OLD MOK'S TALES.
It was worth while listening to Old Mok when he forgot himself and talked and became earnestly reminiscent in telling of what he had seen or had heard when he was young. One day there had been trouble in the cave, for Bark, left in charge, had neglected the fire and it had "gone out," and upon the return of his parents there had been blows and harsh language, and then much pivotal grinding together of dry sticks before a new flame was gained, and it was only after the odor of cooked flesh filled the place and strong jaws were busy that the anger of One-Ear had abated and the group became a comfortable one. Ab had come in hungry and the value of fire, after what had happened, was brought to his mind forcibly. He laid himself down upon the cave's floor near Old Mok, who was fashioning a shaft of some sort, and, as he lay, poked his toes at Beechleaf, who chuckled and gurgled as she rolled about, never for a moment relinquishing a portion of the slender shin bone of a deer, upon the flesh of which the family had fed. It was a short piece but full of marrow, and the child sucked and mumbled away at it in utmost bliss. Ab thought, somehow, of how poor would have been the eating with the meat uncooked, and looked at his hands, still reddened--for it was he who had twisted the stick which made the fire again. "Fire is good!" he said to Mok.
The old man kept his flint scraper going for a moment or two before he answered; then he grunted:
"Yes, it's good if you don't get burned. I've been burned," and he thrust out an arm upon which appeared a cicatrice.
Ab was interested. "Where did you get that?" he queried.
"Far from here, far beyond the black swamp and the red hills that are farther still. It was when I was strong."
"Tell me about it," said the youth.
"There is a fire country," answered Old Mok, "away beyond the swamp and woods and the place of the big rocks. It is a wonderful place. The fire comes out of the ground in long sheets and it is always the same. The rain and the snow do not stop it. Do I not know? Have I not seen it? Did I not get this scar going too near the flame and stumbling and falling against a hot rock almost within it? There is too much fire sometimes!"
The old man continued: "There are many places of fire. They are to the east and south. Some of the Shell People who have gone far down the river have seen them. But the one where I was burned is not so far away as they; it is up the river to the northwest."
And Ab was interested and questioned Old Mok further about the strange region where flames came from the ground as bushes grow, and where snow or water did not make them disappear. He was destined, at a later day, to be very glad that he had learned the little that was told him. But to-night he was intent only on getting all the tales he could from the veteran while he was in the mood. "Tell about the Shell People," he cried, "and who they are and where they came from. They are different from us."
"Yes, they are different from us," said Old Mok, "but there was a time, I have heard it told, when we were like them. The very old men say that their grandfathers told them that once there were only Shell People anywhere in this country, the people who lived along the shores and who never hunted nor went far away from the little islands, because they were afraid of the beasts in the forests. Sometimes they would venture into the wood to gather nuts and roots, but they lived mostly on the fish and clams. But there came a time when brave men were born among them who said they would have more of the forest things, and that they would no longer stay fearfully upon the little islands. So they came into the forest and the Cave Men began. And I think this story true."
"I think it is true," Old Mok continued, "because the Shell People, you can see, must have lived very long where they are now. Up and down the creek where they live and along other creeks there lie banks of earth which are very long and reach far back. And this is not really earth, but is all made up of shells and bones and stone spearheads and the things which lie about a Shell Man's place. I know, for I have dug into these long banks myself and have seen that of which I tell. Long, very long, must the Shell People have lived along the creeks and shores to have made the banks of bones and shells so high."
And Old Mok was right. They talk of us as the descendants of an Aryan race. Never from Aryan alone came the drifting, changing Western being of to-day. But a part of him was born where bald plains were or where were olive trees and roses. All modern science, and modern thoughtfulness, and all later broadened intelligence are yielding to an admission of the fact that he, though of course commingling with his visitors of the ages, was born and changed where he now exists. The kitchen-midden--the name given by scientists to refuse from his dwelling places--the kitchen-middens of Denmark, as Denmark is to-day, alone, regardless of other fields, suffice to tell a wondrous story. Imagine a kitchen-midden, that is to say the detritus of ordinary living in different ages, accumulated along the side of some ancient water course, having for its dimensions miles in length, extending hundreds of yards back from the margin of this creek, of tens and tens of thousands of years ago, and having a depth of often many feet along this water course. Imagine this vast deposit telling the history of a thousand centuries or more, beginning first with the deposit of clams and mussel shells and of the shells of such other creatures as might inhabit this river seeking its way to the North Sea. Imagine this deposit increasing year after year and century by century, but changing its character and quality as it rose, and the base is laid for reasoning.
At first these creatures who ranged up and down the ancient Danish creek and devoured the clams and periwinkles must have been, as one might say, but little more than surely anthropoid. Could such as these have migrated from the Asiatic plateaus?
The kitchen-middens tell the early story with greater accuracy than could any writer who ever lifted pen. Here the creek-loving, ape-like creatures ranged up and down and quelled their appetites. They died after they had begotten sons and daughters; and to these sons and daughters came an added intelligence, brought from experience and shifting surroundings. The kitchen-middens give graphic details. The bottom layer, as has been said, is but of shells. Above it, in another layer, counting thousands of years in growth, appear the cracked bones of then existing animals and appear also traces of charred wood, showing that primitive man had learned what fire was. And later come the rudely carved bones of the mammoth and woolly rhinoceros and the Irish elk; then come rude flint instruments, and later the age of smoothed stone, with all its accompanying fossils, bones and indications; and so on upward, with a steady sweep, until close to the surface of this kitchen-midden appear the bronze spear, the axhead and the rude dagger of the being who became the Druid and who is an ancestor whom we recognize. From the kitchen-midden to the pinnacle of all that is great to-day extends a chain not a link of which is weak.
"They tell strange stories, too, the Shell People," Old Mok continued, "for they are greater story-tellers than the Cave Men are, more of them being together in one place, and the old men always tell the tales to the children so that they are never forgotten by any of the people. They say that once huge things came out of the great waters and up the creeks, such as even the big cave tiger dare not face. And the old men say that their grandfathers once saw with their own eyes a monster serpent many times as large as the one you two saw, which came swimming up the creek and seized upon the river horses there and devoured them as easily as the cave bear would a little deer. And the serpent seized upon some of the Cave People who were upon the water and devoured them as well, though such as they were but a mouthful to him. And this tale, too, I believe, for the old Shell Men who told me what their grandfathers had seen were not of the foolish sort."
"But of another sort of story they have told me," Mok continued, "I think little. The old men tell of a time when those who went down the river to the greater river and followed it down to the sea, which seems to have no end, saw what no man can see to-day. But they do not say that their grandfathers saw these things. They only say that their grandfathers told of what had been told them by their grandfathers farther back, of a story which had come down to them, so old that it was older than the great trees were, of monstrous things which swam along the shores and which were not serpents, though they had long necks and serpent heads, because they had great bodies which were driven by flippers through the water as the beaver goes with his broad feet. And at the same time, the old story goes, were great birds, far taller than a man, who fed where now the bustards and the capercailzie are. And these tales I do not believe, though I have seen bones washed from the riversides and hillsides by the rains which must have come from creatures different from those we meet now in the forests or the waters. They are wonderful story-tellers, the old men of the Shell People."
"And they tell other strange stories," continued the old man. "They say that very long ago the cold and ice came down, and all the people and animals fled before it, and that the summer was cold as now the winter is, and that the men and beasts fled together to the south, and were there for a long time, but came back again as the cold and ice went back. They say, too, that in still later times, the fireplaces where the flames came out of great cracks in the earth were in tens of places where they are in one now, and that, even in the ice time, the flames came up, and that the ice was melted and then ran in rivers to the sea. And these things I do not believe, for how can men tell of what there was so long ago? They are but the gabblings of the old, who talk so much."
Many other stories the veteran told, but what most affected Ab was his account of the vale of fire. He hoped to see it sometime.