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_ 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--vas 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. _
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