A HOUSEKEEPING
"More to-morrow," the Master-Girl had said, but to-morrow has a knack
of taking the bit in its teeth. When Dêh-Yān looked forth at the
weather very early next morning she knew that her path was blocked.
Snow had fallen in the night and was still falling from clouds which
were creeping down the wooded shoulders of the foot-hills after
powdering their bare polls with the first fall of autumn. The nine
white giants which never changed were hidden, and the horrid, bitter,
frozen river of ice which came winding down from the closed valley
which we call the Lap of the Gods, bearing dirt and stones upon its
cracked and dirty back, was hidden too.
The old chief sniffed more snow in the sky and bade strike the
wigwams, the summer homes of his people. 'Twas ho, for their winter
quarters, the range of southward-facing limestone caverns, a
ten-fingers' march down-stream. Certain braves were sent on ahead
to prospect and smoke out the hyænas which were pretty sure to have
usurped possession.
Preparations began at once and the Master-Girl must make herself
conspicuously useful and prominent in the flitting with whatever heart
she set to it. As she worked and packed she thought hard and keenly
as she had never thought before in her life. Hitherto her thoughts
had been solely for her tribe, and upon topics upon which she could
think aloud, but, now, and for the first time, she had thoughts for
someone outside the circle which had enclosed her since she could
first remember, and thoughts which must most carefully be kept to
herself; yes, so rigorously that she gabbled loudly, as girls who work
in company will when they fear the suspicion of having any private
thoughts at all.
Before mid-day the march was begun, and the Master-Girl, still chatting
loudly and thinking hard, must take her place on the trail, albeit with
a very backward-looking heart. How was her man getting on?--This cold
was bad for him, he had no bison-skin robe with him. A wife-hunter's
kit is light, and no doubt the weather had been warmer when he left
his people upon the other, the sunny side of the ranges. Another night
of this would finish him. She had given him her word, too, and the
Master-Girl was as truthful as girls went in those days, which means
she didn't lie from choice, and had a natural pride in doing the
thing which she had said she would do, even if it proved unexpectedly
difficult.
Thus it befell that without committing herself to any specific plan the
Master-Girl kept a definite end resolutely in view, even to the extent
of selecting for her special burdens on the march certain articles
which on another occasion she might have placed upon the back of one
and another of her pupils.
The braves formed line and scouted for game ahead of the old men in the
centre. The squaws and girls staggered slowly behind bowed beneath the
property of the tribe, the accumulated gettings of a summer's hunting.
There were also the household stuff and the babies.
So big were the flakes that progress was difficult from the first, and
presently became impossible, the smaller and more heavily-laden girls
could not be kept going. It was no use beating the stragglers. The old
chief called a halt. When young things begin to get behind, someone
will presently be missing. The braves, who had come upon bears' sign,
might follow it up; but a camp must be pitched for the night at any
rate, and the girls must drop their burdens and forth for firing before
the snow covered all. Down went ill-secured bundles of skins, sheaves
of assegais, wallets of jerked deer-meat, the miscellaneous lumber of a
tribe of hunters, and out went the stick collectors; 'twas then or not
at all.
A little girl near the edge of the covert saw the Master-Girl bending
beneath a faggot, saw her drop it and run, heard her shriek "_Bear!_"
There was a headlong race through swirling flakes over and under fallen
trunks and laden boughs: five minutes later the last of the runners was
safe in camp. The mother-squaws were scolding, counting, cackling, but
where was Dêh-Yān? The hunters must be recalled, but were far ahead
running a trail. By the time they were told of what had happened, and
the pack had been lifted, the snow had covered all marks, indeed a
good deal of property which had been thrown down in the confusion was
temporarily lost. For the rest of the short dark day the braves cast
forward up this gully and that glen, but it was upon their return
that a hound scratched up from under a drift a skin wallet stiff and
red. The finder of this grim relic brought it to the old chief in good
faith. The elder looked, sniffed, snarled, "Fool!--this is not blood,
but berry-juice!" whereat Gow-Loo, a somewhat jolter-headed young
savage, slunk away cursing the lost girl and wishing the bear a good
meal of her. Later he cursed her more bitterly still.
A hasty camp was pitched, ill-warmed, ill-lighted. The squaws huddled
amid their shuddering children, the men never laid down their arms
all night. A cannibal bear was the most terrible enemy known to the
tribe; a taste for human flesh once acquired, and the fear of man once
overcome, there was no knowing to what lengths such a beast might go.
'Twas opined to be no brown bear either, but a grizzly, or worse, a
cave monster, one of the sort that even the lions feared, a brute that
hung around the mammoth herd on its march, and occasionally cut off a
calf. Nobody slept, and there was but one topic of conversation, the
fate of Dêh-Yān.
One boy, indeed, the boy whom she had spanked the day before, stuck
to it that she had outrun him whilst making for camp, had passed him
running silently and running wide, but none believed him, for he was
not a truthful boy, nor did his tale obtain a moment's credence from
the fact that next morning certain assegais, axes and skins were
missing. Such losses are incidental to a panic when women and girls run
and cry out and drop things; they would be found, if and when the snow
melted. But the snow did not melt.
So, a day later, the Little Moons trailed down in close order to
their winter quarters, leaving their summer camp under a robe of new
snow. The fate of the First Governess added a delicious piquancy to
the nightly tremors of the children whom she had whipped. The women
regretted, grumbled and speculated without a misgiving, but a doubt
remained in the mind of a certain young brave, which doubt he later
imparted to a couple of his comrades, who turned it over silently in
their minds.
* * * * *
The man with the broken leg had made a poor night of it. He had
finished the jerked deer-meat and was ravenously hungry, sickeningly,
dreadfully hungry, and quite desperately cold. He had been telling
himself all night between the brief naps permitted him by the various
pains, cramps and gnawings which assailed him, that this girl could not
return, yet, all through, something within him kept the spark of hope
alight. A dark, thick, long-delayed morning, with eddying flakes as big
as beech-leaves, put that spark out. Such weather he knew would break
up the summer camp at once. The girl, who, under other circumstances,
might conceivably have paid him a single surreptitious visit, would be
tied to her burden and to the line of march; every hour would lengthen
the distance between them. No, it was all up ... he must die ... and
this dying was very slow work ... and abominably painful.... He wished
the braves of her tribe had found him.... He would have shown those
dirty Little Moons how a Sun-Disc man could stand fire. Ugh!--he was a
fool to have given the creature a second thought--a mere Little Moon
woman, useful perhaps when properly trained, but one of a backward
tribe that ate snake (think, snake!) and plumed their axes with owls'
feathers.
The contempt and hatred felt by a savage for a man of another totem and
habits is almost inconceivably bitter, nearly as fierce and irrational
as the loathing entertained by an Orangeman for a Papist, or a Wee Free
for a United.
So the broken-legged man sate and shuddered involuntarily, for he was
true to stock, and made no more moan about his condition and prospects
than does a trapped wolf. He had gone over his chances and appraised
and laid the last of them down--worthless! But, there was one which
he had given not a thought to--the ardent strength of a woman's first
passion.
"_Man, I am come._"
His dim eyes opened very slowly. 'Twas no dream, she was there, dark
bronze-red with exertion and exhaling warmth. She was burdened too;
he marvelled dully how she had got such a bundle down that rock-face.
A bison-robe was drawn under him, another laid over him: he was fed
again, and again he revived, but more slowly, for this time he was far
gone with cold and exhaustion. He had not spoken. She was gone. He
wondered. Then the mouth of the cave was darkened once more, and she
was back with something, a small sheaf of assegais, two axes, and a
dozen flake-knives. A second absence and a second return revealed her
in another character, for there lay her fire-sticks, and scrapers, yes,
and more skins, a housekeeping!
The man's eyes were clear by this time. "What will the Little Moons say
to this?" he asked, his brown cheek bulging with food.
The girl frowned and plucked at the hair of her kilt. "I am dead. A
bear got me at our first camp. Oh, I did it well! We were out for
wood; the snow was falling thickly; I laid a trail of my things up a
side glen, mittens, wallet, and an old kaross, then I cried _Bear!_
and sprinted back to camp, picked up these things (none of mine--no
scent for the pack--am I a child?) and doubled on our trail across the
open where tracks were many. If a hound opens on my line they will
whip him off for running heel!--But there was no padding me after the
first minute--the snow saw to that!" She grinned. "Neither spoor
nor scent!--And while they are casting forward on a false line, I am
here,--with you!" Her eyes shone, her voice, hard and hunter-like at
first, fell softly and almost shyly at the end.
Here again, as at their first interview, the man's intelligence
followed the girl's speech laggingly. Her people and his had been
separated for many generations by mutual distrust and mountains.
Intertribal trade did not exist, nor peaceful communication, but
internecine wife-stealing had kept alive a common glossary. When she
had passed to another subject he recalled something strange in her
story: "the pack," she had said, she had referred to "a hound" ("good
wolf" was her word--Pŭl-Yūn knew bad wolves only). He did not interrupt
his meal and her recital at the time with questions, but learnt later
that the Master-Girl's people, more backward than his in most respects,
had recently domesticated wolf-whelps.
The man touched the skins wistfully, he hardly understood as yet.
"But a bear would not eat bison-robe and hatchets. When you go back to
camp--" he began, feeling his way towards the incredible.
"I am not going back to camp," said Dêh-Yān, in a whisper. "This is my
camp."
The broken-legged man sucked in both lips and stared, but his eyes
kindled and smiled. "It seems that I am to get my wife after all," he
said softly.
The Master-Girl brought to the point--the point for which she had been
scheming and working for the past day and night, was already modern
woman enough to cover her mouth with her hand and shiver. After all
then, she would belong to this man, not he to her; her captive had
caught her, and thus soon!--Well, it was to be, she had no retreat open
to her, and--and--he was gloriously beautiful, and--and--so gentle!
She nodded assent, her hand still over her mouth. The young people's
eyes met. It meant marriage.
"It is well," said the man. "We will--live!"--his eyes shone--"for
a little while, perhaps. But, who knows? The Gods of your hills may
be kind to us. They have been kind to us so far, and have covered my
hiding-place and your tracks with the ptarmigan's feathers. Let us
praise them! I do not know their names. As for the God of my tribe, She
is hidden. She must wait. I will greet Her when next She shows me Her
face. Meanwhile, be our time together long or short, I will sing my
wedding-song."
He sate as erect as he was able, staying himself upon his palms and,
filling his chest, began to chant trumpet-lipped the hymn of his
people, the one reserved for such occasions. Its exact terms are,
perhaps fortunately, irrecoverable. It was even then of an immemorial
antiquity (nothing changes more slowly than the wedding custom of a
primitive people), this was an archaic survival, sanctioned by use
and wont and age; there were words and idioms in it which were wholly
foreign to the girl--imbedded fragments of the long-dead River-drift
men's gabble, frog-like guttural cluckings of tongue and the tonsil
mingled with newer and nobler speech, vocables truly human and musical.
The girl listened and panted and glowed, tingling to the tips of her
toes. This was life!--Life!--If, by any hap, she were tracked, caught
and dragged back to her tribe to suffer the frightful penalty reserved
for a girl who so far forgot herself as to "steal her man"--as their
speech had it (a phrase still used by our peasantry)--well, she would
grin it out to the very last. She had lived!
How shall we picture the youngsters? Were they handsome? According to
modern canons--no. High in the cheek, narrow and low in the brow, and
something heavy in the jaw, one fancies; strongly outlined sketches of
the race to come after. Comely enough though, in one another's eyes--oh
(a detail this, but worth preserving), stalwart exceedingly--he a good
seven feet in height by our measure, and the Master-Girl six feet three.
Suddenly in mid-chant the singer's eyes rolled inward, his lip was
drawn up from the teeth and he was sinking back. She caught and
cherished him to warmth and comfort. He was splendidly plucky, but weak.
So passed the first day of these young people's housekeeping. The girl
got some kindling in before the light went, and made fire, and watched
the night out beside her sleeping patient. The First Nurse. Before dawn
she recognised and prostrated herself to the crescent moon, her totem,
to whom she gave credit for her successful elopement, and to whose
mercy she committed her husband and herself.
The next day he was better. Dêh-Yān found herself able to leave her new
treasure. It was hard, but business is business, and the girl was as
practical as she was enthusiastic.
"It has stopped. I go to hunt--for us."
"The fall is too young," he objected. "Nothing will be afoot yet--no
spoor."
"You shall see," said the girl. "At least I can be getting more wood."
At the edge of the covert below the face Dêh-Yān, moving slowly and
with eyes all around her, saw a something tiny and black moving upon
the whiteness, the jetty tail-tip of an ermine in his winter pelage.
Pursing her lips she gave the shrill, small squeal of a leveret in
difficulties, and was presently looking into the face of the eager
little robber who had raced to her lure. Her throwing-stick broke his
back. Dêh-Yān was not fond of stoat, no one is, but meat is meat; she
cut out the gland and pouched him. Observing that his muzzle was
bloody, she worked his line to heel, and coming upon the hole he had
just left, dug down to a family party of hedgehogs laid up for their
winter sleep in beech leaves, each as fat as butter, and only one of
them sucked. Here, with economy, was meat for three days at a pinch.
She returned to the cave silently pleased with herself to meet the
silent approval of her man.
For the rest of the day she accumulated firewood. Her man should be
warm.
At night Pŭl-Yūn, as he bade her call him, groaned in sleep. By
daylight his wife would examine his hurt. The limb was sufficiently
wasted to show the overlapping of the bones. It was a simple fracture
of the fibula, and the muscle was enfeebled enough to tempt her to put
into practice the woman's lore learnt of the old chiefs head-wife.
"Hold to the rock--hard--I shall pull." He braced himself, she drew
with slow power and felt the limb give, then, venting pent breath,
relaxed and heard the broken ends of the bone cluck neighbourly as they
came to a renewed understanding.
"Now, lie upon your sound side, and the leg will keep its shape."
Her man took breath, for the operation had hurt him abominably, albeit
he had not let the least little moan. "O woman, what talk is this?--It
is a moon-and-a-half of a matter before broken leg-bone knits strongly;
how am I to keep it in one shape so long?--when I am sleeping, say?
Wah! You are very clever, but I shall break it again before morning."
The girl thought hard, sitting at the entrance of the cave and studying
the curve of the young moon just visible, afloat in the darkening blue,
her people's totem and her own, and her favourite object among the
heavenly host. "O Moon, Little Moon, teach me to medicine my man!" she
murmured. "Here are not the things which we of your people use in such
a case. This cave-floor is hard rock, I cannot drive little pegs to
keep the limb in place, nor while this frost holds can I dig clay to
make a mould to hold it firm. What shall I do for him, O Little Moon?"
And, behold it came, a Thought, an Expedient, bright and wonderfully
simple, and perfectly novel and practicable. Arising without a word,
she fetched six straight hazel wands, and, having wound the limb
carefully in a deer's hide, bound it within a cradle of splints. 'Twas
new practice, she had never seen nor heard of such work before, nor
had her man, but he let her have her way with him, for he was not only
very weak and weary, but the fellow saw that he had fallen into the
hands of a wise woman. We, too, are by way of recognising that here
was that rare and invaluable creature, a born inventor. Such are of
altogether incalculable value to the race. And, bethink you, how seldom
do they appear. Our own age, verily an age of miracles, is altogether
exceptional; never in the whole course of man's history has there
been such a time. Dimly one descries a period, the so-called Second
Dynasty, when the Egyptian brain, then young and new and plastic,
scintillated once in a century or so, admirable inventions, the wedge,
the lever, inclined plane, wheel-and-axle, but who invented anything
since until our own day?--Gunpowder and printing, the arch, and steel,
the mariner's compass, you'll remind me, and what else in the course
of six thousand years? Within the memory of living men if an Oxford
don wanted light in haste he had recourse to flint and steel and an
oil lamp. If he wished to reach London in haste a good horse was his
best servant. Rameses the Great would have done no otherwise in either
emergency. Most of earth's greatest men have harboured an inexplicable
prejudice against inventors, the Greek philosophers, for instance; even
the greatest generals in history would trust nothing that was new,
Alexander, Hannibal, Marlborough conquered with the ordinary weapons
of their day; Wellington distrusted the rocket and preferred Brown Bess
to the rifle, Napoleon (fortunately for Liberty and England), sneered
at inventions and had a nickname for inventors.
No, not only the practice of invention, but the very theory of
it is modern: the mere idea that there is anything that _can_ be
discovered (without mortal sin) is of yesterday. Your ancient inventor
investigated at the risk of his life, and published his invention in
terror. However obvious and useful it might chance to be, if it hit
a vested interest, or offended a priest, the man would be burned for
having commerced with the devil.
So with the lowest savages; not the filthiest of their foods, the most
objectionable of their customs, or the silliest and clumsiest of their
tools or weapons, but is bound up in some way with their religion, and
protected from innovation by its sanctions. Did not Mumbo Jumbo give
them the throwing-stick in the days before the Moon began to chase his
sister the Sun?--Who so presumptuous then as to suggest any improvement
upon the throwing-stick, the divinely-inspired throwing-stick? Let him
be skinned alive and eaten, says Mumbo Jumbo, and let the best and
tenderest of his chops be the portion of me, Rum Tum, the High Priest
of Mumbo Jumbo.
Thus hampered, man's intelligence moves slowly, and racial advance has
not been precipitate in Korea, say, or Spain. Among the Little Moons
the very possibility of inventing anything had been long forgotten.
From his childhood to his death each member of the tribe moved in a
web of routine, and did what he did at stated times because it was the
custom of the community. There was never any change, improvement was
impossible, for the corpus of the law which regulated his life and
bound him hand and foot, resided in the retentive memories of the
oldest and most pig-headed of his people, themselves brought up in a
similar environment and mentally incapable of breaking away from it in
any one smallest particular.
Hence this departure from practice in the matter of treating a broken
leg filled the man's bosom with wonder too deep for words. He found
himself encumbered with novel feelings, feelings for which he had no
suitable vocabulary. When a young brave went on a wife-hunt it was not
to be supposed that he should respect or reverence the dejected and
sulky captive whom he drove home before him. That in the course of
years their mutual relations might improve, that some regard for the
mother of his sons, some admiration even for her capacity and judgment
might arise was possible, but at the first her lot was a sorry one; she
stood for the proof of her captor's strength, courage and address; his
slave, no more.
But, Dêh-Yān stood for nothing of the kind. And what she did stand for
Pŭl-Yūn was at a loss to explain to himself. Having nothing to do, he
watched her about the cave and marvelled at her--also at himself and at
something which was going on inside him.
And in her, though he did not know it. The first passage of their eyes
had begun it, but much had happened since. She had touched him. She had
handled, lifted, supported him--given him exquisite pain (as she knew
by intuition), fed him, rubbed his cold stiff limbs back to warmth and
suppleness. Needless to say that this girl had never had occasion to
deal thus with a man-creature of her own age hitherto. What she had
done, she had done with a steady and purposeful hand, but now it was
over, she found herself shaking as if from cold. Yet she was not cold.
What was it?--Dêh-Yān could put no name to this novel experience, and
whilst she thought upon it, seated as far from her patient as the
limits of the cave permitted (for the revulsive fit was upon her) it
came over her with a horrid clearness how near she had been to handing
this delightful, troublesome, beautiful, helpless, bewilderingly
strange creature-comrade of hers over to the braves of her tribe. With
a momentary gleam of insight, she saw him as he might have been at the
stake. The sight wrung her heart. "Ooh!"--she groaned, and clapped a
hand over her mouth. Then, with a second gleam of prescience, she saw
herself in a like predicament--as yet might be her fate--and laughed!
"What are you laughing at?" her man was asking weakly.
"I was thinking that I must get to my hunting--we cannot live long
upon a stoat and a walletful of hedgehogs. Also I am thinking we must
have skins for leggings and mittens," smiled the girl, lying glibly to
conceal feelings of which she was half ashamed.
The frost had not given, and wild-life, hunger-nipped, was getting over
the first paralysing fear of making tracks. The big game, elephants
and bison, would have moved down-stream for the winter, and lion would
have followed them, and bear laid up to sleep off his fat. She knew as
much. The edge of the covert was printed thickly with slot of hare,
badger, fox and marten. She could see that chamois and stone-buck had
come down, but chamois and stone-buck were kittle cattle. There were
the broad pads of a big tom-lynx. The girl looked them over narrowly,
and knew them from wolf by the sign of hair upon the soles of the feet.
She dreaded lynx, but meat she must have. There among the tangle of
creeping pine (the _Pinus pumulus_ which makes such desperately hard
going) was the well-beaten run of capercaillie. Dêh-Yān followed it
into the scrub as far as a fallen spruce and set that log with twenty
springes of deer-sinew, then, fetching a circle, she beat the covert
with some small outcry back towards her nooses, and with results. The
master-cock, a great black-bearded tyrant, twice as big as his wives,
had got a hairy leg into trouble but had broken away, but not before
six youngsters and hens, hastening to their lord's assistance, had been
themselves ensnared.
"Good!" said the man when the huntress panted up the cliff face
carrying an almost throttling necklace of heavy birds, "we have food
for days. Give that covert a rest, Dêh-Yān. Also I have another reason.
Listen. I dreamed of a hare whilst you were away. Danger is near."
Without a word, weary as she was, the girl left the cave and ascended
the rock face, climbing slowly and very carefully, keeping to the bare
exposures lest she should leave incriminating sign, and ensconcing
herself in a juniper bush, spied far and long over the white expanse.
The dream had already come true. There, below her and more than four
miles away by our measurement, three tiny black specks moved slowly
across a snow-field between two dark belts of wood.
The girl watched with a hardening mouth, bending upon these crawling
black specks the wonderful, long-sighted eyes of a savage. Nearer they
came and nearer, she made out and named each. There was Low-Mah, there
was Pongu, and, worst of all, there was the detested Gow-Loo, a brave
whom she most particularly disliked, and with whose property she had
accordingly made free when she left the tribe.
Plainly the man had missed his axes and spears, had revisited the camp
where they had last been seen and had not found them. Pongu in like
manner had missed his bison-robes, and Low-Mah certain deer-skins,
properties which if cast away by girls in a panic-stricken rush would
have lain where they fell. Each had his dog with him, and having failed
in finding what they sought at the site of the snow-camp, were casting
up the glen with a certain air of grim determination which the watcher
did not like.
They had reasoned the matter out and had ceased to believe in that
bear, albeit, just what had induced an unmarried girl to break away
from her tribe and make a winter-hunting of her own was beyond them. It
was a matter which needed clearing up.
There must be no fire for her man that day, nor next day, nor for a
handful of days. Dêh-Yān spied from her bush, her patient from his
cave, and once heard the three hunters pass below him. A sprinkle of
fresh snow had covered the girl's tracks, or this story would never
have been written, but they had lit upon one of her springes and were
justly scandalised. Her motive in absconding was still a mystery, but
such conduct was outrageous. They would see the matter out, and were
curious in devising punishments for the truant.
But next day the girl beheld them in full flight down the glen before
an angry bear.
This was to exchange one danger for another. It might well be that the
dream portended this. Wolf the dwellers in the cave did not fear, for
no wolf could climb so steep a face, but wherever a man can go on rocks
a grizzly can go.
Dêh-Yān told her fears to her husband, who bade block the cave-mouth
with big stones and let a spear be always beside him. Poor defence, but
better than none; his arms were regaining flesh.