HOW RA-NA SAVED HIS PEOPLE
RA-NA was a wise old man who had dwelt in the valley for nearly a
hundred years. He was lame, having had his leg almost torn off by a
bear while hunting in the marshes, but his wits were very keen.
He was one of the watchers of the Sacred Fire, and lived in the Fire
Cave with another old man named Sut, who was almost blind.
There were great piles of firewood before the cave, and more was stored
inside, to be used in wet weather. In the centre of the cave was a flat
rock, with a deep hollow in the top of it, in which the fire burned.
This fire was never allowed to go out. One or the other of the old men
watched it day and night, throwing on a few pieces of wood whenever
they were needed. When rain came and the fires the cave men had built
outside were put out, it was easy to build them again by taking hot
coals from the Sacred Fire.
Later on, the cave people learned a way to make fire by rubbing two
sticks together, but it was a long time before they found out how to
do this, and meanwhile, they had to keep their precious fire always
burning, for fear they might lose it.
Since the old men who watched the fire were never allowed to leave
it, they could not go out to hunt for food for themselves, and so the
cave people brought it in to them; bits of fish, and meat, and roots
and grains and nuts. After a while these offerings they brought to the
fire watchers came to be looked on as offerings to the Fire itself; the
people were thankful to the Fire because it warmed them, when they were
cold, and frightened away wild beasts, and cooked their food. So they
began to think of the Fire as a sort of god, and showed their thanks
to it by bringing in these offerings of food. In this way it soon came
about that the supply of meat, and fish, and other things the people
brought to the cave was much more than the two old men could possibly
eat, so they hung the fish, and the strips of meat, on poles stretched
across the roof of the cave, in order that it might not be wasted. The
nuts, and grains, and sweet-tasting roots they piled up in great heaps
in the back of the cave. Ra-Na and his companion did not know when they
hung the strips of meat and fish in the roof of the cave that the smoke
from the fire would preserve them. They only thought that they would
dry. But we know now that if we hang fish, or meat, in the smoke of a
burning fire, it will be preserved from decay, and will keep, without
spoiling, for months and even years. There are certain chemicals, such
as creosote, in the smoke from burning wood, which go into the meat or
fish and keep it from decaying, and this way of preserving food has
been used from the earliest times, and is still used to-day, just as it
was thousands of years ago, to make smoked fish, and bacon and ham.
The weather in the valley had been growing colder year after year, but
so far there had been very little ice or snow. Mother Nature, who was
now ready to teach her children another lesson, called Cold to her.
"Cold," she said, "you have certainly helped me a great deal. Now I
have something more for you to do."
"What?" Cold asked. "Do you want me to freeze your little people again?
I love to make them shiver and shake."
"I want you to send them Ice and Snow. They might as well get used to
such things, for they are going to see a great deal of them from now
on."
So Cold flapped his wings, and blew a bitter blast from the frozen
north, and all the little raindrops were turned to beautiful white
flakes of snow, and all the marshes and streams and lakes were covered
with ice many inches thick.
The north wind swept through the valley like a knife, and made the cave
people shiver and shake to their very bones. They put on their fur
coats, and huddled over fires in the caves, waiting for the cold to go
away, as it always had before. But this time the cold did not go away,
but got worse and worse, and the snow whirled down and covered all the
valley, and the ice got thicker and thicker. The cave people had never
seen anything like this before, and they were afraid. After a while,
when they had eaten all the food they had in the caves, they began to
get hungry, so hunting parties went out to find food. These parties
searched everywhere through the valley, and the marsh-land outside,
but they could find hardly anything. The ice on the marshes kept them
from spearing fish; they broke holes in it here and there, but the
fish would not come near the holes, and they could not reach them with
their spears. The thick snow which covered the ground prevented them
from finding any of the sweet roots they often ate when other food was
scarce, and there were scarcely any animals about that they could kill.
The few that they saw easily got away, for the cave people could not
run through the thick snow fast enough to catch up with them. Party
after party came back to the caves with little or nothing at all; a
few wild fowl that they had managed to knock down with stones, and
some small animals that they found frozen in the snow. There was not
enough food to go around, only a mouthful apiece, and as the days went
by, and the cold got worse, the cave people once more found themselves
starving.
[Illustration: THE SACRED FIRE
Many of them went to the cave of the Sacred Fire, and prayed to it, for
they thought the fire was a god which could drive away the cold.]
Many of them went to the cave of the Sacred Fire, and prayed to it, for
they thought the fire was a god, the spirit of warmth and heat, which
could drive away the cold. But they brought no offerings of food to
place before the fire, because they had none to bring. Even to the fire
watchers they could bring nothing.
This, however, made no difference to Ra-Na and his companion, because
the fire cave was full of food, and they had plenty to eat.
Ra-Na got to thinking about how hungry the people were, and of all the
good food in the cave, so when any came to worship the Sacred Fire, he
gave them something to eat. Soon all through the valley the people were
saying that the Fire God was taking care of his children by giving them
food, and they came, and were fed with the smoked meats, and fish, and
the roots and nuts which the two old men had stored away.
It did not take very long to eat all this food up, for there were many
people in the valley, but by the time it was all gone, the storm had
passed, and under the heat of the sun the snow and ice began to melt,
so that the hunting parties were once more able to find fish and
animals for food. They had a hard time, and many starved to death, but
the tribe was saved.
Ra-Na explained to the people how the Sacred Fire had kept the meat and
fish for them, and they thought it a very wonderful thing, a miracle.
After that, when food was once more plentiful, they brought great
offerings of it to the Fire Cave, to show how grateful they were for
their escape from starvation, and they laid away stores in their own
caves too, all through the summer, for they had learned a great lesson,
the need of storing food for use during the winter. From that time on
the cave people were never in danger of starving in the cold months,
and for this they gave thanks to the Fire God, and to Ra-Na and Sut,
who came to be looked upon as the Sacred Fire's priests.
When the first men began to worship Fire, they were giving thanks to
one of God's great forces, which had brought them comfort and happiness
in the shape of warmth and cooked food and safety from their enemies,
the wild beasts, who feared the hot flames. This worship of God's
great natural forces was the beginning of religion. Later on, they
came to worship the Sun, the Rain, the Wind, the Sea, the Lightning,
the Rivers and Mountains, seeing in each the power of the Great Spirit
which had created them all. This early kind of worship was in many ways
very beautiful, but it was not long before the priests of the Fire or
other god began to change it to suit themselves. Having nothing to do
but live in the cave or temple, and be fed by the tribe, they found
life very easy and comfortable, and this made them think themselves
better than the common people. So they became proud and arrogant, and
made every one believe they could get special favours from the gods. In
this way they came to rule the people, for they would threaten any one
who did not obey them with the anger of the gods. It was very easy for
these priests, they had great power, and instead of being two old men
who watched the fire, younger men became priests, with many followers
about them, all of whom the people had to feed and support in idle
luxury. Soon the priests began to make all sorts of rules, telling the
people what they should eat, and wear, ordering them to build fine
temples, in which the priests might live, forbidding them this and
that, and claiming to have wonderful powers given to them by the gods.
They became very cruel, too, and not only frightened the people by
clever tricks, which to these simple creatures seemed like wonderful
miracles, but told them to make all sorts of sacrifices to the gods,
sometimes even human beings, men, women and children, who, they said,
had to be killed and offered upon altars so that the gods would not be
angry. All this work by the priests soon changed the simple religion of
the people, worshipping God through His great forces into a brutal kind
of religion which we call Paganism. This rule by the priests lasted
for a very long time; it was found among all the ancient peoples, in
Nineveh and Babylon, in Egypt, Greece and Rome, and it was only when
Christ came to teach people a better way to worship the Divine Creator
that people began to understand that God is not cruel and angry, asking
sacrifices, but a God of Love.