A FRESH START
Indomitably the human spirit, temporarily beaten down and
crushed by misfortunes beyond all calculation, once more rose in
renewed strength to the tremendous task ahead. And, first of all,
Stern and the girl made a camping place in the edge of the forest,
close by the spring under the big rock.
"We've got to have a base of supplies, or something of that sort," the
man declared. "We can't start trekking away into the wilderness at
once, without consideration and at least some definite place where we
can store a few necessaries and to which we can retreat, in case of
need. A camp, and--if possible--a fire, these are our first
requisites."
Their camp they built (regardless of the protests of birds and
squirrels and many little woodland folk) roughly, yet strongly enough
to offer protection from the rain, under a thick-leaved oak, which in
itself gave shelter. This oak, through whose branches darted many a
gay-plumaged bird of species unknown to Stern, grew up along the
overhanging face of Spring Rock, as they christened it.
By filling in the space between the rock and the bole of the oak with
moss and stones, and then by building a heavy lean-to roof of leafy
branches, thatched with lashed bundles of marsh-grass, they
constructed in two days a fairly comfortable shack, hard by an
abundant, never-failing supply of the finest water ever a human set
lip to.
Here Stern piled fragrant grasses in great quantity for the girl's
bed. He himself volunteered to sleep at the doorway, on guard with his
only weapon--a jagged boulder lashed with leather thongs to a
four-foot heft, even in the; very fashion of the neolithic ancestors
of man.
Their food supply reverted to such berries and fruits as they could
gather in the fringes of the forest, for as yet they dared not
penetrate far from the shore. To these they added a plentiful supply
of clams, which they dug with sharp sticks, at low tide, far out
across the sand-flats--toiling for all the world like two of the
identical savages who in the long ago, a thousand or five thousand
years before the white man came to America, had left shell-heap
middens along the north Atlantic coast.
This shell-fish gathering brought the action of the tides to their
careful attention. The tide, they found, behaved ire an erratic
manner. Instead of two regular flows a day there was but one. And at
the ebb more than two miles of beach and sea-bottom lay exposed below
the spot where they had landed at the flood. Stern analyzed the
probable cause of this phenomenon.
"There must be two regular tides," he said, "only they're lost in the
far larger flux and reflux caused by the vortex we escaped from. Any
marine geyser like that, able to, suck down water enough from the sea
to lay bare two miles of beach every day and capable of throwing a
column of mist and spray like that across the sky, is worth investing
gating. Some day you and I are going to know more about it--a lot
more!"
And that was truth; but little the engineer suspected how soon, or
under what surpassingly strange circus stances, the girl and he were
destined to behold once more the workings of that terrible and mighty
force.
On the third day Stern set himself to work on the problem of making
fire. He had not even flint-and-steel now; nor any firearm. Had he
possessed a pistol he could have collected a little birch-bark, sought
out a rotten pine-stump, and discharged his weapon into the "punk,"
then blown the glow to a flame, and almost certainly have got a blaze.
But he lacked everything, and so was forced back to primitive man's
one simplest resource--friction.
As an assistant instructor in anthropology at Harvard University, he
had now and then produced fire for his class of expectant students by
using the Peruvian fire-drill; but even this simple expedient required
a head-strap and a jade bearing, a well-formed spindle and a bow.
Stern had none of these things, neither could he fashion them without
tools. He had, therefore, to resort to the still more primitive method
of "fire-sawing," such as long, long ago the Australian bushmen had
been wont to practice.
He was a strong man, determined and persistent; but two days more had
passed, and many blisters covered his palms ere--after innumerable
experiments with different kinds of woods and varying strokes--the
first tiny glow fell into the carefully scraped sawdust. And it was
with a fast-beating heart and tremulous breath that he blew his spark
to a larger one, then laid on his shredded strips of bark and blew
again, and so at last, with a great up-welling triumph in his soul,
beheld the flicker of a flame once more.
Exhausted, he carefully fed that precious fire, while the girl clapped
her hands with joy. In a few moments more the evening air in the dim
forest aisles was gladdened by the ruddy blaze of a camp-fire at the
door of the lean-to, and for the first time smoke went wafting up
among the branches of that primeval wood.
"Now for some real meat!" cried Stern with exultation. "To-morrow I go
hunting!"
That evening they sat for hours feeding their fire with deadfalls,
listening to the trickle of the little spring and to the night sounds
of the forest, watching the bats flicker among the dusky spaces, and
gazing at the slow and solemn march of the stars beyond the leafy
fretwork overhead. Stern slept but little that night, in his anxiety
to keep the fire fed; and morning found him eager to be at his work
with throwing-sticks among the vistas of the wilderness.
Together they hunted that day. She carried what his skilful aim
brought down from the tangled greenery above. Birds, squirrels,
chipmunks, all were welcome. Noon found them in possession of more
than thirty pieces of small game, including two hedgehogs. And for the
first time in almost a week they tasted flesh again, roasted on a
sharp stick over the glowing coals.
Stern hunted all that day and the next. He dressed the game with an
extraordinarily large and sharp clamshell, which he whetted from time
to time on a rock beside the spring. And soon the fire was overhung
with much meat, being smoked with a pine-cone smudge in preparation
for the journey into the unknown.
"Inside of a week, at this rate," he judged, "we'll be able to start
again. You must set to work platting a couple of sacks. The grass
along the brook is tough and long. We can carry fifty or seventy-five
pounds of meat, for emergencies. Fruits we can gather on the way."
"And fire? Can we carry that?"
"We can take a supply of properly dried-out woods with punk. I've
already had practice enough, so I ought to be able to get fire at any
time inside of half an hour."
"Weapons?"
"I'll make you a battle-ax like my own, only lighter. That's the best
we can do for the present, till we strike some ruin or other where a
city used to be."
"And you're still bent on reaching Boston?"
"Yes. I reckon we're more than half-way there by now. It's the nearest
big ruin, the nearest place where we can refit and recoup the damage
done, get supplies and arms and tools, build another boat, and in
general take a fresh start. If we can make ten miles a day, we can
reach it in; ten days or less. I think, all things considered, the
Boston plan's the wisest possible one."
She gazed into the fire a moment before replying. Then, stirring the
coals with a stick, said she:
"All right, boy; but I've got a suggestion to make."
"What is it?"
"We'll do better to follow the shore all the way round."
"And double the distance?"
"Yes, even so. You know, this shore is--or used to be--flat and sandy
most of the way. We can make better progress along beaches and levels
than we can through the forest. And there's the matter of shell-fish
to consider; and most important of all--"
"Well, what?"
"The sea will guide us. We can't get lost, you understand. With the
exception of cutting across the shank of Cape Cod, if the cape still
exists, we needn't ever get out of sight of salt water. And it will
bring us surely to the Hub."
"By Jove, you're right!" he cried enthusiastically. "The shore-line
has it! And to-morrow morning at sunup we begin preparations in
earnest. You'll weave the knapsacks while I go after still more meat.
Gad! Now that everything's decided, the quicker we're on our way the
better. I'm keen to see old Tremont Hill again, and get my hands on a
good stock of arms and ammunition once more!"
That night, long after Beatrice was sleeping soundly on her bed of
odorous grasses, Allan lay musing by the lean-to door, in the red glow
of the fire. He was thinking of the long and painful history of man,
of the great catastrophe and of the terrible responsibility that now
lay on his own shoulders.
As in a panorama, he saw the emergence of humanity from the animal
stage, the primitive savagery of his kind; then the beginnings of the
family, the nomadic epoch, the stone age, and the bronze age, and the
age of iron; the struggle up to agriculturalism, and communism, and
the beginnings of the village groups, with all their petty tribal
wars.
He saw the slow formation of small states, the era of slavery, then
feudalism and serfdom, and at last the birth of modern nations, the
development of machinery, and the vast nexus of exploitation known as
capitalism--the stage which at one blow had been utterly destroyed
just as it had been transmuting into collectivism.
And at thought of this Stern felt a pang of infinite regret.
"The whole evolutionary process wiped out," mused he, "just as it was
about to pass into its perfect form, toward which the history of all
the ages had conspired, for which oceans of blood had been spilled and
millions of men and women--billions!--lived and toiled and died!
"All gone, all vanished--it's all been in vain, the woe and travail of
the world since time began, unless she and I, just we two, preserve
the memory and the knowledge of the world's long, bitter fight, and
hand them down to strong descendants.
"Our problem is to bridge this gap, to keep the fires of science and
of truth alive, and, if that be possible, to start the world again on
a higher plane, where all the harsh and terrible phases will no longer
have to be lived through again. Our problem and our task! Were ever
two beings weighed by such a one?"
And as he pondered, in the firelight, his thoughts and dreams and
hopes all centered in the sleeping girl, there in the lean-to
sheltered by his watchful care. But what those dreams were, what his
visions of the future--who shall set forth or fully understand?