[Illustration: Clay bowls]
"Of clay!" Thorn said, looking at pieces wonderingly. "I never saw a bowl like that."
Periwinkle threw the oyster shells and pieces of broken bowl up on the shell heap. "We throw all such things in a heap," he said. "Then they are out of the way and will not cut our feet."
After working for days and days, the men got the tree for the dug-out hacked down. Then they hacked off a log and dragged it down to the shore. Here they began to make the dug-out.
They built a fire all along the top of the log. It burned down slowly. The men watched the fire and kept putting on more sticks. If it burned too near the edge, they put on water or clay or wet moss to stop it.
"You see, they burn out only the middle of the log and leave good strong thick sides to the boat," said Periwinkle.
After the fire had burned down into the log a way, the men raked off the hot coals. The wood beneath was burned to charcoal. The men scraped it off with stone scrapers. Then they put on more fire and again burned the log.
"The fire will burn down faster, now that the charcoal is scraped off," said Periwinkle.
The men worked for a long time, burning and scraping away, burning and scraping, until they had dug a little hollow all along the middle of the log.
Then one man said, "We have worked enough."
And the men dropped their scrapers and went off.
The next day Thorn walked along the beach and picked up pretty shells.
"These are for the folks at home," he said to Periwinkle. "They will put them on the strings around their necks."
"Here is my bow," he went on, handing it to Periwinkle. "You may keep it. I can make another. I am going back to my grandfather's now."
Periwinkle and Clam and some of the men went part way with Thorn. They walked for a long time through fir forests and then came to the forests of oak and beech and ash and chestnut. Here Thorn left his friends, and waved his arm to them as he ran on to his grandfather's. The shell people went back to their home by the sea.
CHAPTER XIV
THE FEAST OF MAMMOTH'S MEAT
One morning after Thorn had come back to his grandfather's cave, he woke up with tears on his face.
"Last night when I was asleep," he said to himself, "my shadow self went away to the home cave. And there it saw my mother and Pineknot and the baby sitting about the fire, just as they used to sit. And they were talking about me, saying that they wanted to see me. And I want to go home to see them."
The homesick boy went into the woods for comfort; he loved to watch the wild things going about. Not far off, he saw a herd of mammoths feeding. He never tired of looking at the big hairy elephants with their turned-up tusks and long snaky trunks. They were reaching up for the tender leaves of the birch, or needles of the hemlock, and would carry the green stuff to their mouths with their trunks. Young ones with shaggy coats of woolly hair, were playing about their mothers or eating grass. Sometimes one of the big mothers would give her young one a bunch of leaves. Then she would rub it gently with her trunk, petting it.
The herd ate on toward the edge of the woods. Then, following a big mammoth, it left the forest and went toward a swamp.
Thorn slipped down from his tree and ran to another one on the edge of the woods, where he could get a better view. From here he saw the mammoths out in the swamp. Some were drinking, others were wallowing, and still others were throwing water over themselves with their trunks. After getting a thick coat of mud on their shaggy skins, the herd began to leave the swamp.
But one big mammoth did not leave with the others. He could not; he had gone far out in the swamp. His feet sank in the soft mud; and when he tried to pull them out, he found them stuck fast. Then he began to trumpet. At this the whole herd grew uneasy and turned back and walked round him, waving their trunks and trumpeting and throwing mud and water.
