For several moons now, Urb, the Neanderthal, and his tribe had found it increasingly difficult to locate game in the neighborhood of the family caves. The reason could be any one of several: a nearby water-hole dried up until the rainy season came again; a family of lions holed up close by; an absence of adequate pasturage.
Urb sat crouched near the foot of a lofty escarpment that contained the tribal caves. His deep-sunk button eyes, beneath beetling brows, indifferently watched the young ones of the tribe playing about the clearing between jungle and cliff. Below a flattened, shapeless wedge of nose, his thick pendulous lips worked in and out in worried and laborious thought. As leader of his tribe, Urb was concerned about the lack of game.
It had been comparatively cool here in the shadows of the scarp during most of the morning; but with noon growing near, the sun's direct rays began to penetrate the thick growth of black coarse hair with which Urb's gross body was almost entirely covered.
And so he rose at last and, like the great bull ape he so closely resembled, clambered awkwardly but quickly to one of the caves.
Just inside the entrance he squatted his two hundred and fifty pounds on a boulder and fell to watching Gorb, his eldest son, put final touches to a flint spear head. After heating the bit of rock in a small fire for several minutes, Gorb would withdraw it, hastily touch a spot near the edge with a drop of water which caused a tiny bit of the flint to scale away, then repeat the entire process. It was a long and tedious task; but Gorb had that untiring patience given to those for whom time has no meaning. Eventually, his perseverance would reward him with a fine weapon.
Urb was secretly proud of his son. Even as a boy, Gorb had shown no interest in hunting or in war. Beneath his sharply receding forehead was the brain and soul of a true artist—a soul that found its expression by the creation of implements of the chase and of battle. No other member of Urb's tribe could even approach the artistry Gorb put into his work; no other could fashion a spear so true in balance; none could produce a flint knife so keen-edged and well-formed.
The half-finished spear head reminded Urb of his own immediate problem.
"Gorb," he said, "only two kills have our men made in the past five suns, although all have gone forth each day to hunt. It is not because Narjok or Bana or Muta run away before we can kill them. We cannot find them at all; only twice in those five suns have we come upon the spoor of any one of them."
Gorb paused at his work and drew a hairy forearm across his sweaty face. "Last night," he said, "long after Dyta had found his lair, I heard Sadu roaring and growling among the trees. It was the noise of a hungry Sadu; he, too, was angry because there is no meat."
Urb grunted. Since the day before, he had been turning an idea over in his slow-moving mind, and now he sought to put it into words.