The months came and went. The drama and tragedy of the future were yet
to come upon the stage, and in the meantime we pounded nuts and lived.
It was a good year, I remember, for nuts. We used to fill gourds with
nuts and carry them to the pounding-places. We placed them in
depressions in the rock, and, with a piece of rock in our hands, we
cracked them and ate them as we cracked.
It was the fall of the year when Lop-Ear and I returned from our long
adventure-journey, and the winter that followed was mild. I made
frequent trips to the neighborhood of my old home-tree, and frequently
I searched the whole territory that lay between the blueberry swamp and
the mouth of the slough where Lop-Ear and I had learned navigation, but
no clew could I get of the Swift One. She had disappeared. And I wanted
her. I was impelled by that hunger which I have mentioned, and which
was akin to physical hunger, albeit it came often upon me when my
stomach was full. But all my search was vain.
Life was not monotonous at the caves, however. There was Red-Eye to be
considered. Lop-Ear and I never knew a moment’s peace except when we
were in our own little cave. In spite of the enlargement of the
entrance we had made, it was still a tight squeeze for us to get in.
And though from time to time we continued to enlarge, it was still too
small for Red-Eye’s monstrous body. But he never stormed our cave
again. He had learned the lesson well, and he carried on his neck a
bulging lump to show where I had hit him with the rock. This lump never
went away, and it was prominent enough to be seen at a distance. I
often took great delight in watching that evidence of my handiwork; and
sometimes, when I was myself assuredly safe, the sight of it caused me
to laugh.
While the other Folk would not have come to our rescue had Red-Eye
proceeded to tear Lop-Ear and me to pieces before their eyes,
nevertheless they sympathized with us. Possibly it was not sympathy but
the way they expressed their hatred for Red-Eye; at any rate they
always warned us of his approach. Whether in the forest, at the
drinking-places, or in the open space before the caves, they were
always quick to warn us. Thus we had the advantage of many eyes in our
feud with Red-Eye, the atavism.
Once he nearly got me. It was early in the morning, and the Folk were
not yet up. The surprise was complete. I was cut off from the way up
the cliff to my cave. Before I knew it I had dashed into the
double-cave,—the cave where Lop-Ear had first eluded me long years
before, and where old Saber-Tooth had come to discomfiture when he
pursued the two Folk. By the time I had got through the connecting
passage between the two caves, I discovered that Red-Eye was not
following me. The next moment he charged into the cave from the
outside. I slipped back through the passage, and he charged out and
around and in upon me again. I merely repeated my performance of
slipping through the passage.
He kept me there half a day before he gave up. After that, when Lop-Ear
and I were reasonably sure of gaining the double-cave, we did not
retreat up the cliff to our own cave when Red-Eye came upon the scene.
All we did was to keep an eye on him and see that he did not cut across
our line of retreat.
It was during this winter that Red-Eye killed his latest wife with
abuse and repeated beatings. I have called him an atavism, but in this
he was worse than an atavism, for the males of the lower animals do not
maltreat and murder their mates. In this I take it that Red-Eye, in
spite of his tremendous atavistic tendencies, foreshadowed the coming
of man, for it is the males of the human species only that murder their
mates.
As was to be expected, with the doing away of one wife Red-Eye
proceeded to get another. He decided upon the Singing One. She was the
granddaughter of old Marrow-Bone, and the daughter of the Hairless One.
She was a young thing, greatly given to singing at the mouth of her
cave in the twilight, and she had but recently mated with Crooked-Leg.
He was a quiet individual, molesting no one and not given to bickering
with his fellows. He was no fighter anyway. He was small and lean, and
not so active on his legs as the rest of us.
Red-Eye never committed a more outrageous deed. It was in the quiet at
the end of the day, when we began to congregate in the open space
before climbing into our caves. Suddenly the Singing One dashed up a
run-way from a drinking-place, pursued by Red-Eye. She ran to her
husband. Poor little Crooked-Leg was terribly scared. But he was a
hero. He knew that death was upon him, yet he did not run away. He
stood up, and chattered, bristled, and showed his teeth.
Red-Eye roared with rage. It was an offence to him that any of the Folk
should dare to withstand him. His hand shot out and clutched
Crooked-Leg by the neck. The latter sank his teeth into Red-Eye’s arm;
but the next moment, with a broken neck, Crooked-Leg was floundering
and squirming on the ground. The Singing One screeched and gibbered.
Red-Eye seized her by the hair of her head and dragged her toward his
cave. He handled her roughly when the climb began, and he dragged and
hauled her up into the cave.
We were very angry, insanely, vociferously angry. Beating our chests,
bristling, and gnashing our teeth, we gathered together in our rage. We
felt the prod of gregarious instinct, the drawing together as though
for united action, the impulse toward cooperation. In dim ways this
need for united action was impressed upon us. But there was no way to
achieve it because there was no way to express it. We did not turn to,
all of us, and destroy Red-Eye, because we lacked a vocabulary. We were
vaguely thinking thoughts for which there were no thought-symbols.
These thought-symbols were yet to be slowly and painfully invented.
We tried to freight sound with the vague thoughts that flitted like
shadows through our consciousness. The Hairless One began to chatter
loudly. By his noises he expressed anger against Red-Eye and desire to
hurt Red-Eye. Thus far he got, and thus far we understood. But when he
tried to express the cooperative impulse that stirred within him, his
noises became gibberish. Then Big-Face, with brow-bristling and
chest-pounding, began to chatter. One after another of us joined in the
orgy of rage, until even old Marrow-Bone was mumbling and spluttering
with his cracked voice and withered lips. Some one seized a stick and
began pounding a log. In a moment he had struck a rhythm.
Unconsciously, our yells and exclamations yielded to this rhythm. It
had a soothing effect upon us; and before we knew it, our rage
forgotten, we were in the full swing of a hee-hee council.
These hee-hee councils splendidly illustrate the inconsecutiveness and
inconsequentiality of the Folk. Here were we, drawn together by mutual
rage and the impulse toward cooperation, led off into forgetfulness by
the establishment of a rude rhythm. We were sociable and gregarious,
and these singing and laughing councils satisfied us. In ways the
hee-hee council was an adumbration of the councils of primitive man,
and of the great national assemblies and international conventions of
latter-day man. But we Folk of the Younger World lacked speech, and
whenever we were so drawn together we precipitated babel, out of which
arose a unanimity of rhythm that contained within itself the essentials
of art yet to come. It was art nascent.
There was nothing long-continued about these rhythms that we struck. A
rhythm was soon lost, and pandemonium reigned until we could find the
rhythm again or start a new one. Sometimes half a dozen rhythms would
be swinging simultaneously, each rhythm backed by a group that strove
ardently to drown out the other rhythms.
In the intervals of pandemonium, each chattered, cut up, hooted,
screeched, and danced, himself sufficient unto himself, filled with his
own ideas and volitions to the exclusion of all others, a veritable
centre of the universe, divorced for the time being from any unanimity
with the other universe-centres leaping and yelling around him. Then
would come the rhythm—a clapping of hands; the beating of a stick upon
a log; the example of one that leaped with repetitions; or the chanting
of one that uttered, explosively and regularly, with inflection that
rose and fell, “A-bang, a-bang! A-bang, a-bang!” One after another of
the self-centred Folk would yield to it, and soon all would be dancing
or chanting in chorus. “Ha-ah, ha-ah, ha-ah-ha!” was one of our
favorite choruses, and another was, “Eh-wah, eh-wah, eh-wah-hah!”
And so, with mad antics, leaping, reeling, and over-balancing, we
danced and sang in the sombre twilight of the primeval world, inducing
forgetfulness, achieving unanimity, and working ourselves up into
sensuous frenzy. And so it was that our rage against Red-Eye was
soothed away by art, and we screamed the wild choruses of the hee-hee
council until the night warned us of its terrors, and we crept away to
our holes in the rocks, calling softly to one another, while the stars
came out and darkness settled down.
We were afraid only of the dark. We had no germs of religion, no
conceptions of an unseen world. We knew only the real world, and the
things we feared were the real things, the concrete dangers, the
flesh-and-blood animals that preyed. It was they that made us afraid of
the dark, for darkness was the time of the hunting animals. It was then
that they came out of their lairs and pounced upon one from the dark
wherein they lurked invisible.
Possibly it was out of this fear of the real denizens of the dark that
the fear of the unreal denizens was later to develop and to culminate
in a whole and mighty unseen world. As imagination grew it is likely
that the fear of death increased until the Folk that were to come
projected this fear into the dark and peopled it with spirits. I think
the Fire People had already begun to be afraid of the dark in this
fashion; but the reasons we Folk had for breaking up our hee-hee
councils and fleeing to our holes were old Saber-Tooth, the lions and
the jackals, the wild dogs and the wolves, and all the hungry,
meat-eating breeds.