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

by Frederic Arnold Kummer

"You see," said Mother Nature to the Sun, "whenever I want my new Man to think, I send him some kind of trouble. If I hadn't made him hungry, he would never have got the idea of pulling the bunch of fruit out of the tree with his stick, and now, because I made him cold and wet, he has found himself a home."

"What are you going to make him do next?" asked the Sun.

"Wait and see," said Mother Nature. "But don't forget that I have given him a wife and child to think about, now, and he will do more, on their account, than he would ever do, alone, for in his simple way, he loves them."

"What is Love?" asked the Sun.

"It is one of the great laws of the Universe, that God has made, a feeling, or instinct, that causes all His creatures to want a mate to live with, and thus have children. If it were not for this law, there would never be any children, and all the living creatures on the Earth would disappear in a very little while."

"This Love must be a very queer thing," said the Sun. "I do not understand it."

"And yet, Sun, you will see, some day, that it is the most wonderful law that God has made. Without it, Man would never amount to anything at all. From now on my creature Adh is going to think of doing a great many things, because of his wife and child, that he would not think of doing without them."

When Adh got his wife and child into the cave, they were no longer cold and wet, but they were still very hungry, and all day long the Ape-Man wandered through the valley, looking for something to eat. Sometimes, when all he could find was a few dried berries, or a handful of little grains from the tall grasses that grew here and there, he would carry them back to his wife, instead of eating them himself. In the past, before he had any wife, he would never have thought of such a thing as going hungry for the sake of some one else, but now it was different; he thought of his wife and child.

At last there came a day when from morning to night he could not find a single scrap of food. Everything was gone, and he was weak from hunger. He went down to the shore of the little lake that lay in the bottom of the valley, and throwing himself on the ground, drank as much water as he could, to fill his empty stomach. Then he sat up and stared at the cold, grey sky, not knowing what to do. Presently he saw a great bird, like a fish-hawk, swoop down to the surface of the lake, and rise a moment later with a shining fish in its claws. Then, as Adh watched, another hawk flew up and tried to take the fish away from the first one. The two birds screamed and tore at each other, and as they fought, the fish the first one had been carrying fell to the ground close to where Adh was sitting.

He walked over to where it lay, and picked it up, more from curiosity than anything else, for he had never thought of such a thing as eating a fish. For thousands of years his parents before him had eaten nothing but fruit, and roots, and nuts, with occasionally an egg or a young bird, and he had always done just as they had done. He did not know that the flesh of fish, or animals, was good to eat.