OLD MOK'S TALES.
It was worth while listening to Old Mok when he forgot himself and talked
and became earnestly reminiscent in telling of what he had seen or had
heard when he was young. One day there had been trouble in the cave, for
Bark, left in charge, had neglected the fire and it had "gone out," and
upon the return of his parents there had been blows and harsh language,
and then much pivotal grinding together of dry sticks before a new flame
was gained, and it was only after the odor of cooked flesh filled the
place and strong jaws were busy that the anger of One-Ear had abated and
the group became a comfortable one. Ab had come in hungry and the value of
fire, after what had happened, was brought to his mind forcibly. He laid
himself down upon the cave's floor near Old Mok, who was fashioning a
shaft of some sort, and, as he lay, poked his toes at Beechleaf, who
chuckled and gurgled as she rolled about, never for a moment relinquishing
a portion of the slender shin bone of a deer, upon the flesh of which the
family had fed. It was a short piece but full of marrow, and the child
sucked and mumbled away at it in utmost bliss. Ab thought, somehow, of how
poor would have been the eating with the meat uncooked, and looked at his
hands, still reddened--for it was he who had twisted the stick which made
the fire again. "Fire is good!" he said to Mok.
The old man kept his flint scraper going for a moment or two before he
answered; then he grunted:
"Yes, it's good if you don't get burned. I've been burned," and he thrust
out an arm upon which appeared a cicatrice.
Ab was interested. "Where did you get that?" he queried.
"Far from here, far beyond the black swamp and the red hills that are
farther still. It was when I was strong."
"Tell me about it," said the youth.
"There is a fire country," answered Old Mok, "away beyond the swamp and
woods and the place of the big rocks. It is a wonderful place. The fire
comes out of the ground in long sheets and it is always the same. The rain
and the snow do not stop it. Do I not know? Have I not seen it? Did I not
get this scar going too near the flame and stumbling and falling against a
hot rock almost within it? There is too much fire sometimes!"
The old man continued: "There are many places of fire. They are to the
east and south. Some of the Shell People who have gone far down the river
have seen them. But the one where I was burned is not so far away as they;
it is up the river to the northwest."
And Ab was interested and questioned Old Mok further about the strange
region where flames came from the ground as bushes grow, and where snow or
water did not make them disappear. He was destined, at a later day, to be
very glad that he had learned the little that was told him. But to-night
he was intent only on getting all the tales he could from the veteran
while he was in the mood. "Tell about the Shell People," he cried, "and
who they are and where they came from. They are different from us."
"Yes, they are different from us," said Old Mok, "but there was a time, I
have heard it told, when we were like them. The very old men say that
their grandfathers told them that once there were only Shell People
anywhere in this country, the people who lived along the shores and who
never hunted nor went far away from the little islands, because they were
afraid of the beasts in the forests. Sometimes they would venture into the
wood to gather nuts and roots, but they lived mostly on the fish and
clams. But there came a time when brave men were born among them who said
they would have more of the forest things, and that they would no longer
stay fearfully upon the little islands. So they came into the forest and
the Cave Men began. And I think this story true."
"I think it is true," Old Mok continued, "because the Shell People, you
can see, must have lived very long where they are now. Up and down the
creek where they live and along other creeks there lie banks of earth
which are very long and reach far back. And this is not really earth, but
is all made up of shells and bones and stone spearheads and the things
which lie about a Shell Man's place. I know, for I have dug into these
long banks myself and have seen that of which I tell. Long, very long,
must the Shell People have lived along the creeks and shores to have made
the banks of bones and shells so high."
And Old Mok was right. They talk of us as the descendants of an Aryan
race. Never from Aryan alone came the drifting, changing Western being of
to-day. But a part of him was born where bald plains were or where were
olive trees and roses. All modern science, and modern thoughtfulness, and
all later broadened intelligence are yielding to an admission of the fact
that he, though of course commingling with his visitors of the ages, was
born and changed where he now exists. The kitchen-midden--the name given
by scientists to refuse from his dwelling places--the kitchen-middens of
Denmark, as Denmark is to-day, alone, regardless of other fields, suffice
to tell a wondrous story. Imagine a kitchen-midden, that is to say the
detritus of ordinary living in different ages, accumulated along the side
of some ancient water course, having for its dimensions miles in length,
extending hundreds of yards back from the margin of this creek, of tens
and tens of thousands of years ago, and having a depth of often many feet
along this water course. Imagine this vast deposit telling the history of
a thousand centuries or more, beginning first with the deposit of clams
and mussel shells and of the shells of such other creatures as might
inhabit this river seeking its way to the North Sea. Imagine this deposit
increasing year after year and century by century, but changing its
character and quality as it rose, and the base is laid for reasoning.
At first these creatures who ranged up and down the ancient Danish creek
and devoured the clams and periwinkles must have been, as one might say,
but little more than surely anthropoid. Could such as these have migrated
from the Asiatic plateaus?
The kitchen-middens tell the early story with greater accuracy than could
any writer who ever lifted pen. Here the creek-loving, ape-like creatures
ranged up and down and quelled their appetites. They died after they had
begotten sons and daughters; and to these sons and daughters came an added
intelligence, brought from experience and shifting surroundings. The
kitchen-middens give graphic details. The bottom layer, as has been said,
is but of shells. Above it, in another layer, counting thousands of years
in growth, appear the cracked bones of then existing animals and appear
also traces of charred wood, showing that primitive man had learned what
fire was. And later come the rudely carved bones of the mammoth and woolly
rhinoceros and the Irish elk; then come rude flint instruments, and later
the age of smoothed stone, with all its accompanying fossils, bones and
indications; and so on upward, with a steady sweep, until close to the
surface of this kitchen-midden appear the bronze spear, the axhead and the
rude dagger of the being who became the Druid and who is an ancestor whom
we recognize. From the kitchen-midden to the pinnacle of all that is great
to-day extends a chain not a link of which is weak.
"They tell strange stories, too, the Shell People," Old Mok continued,
"for they are greater story-tellers than the Cave Men are, more of them
being together in one place, and the old men always tell the tales to the
children so that they are never forgotten by any of the people. They say
that once huge things came out of the great waters and up the creeks, such
as even the big cave tiger dare not face. And the old men say that their
grandfathers once saw with their own eyes a monster serpent many times as
large as the one you two saw, which came swimming up the creek and seized
upon the river horses there and devoured them as easily as the cave bear
would a little deer. And the serpent seized upon some of the Cave People
who were upon the water and devoured them as well, though such as they
were but a mouthful to him. And this tale, too, I believe, for the old
Shell Men who told me what their grandfathers had seen were not of the
foolish sort."
"But of another sort of story they have told me," Mok continued, "I think
little. The old men tell of a time when those who went down the river to
the greater river and followed it down to the sea, which seems to have no
end, saw what no man can see to-day. But they do not say that their
grandfathers saw these things. They only say that their grandfathers told
of what had been told them by their grandfathers farther back, of a story
which had come down to them, so old that it was older than the great trees
were, of monstrous things which swam along the shores and which were not
serpents, though they had long necks and serpent heads, because they had
great bodies which were driven by flippers through the water as the beaver
goes with his broad feet. And at the same time, the old story goes, were
great birds, far taller than a man, who fed where now the bustards and the
capercailzie are. And these tales I do not believe, though I have seen
bones washed from the riversides and hillsides by the rains which must
have come from creatures different from those we meet now in the forests
or the waters. They are wonderful story-tellers, the old men of the Shell
People."
"And they tell other strange stories," continued the old man. "They say
that very long ago the cold and ice came down, and all the people and
animals fled before it, and that the summer was cold as now the winter is,
and that the men and beasts fled together to the south, and were there for
a long time, but came back again as the cold and ice went back. They say,
too, that in still later times, the fireplaces where the flames came out
of great cracks in the earth were in tens of places where they are in one
now, and that, even in the ice time, the flames came up, and that the ice
was melted and then ran in rivers to the sea. And these things I do not
believe, for how can men tell of what there was so long ago? They are but
the gabblings of the old, who talk so much."
Many other stories the veteran told, but what most affected Ab was his
account of the vale of fire. He hoped to see it sometime.