The First Days of Man, as Narrated Quite Simply for Young Readers

by Frederic Arnold Kummer

If these ape-like creatures had kept on living in the same sort of a place, where the food grew in high trees, and the forest beneath was filled with savage animals ready to eat them up, they would have kept right on being apes. Indeed, most of them have stayed that way, for we find their descendants living in the jungles of the tropics to-day, not very different from the way they were so many hundreds of thousands of years ago. But about that time Mother Nature stopped by to see how things on the Earth were getting along.

"What are those creatures doing that I spoke to you about?" she asked the Sun.

"Nothing, that I can see," the Sun replied, "except playing about in the tree tops, and eating nuts and fruit."

"That won't do at all," said Mother Nature. "We must get them up into the hills, where things will be different. I see some splendid big valleys over there on the mountain side, where there aren't many wild beasts to eat them, and where the trees and bushes are low, and full of nuts and fruit. It is the very place for them."

"How are you going to get them there?" asked the Sun.

"I think I will have Wind blow up a storm, and set the jungle on fire with Lightning. Then, when the fire drives them up the mountain side, some of them will surely wander into the valleys."

So the Wind blew up a great storm, and the Lightning flashed and set the jungle on fire, and all the beasts ran before the flames, afraid. Some went in one direction and some in another, but a few of the ape-like animals ran into the hills, and here they found a wide, peaceful valley, with a stream running through it, and plenty of food about for them to eat, so they took refuge there.

It was not so warm in the mountain country as it had been in the jungle below, because the higher up in the air we go, the cooler it gets, and we often see snow on the tops of high mountains, even in the middle of summer. And where it is cooler, the trees do not grow so thick and tall and close together as they do in the hot jungle. So the trees and bushes in the valley which the ape-like creatures had found were smaller, and easier to climb than the ones they had been used to, and on many of them the fruit and nuts hung so close to the ground that they could easily be picked without climbing at all. There were no savage animals in the valley, either, for the fierce flesh-eating beasts preferred to stay down in the jungle, where there was always plenty for them to eat.

The ape creatures had an easy time of it in their new home. When they saw that no enemies came to eat them up, and that there was plenty of food all about, fruit, and nuts, and sweet-tasting roots that grew underground, they began to get out of the habit of spending all their time in the trees. But they still ran about on all fours, like the other animals.