Og—Son of Fire

by Irving Crump

Og marked another difference between the tree people and the race of hairy men. It was a physical difference. Under his own long hair Og knew that his skin was a yellowish white. The skin under the hair of the tree people was dark; in truth it was quite black. Og, thinker though he was slowly growing to be, noted this with only passing interest, for he could not know that this was the key to the whole mystery, and this difference in skin color marked the ape men as a different race, a race that even at that early date was still thousands of years behind his own people. Nor could he understand that a million years hence, when his race should have achieved the heights of civilization, the offsprings of the tree people would still be savages.

Yet Og could see that some of them, especially their leader, were making slow progress. Their interest in his fire and all that he did was evidence of this to him. The fact that Scar Face imitated him in everything he did, to the best of his ability, also helped Og in this conclusion. The scarred one walked more upright than the rest of his kind. He carried a club for a weapon more frequently than the rest and he always watched Og’s stone hammers with interest whenever he came close to his fire. Og noted this fact and one day, more out of curiosity than anything else, he gave Scar Face one of his best weapons.

Og needed no interpreter to understand from the grunts and gibberish that Scar Face was grateful. Indeed, he was so delighted that his antics were childish. He paraded before his warriors with the hammer over his shoulder, and smote trees and bushes for no other reason than just to show off his weapon, and his warriors were duly impressed.

Scar Face watched with interest, too, Og’s handling of the fire, and often when he sat near it he would toss a stick onto the flames, and chatter excitedly when he saw the flames consume his contribution. The fact that Og always carried a smoking and flaming firebrand about with him wherever he went impressed old Scar Face, too, for he perceived that that was equally as important a weapon as the stone hammer.

First he had a wholesome respect for the fire, although for some reason he did not fear it as many of his people did. This respect for the flames increased when he inadvertently stepped on a hot coal that had popped some distance from Og’s stone fireplace. But he could appreciate its virtues, too. Its biggest appeal to him was the fact that it dispelled the darkness of night, the darkness which he and his people feared. It gave light and he knew that monsters like the sabre-toothed tiger, the cave-lion, and other beasts of prey shunned light and hunted only during the hours of darkness.

He appreciated its warmth, too, for it was a delightful sensation to crouch within its circle of radiance and feel the warmth against his hairy coat. The rites that Og performed over the flames each time he killed a rabbit or some other small animal, and the transition of the red and bloody meat to rich savory brown food, was something he could not understand.

He often gnawed at the few bones that the wolf cubs left and found that the taste was pleasing, and several times Og flung him a small piece of cooked meat, which he sampled and ate with great gusto. Scar Face and his people were not meat eaters like the hairy men, for the chief reason that they had never had the ability or the weapons with which to procure this kind of food. They never shunned the contents of birds’ nests, however, and small rodents that they were able to catch, they always gobbled down with relish. Scar Face soon perceived that flesh, and especially cooked flesh, was well worth the eating and, as a result of his introduction to this form of food by Og, he was to become the first meat eater among the tree people.

Soon after he had sampled the cooked food that Og gave him, and some time after he had acquired the stone hammer, he took to hunting as diligently as Og did, and the first day he was rewarded by killing one of the many rabbit-like animals that were abundant in the pleasant valley. After surprising it and crushing it with a blow of the stone hammer, he brought the mangled form to Og and told him gruntingly that he’d like to have the hairy boy cook it for him.

Og obligingly skinned it and cooked it, and Scar Face devoured it with much smacking and sucking. The bones he tossed to the wolf cubs as he had seen Og do, and when he finished he licked his fingers in imitation of the boy.

After that Scar Face wanted a fire of his own. For some time he tried to make Og understand his desires and finally, when the hairy boy did comprehend him, he flatly refused by a vigorous shaking of his head. The disappointment of Scar Face was very evident. He sulked and grew ugly. He showed his teeth at Og and even clutched the handle of his stone hammer menacingly. It was a show of belligerence that the hairy boy could not tolerate for a moment, and angrily Og snatched up a burning fire brand and hurled it at the ape man with such accuracy that it hit him in the pit of the stomach and singed the hair and burned the flesh until old Scar Face shrieked with pain and ran away clutching at his paunch and squealing.