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."
[Illustration: THE WOODEN SPEAR
Reaching down, he seized in his hands the fish he had speared.]
"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."