HARD-NEED MOTHER OF INVENTION
The days wore. Dêh-Yān went about her hunting with extreme precaution, cultivated eyes all over her brown body, pricked her small hairy ears perpetually, and moved through the most tangled coverts of trailing pine as silently as a fox.
Acting upon her husband's suggestion, she laid a trail about the main glen, and having completed the circuit, sate a day out ambushed beside her tracks to wit if any creature, whether lynx, wolf, ghost-bear or man should be following up her spoor. None showed, and she grew uplifted of heart again, and as luck would have it, her hunting prospered for once beyond reason.
A roebuck met her face to face in a pass between two rocks. The small fellow was more than full-headed, he bore eight three-inch tines, any one of which was death to a naked woman, and for a moment meant battle; but, after a startled grunt, tossed his head and doubled in panic. Dêh-Yān's throwing-stick broke his off-hind leg below the hough, and she finished him after a fight in which the odds were still about even, for the charges of a roebuck at bay, even when upon three legs, are sudden and very difficult to avoid in deep snow. If he had once got the girl down she would never have risen again; but the affair went well, and Dêh-Yān, toiling mightily, won home with a load of meat and a deep-piled, mossy skin for her man to sit upon.
She had restocked the cave with missiles: scores of stones, as heavy as she could manage, were piled against the rock-sides of the dwelling ready at need. This was a three days' labour, and it was whilst resting after her last load and discussing the arrangement of their stores of artillery, that the singular incident occurred which resulted in—but I will not anticipate. The element of luck mingles in the best-laid schemes of human intelligence, chances lie thick about us, and genius consists in the recognition and utilisation of chance.
These strung-drills were common form to Pŭl-Yūn who had known them all his life, and expected nothing more from them than they were made to yield, and had long since disclosed of use. As for playing with them, it had no more occurred to him to amuse himself by playing tricks with a strung-drill than it occurs to your harvestman to use his scythe handle as a vaulting-pole, or to your gardener to practise throwing with his fork at a target, or to toss and catch his spade. The implements of labour are invested with the seriousness due to maturity; respect should be paid to them; if one gets larking something is sure to be broken. They are tools, not toys.
But, to the girl a strung-drill was a novelty, a thing beautiful and astonishing, an inexhaustible source of wonder and amusement, fraught with all manner of latent possibilities.
To Pŭl-Yūn, a good conservative, it was unimprovable. The girl's audacious innovation had already outpaced him. There was much that was interesting, but nought that was sacred in the thing to her; she had amazed her husband by one improvement, and was about to astonish him yet more. Not that she was aware of what was coming, no; she was simply uneasy as yet in the presence of a tricky piece of mechanism with unexplored capacities of use and delight in it. She did not sit down to invent, she simply started to play. And in this her sex and temperament gave her a pull over her comrade. A man loses much of his zeal for, if not the power of playing soon after sixteen—that is to say for anything that is not a contest or a gamble. The so-called sports of manhood, cricket, footer, rowing, hunting and what-not, are usually very exhausting, and frequently outrageously expensive forms of business, from which the primary idea and essential qualities of play have disappeared. For it is of the very quiddity of play that it should be gay, irresponsible, jolly in a word; and who will be hardy enough to claim gaiety for croquet, or irresponsibility for bridge?