The commonest dream of my early childhood was something like this: It
seemed that I was very small and that I lay curled up in a sort of nest
of twigs and boughs. Sometimes I was lying on my back. In this position
it seemed that I spent many hours, watching the play of sunlight on the
foliage and the stirring of the leaves by the wind. Often the nest
itself moved back and forth when the wind was strong.
But always, while so lying in the nest, I was mastered as of tremendous
space beneath me. I never saw it, I never peered over the edge of the
nest to see; but I _knew_ and feared that space that lurked just
beneath me and that ever threatened me like a maw of some all-devouring
monster.
This dream, in which I was quiescent and which was more like a
condition than an experience of action, I dreamed very often in my
early childhood. But suddenly, there would rush into the very midst of
it strange forms and ferocious happenings, the thunder and crashing of
storm, or unfamiliar landscapes such as in my wake-a-day life I had
never seen. The result was confusion and nightmare. I could comprehend
nothing of it. There was no logic of sequence.
You see, I did not dream consecutively. One moment I was a wee babe of
the Younger World lying in my tree nest; the next moment I was a grown
man of the Younger World locked in combat with the hideous Red-Eye; and
the next moment I was creeping carefully down to the water-hole in the
heat of the day. Events, years apart in their occurrence in the Younger
World, occurred with me within the space of several minutes, or
seconds.
It was all a jumble, but this jumble I shall not inflict upon you. It
was not until I was a young man and had dreamed many thousand times,
that everything straightened out and became clear and plain. Then it
was that I got the clew of time, and was able to piece together events
and actions in their proper order. Thus was I able to reconstruct the
vanished Younger World as it was at the time I lived in it—or at the
time my other-self lived in it. The distinction does not matter; for I,
too, the modern man, have gone back and lived that early life in the
company of my other-self.
For your convenience, since this is to be no sociological screed, I
shall frame together the different events into a comprehensive story.
For there is a certain thread of continuity and happening that runs
through all the dreams. There is my friendship with Lop-Ear, for
instance. Also, there is the enmity of Red-Eye, and the love of the
Swift One. Taking it all in all, a fairly coherent and interesting
story I am sure you will agree.
I do not remember much of my mother. Possibly the earliest recollection
I have of her—and certainly the sharpest—is the following: It seemed I
was lying on the ground. I was somewhat older than during the nest
days, but still helpless. I rolled about in the dry leaves, playing
with them and making crooning, rasping noises in my throat. The sun
shone warmly and I was happy, and comfortable. I was in a little open
space. Around me, on all sides, were bushes and fern-like growths, and
overhead and all about were the trunks and branches of forest trees.
Suddenly I heard a sound. I sat upright and listened. I made no
movement. The little noises died down in my throat, and I sat as one
petrified. The sound drew closer. It was like the grunt of a pig. Then
I began to hear the sounds caused by the moving of a body through the
brush. Next I saw the ferns agitated by the passage of the body. Then
the ferns parted, and I saw gleaming eyes, a long snout, and white
tusks.
It was a wild boar. He peered at me curiously. He grunted once or twice
and shifted his weight from one foreleg to the other, at the same time
moving his head from side to side and swaying the ferns. Still I sat as
one petrified, my eyes unblinking as I stared at him, fear eating at my
heart.
It seemed that this movelessness and silence on my part was what was
expected of me. I was not to cry out in the face of fear. It was a
dictate of instinct. And so I sat there and waited for I knew not what.
The boar thrust the ferns aside and stepped into the open. The
curiosity went out of his eyes, and they gleamed cruelly. He tossed his
head at me threateningly and advanced a step. This he did again, and
yet again.
Then I screamed...or shrieked—I cannot describe it, but it was a shrill
and terrible cry. And it seems that it, too, at this stage of the
proceedings, was the thing expected of me. From not far away came an
answering cry. My sounds seemed momentarily to disconcert the boar, and
while he halted and shifted his weight with indecision, an apparition
burst upon us.
She was like a large orangutan, my mother, or like a chimpanzee, and
yet, in sharp and definite ways, quite different. She was heavier of
build than they, and had less hair. Her arms were not so long, and her
legs were stouter. She wore no clothes—only her natural hair. And I can
tell you she was a fury when she was excited.
And like a fury she dashed upon the scene. She was gritting her teeth,
making frightful grimaces, snarling, uttering sharp and continuous
cries that sounded like “kh-ah! kh-ah!” So sudden and formidable was
her appearance that the boar involuntarily bunched himself together on
the defensive and bristled as she swerved toward him. Then she swerved
toward me. She had quite taken the breath out of him. I knew just what
to do in that moment of time she had gained. I leaped to meet her,
catching her about the waist and holding on hand and foot—yes, by my
feet; I could hold on by them as readily as by my hands. I could feel
in my tense grip the pull of the hair as her skin and her muscles moved
beneath with her efforts.
As I say, I leaped to meet her, and on the instant she leaped straight
up into the air, catching an overhanging branch with her hands. The
next instant, with clashing tusks, the boar drove past underneath. He
had recovered from his surprise and sprung forward, emitting a squeal
that was almost a trumpeting. At any rate it was a call, for it was
followed by the rushing of bodies through the ferns and brush from all
directions.
From every side wild hogs dashed into the open space—a score of them.
But my mother swung over the top of a thick limb, a dozen feet from the
ground, and, still holding on to her, we perched there in safety. She
was very excited. She chattered and screamed, and scolded down at the
bristling, tooth-gnashing circle that had gathered beneath. I, too,
trembling, peered down at the angry beasts and did my best to imitate
my mother’s cries.
From the distance came similar cries, only pitched deeper, into a sort
of roaring bass. These grew momentarily louder, and soon I saw him
approaching, my father—at least, by all the evidence of the times, I am
driven to conclude that he was my father.
He was not an extremely prepossessing father, as fathers go. He seemed
half man, and half ape, and yet not ape, and not yet man. I fail to
describe him. There is nothing like him to-day on the earth, under the
earth, nor in the earth. He was a large man in his day, and he must
have weighed all of a hundred and thirty pounds. His face was broad and
flat, and the eyebrows over-hung the eyes. The eyes themselves were
small, deep-set, and close together. He had practically no nose at all.
It was squat and broad, apparently without any bridge, while the
nostrils were like two holes in the face, opening outward instead of
down.
The forehead slanted back from the eyes, and the hair began right at
the eyes and ran up over the head. The head itself was preposterously
small and was supported on an equally preposterous, thick, short neck.
There was an elemental economy about his body—as was there about all
our bodies. The chest was deep, it is true, cavernously deep; but there
were no full-swelling muscles, no wide-spreading shoulders, no
clean-limbed straightness, no generous symmetry of outline. It
represented strength, that body of my father’s, strength without
beauty; ferocious, primordial strength, made to clutch and gripe and
rend and destroy.
His hips were thin; and the legs, lean and hairy, were crooked and
stringy-muscled. In fact, my father’s legs were more like arms. They
were twisted and gnarly, and with scarcely the semblance of the full
meaty calf such as graces your leg and mine. I remember he could not
walk on the flat of his foot. This was because it was a prehensile
foot, more like a hand than a foot. The great toe, instead of being in
line with the other toes, opposed them, like a thumb, and its
opposition to the other toes was what enabled him to get a grip with
his foot. This was why he could not walk on the flat of his foot.
But his appearance was no more unusual than the manner of his coming,
there to my mother and me as we perched above the angry wild pigs. He
came through the trees, leaping from limb to limb and from tree to
tree; and he came swiftly. I can see him now, in my wake-a-day life, as
I write this, swinging along through the trees, a four-handed, hairy
creature, howling with rage, pausing now and again to beat his chest
with his clenched fist, leaping ten-and-fifteen-foot gaps, catching a
branch with one hand and swinging on across another gap to catch with
his other hand and go on, never hesitating, never at a loss as to how
to proceed on his arboreal way.
And as I watched him I felt in my own being, in my very muscles
themselves, the surge and thrill of desire to go leaping from bough to
bough; and I felt also the guarantee of the latent power in that being
and in those muscles of mine. And why not? Little boys watch their
fathers swing axes and fell trees, and feel in themselves that some day
they, too, will swing axes and fell trees. And so with me. The life
that was in me was constituted to do what my father did, and it
whispered to me secretly and ambitiously of aerial paths and forest
flights.
At last my father joined us. He was extremely angry. I remember the
out-thrust of his protruding underlip as he glared down at the wild
pigs. He snarled something like a dog, and I remember that his
eye-teeth were large, like fangs, and that they impressed me
tremendously.
His conduct served only the more to infuriate the pigs. He broke off
twigs and small branches and flung them down upon our enemies. He even
hung by one hand, tantalizingly just beyond reach, and mocked them as
they gnashed their tusks with impotent rage. Not content with this, he
broke off a stout branch, and, holding on with one hand and foot,
jabbed the infuriated beasts in the sides and whacked them across their
noses. Needless to state, my mother and I enjoyed the sport.
But one tires of all good things, and in the end, my father, chuckling
maliciously the while, led the way across the trees. Now it was that my
ambitions ebbed away, and I became timid, holding tightly to my mother
as she climbed and swung through space. I remember when the branch
broke with her weight. She had made a wide leap, and with the snap of
the wood I was overwhelmed with the sickening consciousness of falling
through space, the pair of us. The forest and the sunshine on the
rustling leaves vanished from my eyes. I had a fading glimpse of my
father abruptly arresting his progress to look, and then all was
blackness.
The next moment I was awake, in my sheeted bed, sweating, trembling,
nauseated. The window was up, and a cool air was blowing through the
room. The night-lamp was burning calmly. And because of this I take it
that the wild pigs did not get us, that we never fetched bottom; else I
should not be here now, a thousand centuries after, to remember the
event.
And now put yourself in my place for a moment. Walk with me a bit in my
tender childhood, bed with me a night and imagine yourself dreaming
such incomprehensible horrors. Remember I was an inexperienced child. I
had never seen a wild boar in my life. For that matter I had never seen
a domesticated pig. The nearest approach to one that I had seen was
breakfast bacon sizzling in its fat. And yet here, real as life, wild
boars dashed through my dreams, and I, with fantastic parents, swung
through the lofty tree-spaces.
Do you wonder that I was frightened and oppressed by my
nightmare-ridden nights? I was accursed. And, worst of all, I was
afraid to tell. I do not know why, except that I had a feeling of
guilt, though I knew no better of what I was guilty. So it was, through
long years, that I suffered in silence, until I came to man’s estate
and learned the why and wherefore of my dreams.