"Tomorrow," he said, "when Dyta first awakens, some of us will look for caves far from here. I will go; Boz and Kor and Tolb and you, Gorb, will go with me. There are many hills; there will be many caves in them, and much meat in grasslands nearby. When we find a good place we will come back for the others of our tribe."
"Good!" approved Gorb, turning back to his labors. "It has been many suns since I have eaten all the meat I can hold. I will go with you, Urb."
Early the next morning a little band of Neanderthal men descended the escarpment and set out toward the rising sun. They were six; besides those named by Urb, Mog, the sullen, had been taken. All were armed with huge flint-studded hardwood clubs, so heavy that only an arm of great strength might wield one; rude knives of flint and short-shafted spears completed their armament.
They moved along with the curious shuffling gait peculiar to their kind alone. Their passage seemed to diffuse an atmosphere of terror and dread, striking dumb the countless denizens of the teeming jungle. Urb was in the lead, his small black eyes darting about for the first sign of danger, ears and nose alert lest Sadu or Jalok or Tarlok find him and his fellows unprepared. But if any of the more formidable beasts were near, they remained concealed. Only Pandor, the elephant, neglected to give the Hairy Men a wide berth when several were together—Pandor, who feared no creature that walked or flew or wriggled.
The shaggy-coated males moved steadily ahead, their objective a group of low mountains far to the east, the upper portions of which were clearly discernible on the few occasions the band crossed a clearing of any consequence.
At noon they halted on the reed-covered banks of a shallow river; and while Urb and Tolb hunted game, the others rested beneath the broad boughs of a jungle patriarch.
Soon the two hunters returned, bearing between them the still warm carcass of Muta, the wild boar. Each of the six hacked off a juicy portion and devoured it raw, blood matting the hair of face and chest.
After drinking at the river's brink, the brute-men stretched out beneath the trees, covered their faces with huge fronds of a palm tree and slept until mid-afternoon. Urb roused them, then, and once more the savage band took up their march.
Darkness was near when the six passed through a fringe of jungle and paused at the foot of a lofty cliff. Urb, deciding too little daylight remained for them to attempt scaling the vertical slope, ordered the Neanderthals back into the forest.