In the Morning of Time

At Mawg’s scream of terror, Grôm had turned and rushed to the rescue, swinging his club. But before he had covered half the distance, he saw that the monster had done its work; and he hesitated. He was too late to help the victim. And he knew the mettle of this ferocious bird, almost as much to be dreaded, in single combat, as the saber-tooth itself. At his approach, the bird had lifted its dripping beak, half turned, and stood gripping the prey with one foot, swaying its grim head slowly and eyeing him with malevolent defiance. Still he hesitated, fingering his club; for the insolence of that challenging stare made his blood seethe. Then came A-ya’s voice from the tree-top, calling him. “Come away!” she cried. “It was Mawg.”

Whereupon he turned, with the content of one who sees all old scores cleanly wiped out together, and went back to gather his ripe plantains.

The peril of Mawg being thus removed from their path, they journeyed more swiftly; and when the next new moon was a thin white sickle in the sky, just above the line of saw-toothed hills, they came safely back to the comfortable caves and the clear-burning watch-fires of their tribe.

CHAPTER VIII

THE BENDING OF THE BOW

Before the Caves of the Pointed Hills the fires of the tribe burned brightly. Within the caves reigned plenty and an unheard-of security; for since the conquest of fire those monstrous beasts and gigantic carnivorous, running birds, which had been Man’s ceaseless menace ever since he swung down out of the tree-tops to walk the earth erect, had been held at a distance through awe of the licking flames. Though the great battle which had hurled back the invading hosts of the Bow-legs had cost the tribe more than half its warriors, the Caves were swarming with vigorous children. To Bawr, the Chief, and to Grôm, his Right Hand and Councilor, the future of the tribe looked secure.

So sharp had been the lessons lately administered to the prowling beasts–the terrible saber-tooth, the giant red bear of the caves, the proud black lion, and the bone-crushing cave hyena–that even the stretch of bumpy plain outside the circle of the fires, to a distance of several hundred paces, was considered a safe playground for the children of the tribe. On the outermost skirts of this playground, to be sure, just where the reedy pools and the dense bamboo thickets began, there was a fire kept burning. But this was more as a reminder than as an actual defense. When a bear or a saber-tooth had once had a blazing brand thrust in his face, he acquired a measure of discretion. Moreover, the activities of the tribe had driven all the game animals to some distance up the valley; and it was seldom that anything more formidable than a jackal or a civet-cat cared to come within a half-mile of the fires.

It was now two years since the rescue of A-ya from her captivity among the Bow-legs. Her child by Grôm was a straight-limbed, fair-skinned lad of somewhere between four and five years. She sat cross-legged near the sentinel fire, some fifty yards or so from the edge of the thickets, and played with the lad, whose eyes were alight with eager intelligence. Behind her sprawled, playing contentedly with its toes and sucking a banana, a fat brown flat-nosed baby of some fourteen or fifteen months.

Both A-ya and the boy were interested in a new toy. It was, perhaps, the first whip. The boy had succeeded in tying a thin strip of green hide, something over three feet in length, to one end of a stick which was several inches longer. The uses of a whip came to him by unerring insight, and he began applying it to his mother’s shoulders. The novelty of it delighted them both. A-ya, moreover, chuckled slyly at the thought that the procedure might, on some future occasion, be reversed, not without advantage to the cause of discipline.

At last the lithe lash, so enthusiastically wielded, stung too hard for even A-ya, with all her stoicism, to find it amusing. She snatched the toy away and began playing with it herself. The lash, at its free end, chanced to be slit almost to the tip, forming a loop. The butt of the handle was formed by a jagged knot, where it had been broken from the parent stem. Idly but firmly, with her strong hands she bent the stick, and slipped the loop over the jagged knot, where it held.

Interested, but with no hint of comprehension in her bright eyes, she looked upon the first bow–the stupendous product of a child and a woman playing.

The child, displeased at this new, useless thing, and wanting his whip back, tried to snatch the bow from his mother’s hands. But she pushed him off. She liked this new toy. It looked, somehow, as if it invited her to do something with it. Presently she pulled the cord, and let it go again. Tightly strung, it made a pleasant little humming sound. This she repeated many times, holding it up to her ear and laughing with pleasure. The boy grew interested thereupon, and wanted to try the new game for himself. But A-ya was too absorbed. She would not let him touch it. “Go get another stick,” she commanded impatiently; but quite forgot to see her command obeyed.

As she was twanging the strange implement which had so happily fashioned itself under her hands, Grôm came up behind her. He stepped carefully over the sprawling brown baby. He was about to pull her heavy hair affectionately; but his eyes fell upon the thing in her hands, and he checked himself.

For minute after minute he stood there motionless, watching and studying the new toy. His eyes narrowed, his brows drew themselves down broodingly. The thing seemed to him to suggest dim, cloudy, vast possibilities; and he groped in his brain for some hint of the nature of these possibilities. Yet as far as he could see it was good for nothing but to make a faintly pleasant twang for the amusement of women and children. At last he could keep his hands off it no longer. “Give it to me,” said he suddenly, laying hold of A-ya’s wrist.

But A-ya was not yet done with it. She held it away from him, and twanged it with redoubled vigor. Without further argument, and without violence, Grôm reached out a long arm, and found the bow in his grasp. A-ya was surprised that such a trifle should seem of such importance in her lord’s eyes; but her faith was great. She shook the wild mane of hair back from her face, silenced the boy’s importunings with an imperative gesture, and gathered herself with her arms about both knees to watch what Grôm would do with the plaything.

First he examined it minutely, and then he fastened the thong more securely at either end. He twanged it as A-ya had done. He bent it to its limit and eased it slowly back again, studying the new force imprisoned in the changing curve. At last he asked who had made it.

“I did,” answered A-ya, very proud of her achievement now that she found it taken so seriously by one being to whom her adventurous spirit really deferred.

“No, I did!” piped the boy, with an injured air.

The mother laughed indulgently. “Yes, he tied one end, and beat me with it,” said she. “Then I took it from him, and bent the stick and tied the other end.”

“It is very good!” said Grôm, nodding his approval musingly. He squatted down a few feet away, and began experimenting.

Picking up a small stone, he held it upon the cord, bent the bow a little way, and let go. The stone flew up and hit him with amazing energy in the mouth.

“Oh!” murmured A-ya, sympathetically, as the bright blood ran down his beard. But the child, thinking that his father had done it on purpose, laughed with hearty appreciation. Somewhat annoyed, Grôm got up, moved a few paces farther away, and sat down again with his back to the family circle.

As to the force that lurked in this slender little implement he was now fully satisfied. But he was not satisfied with the direction in which it exerted itself. He continued his experiments, but was careful to draw the bow lightly.

For a long time he found it impossible to guess beforehand the direction which the pebbles, or the bits of stick or bark, would take in their surprising leaps from the loosed bow-string. But at length a dim idea of aim occurred to him. He lifted the bow–his left fist grasping its middle–to the level of his eyes, at arm’s length. He got the cord accurately in the center of the pebble, and drew toward his nose. This effort was so successful that the stone went perfectly straight–and caught him fair on the thumb-knuckle.

The blow was so sharp that he dropped the bow with an angry exclamation. Glancing quickly over his shoulder to see if A-ya had noticed the incident, he observed that her face was buried between her knees and quite hidden by her hair. But her shoulders were heaving spasmodically. He suspected that she was laughing at him; and for a moment, as his knuckle was aching fiercely, he considered the advisability of giving her a beating. He had never done such a thing to her, however, though all the other Cave Men, including Bawr himself, were wont to beat their women on occasion. In his heart he hated the idea of hurting her; and it would hardly be worth while to beat her without hurting her. The idea, therefore, was promptly dismissed. He eyed the shaking shoulders gloomily for some seconds; and then, as the throbbing in the outraged knuckle subsided, a grin of sympathetic comprehension spread over his own face. He picked up the bow, sprang to his feet, and strolled over to the edge of a thicket of young cane.

The girl, lifting her head, peered at him cautiously through her hair. Her laughter was forgotten on the instant, because she guessed that his fertile brain was on the trail of some new experiment.

Arriving at the cane-thicket, Grôm broke himself half a dozen well-hardened, tapering stems, from two to three feet in length, and about as thick at their smaller ends as A-ya’s little finger.

These seemed to suggest to him the possibility of better results than anything he could get from those erratic pebbles.

By this time quite a number of curious spectators–women and children mostly, the majority of the men being away hunting, and the rest too proud to show their curiosity–had gathered to watch Grôm’s experiments. They were puzzled to make out what it was he was busying himself with. But as he was a great chief, and held in deeper awe than even Bawr himself, they did not presume to come very near; and they had therefore not perceived, or at least they had not apprehended, those two trifling mishaps of his. As for Grôm, he paid his audience no attention whatever. Now that he had possessed himself of those slender straight shafts of cane, all else was forgotten. He felt, as he looked at them and poised them, that in some vital way they belonged to this fascinating implement which A-ya had invented for him.

Selecting one of the shafts, he slowly applied the bigger end of it to the bow-string, and stood for a long time pondering it, drawing it a little way and easing it back without releasing it. Then he called to mind that his spears always threw better when they were hurled heavy end first. So he turned the little shaft and applied the small end to the bow-string. Then he pulled the string tentatively, and let it go. The arrow, all unguided, shot straight up into the air, turned over, fell sharply, and buried its head in a bit of soft ground. Grôm felt that this was progress. The spectators opened their mouths in wonder, but durst not venture any comment when Grôm was at his mysteries.

Plucking the shaft from the earth, Grôm once more laid it to the bow-string. As he pulled the string, the shaft wobbled crazily. With a growl of impatience, he clapped the fore-finger of his left hand over it, holding it in place, and pulled it through the guide thus formed. A light flashed upon his brooding intelligence. Slightly crooking his finger, so that the shaft could move freely, he drew the string backward and forward, with deep deliberation, over and over again. To his delight, he found that the shaft was no longer eccentrically rebellious, but as docile as he could wish. At last, lifting the bow above his head, he drew it strongly, and shot the shaft into the air. He shouted as it slipped smoothly through the guiding crook of his finger and went soaring skyward as if it would never stop. The eyes of the spectators followed its flight with awe, and A-ya, suddenly comprehending, caught her breath and snatched the boy to her heart in a transport. Her alert mind had grasped, though dimly, the wonder of her man’s achievement.

Now, though Grôm had pointed his shaft skyward, he had taken no thought whatever as to its direction, or the distance it might travel. As a matter of fact, he had shot towards the Caves. He had shot strongly; and that first bow was a stiff one. Most of the folk who squatted before the Caves were watching; but there were some who were too indifferent or too stupid to take an interest in anything less arresting than a thump on the head. Among these was a fat old woman, who, with her back to all the excitement, was bending herself double to grub in the litter of sticks and bones for some tit-bit which she had dropped. Grôm’s shaft, turning gracefully against the blue came darting downward on a long slope, and buried its point in that upturned fat and grimy thigh. With a yell the old woman whipped round, tore out the shaft, dashed it upon the ground, stared at it in horror as if she thought it some kind of snake, and waddled, wildly jabbering, into the nearest cave.

An outburst of startled cries arose from all the spectators, but it hushed itself almost in the same breath. It was Grôm who had done this singular thing, smiting unawares from very far off. The old woman must have done something to make Grôm angry. They were all afraid; and several, whose consciences were not quite at ease, followed the old woman’s example and slipped into the Caves.

As for Grôm, his feelings were a mixture of embarrassment and elation. He was sorry to have hurt the old woman. He had a ridiculous dislike of hurting any one unnecessarily; and when he looked back and saw A-ya rocking herself to and fro in heartless mirth, he felt like asking her how she would have liked it herself, if she had been in the place of the fat old woman. On the other hand, he knew that he had made a great discovery, second only to the conquest of the fire. He had found a new weapon, of unheard-of, unimagined powers, able to kill swiftly and silently and at a great distance. All he had to do was to perfect the weapon and learn to control it.

He strode haughtily up to the cave mouth to recover his shaft. The people, even the mightiest of the warriors, looked anxious and deprecating at his approach; but he gave them never a glance. It would not have done to let them think he had wounded the old woman by accident. He picked up the shaft and examined its bloodstained point, frowning fiercely. Then he glared into the cave where the unlucky victim of his experiments had taken refuge. He refitted the shaft to the bow-string, and made as if to follow up his stroke with further chastisement. Instantly there came from the dark interior a chorus of shrill feminine entreaties. He hesitated, seemed to relent, put the shaft into the bundle under his arm, and strode back to rejoin A-ya. He had done enough for the moment. His next step required deep thought and preparation.

An hour or two later, Grôm set out from the Caves alone in spite of A-ya’s pleadings. He wanted complete solitude with his new weapon. Besides a generous bundle of canes, of varying lengths and sizes, he carried some strips of raw meat, a bunch of plantains, his spear and club, and a sort of rude basket, without handle, formed by tying together the ends of a roll of green bark.

This basket was a device of A-ya’s, which had added greatly to her prestige in the tribe, and caused the women to regard her with redoubled jealousy. By lining it thickly with wet clay, she was able to carry fire in it so securely and simply that Grôm had adopted it at once, throwing away his uncertain and always troublesome fire-tubes of hollow bamboo.

Mounting the steep hillside behind the Caves, Grôm turned into a high, winding ravine, and was soon lost to the sight of the tribe. The ravine, the bed of a long-dry torrent, climbed rapidly, bearing around to the eastward, and brought him at length to a high plateau on a shoulder of the mountain. At the back of the plateau the mountain rose again, abruptly, to one of those saw-tooth pinnacles which characterized this range. At the base of the steep was a narrow fissure in the rock-face, leading into a small grotto which Grôm had discovered on one of his hunting expeditions. He had used it several times already as a retreat when tired of the hubbub of the tribe and anxious to ponder in quiet some of the problems which for ever tormented his fruitful brain.

Absorbed in meditations upon his new weapons, Grôm set himself to build a small fire before the entrance of the grotto. The red coals from his fire-basket he surrounded and covered with dry grass, dead twigs, and small sticks. Then, getting down upon all fours, he blew long and steadily into the mass till the smoke which curled up from it was streaked with thin flames. As the flames curled higher, his ears caught the sound of something stirring within the cave. He looked up, peering between the little coils of smoke, and saw a pair of eyes, very close to the ground, glaring forth at him from the darkness.

With one hand, he coolly but swiftly fed the fire to fuller volume, while with the other he reached for and clutched his club. The eyes drew back slowly to the depths of the cave. Appearing not to have observed them, Grôm piled the fire with heavier and heavier fuel, till it was blazing strongly and full of well-lighted brands. Then he stood up, seized a brand, and hurled it into the cave. There was a harsh snarl, and the eyes disappeared, the owner of them having apparently shrunk off to one side.

A moment or two later the interior was suddenly lighted up with a smoky glare. The brand had fallen on a heap of withered grass which had formerly been Grôm’s couch. Grôm set his teeth and swung up his club; and in the same instant there shot forth two immense cave-hyenas, mad with rage and terror.

The great beasts were more afraid of the sudden flare within than of the substantial and dangerous fire without. The first swerved just in time to escape the fire, and went by so swiftly that the stroke of Grôm’s club caught him only a light, glancing blow on the rump. But the second of the pair, the female, was too close behind to swerve in time. She dashed straight through the fire, struck Grôm with all her frantic weight, knocked him flat, and tore off howling down the valley, leaving a pungent trail of singed fur on the air.

Uninjured save for an ugly scratch, which bled profusely, down one side of his face, Grôm picked himself up in a rage and started after the fleeing beasts. But his common sense speedily reasserted itself. He grunted in disgust, turned back to the fire, and was soon absorbed in new experiments with the bow. As for the blaze within the cave, he troubled himself no more about it. He knew it would soon burn out. And it would leave the cave well cleansed of pestilential insects.

All that afternoon he experimented with his bundle of shafts, to find what length and what weight would give the best results. One of the arrows he shattered completely, by driving it, at short range, straight against the rock-face of the mountain. Two others he lost, by shooting them, far beyond his expectations, over the edge of the plateau and down into the dense thickets below him, where he did not care to search too closely by reason of the peril of snakes. The bow, as his good luck would have it, though short and clumsy was very strong, being made of a stick of dry upland hickory. And the cord of raw hide was well-seasoned, stout and tough; though it had a troublesome trick of stretching, which forced Grôm to restring it many times before all the stretch was out of it.

Having satisfied himself as to the power of his bow and the range of his arrows, Grôm set himself next to the problem of marksmanship. Selecting a plant of prickly pear, of about the dimensions of a man, he shot at it, at different ranges, till most of its great fleshy leaves were shredded and shattered. With his straight eye and his natural aptitude, he soon grasped the idea of elevation for range, and made some respectable shooting. He also found that he could guide the arrow without crooking his finger around it. His elation was so extreme that he quite forgot to eat, till the closing in of darkness put an end to his practice. Then, piling high his fire as a warning to prowlers, he squatted in the mouth of the cave and made his meal. For water he had to go some little way below the lip of the plateau; but carrying a blazing balsam-knot he had nothing to fear from the beasts that lay in ambush about the spring. They slunk away sullenly at the approach of the waving flame.

That night Grôm slept securely, with three fires before his door. Every hour or two, vigilant woodsman that he was, he would wake up to replenish the fires, and be asleep again even in the act of lying down. And when the dawn came red and amber around the shoulder of the saw-toothed peak, he was up again and out into the chill, sweet air with his arrows.

The difficulty which now confronted him was that of giving his shafts a penetrating point. Being of a very hard-fibered cane, akin to bamboo, they would take a kind of splintering-point of almost needle sharpness. But it was fragile; and the cane being hollow, the point was necessarily on one side, which affected the accuracy of the flight. There were no flints in the neighborhood, or slaty rocks, which he could split into edged and pointed fragments. He tried hardening his points in the fire; but the results were not altogether satisfactory. He thought of tipping some of the shafts with thorns, or with the steely points of the old aloe leaves; but he could not, at the moment, devise such a method of fixing these formidable weapons in place as would not quite destroy their efficiency. Finally he made up his mind that the thing to use would be bone, ground into a suitable shape between two stones. But this was a matter that would have to await his return to the Caves, and would then call for much careful devising. For the present he would perforce content himself with such points as he had fined down and hardened in the fire.

This matter settled in his mind, Grôm burned to put his wonderful new weapon to practical test. He descended cautiously the steep slope from the eastern edge of his plateau–a broken region of ledges, subtropical thickets, and narrow, grassy glades, with here and there some tree of larger growth rising solitary like a watch-tower. Knowing this was a favorite feeding-hour for many of the grass-eaters, he hid himself in the well-screened crotch of a deodar, overlooking a green glade, and waited.

He had not long to wait, for the region swarmed with game. Out from a runway some thirty or forty yards up the glade stepped a huge, dun-colored bull, with horns like scimitars each as long as Grôm’s arm. His flanks were scarred with long wounds but lately healed, and Grôm realized that he was a solitary, beaten and driven out from his herd by some mightier rival. The bull glanced warily about him, and then fell to cropping the grass.

The beast offered an admirable target. Grôm’s arrow sped noiselessly between the curtaining branches, and found its mark high on the bull’s fore-shoulder. It penetrated–but not to a depth of more than two or three inches. And Grôm, though elated by his good shot, realized that such a wound would be nothing more than an irritant.

Startled and infuriated, the bull roared and pawed the sod, and glared about him to locate his unseen assailant. He had not the remotest idea of the direction from which the strange attack had come. The galling smart in his shoulder grew momentarily more severe. He lashed back at it savagely with the side of his horn, but the arrow was just out of his reach. Then, bewildered and alarmed, he tried to escape from this new kind of fly with the intolerable sting by galloping furiously up and down the glade. As he passed the deodar, Grôm let drive another arrow, at close range. This, too, struck, and stuck. But it did not go deep enough to produce any serious effect. The animal roared again, stared about him as if he thought the place was bewitched, and plunged headlong into the nearest thicket, tearing out both arrows as he went through the close-set stems. Grôm heard him crashing onward down the slope, and smiled to think of the surprise in store for any antagonist that might cross the mad brute’s path.