But most girls and many women can play at any time as naturally and spontaneously as a child or a kitten. Dêh-Yān, fortunately for herself, and for Pŭl-Yūn (and for you and me)—Dêh-Yān, I say, possessed this happy faculty of amusing herself with whatever scrap of stone, stick or string came within her reach. These strung-drills for example, she was for ever stretching, releasing, twanging the things, studying their actions and reactions, wondering at the difference in their notes, and had come within a little of discovering the germ of the lyre, when—well, what she did discover was of more importance than music to mankind in the making.
Pŭl-Yūn had been for a month and more carving a tom-lynx out of a piece of bone. It was a spirited performance, for the man, like many of his race, was an artist. At this work Dêh-Yān, whose faculty lay in another direction, could not assist him, and thus, whilst he bent over his work, she was trifling with one of the strung-drills temporarily out of use. She had been trimming the hide of the roebuck and was still holding a sharp-edged shard of chert in her left hand, the hand which also held the taut, bent wood. She was plucking and releasing the string, listening to the twang of it, and by chance—by the veriest chance—the shard pricked her palm. She transferred it to her right, the string-hand, and plucked again. The loosened cord caught the stone, which flew across the cave and struck Pŭl-Yūn above the ear, drawing blood.
"Wah! what was that?" he asked without temper, and would be shown how she had done the trick.
It was amazing. Dêh-Yān, whilst amusing herself, had stumbled upon a property of the bent stick and cord which had escaped the dull eyes of countless generations of routine-ridden, unimaginative men.
The new play diverted the girl, and her husband through her, albeit neither as yet had caught a glimpse of its significance. Indeed, it was three days before Dêh-Yān (Dêh-Yān again!) discovered that a stick could be propelled endlong by the same agency.
They had hit upon the root-idea of the bow and arrow without knowing it, and like a thousand other excellent ideas, this might have perished without bearing fruit, but for the occasion which revealed its importance, lifting the fortuitous combination of two sticks and a string from the status of a toy to the dignity of a lethal weapon of the first rank.
[The luck of inventions is very various. We know a crabbed octogenarian who, in boyhood, invented a certain tool but could find no one to take it up, nor had means to patent and push it himself. He broke his model in chagrin, and sixty years later saw another man rediscover his idea and win wealth and fame by his discovery.]
It will be understood that since the Ghost-Bear's attempted escalade the youthful householders had never felt safe. But suspense and fear did not break them down as a modern couple under similar conditions might have been broken down. Early man was a hunting animal, hunted in turn by beasts stronger but less cunning than himself. Among the first recollections of our ancestors would be that thrilling cry of Wolf! and the scurry for shelter of tiny bare feet up rock-faces too steep for the blunt claws of the secular enemy of childhood. When the shadows lengthened the fear of Bears grew urgent (as it does to those cave-children's far-removed descendants to-day in nurseries lit by electric lights), a fear sedulously instilled by the careful cave-mother, for the shaggy urchin who "didn't care," and who adventured one step too far beyond the circle of fire-light, never came back. (And left no progeny!)
We are the lineal heirs of a race of creatures who had the very best reasons for dreading the dark, hence you shall find among your acquaintance tall men of fine physique and cultivated women whose almost complete emancipation does not include the liberty of walking around their own suburban tennis-courts alone after nightfall.