A GREAT STEP FORWARD.
There came to Ab and Lightfoot that comfort which comes with laboring for something desired. In all that the two did amid their pleasant surroundings life became a greater thing because its dangers were so lessened and its burdens lightened. But they were not long the sole human beings in the Fire Valley. There was room for many and soon Old Mok took up his permanent abode with them, for he was most contented when with Ab, who seemed so like a son to him. A cave of his own was dug for Mok, where, with his carving and his making of arrows and spearheads, he was happy in his old age. Soon followed a hegira which made, for the first time, a community. The whole family of Ab, One-Ear, Red-Spot and Bark and Beech-leaf and the later ones, all came, and another cave was made, and then old Hilltop was persuaded to follow the example and come with Moonface and Branch and Stone Arm, his big sons, and the group, thus established and naturally protected, feared nothing which might happen. The effect of daily counsel together soon made itself distinctly felt, and, under circumstances so different, many of the old ways were departed from. Half a mile to the south the creek, which made a bend adown its course, tumbled into the river and upon the river were wild fowl in abundance and in its depths were fish. The forest abounded in game and there were great nut-bearing trees and the wild fruits in their season. Wild bees hovered over the flowers in the open places and there were hoards of wild honey to be found in the hollows of deadened trunks or in the high rock crevices. A great honey-gatherer, by the way, was Lightfoot, who could climb so well, and who, furthermore, had her own fancy for sweet things. It was either Bark or Moonface who usually accompanied her on her expeditions, and they brought back great store of this attractive spoil. The years passed and the community grew, not merely in numbers, but intelligence. Though always an adviser with Old Mok, Ab's chief male companion in adventure was the stanch Hilltop, who was a man worth hunting with. Having two such men to lead and with a force so strong behind them the valley people were able to cope with the more dangerous animals venturesomely, and soon the number of these was so decreased that even the children might venture a little way beyond the steep barriers which had been raised where the flame circle had its gaps. The opening to the north was closed by a high stone wall and that along the creek defended as effectively, in a different way. They were having good times in the valley.
At first, the home of all was in the caves dug in the soft rock of the ledge, for of those who came to the novel refuge there was, for a season, none who could sleep in the bright light from the never-waning flames. There came a time, though, when, in midsummer, Ab grumbled at the heat within his cave and he and Lightfoot built for themselves an outside refuge, made of a bark-covered "lean-to" of long branches propped against the rock. Thus was the first house made. The habitation proved so comfortable that others in the valley imitated it and soon there was a hive of similar huts along the foot of the overhanging precipice. When the short, sharp winter came, all did not seek their caves again, but the huts were made warmer by the addition to their walls of bark and skins, and cave dwelling in the valley was finally abandoned. There was one exception. Old Mok would not leave his warm retreat, and, as long as he lived, his rock burrow was his home.
There came also, as recruits, young men, friends of the young men of the valley, and the band waxed and waned, for nothing could at once change the roving and independent habits of the cave men. But there came children to the mothers, the broad Moonface being especially to the fore in this regard, and a fine group of youngsters played and straggled up and down the creek and fought valiantly together, as cave children should. The heads of families were friendly, though independent. Usually they lived each without any reference to anyone else, but when a great hunt was on, or any emergency called, the band came together and fought, for the time, under Ab's tacitly admitted leadership. And the young men brought wives from the country round.
The area of improvement widened. Around the Fire Village the zone of safety spread. The roar of the great cave tiger was less often heard within miles of the flaming torches of the valley so inhabited. There grew into existence something almost like a system of traffic, for, from distant parts, hitherto unknown, came other cave men, bringing skins, or flints, or tusks for carving, which they were eager to exchange for the new weapon and for instruction in its uses. Ab was the first chieftain, the first to draw about him a clan of followers. The cave men were taking their first lesson in a slight, half unconfessed obedience, that first essential of community life where there is yet no law, not even the unwritten law of custom.
Running in and out among the children, sometimes pummeled by them, were a score or two of gray, four-footed, bone-awaiting creatures, who, though as yet uncounted in such relation, were destined to furnish a factor in man's advancement. They were wolves and yet no longer wolves. They had learned to cling to man, but were not yet intelligent enough or taught enough to aid him in his hunting. They were the dogs of the future, the four-footed things destined to become the closest friends of men of future ages, the descendants of the four cubs Ab and Oak had taken from the dens so many years before.
It was humanizing for the children, this association of such a number together, though they ran only a little less wildly than those who had heretofore been born in the isolated caves. There came more of an average of intelligence among them, thus associated, though but little more attention was paid them than the cave men had afforded offspring in the past. There had come to Ab after Little Mok two strong sons, Reindeer and Sure-Aim, very much like him in his youth, but of them, until they reached the age of help and hunting, he saw little. Lightfoot regarded them far more closely, for, despite the many duties which had come upon her, there never disappeared the mother's tenderness and watchfulness. And so it was with Moonface, whose brood was so great, and who was like a noisy hen with chickens. So existed the hovering mother instinct with all the women of the valley, though then the mothers fished and hunted and had stirring events to distract them from domesticity and close affection almost as much as had the men.
From this oddly formed community came a difference in certain ways of doing certain things, which changed man's status, which made a revolution second only to that made by the bow and for which even men of thought have not accounted as they should have done, with the illustration before them in our own times of what has followed so swiftly the use of steam and, later, of electricity. Men write of and wonder at the strange gap between what are called the Paleolithic and the Neolithic ages, that is, between the ages when the spearheads and ax and arrowheads were of stone chipped roughly into shape, and the age of stone even-edged and smoothly polished. There was really no gap worth speaking of. The Paleolithic age changed as suddenly into the Neolithic as the age of horse power changed into that of steam and electricity, allowance being always made for the slower transmission of a new intelligence in the days when men lived alone and when a hundred years in the diffusion of knowledge was as a year to-day.
One day Ab went into Old Mok's cave grumbling. "I shot an arrow into a great deer," he said, "and I was close and shot it with all my force, but the beast ran before it fell and we had far to carry the meat. I tore the arrow from him and the blood upon the shaft showed that it had not gone half way in. I looked at the arrow and there was a jagged point uprising from its side. How can a man drive deeply an arrow which is so rough? Are you getting too old to make good spears and arrows, Mok?" And the man fumed a little. Old Mok made no reply, but he thought long and deeply after Ab had left the cave. Certainly Ab must have good arrows! Was there any way of bettering them? And, the next day, the crippled old man might have been seen looking for something beside the creek where it found its exit from the valley. There were stones ground into smoothness tossed up along the shore and the old man studied them most carefully. Many times he had bent over a stream, watching, thinking, but this time he acted. He noted a small sandstone block against which were rasping stones of harder texture, and he picked this from the tumbling current and carried it to his cave. Then, pouring a little water upon a depression in the stone's face, he selected his best big arrowhead and began rubbing it upon the wet sandstone. It was a weary work, for flint and sandstone are different things and flint is much the harder, but there came a slow result. Smoother and smoother became the chipped arrowhead, and two days later--for all the waking hours of two days were required in the weary grinding--Old Mok gave to Ab an arrow as smooth of surface and keen of edge as ever flew from bow while stone was used. And not many years passed--as years are counted in old history--before the smoothed stone weaponhead became the common property of cave men. The time of chipped stone had ended and that of smoothed stone had begun. There was no space between them to be counted now. One swiftly became the other. It was a matter of necessity, this exhibition of enterprise and sense by the early man in the prompt general utilization of a new discovery. And not alone in the improvements in means which came when men of the hunting type were so gathered in a community were the bow and the smoothed implements, though these were the greatest of the discoveries of the epoch. The fishermen who went to the river were not content with the raft-like devices of the aquatic Shell People and learned, in time, that hollowed logs would float and that, with the aid of fire and flint axes, a great log could be hollowed. And never a Phoenician ship-builder, never a Fulton of the steamer, never a modern designer of great yachts, stood higher in the estimation of his fellows than stood the expert in the making of the rude boats, as uncouth in appearance as the river-horse which sometimes upset them, but from which men could, at least, let down their lines or dart their spears to secure the fish in the teeming waters. And the fishermen had better spears and hooks now, for comparison was necessarily always made among devices, and bone barbs and hooks were whittled out from which the fish no longer often floundered. There came, in time, the making of rude nets, plaited simply from the tough marsh grasses, but they served the purpose and lessened somewhat the gravity of the great food question.