long gorge, almost a valley, which lay not far from the river and nearly parallel with it. I knew that in this gorge our homes were, but I could not yet remember much about them, though each new scene, as we advanced, became familiar. I recognized the place where I had once killed a hare with a well-hurled stone.
Suddenly one of my companions gave utterance to a long drawn cry, “O-o-e-e, O-o-e-e,” far reaching and sustained, until there came an answer from farther up the valley, “O-o-e-e, O-o-e-e!” Then, in the distance, seeming to issue from the solid rock, came three figures, and I knew they were our people.
In the lead were two women and behind them was a child, a little girl. The woman first to reach us was of middle age, and, chattering joyously, she took the load from the older of my companions and trudged along beside him, as did the younger woman with the other man, and I knew that the women were their mates. All together, we went on to the place whence the woman and child had issued, and there was the entrance to a cave, not very large, but which rose and widened out inside into what was a vast chamber, fifty feet across, at least, and nearly as many high. Away off in one corner of the floor there gleamed a tiny light which indicated a smouldering fire, and about it, tending it, an old man tottered. There were heaps of leaves and grass, too, and upon the floor were a few skins of animals and many bones and roots and the shells of nuts, all scattered heedlessly about. The women chattered continuously, for they were delighted with the meat. Each was eating torn strips, raw, but soon one ran out and brought in an armful of meat, which was stuck firmly upon long sharpened sticks, and thrust into the fed flame until it was burned and blackened and then eaten with greater gusto. The child devoured her share like a young hyena, while the elders sucked and mumbled. The women seemed to know me and be glad that I had come. One of them pointed, laughing, to the burden I had carried, and then up toward the valley, and I knew that my own cave was there. Soon, refreshed, I took up my own burden of the meat and left my friends and followed the path southward, knowing instinctively each rise and run. I reached a place where the rock sloped sharply down and where, halfway up, appeared the dark mouth of a narrow opening. I had reached my home at last.
Up the steep ascent of thirty feet or more was a twisting way, worn smooth. Long travelled must have been that path. I entered the cave and found it very like the other, save that it was not more than a fourth as large. The one I had just left was the largest in all the region.
There were embers still alive where was a spot of red at one end of the cave, and I cast down my load and threw on fresh wood, which was at hand, and then lay down to sleep, for I was tired. But I could not sleep. There were flames and light in the cave and, now, everything came back to me. I remembered the two days before I went away with my companions. I remembered the pleasures and perils of my life, and all the horrors of the discovery, not long ago, when I, returning from a night spent with a hunter in another cave, found all of those I had lived with dead and nearly all devoured, all slain in the cave together, surprised while sleeping, by the wolf pack which had found swift entrance through the opening, for once left carelessly unblocked by slabs of stone.
Then, all at once, with my clearing mind came to me the thought that I was not a solitary creature inhabiting that cave. I ran to its mouth and my “O-o-e-e” went forth resoundingly.
Again and again I called, and at last there was an answer, nearer and nearer with each reply, and a man came running easily. I was glad. It was Woof, my hunting mate, who lived with me in the cave. A great companion was Woof. He had left his own people to come and live with me, for we had known each other a long time. He was almost as tall and strong as I and could run almost as swiftly as the little deer. He loped up the pathway to our home, saw the meat, and shouted aloud in satisfaction and began to roast and eat. He had not been over-fortunate in his hunting in my absence.
We talked long in our clucking way until the day was late. Then we heaped up the stone slabs until the entrance to the cave was filled nearly to the top and threw ourselves down to sleep. As my eyes grew heavy I dreamed again perplexedly. Again I was in the treetops, swinging easily along and hearing familiar cries. And there were flames and roaring and tottering forests. I would waken at times and look upon the smouldering fire and toward where Woof lay breathing deeply, and realize the present, and then a fog would arise and Woof and the cave side would disappear. Had there been something before? I could see, at times, a face, but to whom it belonged I could not tell. I knew it now; it was a face of another time, the merry, impish face of an ape-like creature with whom I had had comradeship. I awakened and groped hungrily in my mind, but could remember nothing. At last I slept contentedly.
With the flood of the fair morning light came still greater clearness to my thoughts. I forgot for a time even that I had dreamed and was, like Woof, eager for the outside. It was a good thing that there was yet meat enough to finish in a great breakfast. As things went we were well-to-do young men. Club in hand, we tumbled down the pathway and swung up the long ravine.
We finally clambered to the summit of towering rocks and looked up and down seekingly; it was a way we had, and with reason, in those death-laden times, never to travel far without ascending a tree or some eminence and searching the entire country in sight. Now we saw nothing moving save two black spots in the direction whence we came. We knew what they meant, and the long-drawn call for them went forth, “O-o-e-e, O-o-e-e!” The two men, running, were Gurr and Hair, my companions of the day before, who were soon beside us there on the rock pile.
Strictly speaking, we had yet no proper names, though we had the result of an effort toward them. We could indicate an absent one, but in most cases only by a sort of mimicry. Thus Woof was so known because of a trick of his in imitating well the “woof” of a startled beast. Gurr was so designated because of his husky voice, and his wife was Goor because her call was similar to his though not so harsh. There was another man with a split lip and singular utterance, and we said “Chu-Chu” when we referred to him. Hair was so called because he was the most hairy one among us. We must have known more than a hundred different sounds for different things. Names, or sounds, we had for fire, water, food, the sun and moon and trees and rocks and clubs, and for most of the great beasts.
And certain other words we had, too, that had to do with actions, such as fighting and the hunt. We had indeed the inception of a language which lifted us above and beyond all other creatures. Of some personal names, mostly imitative, there were Gluck-Gluck, Blink, and Limp, and there was one big cave man Ugh, who grunted savagely at times, and who was very strong. His jaws were heavy, his mouth was armed with great teeth, and his thumbs and great toes were very long. He could climb better than most of us, but was dull-witted and not any more successful than others in the hunt. Once he built a great nest in a treetop, but abandoned it and returned to his hollow in the rocks, because it was warmer there.
Not long had there been fire in the caves, and in some tribes they had no fire at all, and ate flesh raw. Once the old man, Hair’s father, tried to tell me what his father had told him of how they first learned that they could bring fire with lighted brands from the fire mountains. It was a wonder that he could remember so much. Now, when the fire failed us we went to the burning places miles away and lighted fagots and journeyed back, building frequent fires on our way, so that each of us could keep his torch alight until we reached the caves again. It was rarely, though, that this was necessary, for we had learned to keep our fires by covering giant brands with ashes when we went away, and when, at times, a failure came, the fire could usually be renewed from another cave. Always some of the old women or old men remained at home to keep the fires alight. Our life was fierce and simple. We thought little, and cared not, save for the moment. We were hungry and must eat; we were cold and must seek warmth; we were in peril and must flee or fight; we had the elementary passions and must mate; we had rages sometimes and sought to slay. There were not many of us in the long gorge or valley, though nature had made it a place abounding in caves everywhere. We were but a dozen or two in all, doubtless all related or descended from a single family, and the nearest creatures of our kind were another group living in the hills far to the southward. These people we seldom met, and when by chance there was a meeting, it was with a somewhat sullen watchfulness on either side, though we had never warred. Such were we, hungry and gorged, alternately, alert among the other creatures, seeking some, fearing some, chasing or fleeing, and having the vast advantage of being almost omnivorous in our feeding. And there was a fierce joy to it as well. Hoo! It was a life!
We four trooped onward together, for we had made a plan, and when we neared the cave of Ugh we howled together and he joined us, grim as the great-jawed hyena. We wanted him along because we might have need of one who could deal strong blows, and his club was heavy. I envied him that tough club of blackened wood, the more so because it chanced that I alone among us might not find the thing too mighty for the arm.
We needed force that day, for ours was to us a mighty prospect. There were urus, which Woof had discovered a day or two before, now pasturing in a not distant lowland, and the slaying of the urus was a great event comparable only to the rare killing of the aurochs, the mighty bison of the time. Woof had discovered a band of urus a day or two before feeding in a narrow valley which ended in a precipice some thirty feet in height as it neared the river. In this valley were various small mounds, and we could, by utilizing these, get the urus between us and the river, and by loud shouting and a sudden rush drive them in a panic to their deaths. This had been done once in the past and might be done again. We went eastward through the hills, until we could see the urus feeding below, and then crept down into the valley, ever keeping the little mounds between us and the grazing beasts, Ugh in the lead. Then something happened. There was a threatening bellow as Ugh crept by one of the mounds between us, and he sprang back, with abundant reason, for, within twenty yards of him was a huge bull feeding apart from the rest. For a moment the beast stood still, then, with lowered head and glaring eyes, charged savagely upon the hunter, while the rest of us fled, yelling.
Not a moment too soon did Ugh leap and crouch beside the mound, but even his mortal peril did not destroy his hardihood. Even as he eluded the rush, he swung his club and brought it down with all his might as the brute swept by, seeking, by some chance, to stun him. It was not to be, nor, because of an amazing happening, was Ugh in further peril. It was the strange chance in a thousand, but the club, driven so hardly by that enormous, muscular arm, came fairly down upon the sharp point of one of the great horns and, dense and tough as was its fibre, split and impaled itself and was wrenched from the grip of Ugh as the beast crashed by. And then followed a grotesque spectacle.
Stunned, dazed, crazed with the pain of the benumbing blow, the urus galloped blindly about in circles, bellowing and almost bleating and shaking its great head. The impaled club was flung off at last, flying a score of yards, and, a moment later, the beast, regaining his senses, went dashing off in the direction already taken by the flying herd. So ended the urus hunt. We had failed, but that hunt, in its indirect results, was vast in its effects upon the future of the Cave men.
Ugh regained his weapon, split at its end, and, as we gathered again, stood gazing upon it ruefully. We wandered away to where the creek of the valley entered the river, and found crayfish and the eggs of waterfowl, and feasted merrily, and lay there resting in a place where the sun shone warm on the rocks.
But Ugh could not keep his eyes from his split club. It was rent fairly across the middle of its heavier end for a length of more than a foot from its head, and he, with his strong hands, could pull the sides an inch or two apart. Woof stood beside him, and as Ugh thus strained the wood until there was an opening, Woof, in sheer sport, dropped into the inviting space a great flake of flint which had parted from the rock and lay there ready to his hand. As Ugh, surprised, released the parts they clashed together upon the flint and held it there, for the wood was tough of fibre and had a vicious springiness. There, held strongly and tenaciously in the jaws of the cleft club, was the broad, heavy flint flake, its sharp edges outstanding inches on either side. In the hand of Ugh was a rude axe, the first whose handle was ever clutched by man!
We all stood looking curiously at this strange mingling of wood and stone, when Ugh, with a hoarse cry, swung it aloft and waved it above our heads in mock threatening and shouted “Kill!” Well might he yell out “Kill!” We knew it could do that were the stone but firmly fixed, and we all alike yelled, but wondered at it. The stone was left in the club just as it had been gripped and so was carried back with us. More than it did the others, the stone and wood so seemingly grown together in what might be a mighty weapon, fascinated me. For the split club with a stone—already we sometimes, by signs, exchanged things in the beginning of all barter—I gave Ugh my own fine club, and my new possession I carried with me to my cave that night. A dim idea of something great was forming in my mind. Could the stone be held there always, what a weapon I would have! I smote with the rude axe, and unshattered and unmoved it bit deep into thick tree bark. With repeated strokes the axe stone loosened a little in its accidental socket and I was troubled. I strained it into proper bearing in the cleft again and studied how to make it permanently firm. The problem was still with me when I reached our cave with Woof. It came to me to tie the axe as we tied things, with sinews—for we had, somehow, learned how to make a knot—and with sinew I toiled long beside the fire until I had bound, with my utmost straining strength, and firmly fastened together the intersection of the rugged flake of stone and the tough wood. Then I ran out and down the path in the moonlight and tried the axe recklessly upon a tree trunk and found the stone immovable. It could not be wrenched nor sprung from the eye. I had an axe! The axe, mightiest weapon and implement in the hand of man for thousands of years to come, had been invented by chance, and rudely, in a single day. The age of wood and the club alone had passed. The Age of Stone had come!
So I alone had the axe, and soon, in our hunting as in the littler things, like the getting away of a vine in our paths through the forest, as compared with the axe the club was a feeble thing. The sharp stone could shear the little things, and the sharp and heavy stone, driven deeply, could bring death where the club might only stun or bruise. With the axe I could readily open a way along the thick skin of a slain thing, making easy the stripping for the flint flakes, and with the axe I could divide the body. We must all have axes! With my own I split the ends of other clubs, and flint flakes were sought to bind in them, and soon all grown males of our kith and kin bore axes as did I. But, oddly enough, there was no axe possessed in all the clan quite so hard and rightly shaped and keen as mine. Nature had made, accidentally, a better axe than we, in our crude and bungling way, could fashion at the time. Yet we were better equipped now than ever before for either hunt or fray, though there came soon a miserable time when we almost lost our courage and were fearful in our coming and going.
There was a broad and pleasant wide-open space, almost a plain, in the near forest which was our nearest and favoured hunting ground. It was acres in extent and upon it were hosts of berry bushes and little nut thickets, in which harboured many hares and small game of all sorts, and also birds that ran upon the ground where were nuts, which were good to eat. Food of some kind we always found there. In the midst of this small plain uprose, as if all out of space, though near the mountains, a long, huge rock, perhaps some twenty feet in height, and with sides so sheer that none except a man or other climbing animal could reach the top. But some great upheaval had split this monster rock crosswise, and so there gapped through it a passageway, broad at one end and narrowing at the other, the space between the walls filled with soil up to the level of the land about. There stood this strange split rock, almost in the midst of this little plain, of so much importance to us, but which now we dared not enter. There had come there one of the things we feared and had made it his chosen haunt.
What brought the cave bear to our hunting place no one could tell. It may have been the berries or the roots or some whim of the beastly savage brain. We had, shudderingly, to hunt around but not near the little plain, and in my own heart a great anger was growing. “Why? Why?” I said in my dull brain.
Whatever the cause, there he was, and one day, when two of the cave men had ventured a little way in the bushes, one of them was smitten down by a huge paw, and the other heard but one gasp in the bushes as he fled. Daily, watching from the treetops which fringed the place, could we see the hulking monster as he ranged the open spaces or went toward his lair, to be lost there for a while. And near that thicket lair rose the vast rock.
One night we were together, a company of us, in the great cave of Hair and Gurr, and we were hungry, because we had come from bad hunting toward the north. We could have found more had we not feared to invade the bushy plain, and I could have howled aloud in anger, for I was half famished. I thought of the purple berries and the sweet nuts and the sucking roots and the little things to kill, and I sulked off alone and dared and ventured in my mind, and there came the thought, a thing so dreadful that I gasped in the thinking of it, yet which clung to me as fiercely as cling the vines which bear the blood-red blossoms on the rocks. And my dreams came to a red climax the next day, when one man, venturing into the borders of the plain, just narrowly escaped the monster. All through the night I tossed fitfully, and again the desperate fancy gripped me. I leaped to my feet and swung my axe and yelled out “Bear” and “Kill!” and Woof awakened and leaped in alarm, and laughed when he saw that I seemed raving. Sometimes Cave men had madness.
But the craze was on me, and, the next morning, I ran up and down the valley and howled aloud and screamed and yelped that I, I alone, would kill the monster in the plain. The others heard my ravings and came out, but they only grinned and chuckled, though all followed me as I turned and ran southward and toward the wood-path which led through the forest to where was the little plain—and death. I did not linger, and my following tribe ran close behind me until I reached the very edge of the dangerous ground, when, as monkeys climb, they swarmed into the treetops while I slipped forward among the bushes, a crazed and yet contained thing, half demented, strong and unconsciously, blindly, seeking what seemed suicide, but—with the Axe.
I crept into a little pathway and saw nothing, and so slipped along unhindered until I reached the rock. I climbed it, tremblingly, for another mood had come upon me now. I was afraid. I threw myself down upon the stone and shook all over as the leaves shake in the aspen tree which the wind owns. So in awful terror I tossed about for a time until, in my very desperation, the rage came back again and I cared for nothing in all the world, for the blue sky or the people in the treetops or myself or death or mangling. I leaped to my feet and danced up and down and whooped and swung my arms. Then, in a near thicket, there was a rustle, and “woof,” and the huge cave bear rushed forth and gazed about.
Slowly at first, looking up toward me, the monster came shuffling and shambling into the open. He saw me plainly now, and there was another great “woof,” a growl, and he lurched forward with astounding swiftness. And then just when the dread was most appalling, the awful sickness, which had come again, left me, and I became cold of blood and insanely crafty and blood-hungry. Then I, the Axeman, dropped to the ground, not a score of yards before the approaching beast!
The monster uprose, for a moment, apparently astonished, then plunged forward with a growling roar as I dashed in flight between the gaping jaws of the split rock.
Not twenty yards through the rock did the fissure run, but I was near that fearful paw-stroke when I leaped through the further narrow opening and fell panting to the ground. And even as I sprawled, the great body hurled and wedged itself into the tapering space, and the “swish” of the paw passed close beside my head. I lay just out of reach. I could see the red jaws and grinding teeth and wicked, glaring eyes and hear the rush of the foul breath above me.
Straining outward with his one free arm the brute struck savagely, and his great strokes fairly whistled through the air as they swept within a hand’s breadth of me. For a moment I was faint again with the sickening fear, and then once more the change came. I leaped to my feet and yelled. There, pushing, gnashing his teeth and striking, clawing blows in vain, was the monster who had been our dread. I became a sudden demon. I roared as roars the tiger. I danced about closely as the beast strained out with lowered head, and then I leaped in as the paw went by and whirled my axe aloft and struck. What a blow was that! When had even the strong arm of the Cave man delivered stroke as mighty as that which sent my axe clean to the haft into the bone and brain of that huge head? Clean to the haft the blade was driven, and there it stayed as I leaped backward wrenching in vain at the tough handle. I shrank aside to avoid another stroke, but that was needless. There was a roar, a wild, helpless clawing, and then the huge head in which the axe was buried sagged downward and the monstrous thing was dead! I, single-handed, had slain the great cave bear! Never before in all the happenings of time had so great a thing been done!
The shuddering, breathless people in the treetops were the insane ones now. Their frenzied shoutings filled the wood at first, and soon they were around me, but wondering and awestricken and silent again. Their demeanour toward me was such as they had never shown before. I was greater than they. The huge body of the bear was hauled out and the skin taken, toilsomely, and ever after I slept upon it in my cave.
The world had changed for me. I was another being and I could not help it. I had been called “Scar” because of the great scar upon my face straight up and down from eye to jaw, but they changed my name and called me “Bear,” and like a bear I must have grown somewhat as time passed. The news of the great slaying went about among the creatures of our kind as far as our world extended and I became an awesome man apart. Even Woof, my comrade, seemed half afraid of me and, at last, following the mating instinct, took a mate and went away from me to live in a cave far up the gorge. I had it in my mind to take a mate myself, and resolved upon an almost burly woman of the Cave people I had met afar, who feared nothing and who hunted, sometimes alone, as did the men. I went to get her, but she had disappeared. She had hunted once too often recklessly. I might have taken another, but, I know not why, the mood to do so never came again. I still joined with the others in the chase and my axe stroke was the heaviest, and none surpassed me whenever there was danger to be met.
And the seasons and the years passed, and all men had the stone axes, and we fed well, and children were born, and the people of the long gorge grew in number. Then came a pall. The world was going wrong.
Creeping as creeps the snake in the grass and bushes, down where the rocks shelve off into the lowlands, had come, with the swiftly passing seasons, a dreadful something. The sun, the big blazing thing up in the sky, seemed growing old and helpless and did not warm us as he had before. And down the sides of the mountain came crawling those wide blue-white cloaks of ice, never stopping, always crawling.
The seasons had been changing steadily. Each year was unlike the one before it, with skies more lowering and chillier blasts and less of sunshine. And in the cold time the snow fell and stayed longer than in the past and did not leave the mountain tops at all in summer, and the days of the seasons when the sun shone and there came the fruits and nuts were not so many. Ever the grass upon the plains grew less and the creatures feeding there became less in their numbers, and it was not good hunting. There was a constant thinning of the creatures which felt the change and ever they turned toward the south, the south above which the sun seemed to shine less coldly. The chill came even to me, and I thought dimly that it might be because I was no longer young, for I had seen old men shudder when the cold came. But it was not that, it was the world itself, the ice sheets pushing themselves down from the north.
Sometimes the hunters, venturing too far away, hampered in snow, would become exhausted and go to sleep, and when they did this they never woke. When we found them they would not answer, and we took their axes and left them. It came to me at last, that we must do as had done the beasts, and flee southward, where, perhaps, it would be warmer. Why had I not sooner seen the need? Why had our clan alone been reckless fools and failed to join the birds and beasts, and others of our own kind?
The cold became more dreadful. The wind howled and swept away the snow, leaving bare the ice masses on mountains down which swift streams had once run. The great river was ice-locked and silent. An awful stillness came upon the world about us, so that our own cries sounded hoarse and loud. We were cold and starving and, at last, we were forced together in the cave of Hair and Gurr, where there was room for all who remained of us. We gathered much fuel and kept up a fire, about which we huddled, famished and desperate. The end seemed very near.
One night, a storm fiercer than any we had ever known, raged down the valley. From the mouth of the cave we could see but the swirling drifts and hear only the roaring and shrieking of the wind. But at midnight it seemed to me I could distinguish another sound amid the unearthly clamour. It was different from the other noises, a bellowing in which was a note of fear. I had heard the trumpetings of the great mammoths once, and this somewhat recalled the sound, but it could not be. This was no haunt of the monster things, yet from somewhere up the gorge the sound continued, now higher or lower and sometimes moaning and most pitiful. Near morning it ceased entirely, but I must know what it meant. At daybreak I started up the gorge with four companions.
We did not have far to go. Fighting our way through, we came to a mighty hollow in which the snow had drifted to a depth many times the height of a man, and there, plunged deeply, almost buried, was an enormous, brown, hairy mass. It was incredible; it could not be that there had come to us such salvation, but it was true. Here was a strayed mammoth, last of his gigantic kind in the accursed region, caught helpless in the pass and dead, now to our hands!
With shouts of joy that were near to madness we hurled ourselves down upon the mountain of flesh, hewed frantically with our axes and cut out great chunks of meat and bore them to the cave, and there the whole starved company of us roasted and ate until we could eat no more. We could but eat and lie about and sleep and eat, and sleep again throughout all that day and night. And the next day, with much hewing and many burdened journeys, the whole of the vast body was stored within the cave. We were prisoners, but we had food and warmth. Soon all were strong again and there was almost merriment, for we were foolish.
We fed—for we were not many and the body of the mammoth was a monster thing—we fed and lounged before the flames for many days, but we did not think, though the wind still roared outside and the drifts were becoming deeper. I, who should have been wiser than the others—fool that I was—remained as dazed and warm and sluggish as the rest. Surely the trials which had come upon us must have changed me. But at last I woke to an affrighted half-understanding. The heap of mammoth flesh was growing smaller, and warmth, it seemed to me, might never come again. The storm ceased and a cold sun appeared and we could see the way, at least, along the silent valley. We must go or die. I became a furious thing. I leaped about and shouted. I whirled my axe and threatened overmasteringly. I made all left of the following burden themselves with what remained of the flesh and so drove them out before me to the southward.
All day long we plodded, and when night fell we harboured, shiveringly, in a vacant cave, and with the next morning took up the journey again, though some fell fainting as we struggled. We left them as they fell, for we could do no more. And then, toward the evening of the third day, I caught my foot in a rock crevice and wrenched my ankle as I lurched, so that I heard the bones crack, and I, the strongest, became in a moment the most helpless of the band. I plunged and floundered ahead in agony. I bellowed as does the bull to his dun following, but my companions did not heed me. We were past all helping and I was left alone. I fell prone in the deep snow and the cold crept upon me. It was bitter cold. And then to me it became less cold, and the snow began falling heavily and softly again, covering me with a warm blanket. I was tired and I could but sleep, restfully, too, as often I had done after some long chase. And I had barely slept when there came to me dreams like the pleasant memories of a thousand years. There were soft skies above me, and waving boughs, and a fragrance in my nostrils. And a laughing, apish face peered at me from between the branches bright with blossoms. And then there came other visions, but dimmer and more senseless, and so I slipped away into all dreamlessness.