The tribe was more comfortable than ever it had been before. Bows and arrows supplied game, bowls full of cold water stood handy in every cave, and as the season advanced in severity fires were kindled and kept going.
One day Sunrise went to One Eye’s cave bearing a gift of venison. This was after the first snow, and the weather was bitterly cold. In front of One Eye’s cave was a cheery fire, and in the cave itself lay the old man dead. He had died in the night of his great age and of the cold.
Now this is deserving of mention. That when One Eye fled from the great fire, he carried with him but one treasure, and that was neither club, nor spear, nor bow, nor net, but the flat bone upon which his own glorious deeds had been recorded by the clever fingers of No Man.
At no time had his weariness or suffering been so great as to make him part with this heavy article. Now he lay dead with the bone clenched in his frozen hands.
“One Eye is dead and done with,” said Sunrise, musing. “There is no woman to howl over him. He will never see with his one eye any more. He will not hear the sounds of the forest any more; nor will he lick his lips at the smell of meat.”
“When we have brought down the roof of his cave upon him, he will be hidden to the eye, and forgotten by the mind. Yet I am told that he was once the swiftest of all runners, a mighty hunter and a striker of terrible blows. These things and others which are true and untrue have been recorded on this bone which even in death he clings to.”
“The hands which kindled this fire are dead and in a little the fire too will be dead for want of nourishment. Yet if I throw wood upon it, it will live, and if I had the will I could keep it alive, as long as my own life lasted, and afterward my son could do likewise and after him his son.”
“Thus many years after old One Eye had become powdered bone in a filled up cave, the fire which he started, would still be burning. And it might happen that one, half dead of the cold, should be laid before that fire and brought back to life. And would that be the work of him who lies here without breath or motion, or would it be my work who gave food to the fire when it was dying, or would it be the work of my son, or of him who brought the half dead one and laid him in the warmth?”
Such were the thoughts that passed thro’ the mind of Sunrise, tho’ he did not say them out in words as I have done. He simply stood and wondered about death, and that is one of the reasons that man has become man. Like the other animals he accepted all things, but unlike them, he wondered about them, and asked questions.