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

by Frederic Arnold Kummer

Long before that, some of the hunters, in making handles for their knives out of bone, or wood, had carved these handles into rude shapes, that looked something like an animal, or a man, but Tor had never seen any drawings, because none had been made. Sometimes he would find a flat piece of rock with weather marks, or cracks on it that reminded him of things he had seen—fish, or the heads of bears, or men. He would look at these for a long time, and try to copy them with his sharp bit of flint, but it was very hard for him to make anything that looked like the objects he saw about him.

Still, Tor kept on trying, while the other boys laughed at him, because he would not go with them to swim, or hunt, or look for fish in the shallow pools at the head of the great marsh, but Tor did not mind, for he was happy scratching on his rocks in the sun.

One day, after many trials, he at last drew something on a flat stone that looked a little like a fish, and he ran to the cave with it and showed it to his father. Tor's father, instead of being pleased, was angry with him, and told him he had better go with the other boys and learn to spear fish, and not waste his time trying to make pictures of them. Tor's mother, however, liked the little drawing, and kept it in the cave.

As Tor grew older he learned to draw many things with his sharp piece of flint—figures of animals and birds, and some of them were so good that his friends could tell what they were, and got him to scratch others for them on bits of bone, or the handles of their knives. He made larger drawings, too, on the walls of the caves, that looked like bears, and mammoths, and wild boars.

After a time, he found a bed of smooth red and yellow clay along the river bank, and used it, and the juice of berries, to colour the figures he drew upon the cave walls. Some of these coloured drawings we find even to-day, on the walls of caves in France and other countries, and protected as they have been from the wind and rain, the colours of these early crude pictures are as bright and clear as when they were first made, fifty thousand years ago.

One day, while playing with some of the clay he had found along the river bank, Tor began to roll a lump of it between his fingers, pleased because it was so smooth and easy to shape. At first he made only round balls, rolling them under his hand on the top of a flat stone, but presently he found that he could press a hollow in the lumps of soft clay, making something that looked like the cup-shaped shells of the large nuts which the tribe used for carrying water. Very carefully Tor smoothed and patted his lump of clay until he had formed a little round bowl, thick and clumsy, but still large enough to hold several drinks of water. The thought that he had made something new pleased him, and he took it home with him and put it on a ledge of rock in the cave. Then he forgot all about it.

When his mother found it, in the morning, it was quite hard and dry. She did not know what it was, at first, but Tor told her how he had made it from the river clay, and she was so pleased that she took it down to the stream with her, and showed it to some of the other women, who had come to fetch drinking water in bowls made of the shells of large nuts. But when Tor's mother came back to the cave with the clay bowl full of drinking water, it got soft and began to lose its shape, which made the other women laugh at her, and at Tor, for trying to make a drinking cup out of mud. Then Tor's mother became angry, and threw the bowl into the fire which she had made before the cave, to cook fish for breakfast. And Tor she sent away to the hills about the valley, to gather eggs from the nests of the wild fowl which lived there.

Tor felt very badly at the loss of his little bowl, and when he got back to the caves that night, and his mother was busy with the eggs he had brought, he took a stick and began to poke about in the hot ashes of the fire, hoping to find the bowl again.

At last he discovered it, among the coals at the bottom of the fire, and dragged it out with the stick, for it was too hot to touch with his hand.