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

by Frederic Arnold Kummer

He called to them to join him, which they did, chattering loudly over his bravery in going outside the valley. They too were very hungry, so Ma-Ra showed them the boar he had killed, and gave them some of the meat to eat. They liked it, as he had, and soon their stomachs too were full. Then the three of them carried the body of the boar up over the steep rocks beside the waterfall, and took it home to the caves, very proud of what they had done.

That night Ma-Ra's family had a big feast, and Ra patted his grandson on the back and said a word or two which meant, in their simple language, that he had done well. The next day several parties of the cave men went out to hunt for the new sort of food. They found many different kinds of animals, in the marsh, and on the hillsides around the valley, and they ate them, and soon got to like the flesh of animals better even than they had liked the raw fish.

That winter the tribe did not go hungry, and the new food they had found, as well as the danger of hunting for it, made them bolder and fiercer than ever. There were scarcely any animals that they were afraid of now, except the great mammoth elephants, which we call mastodons, and the huge hairy rhinoceros, which sometimes attacked them in the marsh, and the terrible sabre-toothed tigers.

Food was not the only thing the cave people got from the bodies of the animals they killed. For one thing, they found a way to use the skins.

At first, finding them tough and not fit to eat, they threw them away, but Mother Nature did not like this. She wanted her children to learn to use the furry skins of the animals they killed. So, one day, when Ma-Ra and some of his friends were stripping the skin from an animal they had speared, in the marsh land, she called Cold and Rain to her and told them to make Ma-Ra and his companions just as uncomfortable as they could.

Cold and Rain laughed when they heard this, for they loved to make the funny little creatures dance, so they poured down such a bitter cold rain that Ma-Ra and the others were chilled to the bone.

Ma-Ra, his teeth chattering from the cold, looked at the skin he had just stripped from a small bear. The skin was still warm, and without thinking he wrapped it about his head and shoulders to keep off the cold rain. His friends did not understand what he was about, at first, but soon they saw that Ma-Ra was warm, while they were not, and they tried to take the skin away from him, but he would not give it up.

When the rain was over, and the party had returned to the valley, Ma-Ra took the skin of the bear with him and hung it up on the wall of the cave.

The next day, when he went to get it, he was very much disappointed to find that it had dried hard and stiff as a board, and seemed no longer of any use to him.