In the Morning of Time

Grôm looked about him wildly–at the sky, at the far-off hills on their right, at the course of the stream, which had changed within the past few miles. His sense of direction was unerring.

“This river,” he answered, “flows towards the rising sun, and must empty into the bitter waters not more than a day or a half day from the Caves. We are going home. We will come again to look for arrows in a new raft which I will make.”

As he spoke, Loob’s spear darted down beside the raft, and came up with a big, silvery fish writhing upon it. He broke its neck with a blow and laid the prize at A-ya’s feet.

“I wish we had fire with us, to cook it with,” said she.

“On the new raft, as I will make it,” said Grôm, “that may very well be. Our journey will be safe and easy, and the good fire we will have always with us.”

CHAPTER XIII

THE FEAR

The People of the Caves were beginning to dread their good fortune. Plenty was being showered upon them with so lavish and sudden a hand that they looked at it askance, distrustful of the unsought-for largess. For a week or more their hunting-grounds had been swarming with game, in amazing and daily increasing numbers, till there was little more of chance or of excitement in the hunt than in plucking a ripe mango from its branch. It was game of the choicest kinds, too–deer of many varieties, and antelope, and the little wild horse whose flesh they accounted such a delicacy. They slew, and slew, and their cooking-fires were busy night and day, and the flesh they could not devour was dried in the sun in long strips or smoked in the reek of green-wood fires. They feasted greedily, but there was something sinister in the whole matter, something ominous; and they would stop at times to wonder anxiously what stroke of fate could be hanging over the Caves.

During the past day or two, moreover, there had been a disquieting influx of those great and fierce beasts which the Cave Men were by no means anxious to hunt. The giant white and the woolly rhinoceros had arrived by the score in the dense thickets of the steaming savannah which unrolled its green-and-yellow breadths along the southward base of the downs. These half-blind brutes appeared to be waging a dreadful and doubtful war with the red herds of those monstrous, cone-horned survivals from an earlier age, the Arsinotheria, who had ruled the reeking savannah for countless cycles. The roar and trampling of the struggle came up from time to time to the dwellers in the Caves, when the hot breeze came up from the southward.

What concerned the Cave Folk far more than any near-sighted and blundering rhinoceros, however malignant, was the sudden arrival of the great red bears, the black lions, the grinning and implacable saber-tooth tigers, and giant black-gray wolves which hunted in small, handy packs of six or seven in number. All these, the dread foes of Man for as long as tradition could remember, had been mercifully few and scattered. Now, in a night, they had become as common as conies; and not a child could be allowed to play beyond shelter of the cave-mouth fires, not a woman durst venture to the spring without a brightly blazing fire-brand in her hand. Yet–and this seemed to the Tribe the most portentous sign of all–these blood-thirsty beasts appeared to have lost much of their ancient hostility to Man. They were all well fed, of course, their accustomed prey being now so abundant that they had little more to do than put forth an armed paw and seize it. But they all seemed uneasy and half-cowed, as if weighed down by a menace which they did not know how to face. When a man confronted them, the fiercest of them made way with a deprecating air, as if to say that they had troubles enough on their minds.

Bawr, the Chief, and Grôm, his right hand and his counselor, stood upon the bare green ridge above the Cave-mouth, and stared down anxiously upon the sun-drenched plain. Of old it had taken keen eyes to discern the varied life which populated its bamboo-thickets and cane-choked marshes. Now it was as thronged as the home pastures of a cattle-farm. Here and there a battle raged between such small-brained brutes as the white rhinoceros and the cone-horned monster; but for the most part there was an apprehensive sort of truce, the different kinds of beasts keeping as far as possible to themselves.

Further out in the plain pastured a herd of gigantic creatures such as neither Bawr nor Grôm had ever seen before. A pair of rhinoceros looked like pygmies beside them. They were both tall and massive, of a dark mud-color, with colossal heads, no necks whatever, huge ears that flapped like wings, immensely long, up-curving tusks of gleaming yellow–mighty enough to carry a bison cradled in their curve–and it seemed to the astonished watchers on the ridge that from the snout of each monster grew a great snake, which reared itself into the air, and waved terribly, and pulled down the tops of trees for the monster’s food.

It was the Cave Man’s first view of the Mammoth–which had not yet developed the shaggy coat it was later to grow on the cold sub-Artic plains.

Recovering at length from his amazement, Bawr remarked:

“They seem to have two tails, those new beasts–a little tail behind, in the usual place, and a very big tail in front, which they use as a hand. They are very many, and very terrible. Do you think it is they who are driving all these other beasts upon us to overwhelm us?”

Grôm thought long before replying.

“No,” said he, “they are not flesh-eaters. See! They do not heed the other beasts. They eat trees. And they, too, seem restless. I think they are themselves driven. But what dreadful beings must be they who can drive them!”

“If they are driven over us,” muttered Bawr, “they will grind us and our fires into the dust.”

“It must be men,” mused Grôm aloud, “men far mightier than ourselves and so countless that the hordes of the Tree Men would seem a handful in comparison. Only men, or gods, and in swarms like locusts, could so drive all these mighty beasts before them as a child drives rabbits.”

“Before they come,” said Bawr, dropping his great craggy chin upon his breast, “the People of the Caves will be trodden out. Whither can we escape from such foes? We will build great fires before the caves, and we will go down fighting, as befits men.”

He lifted his maned and massive head, and shook his great spear defiantly at the unknown doom that was coming up from the south. But Grôm’s eyes were sunken deep under his brows in brooding thought.

“There is one way, perhaps,” he said at length. “We have learned to journey on the water. We must build us rafts, many rafts, to carry all the tribe. And when we can no longer hold our fires and our caves we will push out upon the water, and perhaps make our way to that blue shore yonder, where they cannot follow us.”

“The waves, and the monsters of the waves, will swallow us up,” suggested Bawr.

“Some of us, perhaps many of us,” agreed Grôm. “But many of us will escape, to keep the tribe-fires burning, if the gods be kind upon that day and bind down the winds till we get over. If we stay here we shall all die.”

“It is well,” grunted Bawr, turning to hurry down the steep. “We will build rafts. Let us hasten.”

On the beach below the Caves the Men of the Tribe worked furiously, dragging the trunks of trees together at the water’s edge, lashing them with ropes of vine and cords of hide, and laboriously lopping some of the more obstructive branches by the combined use of fire and split stones. The women, and the lame slave Ook-ootsk–with the old men, who, though their hearts were still high, were too frail of their hands for such a heavy task as raft-building–remained before the Caves under the command of A-ya, Grôm’s mate. They had enough to do in feeding the chain of fires, keeping the children out of danger, and fighting back with spear and arrow the ever-encroaching mob of wild-eyed beasts. The beasts feared the fires, and feared the human beings who leaped and screamed and smote from among the fires. But still more they seemed to fear some unknown thing behind them. For a time, however, the crackling flames and the biting shafts proved a sufficient barrier, and the motley but terrifying invaders went sheering off irresolutely to westward over the downs.

Down by the edge of the tide the raft-builders worked under Grôm’s guidance. The broad water–some four or five miles across–was the tidal estuary of a great river which flowed out of the north-west. Its brimming current bore down from the interior jungles the trunks of many uprooted trees, which the tides of the estuary hurled back and strewed along the beach. The raft-builders, therefore, had plenty of material to work with. And the fear that lay chill upon their hearts urged them to a diligence that was far from their habit.

It was rather like working in a nightmare. From time to time would come a rush, a stampede, of deer or tapirs, along the strip of beach between the water and the cliff. The toiling men would draw aside till the rabble went by, then fall to work again.

Once, however, it was a herd of wild cattle, snorting, and tossing their wide, keen-pointed horns; and their trampling onrush filled the whole space so that the men had to plunge out into deep water to escape. Several, afraid of the big-mouthed, flesh-eating fish which infested the estuary at high tide, stayed too close in shore, and paid for their irresolution by being gored savagely.

It was about the full of the moon and the time of the longest days, and the raft-builders toiled feverishly the whole night through. By sunrise Bawr and Grôm estimated that there were rafts enough to carry the whole tribe, provided the present calm held on. They decided, however, to construct several more, in case some should prove less buoyant than they hoped.

But for this most wise provision Fate refused to grant the time.

A naked slip of a girl, her one scant garment of leopard skin caught upon a rock and twitched from off her loins as she ran, came fleeing down the hill-path, her hair afloat upon the fresh morning air. Straggling far behind her came a crowd of children, and old women carrying babies or bundles of dried meat.

“They must not come yet. They’ll be in the way!” cried Bawr angrily, waving them back. But they paid no attention–which showed that there was something they feared more even than the iron-fisted Chief.

“There are none of the young women or the old men, who can fight, among them,” said Grôm. “A-ya must have sent them, because the time has come. Let us wait for the young girl, who seems to bring a message.”

Breathless, and clutching at her bosom with one hand, the girl fell at Bawr’s feet.

“A-ya says, ‘Come quick!’” she gasped. “They are too many. They run over the fires and trample us.”

Grôm sprang forward with a cry, then stopped and looked at his Chief.

“Go, you,” said Bawr, “and bring them to us. I will stay here and look to the rafts.”

Taking a half-score of the strongest warriors with him, Grôm raced up the steep, torn with anxiety for the fate of A-ya and the children.

It was now about three-quarters tide, and the flood rising strongly. By way of precaution some of the rafts had been kept afloat, let down with ropes of vine to follow the last ebb, and guided carefully back on the returning flood. But most of them were lying where they had been built, or left by the preceding tide, along high-water mark, as hopelessly stranded, for the next two hours, as a birch log after a freshet. As the old women with children arrived, Bawr rushed them down the wet beach to the rafts which were afloat, appointing to each clumsy raft four men, with long, rough flattened poles, to manage it. For the moment, all these men had to do was hold their charges in place that they might not be swept away by the incoming tide.

When Grôm and his eager handful, passing a stream of trembling fugitives on the way, reached the level ground before the Caves, the sight that greeted them was tremendous and appalling. It looked as if some great country to the southward had gathered together all its beasts and then vomited them forth in one vast torrent, confused and irresistible, to the north. It was a wholesale migration, on such a scale as the modern world has never even dreamed of, but suggested in a feeble way by the torrential drift of the bison across the North American plains half a century ago, or the sudden, inexplicable marches of the lemming myriads out of the Scandinavian barrens that give them birth.

The shrill cries of the women, fighting like she-wolves in defense of the children and the home-caves, the hoarse shouts of the old men, weak but indomitable, were mingled with an indescribable medley of noises–gruntings, bellowings, howlings, roarings, bleatings and brayings–from the dreadful mob of beasts which besieged the open space behind the fires. Some of the beasts were maddened with their terror, some were in a fighting rage, some only wanted to escape the throng behind them. But all seemed bent upon passing the fires and getting into the Caves, as if they thought there to find refuge from the unknown fear.

At the extreme right of the line the two farthest fires were already overwhelmed, trodden out by frantic hooves, and three or four old men, with a couple of desperate young women, behind a barrier of slain elk and stags were fighting like furies to hold back the victorious onrush. Two of the old men were down, trodden out between the fires by blind hooves, and a third, jammed limply against the rocky wall beside the furthest cave, was being worried by a bear–hideously but aimlessly, as if the great beast hardly heeded what it was doing. There was something peculiarly terrifying in the animal’s preoccupation.

At the center of the line, immediately before the main Cave-mouth–whose yawning entrance seemed to be the objective of the swarming beasts–A-ya was heading the battle, with the lame slave, Ook-ootsk, crouched fighting at her side like a colossal frog gone mad. Here the fires were almost extinguished–but the line of slain beasts formed a tolerable barricade, upon the top of which the women leapt, stabbing with their spears and screeching shrill taunts, while the old men leaned upon the gory pile to save their strength with frugal precision. Here and there among the carcases was the body of a woman or an old man, impaled on the horn of a bull or ripped open by the rending antler of an elk. As Grôm and his men came shouting across the level a huge woolly rhinoceros plunged over the barrier, his bloody horn ploughing the carcases, trod down a couple of the defenders without appearing to see them, dashed through the nearest fire, and charged blindly into the Cave-mouth with his matted coat all ablaze. The children and old women who had not already fled down to the beach shrieked in horror. The frantic monster heeded them not at all, but went thundering on into the bowels of the cavern.

“Go back, all you women!” yelled Grôm above the tumult, as he and his men raced to the barrier. “Get down to the beach with the children. We’ll hold the rush back till you get down. Run! Run!”

Sobbing with the fury of the struggle, the women obeyed, darting back and pouncing upon their own little ones–all but A-ya, who remained doggedly at Grôm’s side.

“Go,” ordered Grôm fiercely. “The children need you. Get them all down.”

Sullenly the woman obeyed, seeing he was right, but still lusting for the fight, though her wearied arm could now do little more than lift the spear.

Under the shock of these fresh fighters, with lionlike heads, masterful eyes, and smashing, irresistible weapons, the front ranks of the animals recoiled, trampling those behind them; and for a few minutes the pressure was relieved. Grôm turned to the old men.

“You go now,” he ordered.