As he held the fish in his hands, he smelt the fresh blood from the wound made by the claws of the fish-hawk and it made him hungrier than ever. Half starved as he was, he could have eaten anything, and without thinking any more about it, he tore the fish apart and put a piece of it in his mouth. It tasted strange to him, and he did not like it, but his stomach was very empty, and almost before he knew what he was about, he had eaten the whole fish.
After that, he felt better, and sat on the edge of the lake for a long time, watching the fish swimming about in the shallow water. Then he thought of his wife. She would want something to eat, too. How could he get another fish? He tried for a long time to catch one in his hands, but they were too quick for him.
Then he thought of his club, and taking it in his hands, he did his best to hit one of the fish with it, but every time he failed. Once he struck so hard that the club was splintered against a rock, and the heavy end of it broken off. Adh looked at the piece left in his hands and felt sad, for he loved his club, and always carried it about with him. Pretty soon he noticed, as he felt the broken and splintered end of the stick, that it was very sharp, and he thought to himself, why could he not drive the sharp end into the back of one of the fish, as it lay in the mud. It took him a long time to do this, but by lying among the rushes, and keeping very quiet, he finally succeeded. Reaching down, he seized the fish he had speared in his hands.
"Look!" said Mother Nature to the Sun. "My new Man has made himself a spear."
When Adh gave the fish to his wife, she did not understand what he wanted her to do with it, but finally, by chattering, and making signs, he got her to eat a little of it. The new kind of food made her rather sick, at first, but after a while, as there was nothing else to eat, she made a meal of it, and from then on Adh went to the lake every day and speared a fish or two for their dinner. By the time the cold rainy season was over, and the warm weather had come again, he and his wife had grown quite used to eating fish, and had even got to like it.
Mother Nature watched all this and smiled to herself.
"See how quickly my Ape-Man is learning to think," she said to the Sun. "Already he has found a home, and taught himself to get food from the rivers and lakes, instead of from the trees and bushes, and he has made himself a spear. I knew he was not going to let himself starve."
THE WOODEN SPEAR