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_ There is one puzzling thing about these prehistoric
memories of mine. It is the vagueness of the time
element. I lo 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. _
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