Days Before history

by H. R. Hall

ONCE upon a time, a very long time ago, there was a boy called Tig. When the story begins, Tig was only a baby; he was four, or nearly four. To tell the truth, he did not quite know when his birthday was. He did not have a proper birthday every year. Nobody kept birthdays when Tig was little, because people had not any names for the months, as we have now.

They talked about the hot-time and the cold-time, two times instead of four seasons; and if you could have spoken their language, and had asked Gofa, Tig’s mother, when Tig’s birthday was, she would have said, “One day in the cold-time.”

When Tig was born, he lived first of all in a little house which had only one room in it. It was rather like a cellar, because it was dug out of the ground.

There were no windows in the house. There was only one doorway, and it was a hole, like the mouth of a burrow; and Tig’s father and mother, and any of their friends who came to visit them, had to crawl in and out on all-fours. At night, when the family were all inside, Tig’s father used to set up a big stone against the entrance-hole. He used to say in fun that this was to keep out the wolves and the bears. But neither bears nor wolves had much chance to get in, because there was a high paling of posts that surrounded all the huts. The big door-stone was always kept inside the hut, so that it was handy if ever they wanted to block the doorway against anybody during the daytime.

The fireplace was in the middle of the floor, and there was a hole in the roof to let the smoke out. In the daytime the hole in the roof made a kind of window. The roof was made of branches of trees. These were supported on the ground by a foundation of thick flat stones and pieces of turf, and were overlaid with smaller branches and turves and a rough thatch of reeds.

Here Tig’s father, who was called Garff, and Gofa, Tig’s mother, lived nice and snug in the cold-time. They had no bedsteads nor tables nor chairs nor chests of drawers. But they had plenty of skins of wild horses and cows and deer, and wolf-skins and bear-skins, instead of beds and chairs; and Tig’s own sleeping-cot was a skin of a little bear that Garff had killed on purpose for him. Their other belongings were of a useful sort, not large and heavy like furniture, but such things as cooking pots, the mealing-stone for crushing corn, and the big wooden mortar in which grain or acorns could be pounded into flour.

In summer-time they used to find the dug-out hut too hot to live in, and besides, they had to take their cattle out to fresh pastures. So they, and their friends who lived in the other huts close by, used to pack up their skin rugs and all their other belongings, and travel to another part of the hill country. Some of the men used to march on in front, with their spears and bows and arrows ready, in case they were to meet any wild beasts. Then came the rest of the men and the boys with the dogs, driving the cattle along; and after them the old men and the women and children, with more armed men to bring up the rear. The women carried the skins and the cooking pots and the food; and almost every one had a baby bound on to her back. The food was carried in baskets, and the bigger children helped to carry the baskets. The smaller children had no loads to carry, except their dolls and playthings which they hugged in their arms as they walked along beside their mothers.