THE ISLAND MEN
THERE were twenty-two men and eight women in Tul-Ab's little party. The
great log canoe had been crowded.
The place where they landed was a little harbour at the mouth of a
small river, with high cliffs on either side of it, and a narrow beach
at their feet. They managed to catch some fish in the bay without much
trouble, and to find dry brushwood for fire, but there was no water to
drink, except the little they had found in the hollows in the rocks,
left there from the rainstorm of the night before. The shallow caves in
which they slept were only holes in the rock.
When morning came, Tul-Ab and some of his men began to climb up the
cliffs, in search of water, and a place to make a camp. They did not
like the small caves along the shore; they wanted to be higher up,
where they would be safe from attack, and where they could build brush
huts of the kind they had always lived in.
They found a smooth grassy place at the top of the cliffs, from which
they could look far out over the sea. There were no trees on the cliff
top, but only some low bushes. A stream, however, came from the rocks
higher up and crossing the little plateau, tumbled over the edge of
the cliffs into the sea. All over the surface of the plateau were many
flat rocks, some small, some very large and heavy. An easy path down
the side of the cliff led to the beach below, where they had spent the
night.
Tul-Ab and his men were troubled, because they found nothing about
them the way it had been in their other home. There were no trees on
the cliff tops with which to build huts; they saw some, on the hills
further back, but they were small and stunted. Nowhere did they see any
of the marsh grasses and reeds they had used so much in making their
houses. Yet they liked the place they had found for a camp, because
it was high and safe from attack, in case Ban and his hill men should
come after them from the other shore. Tul-Ab looked about and saw
nothing but rocks, and the thought came to him, why not build houses
for themselves out of these rocks.
He picked out a great flat boulder near the stream, and he and his men
dragged up other boulders, and arranged them in the form of a square.
On these they placed more stones, choosing the flat ones, until they
had built four walls, as high as their heads. In one of the walls they
left a hole for a door, placing over its top a long, flat stone, to
keep the wall above from falling down. The front wall they built higher
than the back, so that the roof of the house would slant, to make the
rain run off.
The roof bothered Tul-Ab a great deal. If he had had reeds and marsh
grass, he would have known what to do, but he could find none. With
his men he went farther up the hillside and cut down many of the short
stunted trees, and these they laid side by side across the walls of the
house to make a roof. There were spaces between these logs, through
which rain would come, so they cut sods of earth from the grassy
surface of the plateau, and covered the roof with a thick layer of
them, with flat stones on top to hold the sods in place. When the house
was done, Tul-Ab took it for his home, for he was the chief, and he
also took one of the women for his wife.
When the first stone house had been built, the little tribe built
others, until there was room for all to sleep protected from the rain.
Not knowing what wild animals, or even men, might live in the woods
further back from the shore, they also built a stone wall across the
neck of the plateau, so that on one side their camp was protected by
the cliffs leading down to the ocean, and on the other, by this wall of
stone. They brought great piles of firewood into the camp for cooking
the fish they caught, and the waterfowl they shot with bows and arrows,
along the shores of the little bay at the foot of the cliffs. Every day
the men went out hunting and fishing in the canoe, sometimes on the
ocean, when it was smooth, and at others, on the bay, or up the river
which ran into it. They could not go up this river very far, because
of the rocks in it, which made rapids, over which the boat could not
pass. But they often went beyond the rapids on foot, and brought back
wild hogs, and many small furry animals they had never seen before, and
sometimes bears and horned deer.
Having no marsh grass from which to weave cloth, the tribe began once
more to use skins and furs for clothing, and to eat more meat, and
less fish, than they had eaten in their old home. The country of the
sea people had been flat and marshy, while that of the valley tribes
was hilly and far from the sea, but in the new home of Tul-Ab and his
tribe, they found both the hills and the sea, close together, and so
they grew to be like both the sea folk, and the people of the valley
and the hills from which they had first come.
Already, in building things of stone, they had done something that men
had never done before. Instead of living in caves, or brush huts, they
had built houses of stone, and a stone fort. This was a new thing, and
from it they began to learn to be carpenters. As the tribe got larger,
and more houses were built, they found they could make the roof logs
fit closer together by chipping off the two sides of them, and so they
made the first hewn timbers. It was not long, before they found they
could split the logs with stone wedges, and in this way make rough
planks, or boards. These boards they fastened to cross pieces with
wooden pegs, to make doors for their houses to keep out the wind and
snow and rain.
The women they had brought with them had children, and these children
grew up and had more children, and before very long there were many
hundred people in the tribe, and their stone huts dotted the cliffs as
far as the eye could see. When they found there was not room enough
behind the first wall for the growing village, they built another and
longer wall, further back from the sea, for they were always afraid of
being attacked, on account of the way their former village had been
destroyed. Only the very oldest men remembered this now, but they told
the story to the younger men, around the fires at night, and when these
grew old, they told it to their children and grandchildren, so that it
became a legend in the tribe that they had come from another country,
where enemies lived who might attack them. A watchman stood day and
night on the cliffs, looking out over the sea, ready to light signal
fires, in case he saw boats coming toward them from across the water.
The island people found plenty of flint, out of which to make weapons
and tools for working wood, and they were very skilful fishermen, and
also great hunters with the bow and arrow. As they made hunting trips
far back into the country, they found many different kinds of wood for
making bows and small canoes, but no reeds were to be found, so they
forgot the art of making basket work. Neither did they find any clay,
for a long time, and when the few bowls and jars they had brought with
them were broken, they made drinking cups of the horns of animals, or
of wood. They still used smoked meat and fish, but they knew nothing
about planting and growing grains to make bread.
These people were great workers in wood and stone. They worshipped the
Sun, and built a temple to him of huge upright stones, set in a wide
circle, with a flat altar stone in the middle, on which they placed
their offerings of meat and fish. These offerings they burnt with fire,
because the priests of the temple told them it pleased the Sun to
smell the smoke of the burning flesh as it rose up in the sky. Twice
in the year they had great feasts. One was when the days began to get
longer, in the spring, and fruits and flowers began to grow. This
time is in March, and we call it the vernal equinox, because then the
days and nights are of equal length, and equinox means equal nights.
From then on, until June, the days grow longer and the nights grow
shorter. From June till September, the nights grow longer and the days
shorter, until once more they are the same length, and this is called
the autumnal equinox. Then the island tribe held another festival, the
feast of the harvest. After that the nights began to grow still longer,
and the days shorter, because the sun was going away from them more and
more, all through the cold winter. Even to-day we remember these two
festivals, by offerings of flowers in the spring, at Easter time, and
by the harvest feasts which country people still hold in some places at
the end of the summer, when the harvests are gathered in.
The island people built their houses and temples of stone. With wood
they at first made only roofs and doors, but it was not long before
they began to use it for building other things, such as boats. They
found no big trees of soft wood on the rocky hillsides, out of which
they could make large canoes. So they hewed planks out of the smaller
trees, and built the first wooden ships made by man. They could not be
called ships, at first, for they were only small boats, but as time
went on they built them larger and larger until they would carry forty
or fifty men.
Modor was the first man to build one of these boats and he was a
skilful carpenter. He hewed a long heavy keel for his boat out of a
tree trunk, and at each end he set up a stout post, one for the stem,
the other for the stern. Wooden braces, or knees, as they are called,
fastened by pegs, held the posts to the keel. Modor's tools were
heavy stone axes, wedges of stone to split planks with, saws, made of
jagged, toothed pieces of flint, with wooden handles bound to them,
sharp flint knives for making wooden pegs, and drills, for boring holes
for the pegs. With such rough tools it was not easy for Modor and
his companions to build a boat, but they were strong and patient, and
worked very hard.
After the stem and stern posts had been fastened in place, ribs were
pegged to the keel to form the frame of the boat. These curved ribs
they made in two ways. One was to hew them from the crooked limbs of
trees. The other was to take straight pieces of wood and soak them for
many days in water, until the wood became soft and pliable, and then
bend them to shape, and tie them that way with leather cords while they
dried.
When the ribs had been fastened to the keel with wooden pegs, long
strips of wood were bent around the tops of the ribs, from the stem
post to the stern post, and fastened to each rib with a peg. This made
the framework of the boat, and now it had to be covered with planks.
Modor and his helpers took the split boards they had made and bent them
over the framework, with a peg at each rib to hold them, and in this
way covered the whole framework of the boat. Of course a boat built
in this rough way would not be water-tight; there were many joints
and seams between the rough planking through which water would leak.
But Modor had found, oozing from the pine trees, a black, sticky sort
of gum or pitch, and this, with soft fibres from the bark of trees,
he used to calk his boat and make it tight. The way he did this was
to heat the pitch in a large shell, dip the fibres in it, and then
drive them into the cracks with a stone wedge. In this way, after many
trials, Modor at last got his boat so that it would not leak.
He built a deck of wood over the forward part of the boat, and across
the middle part he put five board seats. These seats were for the
paddlers to sit on, but the paddles were so long, in order to reach
the water, that they were like oars, and it was hard to handle them
against the ocean waves. So Modor drove pegs into the edges or gunwales
of the boat to hold the oars in place, and men thus began to row boats,
instead of paddling them, as they had their canoes and rafts.
As we have seen, the tribe had almost forgotten how to weave, because
they no longer had the tough marsh grasses to make cord from. But Modor
twisted the fibres from the bark of certain trees into strong cords,
and took them to some of the old women, who knew how to weave, and they
wove him a sail from them. Then he put a mast in the middle of his
boat, with a pole or yard across it, and hung the sail from this yard,
with strong cords tied to its lower corners to hold it down.
In this boat Modor and his companions made many voyages along the
coast, fishing, and hunting. On one of these trips he found a marsh
covered with reeds and rushes, but he did not gather them, for the
tribe had no use for them now. On another voyage Modor's boat was
carried by the wind across the water to a low shore. It was the same
shore from which Tul-Ab and his companions had fled hundreds of years
before. When Modor's boat came in sight of the beach, he saw many men
running along the sand, waving their spears and shouting. Several
canoes crowded with fighting men came out from the shore. Then Modor
lowered the sail of his boat, and the rowers bent to their oars, and
soon left the canoes and the shore far behind.
When Modor got back to the village he told the old men what he had
seen, and that night around the camp fires they told again the story of
Tul-Ab, and sang a song about him, and his coming to the island.
The next day the chief of the tribe, whose name was Gudr, told the
watchers on the cliffs to be very careful, and to keep their eyes
always on the sea, for he feared that the people from across the water
might come to attack them. But for a long time none came.
Other men in the tribe also built boats like the one made by Modor,
larger ones, and they carved the heads of animals, or birds, or fish,
out of wood, and fastened them at the bows of their boats, and this was
the first use of figureheads, which you can see on some sailing ships
even now. They painted the boats with red, and yellow and blue earths,
mixed with fish oil, and stained the sails different colours with the
juices of berries and plants.
One day, while digging along the bottom of the cliffs for red earth
with which to make paint for his boat, Modor came across a lump of
something that he at first thought was stone. It was yellow in colour,
and very heavy. He laid it on a rock, and beat it with the head of his
axe, expecting it would break. But instead of breaking, it flattened
out, and began to shine, where the axe head struck it, like the rays
of the sun. Modor was very much pleased with his find, because it was
so pretty, and he beat it out into a thin strip, and rubbed it bright
with a stone, and bent it like a bracelet about his upper arm. His
companions, when they saw it, liked its pretty, bright colour, but
beyond that, they paid no attention to it. They did not know that Modor
was the first man in the world to discover a metal. The bracelet he had
bent around his arm was made of pure gold.