A GREAT STEP FORWARD.
There came to Ab and Lightfoot that comfort which comes with laboring for
something desired. In all that the two did amid their pleasant
surroundings life became a greater thing because its dangers were so
lessened and its burdens lightened. But they were not long the sole human
beings in the Fire Valley. There was room for many and soon Old Mok took
up his permanent abode with them, for he was most contented when with Ab,
who seemed so like a son to him. A cave of his own was dug for Mok,
where, with his carving and his making of arrows and spearheads, he was
happy in his old age. Soon followed a hegira which made, for the first
time, a community. The whole family of Ab, One-Ear, Red-Spot and Bark and
Beech-leaf and the later ones, all came, and another cave was made, and
then old Hilltop was persuaded to follow the example and come with
Moonface and Branch and Stone Arm, his big sons, and the group, thus
established and naturally protected, feared nothing which might happen.
The effect of daily counsel together soon made itself distinctly felt,
and, under circumstances so different, many of the old ways were departed
from. Half a mile to the south the creek, which made a bend adown its
course, tumbled into the river and upon the river were wild fowl in
abundance and in its depths were fish. The forest abounded in game and
there were great nut-bearing trees and the wild fruits in their season.
Wild bees hovered over the flowers in the open places and there were
hoards of wild honey to be found in the hollows of deadened trunks or in
the high rock crevices. A great honey-gatherer, by the way, was
Lightfoot, who could climb so well, and who, furthermore, had her own
fancy for sweet things. It was either Bark or Moonface who usually
accompanied her on her expeditions, and they brought back great store of
this attractive spoil. The years passed and the community grew, not
merely in numbers, but intelligence. Though always an adviser with Old
Mok, Ab's chief male companion in adventure was the stanch Hilltop, who
was a man worth hunting with. Having two such men to lead and with a
force so strong behind them the valley people were able to cope with the
more dangerous animals venturesomely, and soon the number of these was so
decreased that even the children might venture a little way beyond the
steep barriers which had been raised where the flame circle had its gaps.
The opening to the north was closed by a high stone wall and that along
the creek defended as effectively, in a different way. They were having
good times in the valley.
At first, the home of all was in the caves dug in the soft rock of the
ledge, for of those who came to the novel refuge there was, for a season,
none who could sleep in the bright light from the never-waning flames.
There came a time, though, when, in midsummer, Ab grumbled at the heat
within his cave and he and Lightfoot built for themselves an outside
refuge, made of a bark-covered "lean-to" of long branches propped against
the rock. Thus was the first house made. The habitation proved so
comfortable that others in the valley imitated it and soon there was a
hive of similar huts along the foot of the overhanging precipice. When
the short, sharp winter came, all did not seek their caves again, but the
huts were made warmer by the addition to their walls of bark and skins,
and cave dwelling in the valley was finally abandoned. There was one
exception. Old Mok would not leave his warm retreat, and, as long as he
lived, his rock burrow was his home.
There came also, as recruits, young men, friends of the young men of the
valley, and the band waxed and waned, for nothing could at once change
the roving and independent habits of the cave men. But there came
children to the mothers, the broad Moonface being especially to the fore
in this regard, and a fine group of youngsters played and straggled up
and down the creek and fought valiantly together, as cave children
should. The heads of families were friendly, though independent. Usually
they lived each without any reference to anyone else, but when a great
hunt was on, or any emergency called, the band came together and fought,
for the time, under Ab's tacitly admitted leadership. And the young men
brought wives from the country round.
The area of improvement widened. Around the Fire Village the zone of
safety spread. The roar of the great cave tiger was less often heard
within miles of the flaming torches of the valley so inhabited. There
grew into existence something almost like a system of traffic, for, from
distant parts, hitherto unknown, came other cave men, bringing skins, or
flints, or tusks for carving, which they were eager to exchange for the
new weapon and for instruction in its uses. Ab was the first chieftain,
the first to draw about him a clan of followers. The cave men were taking
their first lesson in a slight, half unconfessed obedience, that first
essential of community life where there is yet no law, not even the
unwritten law of custom.
Running in and out among the children, sometimes pummeled by them, were a
score or two of gray, four-footed, bone-awaiting creatures, who, though
as yet uncounted in such relation, were destined to furnish a factor in
man's advancement. They were wolves and yet no longer wolves. They had
learned to cling to man, but were not yet intelligent enough or taught
enough to aid him in his hunting. They were the dogs of the future, the
four-footed things destined to become the closest friends of men of
future ages, the descendants of the four cubs Ab and Oak had taken from
the dens so many years before.
It was humanizing for the children, this association of such a number
together, though they ran only a little less wildly than those who had
heretofore been born in the isolated caves. There came more of an average
of intelligence among them, thus associated, though but little more
attention was paid them than the cave men had afforded offspring in the
past. There had come to Ab after Little Mok two strong sons, Reindeer and
Sure-Aim, very much like him in his youth, but of them, until they
reached the age of help and hunting, he saw little. Lightfoot regarded
them far more closely, for, despite the many duties which had come upon
her, there never disappeared the mother's tenderness and watchfulness.
And so it was with Moonface, whose brood was so great, and who was like a
noisy hen with chickens. So existed the hovering mother instinct with all
the women of the valley, though then the mothers fished and hunted and
had stirring events to distract them from domesticity and close affection
almost as much as had the men.
From this oddly formed community came a difference in certain ways of
doing certain things, which changed man's status, which made a revolution
second only to that made by the bow and for which even men of thought
have not accounted as they should have done, with the illustration before
them in our own times of what has followed so swiftly the use of steam
and, later, of electricity. Men write of and wonder at the strange gap
between what are called the Paleolithic and the Neolithic ages, that is,
between the ages when the spearheads and ax and arrowheads were of stone
chipped roughly into shape, and the age of stone even-edged and smoothly
polished. There was really no gap worth speaking of. The Paleolithic age
changed as suddenly into the Neolithic as the age of horse power changed
into that of steam and electricity, allowance being always made for the
slower transmission of a new intelligence in the days when men lived
alone and when a hundred years in the diffusion of knowledge was as a
year to-day.
One day Ab went into Old Mok's cave grumbling. "I shot an arrow into a
great deer," he said, "and I was close and shot it with all my force, but
the beast ran before it fell and we had far to carry the meat. I tore the
arrow from him and the blood upon the shaft showed that it had not gone
half way in. I looked at the arrow and there was a jagged point uprising
from its side. How can a man drive deeply an arrow which is so rough? Are
you getting too old to make good spears and arrows, Mok?" And the man
fumed a little. Old Mok made no reply, but he thought long and deeply
after Ab had left the cave. Certainly Ab must have good arrows! Was there
any way of bettering them? And, the next day, the crippled old man might
have been seen looking for something beside the creek where it found its
exit from the valley. There were stones ground into smoothness tossed up
along the shore and the old man studied them most carefully. Many times
he had bent over a stream, watching, thinking, but this time he acted. He
noted a small sandstone block against which were rasping stones of harder
texture, and he picked this from the tumbling current and carried it to
his cave. Then, pouring a little water upon a depression in the stone's
face, he selected his best big arrowhead and began rubbing it upon the
wet sandstone. It was a weary work, for flint and sandstone are different
things and flint is much the harder, but there came a slow result.
Smoother and smoother became the chipped arrowhead, and two days
later--for all the waking hours of two days were required in the weary
grinding--Old Mok gave to Ab an arrow as smooth of surface and keen of
edge as ever flew from bow while stone was used. And not many years
passed--as years are counted in old history--before the smoothed stone
weaponhead became the common property of cave men. The time of chipped
stone had ended and that of smoothed stone had begun. There was no space
between them to be counted now. One swiftly became the other. It was a
matter of necessity, this exhibition of enterprise and sense by the early
man in the prompt general utilization of a new discovery. And not alone
in the improvements in means which came when men of the hunting type were
so gathered in a community were the bow and the smoothed implements,
though these were the greatest of the discoveries of the epoch. The
fishermen who went to the river were not content with the raft-like
devices of the aquatic Shell People and learned, in time, that hollowed
logs would float and that, with the aid of fire and flint axes, a great
log could be hollowed. And never a Phoenician ship-builder, never a
Fulton of the steamer, never a modern designer of great yachts, stood
higher in the estimation of his fellows than stood the expert in the
making of the rude boats, as uncouth in appearance as the river-horse
which sometimes upset them, but from which men could, at least, let down
their lines or dart their spears to secure the fish in the teeming
waters. And the fishermen had better spears and hooks now, for comparison
was necessarily always made among devices, and bone barbs and hooks were
whittled out from which the fish no longer often floundered. There came,
in time, the making of rude nets, plaited simply from the tough marsh
grasses, but they served the purpose and lessened somewhat the gravity of
the great food question.