HARD-NEED MOTHER OF INVENTION
The days wore. Dêh-Yān went about her hunting with extreme precaution,
cultivated eyes all over her brown body, pricked her small hairy ears
perpetually, and moved through the most tangled coverts of trailing
pine as silently as a fox.
Acting upon her husband's suggestion, she laid a trail about the main
glen, and having completed the circuit, sate a day out ambushed beside
her tracks to wit if any creature, whether lynx, wolf, ghost-bear
or man should be following up her spoor. None showed, and she grew
uplifted of heart again, and as luck would have it, her hunting
prospered for once beyond reason.
A roebuck met her face to face in a pass between two rocks. The small
fellow was more than full-headed, he bore eight three-inch tines,
any one of which was death to a naked woman, and for a moment meant
battle; but, after a startled grunt, tossed his head and doubled in
panic. Dêh-Yān's throwing-stick broke his off-hind leg below the hough,
and she finished him after a fight in which the odds were still about
even, for the charges of a roebuck at bay, even when upon three legs,
are sudden and very difficult to avoid in deep snow. If he had once got
the girl down she would never have risen again; but the affair went
well, and Dêh-Yān, toiling mightily, won home with a load of meat and a
deep-piled, mossy skin for her man to sit upon.
She had restocked the cave with missiles: scores of stones, as heavy
as she could manage, were piled against the rock-sides of the dwelling
ready at need. This was a three days' labour, and it was whilst resting
after her last load and discussing the arrangement of their stores of
artillery, that the singular incident occurred which resulted in--but
I will not anticipate. The element of luck mingles in the best-laid
schemes of human intelligence, chances lie thick about us, and genius
consists in the recognition and utilisation of chance.
These strung-drills were common form to Pŭl-Yūn who had known them
all his life, and expected nothing more from them than they were made
to yield, and had long since disclosed of use. As for playing with
them, it had no more occurred to him to amuse himself by playing
tricks with a strung-drill than it occurs to your harvestman to use
his scythe handle as a vaulting-pole, or to your gardener to practise
throwing with his fork at a target, or to toss and catch his spade. The
implements of labour are invested with the seriousness due to maturity;
respect should be paid to them; if one gets larking something is sure
to be broken. They are tools, not toys.
But, to the girl a strung-drill was a novelty, a thing beautiful and
astonishing, an inexhaustible source of wonder and amusement, fraught
with all manner of latent possibilities.
To Pŭl-Yūn, a good conservative, it was unimprovable. The girl's
audacious innovation had already outpaced him. There was much that
was interesting, but nought that was sacred in the thing to her; she
had amazed her husband by one improvement, and was about to astonish
him yet more. Not that she was aware of what was coming, no; she was
simply uneasy as yet in the presence of a tricky piece of mechanism
with unexplored capacities of use and delight in it. She did not sit
down to invent, she simply started to play. And in this her sex and
temperament gave her a pull over her comrade. A man loses much of his
zeal for, if not the power of playing soon after sixteen--that is to
say for anything that is not a contest or a gamble. The so-called
sports of manhood, cricket, footer, rowing, hunting and what-not, are
usually very exhausting, and frequently outrageously expensive forms of
business, from which the primary idea and essential qualities of play
have disappeared. For it is of the very quiddity of play that it should
be gay, irresponsible, jolly in a word; and who will be hardy enough to
claim gaiety for croquet, or irresponsibility for bridge?
But most girls and many women can play at any time as naturally and
spontaneously as a child or a kitten. Dêh-Yān, fortunately for herself,
and for Pŭl-Yūn (and for you and me)--Dêh-Yān, I say, possessed this
happy faculty of amusing herself with whatever scrap of stone, stick
or string came within her reach. These strung-drills for example, she
was for ever stretching, releasing, twanging the things, studying their
actions and reactions, wondering at the difference in their notes,
and had come within a little of discovering the germ of the lyre,
when--well, what she did discover was of more importance than music to
mankind in the making.
Pŭl-Yūn had been for a month and more carving a tom-lynx out of a piece
of bone. It was a spirited performance, for the man, like many of his
race, was an artist. At this work Dêh-Yān, whose faculty lay in another
direction, could not assist him, and thus, whilst he bent over his
work, she was trifling with one of the strung-drills temporarily out
of use. She had been trimming the hide of the roebuck and was still
holding a sharp-edged shard of chert in her left hand, the hand which
also held the taut, bent wood. She was plucking and releasing the
string, listening to the twang of it, and by chance--by the veriest
chance--the shard pricked her palm. She transferred it to her right,
the string-hand, and plucked again. The loosened cord caught the stone,
which flew across the cave and struck Pŭl-Yūn above the ear, drawing
blood.
"Wah! what was that?" he asked without temper, and would be shown how
she had done the trick.
It was amazing. Dêh-Yān, whilst amusing herself, had stumbled upon a
property of the bent stick and cord which had escaped the dull eyes of
countless generations of routine-ridden, unimaginative men.
The new play diverted the girl, and her husband through her, albeit
neither as yet had caught a glimpse of its significance. Indeed, it
was three days before Dêh-Yān (Dêh-Yān again!) discovered that a stick
could be propelled endlong by the same agency.
They had hit upon the root-idea of the bow and arrow without knowing
it, and like a thousand other excellent ideas, this might have
perished without bearing fruit, but for the occasion which revealed
its importance, lifting the fortuitous combination of two sticks and a
string from the status of a toy to the dignity of a lethal weapon of
the first rank.
[The luck of inventions is very various. We know a crabbed octogenarian
who, in boyhood, invented a certain tool but could find no one to take
it up, nor had means to patent and push it himself. He broke his model
in chagrin, and sixty years later saw another man rediscover his idea
and win wealth and fame by his discovery.]
It will be understood that since the Ghost-Bear's attempted escalade
the youthful householders had never felt safe. But suspense and fear
did not break them down as a modern couple under similar conditions
might have been broken down. Early man was a hunting animal, hunted
in turn by beasts stronger but less cunning than himself. Among the
first recollections of our ancestors would be that thrilling cry of
_Wolf!_ and the scurry for shelter of tiny bare feet up rock-faces
too steep for the blunt claws of the secular enemy of childhood.
When the shadows lengthened the fear of _Bears_ grew urgent (as it
does to those cave-children's far-removed descendants to-day in
nurseries lit by electric lights), a fear sedulously instilled by the
careful cave-mother, for the shaggy urchin who "didn't care," and who
adventured one step too far beyond the circle of fire-light, never came
back. (And left no progeny!)
We are the lineal heirs of a race of creatures who had the very
best reasons for dreading the dark, hence you shall find among your
acquaintance tall men of fine physique and cultivated women whose
almost complete emancipation does not include the liberty of walking
around their own suburban tennis-courts alone after nightfall.
Pŭl-Yūn and Dêh-Yān had had their warning, thenceforth their fire was
never let out, nor at night did they both sleep at the same time.
Meanwhile the lynx was turning out well, there were no flaws in the
bone: it worked kindly, and the tedious process of scraping and
undercutting went on steadily.
"Give me but ten more days to get out of these splints and yet another
ten to supple the stiff limb, Dêh-Yān, and then--let thy Ghost-Bear
lover come if he will, I will meet him at the cave-sill and stop him
there."
Then he would expatiate after the manner of men upon the extraordinary
virtues of his tribal totem, the Sun God. "Oh, a good totem, a great
totem, the best of totems!"
"Yet not so good as mine," riposted the woman with conviction, "thou
shalt see my totem, the Little Moon, will have the better of it yet."
She knew not what she meant, but for the fun of opposition she argued
pertinaciously and had the last word whilst testing the capacities of
her new toy at a mark. Yes, it would send a big skewer the whole length
of their dwelling and make it stick firmly into anything softish.
Moreover, and this was a thing to take note of, you must shoot from
the level of the eye and aim point-blank--no throwing high as with
an assegai. She was learning more than she knew. She played at this
childish game at intervals for some days, gradually lengthening the
skewers, and attaining a pretty creditable proficiency, watched with
a good-humoured tolerance by her husband, and might, in the end, have
played her game out and wearied of her toy without getting to the
bottom of it, had not the Thing happened that I am about to tell.
There came a bitter night with the wind edging in and out of the
cave-mouth and compelling the youngsters to shift the fire and the
bed-skins to the far end if they would keep a light or sleep at all.
Pŭl-Yūn had taken his spell off, shuddering and muttering in sleep, and
Dêh-Yān, shivering in her bison robe, had kept watch. The last silver
shard of a waning moon hung low over the forest spires south-eastward,
the cave-woman made silent obeisance to the god of her private
orisons, bending low and striking the rock-floor with her forehead.
"Little Moon!--be good to my man--and to me!" She grovelled prone,
and as she did so something snapped beneath her; it was one of her
assegais. She raised it and examined it in the dim light, good enough
for a woman of a race which still saw well enough in the dark. The
mischief was done, the thin tapering shaft had parted at a knot-hole, a
flaw in the wood selected by its maker, the loutish Gow-Loo. The keen,
leaf-shaped chert head of the weapon had less than an arm's-length of
shaft behind it, and until remounted was useless as a throwing-spear.
Pŭl-Yūn sate up at the sound, asked and was told its cause, and scolded
his wife for her carelessness. She excused herself, and even as they
spoke, querulously as sleepy folk may be excused for speaking who are
miserably cold and are talking down a blusterous wind (and perhaps too
loudly for a hunted folk) the Terror was upon them!
There, upon the sill-platform beyond the cave's mouth, and disregarding
the dull ash of a dying fire let down because the night was over, stood
the Great Ghost-Bear, huge and hairy, terrible, black against the
first pallor of the dawn, obliterating Dêh-Yān's totem, nullifying and
intercepting the answer to her prayer!
Escape was none; nor was resistance reasonably possible. The enemy was
already within their defences; had made good his footing; yet Pŭl-Yūn
without a word of reproach to the woman whose ear had for once been at
fault, gripped his axe and sate square with clenched teeth and narrowed
nostrils. No moan escaped him, his time had come, he would show his
squaw how a Sun-Disc brave could take his death.
The girl's heart seemed to swell upwards until it filled her body, and
thrust against her throat. She did not cower, or shriek, or cover her
eyes, but crouched for a spring--if such might be possible; she would
give away no fraction of a chance. Her man was doomed; nothing that
she could do, nothing that ten men in her place could have done, would
save him. But, life is very, very sweet--_What of herself?_ Could she,
or could she not, slip past and escape? Yes, it was possible. She was
wearing kilt and kaross, she slipped out of both and stood nude and
slippery, agile as an eel. Her garments she proposed to toss in the
bear's face, then to throw her bison-robe over his head and to dart
past him whilst momentarily entangled.
"_And leave your man--the loveliest, kindest, cleverest, wisest, best
creature that ever lived--to this Ghost of the silly Saw-Kimo to be
chawed and mumbled alive? To have the bone that is almost knit cracked
and sucked.... Whilst_ YOU _run away?_"
Something within the woman, not recognisably herself, put this very
pertinent question. Who was the speaker?--Unquestionably it was
the Totem, the Little Moon of her prayers, so she persisted to her
dying day. The innate womanhood of the Master-Girl, that passionate
self-devotion, self-immolation, of which the sex in every land and
under every manner of garb and rite has proved itself capable,[3] arose
and strove. No, she would not go forth safe, alone and humbled; she
would die with her man, _for_ her man, indeed, for this matter should
be taken fighting.
Tossing her clothing behind her, she stooped and groped right and left,
snatching for spears, axes, anything in the darkness.
When she looked again the huge beast had shuffled sidelong past the
hot ashes, and was standing over her husband. Pŭl-Yūn had thrown back
the hand that held the axe for one last stroke. The bear, just beyond
reach, certain of his meal, and perhaps not particularly hungry, or it
may be, disposed, as are all beasts of prey, to play with his victim,
snarled joyously and half-arose upon his broad haunches, hanging a vast
bestial head over the seated man, its pestiferous darkness imperfectly
lit by the green glitter of an eye.
Exactly over the brute's head, and between his round ears, Dêh-Yān
caught sight of that pale, thin sickle of moon, her moon, her people's
god and hers! Her right hand held the broken assegai, her left the
longest strung-drill (she had snatched it from the floor in mistake for
a spear). There was no time to seek another weapon; the spears, as she
now remembered, lay between Pŭl-Yūn and the Ghost-Bear. If there was to
be fighting she must fight with this toy, naught else.
With an almost bursting heart she fitted the stump of that broken
assegai to the string--I have said it had parted at a knot, the
knot-hole provided a natural and quite effective nock. The girl drew
suddenly, hugely, and with the strength of her despair until the
chert-head lay upon her thumb; she aimed at that green eye and loosed
with a cry, "_Moon, help me!_" The cave hummed to the twang of the
cord, the green light of the eye went out. There was a reverberating,
snarling roar, the enemy, instead of charging, backed, shaking his
head in a horrid agony, and as he reached the sill, having lost his
marks, reared and clawing his mask with both paws, fell over the edge
backwards--down--and down!
Open-mouthed, incredulous, the youngsters listened for the rasp of
claws and the sounds of re-ascent. Instead, after a perceptible
interval, came a dull, pounding crash. He had gone to the bottom, taken
the full fall, a hundred feet or more. There was moaning, fainter,
and more faint. Silence came before daylight showed them the extent of
their deliverance and their abounding, enormous wealth.
There at the foot of the cliff lay the dead monster, huddled and broken
and burst! Incredible--but true.
Pŭl-Yūn had held Dêh-Yān in his arms for a minute which seemed an hour;
neither had spoken whilst the Ghost-Bear's dying was going on, and
those gruesome sounds came up from below. For once Dêh-Yān's nerve had
failed. She had clung to her husband, dumbly shuddering, conscious of
what she still possessed and had so nearly, nearly lost. Of her own
escape she was thinking not at all, nor of her amazing feat--at present.
Pŭl-Yūn was the first to pull himself together. As a conservative he
felt that the hour might not pass without the ritual proper to the
occasion, the _hallalai_ sanctioned by custom and use. So, he sang the
Bear Song, an ancient chanty which had come down from the youth of his
tribe; full of absurd boasting, insults to the slain, and gastronomic
anticipations; but, even whilst trolling it out upon the frosty air
and watching his hot breath smoke in the red dawn, he felt less than
himself, and knew well who, by right, should have been celebrating the
victory. (Only, who ever heard of a squaw singing the Bear Song?) He
had not borne himself ill, as he knew; but, had not another interposed,
this ogre had been cracking his marrow-bones by this time.
Meanwhile, Dêh-Yān, being intensely practical, was hardly giving her
husband's music the applause and critical attention which he may have
thought due to it. Hungry and cold as she was she must set to work ere
the great unwieldy carcass should have stiffened, and, labouring as she
had never laboured in her life, heaved, thrust, wrenched and tugged
until the hide came away. During this moenadic spasm of toil I am
bound to confess that my heroine worked stark naked despite the cold,
and neither ate nor drank save for the morsels of raw bear-meat with
which she filled a distended cheek at intervals. For Dêh-Yān, though a
savage, was no fool. She knew, none better, that the smell of so much
spilt blood would bring upon the scene eagle and lammergeier, buzzard
and raven, and what she feared more, wolverene, lynx, wolf, and she
knew not what beside, possibly Man! Whilst it lay there it was a menace
to herself and to her husband; but, promptly and properly dealt with,
it was warmth and food and safety for the remainder of the winter.
The hide when off proved an unhandy burden, made still more massive by
its accumulations of frozen blood and snow. Two whole deer-skins went
in thongs before a cord was knotted by which she, Pŭl-Yūn assisting,
drew the load up the cliff to the cave. Nor was the girl even then
content with her day's work, but ere the short winter's day closed, had
lit fires on three sides of the carcass and begun to strip the bones.
[Illustration: SALVING THE GHOST-BEAR'S SKIN]
The salving of that bear's-meat was a four-days' poem. By the fifth
evening the youngsters were victualled for the rest of the winter, and
Dêh-Yān had not one thumb-nail's breadth of cutting-edge upon the last
of her chert-flakes. She was also dead beat.
The whole of the sixth day and the following night the girl slept the
deep, dreamless sleep of a healthy organism wearied out, watched by
Pŭl-Yūn, who had seen to it that she had gorged herself to repletion
before lying down, and who had himself rubbed her swollen joints
vigorously with fat, and who watched over her whilst she slept beneath
the vast hairy spoil of her twice-dead lover.
"Saw-Kimo," jeered the young brave during the long chilly
night-watches, "this is the third time thou hast bid for my woman. She
was not for thee, nor thy Little Moons. She is mine! mine!--I tell
thee!--Was there ever such a woman?--never!--I have seen two bears die
in my time on the other side of the ranges, but they were Brown Bears,
and young bears at that, yet they died within a ring of as many braves
as they (or thou) had claws upon their feet. It took the whole strength
of a war-party to bring either of them to bay and keep them there. We
brought two braves who did not go home with us. One we buried to each
bear. And, look thou at thy business, O Saw-Kimo (if that be thy name)
and whimper for shame, thou who died at one stroke, and that from the
hand of a squaw--of a girl! a stroke in the eye of thee; in the brain
of thee. Such a stroke! And thou a Cave Grizzly! Was there ever such a
woman?"
So Pŭl-Yūn; for the glory of the feat had got upon his imagination.
The more he sang of it, the less he understood it. You must remember
that his knowledge of how the thing had been done was all by hearsay.
The bolt had been discharged from behind him, and owing to the darkness
of the cave, he had not watched it home; Dêh-Yān's description of the
wound, and of the chert assegai-head still enfixed in the eye-socket,
was unsatisfying. He must see for himself, some day, soon--yes, at
once--the great stripped skull which lay a hundred feet beneath him.
And whilst he pondered a certain familiar sound reached his ears from
the foot of the cliff; it was the cracking of a bone. Some furry
scavenger of the forest had been drawn to the carcass and would not be
long without competitors. The man must risk something. He cast loose
his bandages and splints, crawled to the sill and hurled stone after
stone upon the marauder. Nor did his leg suffer. The bone had knit.
The scraping, greasing and suppling of that immense hide was a
laborious business, but a labour of love for Dêh-Yān, whose heart was
both big and high within her. There was no tribal record, no legend
even, of any woman having killed a bear in single fight. Yet she held
her tongue, and silently grew in moral stature.
Pŭl-Yūn might sing about his wife's prowess, but he was not to be
convinced of the superiority, or even of the use, of her new weapon.
He was a spearman. As a spearman, an expert with the assegai, he had
won the deputy-chieftainship, the war-chieftainship, of his tribe.
What was possible with the spear he could do; but this fiddling with
a strung-drill was too novel, too womanish, too uncertain as yet. He
would have none of it.
The girl, already convinced and sanguine, wisely desisted from
argument. By help of the cord the massive skull was hauled up from
below to tell its tale to deaf ears, to be admired, turned over, its
death-wound marvelled at and its lesson ignored. The man set himself
to dig out the enormous white fangs. He also detached those twenty
black curving claws, arranged, studied and pored over them, watched by
Dêh-Yān. She knew by intuition what was passing in his mind and waited.
This was the critical, the dangerous point of their married life.
Who was to wear those teeth? those claws?
He put the question from him (she had not raised it), it would wait;
the trophies were not ready for wearing as yet, they must be drilled
before they could be strung. Dêh-Yān saw that her husband needed
something but was too sulky to ask, and by a real intuition fetched
him the lengths of elder which he required for this new drilling and
left him to his work, setting herself to study the properties of her
new weapon. There was nothing to take her afield, stacks of frozen
bear-meat blocked the cave, she could experiment at her leisure, and
had conquered some of the initial difficulties before her man, glumly
busy up above, knew anything about them.
Thus, the girl found that assegai-heads were too heavy, and
assegai-shafts too stout for successful shooting; terrible at
point-blank range, at anything over twenty strides they wobbled and
swerved and fell short, and Dêh-Yān, the practical, argued, and argued
rightly, that unless her shafts flew farther and straighter and bit
deeper than a thrown assegai, she had better keep to the orthodox
weapon. She needed chert, or flint, to make for her arrows smaller and
lighter heads: but neither chert nor flint was to be found in that
valley, nor was it possible for her to adventure the week's journey
down-stream to the chalk cliff which was the only source known to
her of the tribe's cutting-tools. But, womanlike, she remembered her
needles, and in default of chert fell to experimenting with bone tips
attached to lighter shafts by rosin and sinew, the hafting method of
the Little Moons. She succeeded from the first attempt, settling after
many trials to a shaft as long as her own arm: made herself ten upon
this pattern and practised sedulously. Skill came apace, far more
quickly to this tense-sinewed one-idead savage woman than it would
come to a modern, and at the end of three days' constant archery she
found herself able to put all ten arrows into a small circle marked out
upon a snow-bank at full assegai-range. Beyond this range her missiles
disappointed her, they still wobbled. As a practical spear-thrower she
knew what was lacking--there was no spin upon them. How could this be
remedied?--This question lay down with her at night and arose with her
in the morning. She besought her totem for wisdom, but got never a
sign. A sacrifice was needed; she vowed to the Moon the first-fruits
of her bow, and greatly daring, adventured out into the wintry
forest armed with her new weapon and nought else. What would the
God send (the moon is a man to the savage), fur or feather? A little
hazel-grouse trotted out into the glade; the shot was a difficult one,
impossible with spear or throwing-stick, owing to overhanging boughs,
but the girl prayed as she drew and brought it off. Her heart filled
with gratitude, her totem was still watching over her for good. This
should be a whole-burnt offering; a few feathers alone would she retain
as her own share of the spoils, the first that ever fell to her bow
(the Ghost-Bear always excepted).
Whilst walking caveward, these curving flight-feathers in hand,
something in their curvature, their shapes, aroused her superstition.
"_Moon-feather_," she whispered, and attached one of them to one of her
shafts. The feather was narrow, stiff and strongly curved, it refused
to lie along the shaft, but must needs curl somewhat around it when
bound thereto by small sinews at either end. Dêh-Yān's first shot with
it at her snow-bank target flooded her bosom with adoring gratitude,
for here was the thing she had sought and prayed for, the shaft spun
as it flew! Again and again she essayed shots at increasing ranges
and still the wonder persisted, at fifty, yes, and at sixty paces
the shaft flew straight, swerving neither to left nor right. All her
shafts were presently feathered, and, since the principle eluded her,
and some behaved better than others, she must practise daily, watch,
consider and think, and within a while came to a practical conclusion,
to closely imitate the feathering of those which span the best.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 3: A capacity independent of religious sanctions and
of future hopes. What celestial reward did Eucharis expect, the
freed-woman of "light life," whose constancy on behalf of her friend,
the falsely-accused Octavia, exhausted the infernal ingenuities of
Nero?]