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

by Frederic Arnold Kummer

Tul-Ab and his men were troubled, because they found nothing about them the way it had been in their other home. There were no trees on the cliff tops with which to build huts; they saw some, on the hills further back, but they were small and stunted. Nowhere did they see any of the marsh grasses and reeds they had used so much in making their houses. Yet they liked the place they had found for a camp, because it was high and safe from attack, in case Ban and his hill men should come after them from the other shore. Tul-Ab looked about and saw nothing but rocks, and the thought came to him, why not build houses for themselves out of these rocks.

He picked out a great flat boulder near the stream, and he and his men dragged up other boulders, and arranged them in the form of a square. On these they placed more stones, choosing the flat ones, until they had built four walls, as high as their heads. In one of the walls they left a hole for a door, placing over its top a long, flat stone, to keep the wall above from falling down. The front wall they built higher than the back, so that the roof of the house would slant, to make the rain run off.

The roof bothered Tul-Ab a great deal. If he had had reeds and marsh grass, he would have known what to do, but he could find none. With his men he went farther up the hillside and cut down many of the short stunted trees, and these they laid side by side across the walls of the house to make a roof. There were spaces between these logs, through which rain would come, so they cut sods of earth from the grassy surface of the plateau, and covered the roof with a thick layer of them, with flat stones on top to hold the sods in place. When the house was done, Tul-Ab took it for his home, for he was the chief, and he also took one of the women for his wife.

When the first stone house had been built, the little tribe built others, until there was room for all to sleep protected from the rain. Not knowing what wild animals, or even men, might live in the woods further back from the shore, they also built a stone wall across the neck of the plateau, so that on one side their camp was protected by the cliffs leading down to the ocean, and on the other, by this wall of stone. They brought great piles of firewood into the camp for cooking the fish they caught, and the waterfowl they shot with bows and arrows, along the shores of the little bay at the foot of the cliffs. Every day the men went out hunting and fishing in the canoe, sometimes on the ocean, when it was smooth, and at others, on the bay, or up the river which ran into it. They could not go up this river very far, because of the rocks in it, which made rapids, over which the boat could not pass. But they often went beyond the rapids on foot, and brought back wild hogs, and many small furry animals they had never seen before, and sometimes bears and horned deer.

Having no marsh grass from which to weave cloth, the tribe began once more to use skins and furs for clothing, and to eat more meat, and less fish, than they had eaten in their old home. The country of the sea people had been flat and marshy, while that of the valley tribes was hilly and far from the sea, but in the new home of Tul-Ab and his tribe, they found both the hills and the sea, close together, and so they grew to be like both the sea folk, and the people of the valley and the hills from which they had first come.

Already, in building things of stone, they had done something that men had never done before. Instead of living in caves, or brush huts, they had built houses of stone, and a stone fort. This was a new thing, and from it they began to learn to be carpenters. As the tribe got larger, and more houses were built, they found they could make the roof logs fit closer together by chipping off the two sides of them, and so they made the first hewn timbers. It was not long, before they found they could split the logs with stone wedges, and in this way make rough planks, or boards. These boards they fastened to cross pieces with wooden pegs, to make doors for their houses to keep out the wind and snow and rain.

The women they had brought with them had children, and these children grew up and had more children, and before very long there were many hundred people in the tribe, and their stone huts dotted the cliffs as far as the eye could see. When they found there was not room enough behind the first wall for the growing village, they built another and longer wall, further back from the sea, for they were always afraid of being attacked, on account of the way their former village had been destroyed. Only the very oldest men remembered this now, but they told the story to the younger men, around the fires at night, and when these grew old, they told it to their children and grandchildren, so that it became a legend in the tribe that they had come from another country, where enemies lived who might attack them. A watchman stood day and night on the cliffs, looking out over the sea, ready to light signal fires, in case he saw boats coming toward them from across the water.

The island people found plenty of flint, out of which to make weapons and tools for working wood, and they were very skilful fishermen, and also great hunters with the bow and arrow. As they made hunting trips far back into the country, they found many different kinds of wood for making bows and small canoes, but no reeds were to be found, so they forgot the art of making basket work. Neither did they find any clay, for a long time, and when the few bowls and jars they had brought with them were broken, they made drinking cups of the horns of animals, or of wood. They still used smoked meat and fish, but they knew nothing about planting and growing grains to make bread.

These people were great workers in wood and stone. They worshipped the Sun, and built a temple to him of huge upright stones, set in a wide circle, with a flat altar stone in the middle, on which they placed their offerings of meat and fish. These offerings they burnt with fire, because the priests of the temple told them it pleased the Sun to smell the smoke of the burning flesh as it rose up in the sky. Twice in the year they had great feasts. One was when the days began to get longer, in the spring, and fruits and flowers began to grow. This time is in March, and we call it the vernal equinox, because then the days and nights are of equal length, and equinox means equal nights. From then on, until June, the days grow longer and the nights grow shorter. From June till September, the nights grow longer and the days shorter, until once more they are the same length, and this is called the autumnal equinox. Then the island tribe held another festival, the feast of the harvest. After that the nights began to grow still longer, and the days shorter, because the sun was going away from them more and more, all through the cold winter. Even to-day we remember these two festivals, by offerings of flowers in the spring, at Easter time, and by the harvest feasts which country people still hold in some places at the end of the summer, when the harvests are gathered in.