The girl's wallet lay where it had fallen disgorging crushed berries and disclosing a certain ration of jerked meat which she had brought with her for the day. An extraordinary and wholly irrational desire suddenly possessed her to capture and tame this man. He promised to be nice in another sense than the gastronomical. She really was pitying him, but of this she was unaware, for pity was an emotion unknown to the Little Moons, who had no equivalent for the word in their speech.
Having bathed his head in her turn and brought him round, the girl fed her man with bits of meat and presently found him stronger. It was not that the food was assimilated; it would be an hour before it passed out of the stomach and was picked up and distributed, but the nerves sent word along that help had arrived and the system responded sympathetically. He looked better, more beautiful than any man had ever looked to Dêh-Yān. Besides he was her discovery, her capture. No one else, man or woman, should share her possession; he was her very own. Here came into play the sense of property, but behind it gratitude awoke, a very rare growth in palæolithic times, as rare as pity. She sate thinking, hand to mouth, her man still slowly eating, restraining his ravenousness, enjoying the food as he had never enjoyed food in his life of seventeen years or so.
What was to do next? A shrill cry from above brought on the crisis. The children had missed her and were growing anxious: if one of those youngsters caught a glimpse, had the faintest inkling, she would lose her treasure.
Necessity was upon her, she must act, and act decisively. Swiftly shovelling with both hands the rest of her day's food from the bottom of the wallet into the lap of the man, she whispered quick and low, "More to-morrow!" and began to re-climb the face.
The boys above saw her coming and grinned roguishly at her slow movements, and more at her empty wallet and juice-stained kilt and bleeding head. She got her breath before chasing and smacking the biggest, then, marshalling her little army, she kept it hard at work until the sun dipped behind the snows and 'twas time to be making for camp.
A HOUSEKEEPING
"More to-morrow," the Master-Girl had said, but to-morrow has a knack of taking the bit in its teeth. When Dêh-Yān looked forth at the weather very early next morning she knew that her path was blocked. Snow had fallen in the night and was still falling from clouds which were creeping down the wooded shoulders of the foot-hills after powdering their bare polls with the first fall of autumn. The nine white giants which never changed were hidden, and the horrid, bitter, frozen river of ice which came winding down from the closed valley which we call the Lap of the Gods, bearing dirt and stones upon its cracked and dirty back, was hidden too.