There is one puzzling thing about these prehistoric memories of mine.
It is the vagueness of the time element. I do not always know the order
of events;—or can I tell, between some events, whether one, two, or
four or five years have elapsed. I can only roughly tell the passage of
time by judging the changes in the appearance and pursuits of my
fellows.
Also, I can apply the logic of events to the various happenings. For
instance, there is no doubt whatever that my mother and I were treed by
the wild pigs and fled and fell in the days before I made the
acquaintance of Lop-Ear, who became what I may call my boyhood chum.
And it is just as conclusive that between these two periods I must have
left my mother.
I have no memory of my father than the one I have given. Never, in the
years that followed, did he reappear. And from my knowledge of the
times, the only explanation possible lies in that he perished shortly
after the adventure with the wild pigs. That it must have been an
untimely end, there is no discussion. He was in full vigor, and only
sudden and violent death could have taken him off. But I know not the
manner of his going—whether he was drowned in the river, or was
swallowed by a snake, or went into the stomach of old Saber-Tooth, the
tiger, is beyond my knowledge.
For know that I remember only the things I saw myself, with my own
eyes, in those prehistoric days. If my mother knew my father’s end, she
never told me. For that matter I doubt if she had a vocabulary adequate
to convey such information. Perhaps, all told, the Folk in that day had
a vocabulary of thirty or forty sounds.
I call them _sounds_, rather than _words_, because sounds they were
primarily. They had no fixed values, to be altered by adjectives and
adverbs. These latter were tools of speech not yet invented. Instead of
qualifying nouns or verbs by the use of adjectives and adverbs, we
qualified sounds by intonation, by changes in quantity and pitch, by
retarding and by accelerating. The length of time employed in the
utterance of a particular sound shaded its meaning.
We had no conjugation. One judged the tense by the context. We talked
only concrete things because we thought only concrete things. Also, we
depended largely on pantomime. The simplest abstraction was practically
beyond our thinking; and when one did happen to think one, he was hard
put to communicate it to his fellows. There were no sounds for it. He
was pressing beyond the limits of his vocabulary. If he invented sounds
for it, his fellows did not understand the sounds. Then it was that he
fell back on pantomime, illustrating the thought wherever possible and
at the same time repeating the new sound over and over again.
Thus language grew. By the few sounds we possessed we were enabled to
think a short distance beyond those sounds; then came the need for new
sounds wherewith to express the new thought. Sometimes, however, we
thought too long a distance in advance of our sounds, managed to
achieve abstractions (dim ones I grant), which we failed utterly to
make known to other folk. After all, language did not grow fast in that
day.
Oh, believe me, we were amazingly simple. But we did know a lot that is
not known to-day. We could twitch our ears, prick them up and flatten
them down at will. And we could scratch between our shoulders with
ease. We could throw stones with our feet. I have done it many a time.
And for that matter, I could keep my knees straight, bend forward from
the hips, and touch, not the tips of my fingers, but the points of my
elbows, to the ground. And as for bird-nesting—well, I only wish the
twentieth-century boy could see us. But we made no collections of eggs.
We ate them.
I remember—but I out-run my story. First let me tell of Lop-Ear and our
friendship. Very early in my life, I separated from my mother. Possibly
this was because, after the death of my father, she took to herself a
second husband. I have few recollections of him, and they are not of
the best. He was a light fellow. There was no solidity to him. He was
too voluble. His infernal chattering worries me even now as I think of
it. His mind was too inconsequential to permit him to possess purpose.
Monkeys in their cages always remind me of him. He was monkeyish. That
is the best description I can give of him.
He hated me from the first. And I quickly learned to be afraid of him
and his malicious pranks. Whenever he came in sight I crept close to my
mother and clung to her. But I was growing older all the time, and it
was inevitable that I should from time to time stray from her, and
stray farther and farther. And these were the opportunities that the
Chatterer waited for. (I may as well explain that we bore no names in
those days; were not known by any name. For the sake of convenience I
have myself given names to the various Folk I was more closely in
contact with, and the “Chatterer” is the most fitting description I can
find for that precious stepfather of mine. As for me, I have named
myself “Big-Tooth.” My eye-teeth were pronouncedly large.)
But to return to the Chatterer. He persistently terrorized me. He was
always pinching me and cuffing me, and on occasion he was not above
biting me. Often my mother interfered, and the way she made his fur fly
was a joy to see. But the result of all this was a beautiful and
unending family quarrel, in which I was the bone of contention.
No, my home-life was not happy. I smile to myself as I write the
phrase. Home-life! Home! I had no home in the modern sense of the term.
My home was an association, not a habitation. I lived in my mother’s
care, not in a house. And my mother lived anywhere, so long as when
night came she was above the ground.
My mother was old-fashioned. She still clung to her trees. It is true,
the more progressive members of our horde lived in the caves above the
river. But my mother was suspicious and unprogressive. The trees were
good enough for her. Of course, we had one particular tree in which we
usually roosted, though we often roosted in other trees when nightfall
caught us. In a convenient fork was a sort of rude platform of twigs
and branches and creeping things. It was more like a huge bird-nest
than anything else, though it was a thousand times cruder in the
weaving than any bird-nest. But it had one feature that I have never
seen attached to any bird-nest, namely, a roof.
Oh, not a roof such as modern man makes! Nor a roof such as is made by
the lowest aborigines of to-day. It was infinitely more clumsy than the
clumsiest handiwork of man—of man as we know him. It was put together
in a casual, helter-skelter sort of way. Above the fork of the tree
whereon we rested was a pile of dead branches and brush. Four or five
adjacent forks held what I may term the various ridge-poles. These were
merely stout sticks an inch or so in diameter. On them rested the brush
and branches. These seemed to have been tossed on almost aimlessly.
There was no attempt at thatching. And I must confess that the roof
leaked miserably in a heavy rain.
But the Chatterer. He made home-life a burden for both my mother and
me—and by home-life I mean, not the leaky nest in the tree, but the
group-life of the three of us. He was most malicious in his persecution
of me. That was the one purpose to which he held steadfastly for longer
than five minutes. Also, as time went by, my mother was less eager in
her defence of me. I think, what of the continuous rows raised by the
Chatterer, that I must have become a nuisance to her. At any rate, the
situation went from bad to worse so rapidly that I should soon, of my
own volition, have left home. But the satisfaction of performing so
independent an act was denied me. Before I was ready to go, I was
thrown out. And I mean this literally.
The opportunity came to the Chatterer one day when I was alone in the
nest. My mother and the Chatterer had gone away together toward the
blueberry swamp. He must have planned the whole thing, for I heard him
returning alone through the forest, roaring with self-induced rage as
he came. Like all the men of our horde, when they were angry or were
trying to make themselves angry, he stopped now and again to hammer on
his chest with his fist.
I realized the helplessness of my situation, and crouched trembling in
the nest. The Chatterer came directly to the tree—I remember it was an
oak tree—and began to climb up. And he never ceased for a moment from
his infernal row. As I have said, our language was extremely meagre,
and he must have strained it by the variety of ways in which he
informed me of his undying hatred of me and of his intention there and
then to have it out with me.
As he climbed to the fork, I fled out the great horizontal limb. He
followed me, and out I went, farther and farther. At last I was out
amongst the small twigs and leaves. The Chatterer was ever a coward,
and greater always than any anger he ever worked up was his caution. He
was afraid to follow me out amongst the leaves and twigs. For that
matter, his greater weight would have crashed him through the foliage
before he could have got to me.
But it was not necessary for him to reach me, and well he knew it, the
scoundrel! With a malevolent expression on his face, his beady eyes
gleaming with cruel intelligence, he began teetering. Teetering!—and
with me out on the very edge of the bough, clutching at the twigs that
broke continually with my weight. Twenty feet beneath me was the earth.
Wildly and more wildly he teetered, grinning at me his gloating hatred.
Then came the end. All four holds broke at the same time, and I fell,
back-downward, looking up at him, my hands and feet still clutching the
broken twigs. Luckily, there were no wild pigs under me, and my fall
was broken by the tough and springy bushes.
Usually, my falls destroy my dreams, the nervous shock being sufficient
to bridge the thousand centuries in an instant and hurl me wide awake
into my little bed, where, perchance, I lie sweating and trembling and
hear the cuckoo clock calling the hour in the hall. But this dream of
my leaving home I have had many times, and never yet have I been
awakened by it. Always do I crash, shrieking, down through the brush
and fetch up with a bump on the ground.
Scratched and bruised and whimpering, I lay where I had fallen. Peering
up through the bushes, I could see the Chatterer. He had set up a
demoniacal chant of joy and was keeping time to it with his teetering.
I quickly hushed my whimpering. I was no longer in the safety of the
trees, and I knew the danger I ran of bringing upon myself the hunting
animals by too audible an expression of my grief.
I remember, as my sobs died down, that I became interested in watching
the strange light-effects produced by partially opening and closing my
tear-wet eyelids. Then I began to investigate, and found that I was not
so very badly damaged by my fall. I had lost some hair and hide, here
and there; the sharp and jagged end of a broken branch had thrust fully
an inch into my forearm; and my right hip, which had borne the brunt of
my contact with the ground, was aching intolerably. But these, after
all, were only petty hurts. No bones were broken, and in those days the
flesh of man had finer healing qualities than it has to-day. Yet it was
a severe fall, for I limped with my injured hip for fully a week
afterward.
Next, as I lay in the bushes, there came upon me a feeling of
desolation, a consciousness that I was homeless. I made up my mind
never to return to my mother and the Chatterer. I would go far away
through the terrible forest, and find some tree for myself in which to
roost. As for food, I knew where to find it. For the last year at least
I had not been beholden to my mother for food. All she had furnished me
was protection and guidance.
I crawled softly out through the bushes. Once I looked back and saw the
Chatterer still chanting and teetering. It was not a pleasant sight. I
knew pretty well how to be cautious, and I was exceedingly careful on
this my first journey in the world.
I gave no thought as to where I was going. I had but one purpose, and
that was to go away beyond the reach of the Chatterer. I climbed into
the trees and wandered on amongst them for hours, passing from tree to
tree and never touching the ground. But I did not go in any particular
direction, nor did I travel steadily. It was my nature, as it was the
nature of all my folk, to be inconsequential. Besides, I was a mere
child, and I stopped a great deal to play by the way.
The events that befell me on my leaving home are very vague in my mind.
My dreams do not cover them. Much has my other-self forgotten, and
particularly at this very period. Nor have I been able to frame up the
various dreams so as to bridge the gap between my leaving the home-tree
and my arrival at the caves.
I remember that several times I came to open spaces. These I crossed in
great trepidation, descending to the ground and running at the top of
my speed. I remember that there were days of rain and days of sunshine,
so that I must have wandered alone for quite a time. I especially dream
of my misery in the rain, and of my sufferings from hunger and how I
appeased it. One very strong impression is of hunting little lizards on
the rocky top of an open knoll. They ran under the rocks, and most of
them escaped; but occasionally I turned over a stone and caught one. I
was frightened away from this knoll by snakes. They did not pursue me.
They were merely basking on flat rocks in the sun. But such was my
inherited fear of them that I fled as fast as if they had been after
me.
Then I gnawed bitter bark from young trees. I remember vaguely the
eating of many green nuts, with soft shells and milky kernels. And I
remember most distinctly suffering from a stomach-ache. It may have
been caused by the green nuts, and maybe by the lizards. I do not know.
But I do know that I was fortunate in not being devoured during the
several hours I was knotted up on the ground with the colic.