CHAPTER XIV
The months came and went. The drama and tragedy of the future were yetto 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 gourdswith nuts and carry them to the pounding-places. We placed them indepressions in the rock, and, with a piece of rock in our hands, wecracked them and ate them as we cracked.
It was the fall of the year when Lop-Ear and I returned from ourlong adventure-journey, and the winter that followed was mild. I madefrequent trips to the neighborhood of my old home-tree, and frequentlyI searched the whole territory that lay between the blueberry swamp andthe mouth of the slough where Lop-Ear and I had learned navigation, butno clew could I get of the Swift One. She had disappeared. And I wantedher. I was impelled by that hunger which I have mentioned, and which wasakin to physical hunger, albeit it came often upon me when my stomachwas full. But all my search was vain.
Life was not monotonous at the caves, however. There was Red-Eye to beconsidered. Lop-Ear and I never knew a moment's peace except when wewere in our own little cave. In spite of the enlargement of the entrancewe had made, it was still a tight squeeze for us to get in. And thoughfrom time to time we continued to enlarge, it was still too small forRed-Eye's monstrous body. But he never stormed our cave again. He hadlearned the lesson well, and he carried on his neck a bulging lump toshow where I had hit him with the rock. This lump never went away, andit was prominent enough to be seen at a distance. I often took greatdelight in watching that evidence of my handiwork; and sometimes, when Iwas myself assuredly safe, the sight of it caused me to laugh.
While the other Folk would not have come to our rescue had Red-Eyeproceeded to tear Lop-Ear and me to pieces before their eyes,nevertheless they sympathized with us. Possibly it was not sympathy butthe way they expressed their hatred for Red-Eye; at any rate theyalways warned us of his approach. Whether in the forest, at thedrinking-places, or in the open space before the caves, they were alwaysquick to warn us. Thus we had the advantage of many eyes in our feudwith Red-Eye, the atavism.
Once he nearly got me. It was early in the morning, and the Folk werenot yet up. The surprise was complete. I was cut off from the way upthe cliff to my cave. Before I knew it I had dashed into thedouble-cave,--the cave where Lop-Ear had first eluded me long yearsbefore, and where old Saber-Tooth had come to discomfiture when hepursued the two Folk. By the time I had got through the connectingpassage between the two caves, I discovered that Red-Eye was notfollowing 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 inupon me again. I merely repeated my performance of slipping through thepassage.
He kept me there half a day before he gave up. After that, when Lop-Earand I were reasonably sure of gaining the double-cave, we did notretreat 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 acrossour line of retreat.
It was during this winter that Red-Eye killed his latest wife with abuseand repeated beatings. I have called him an atavism, but in this hewas worse than an atavism, for the males of the lower animals do notmaltreat and murder their mates. In this I take it that Red-Eye, inspite of his tremendous atavistic tendencies, foreshadowed the comingof man, for it is the males of the human species only that murder theirmates.
As was to be expected, with the doing away of one wife Red-Eyeproceeded to get another. He decided upon the Singing One. She was thegranddaughter 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 cavein the twilight, and she had but recently mated with Crooked-Leg. He wasa quiet individual, molesting no one and not given to bickering withhis fellows. He was no fighter anyway. He was small and lean, and not soactive on his legs as the rest of us.
Red-Eye never committed a more outrageous deed. It was in the quiet atthe end of the day, when we began to congregate in the open space beforeclimbing into our caves. Suddenly the Singing One dashed up a run-wayfrom a drinking-place, pursued by Red-Eye. She ran to her husband. Poorlittle Crooked-Leg was terribly scared. But he was a hero. He knew thatdeath 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 Folkshould dare to withstand him. His hand shot out and clutched Crooked-Legby the neck. The latter sank his teeth into Red-Eye's arm; but the nextmoment, with a broken neck, Crooked-Leg was floundering and squirming onthe ground. The Singing One screeched and gibbered. Red-Eye seized herby the hair of her head and dragged her toward his cave. He handled herroughly when the climb began, and he dragged and hauled her up into thecave.
We were very angry, insanely, vociferously angry. Beating our chests,bristling, and gnashing our teeth, we gathered together in our rage. Wefelt the prod of gregarious instinct, the drawing together as though forunited action, the impulse toward cooperation. In dim ways this need forunited action was impressed upon us. But there was no way to achieve itbecause 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 vaguelythinking thoughts for which there were no thought-symbols. Thesethought-symbols were yet to be slowly and painfully invented.
We tried to freight sound with the vague thoughts that flitted likeshadows through our consciousness. The Hairless One began to chatterloudly. By his noises he expressed anger against Red-Eye and desire tohurt Red-Eye. Thus far he got, and thus far we understood. But when hetried to express the cooperative impulse that stirred within him,his noises became gibberish. Then Big-Face, with brow-bristling andchest-pounding, began to chatter. One after another of us joined in theorgy of rage, until even old Marrow-Bone was mumbling and splutteringwith his cracked voice and withered lips. Some one seized a stick andbegan pounding a log. In a moment he had struck a rhythm. Unconsciously,our yells and exclamations yielded to this rhythm. It had a soothingeffect upon us; and before we knew it, our rage forgotten, we were inthe full swing of a hee-hee council.
These hee-hee councils splendidly illustrate the inconsecutiveness andinconsequentiality of the Folk. Here were we, drawn together by mutualrage and the impulse toward cooperation, led off into forgetfulness bythe establishment of a rude rhythm. We were sociable and gregarious, andthese singing and laughing councils satisfied us. In ways the hee-heecouncil was an adumbration of the councils of primitive man, and of thegreat national assemblies and international conventions of latter-dayman. But we Folk of the Younger World lacked speech, and whenever wewere so drawn together we precipitated babel, out of which arose aunanimity of rhythm that contained within itself the essentials of artyet to come. It was art nascent.
There was nothing long-continued about these rhythms that we struck. Arhythm was soon lost, and pandemonium reigned until we could find therhythm again or start a new one. Sometimes half a dozen rhythms wouldbe swinging simultaneously, each rhythm backed by a group that stroveardently to drown out the other rhythms.
In the intervals of pandemonium, each chattered, cut up, hooted,screeched, and danced, himself sufficient unto himself, filled withhis own ideas and volitions to the exclusion of all others, a veritablecentre of the universe, divorced for the time being from any unanimitywith the other universe-centres leaping and yelling around him. Thenwould come the rhythm--a clapping of hands; the beating of a stick upona log; the example of one that leaped with repetitions; or the chantingof one that uttered, explosively and regularly, with inflection thatrose and fell, "A-bang, a-bang! A-bang, a-bang!" One after another ofthe self-centred Folk would yield to it, and soon all would be dancingor chanting in chorus. "Ha-ah, ha-ah, ha-ah-ha!" was one of our favoritechoruses, and another was, "Eh-wah, eh-wah, eh-wah-hah!"
And so, with mad antics, leaping, reeling, and over-balancing, wedanced and sang in the sombre twilight of the primeval world, inducingforgetfulness, achieving unanimity, and working ourselves up intosen
suous frenzy. And so it was that our rage against Red-Eye was soothedaway by art, and we screamed the wild choruses of the hee-hee counciluntil the night warned us of its terrors, and we crept away to our holesin the rocks, calling softly to one another, while the stars came outand darkness settled down.
We were afraid only of the dark. We had no germs of religion, noconceptions of an unseen world. We knew only the real world, andthe things we feared were the real things, the concrete dangers, theflesh-and-blood animals that preyed. It was they that made us afraid ofthe dark, for darkness was the time of the hunting animals. It was thenthat they came out of their lairs and pounced upon one from the darkwherein they lurked invisible.
Possibly it was out of this fear of the real denizens of the dark thatthe fear of the unreal denizens was later to develop and to culminate ina whole and mighty unseen world. As imagination grew it is likely thatthe fear of death increased until the Folk that were to come projectedthis fear into the dark and peopled it with spirits. I think the FirePeople had already begun to be afraid of the dark in this fashion; butthe reasons we Folk had for breaking up our hee-hee councils and fleeingto our holes were old Saber-Tooth, the lions and the jackals, the wilddogs and the wolves, and all the hungry, meat-eating breeds.