Awakening, however, and noting with a sense of relief that the disturbance was over and that the volcano was slowly settling back to normal, his fear began to leave him and he began to pay more attention to the hunger pangs that assailed his gaunt stomach. He looked down at the wolf cubs, still sleeping, huddled close to his side; then lest they awaken, because his eyes were on them, as he knew they would, he reached out swiftly with two hairy hands and grabbed the cubs by the nape of the neck. They awoke with frightened yelps and forthwith began kicking and snapping.
The hairy boy lifted them into the air and watched them struggle while just the ghost of a grim smile puckered the corners of his mouth and eyes. He needed but to close the grip of his strong fingers on their throats and in a few minutes they would be choked to death. Then he would tear the hide from their bodies with the aid of his teeth and a sharp stone or two, and his meal would be ready. Many times before had he gnawed the flesh of wolf cubs from the bone, and while he did not like it as well as he did the flesh of the wild horse, or the great moose, or bison, that had been the meat of his people, he knew that it would taste wonderful under the circumstances.
But while he sat there holding the squalling, kicking cubs at arm’s length his attention was suddenly arrested by an odor that was almost overpowering in its appeal. Instead of the acrid stinging smell of the sulphur smoke there came to him an odor that was laden with the meat scent, yet it was so subtly different, so irresistible, that his mouth began to drool water from the corners, while his eyes grew big and round. Transfixed he slowly dropped the wolf cubs to the stone ledge, although he kept restraining fingers wound in the hair of their necks. He did not mean to lose a possible meal by letting them get away but he did not want to eat them if he could possibly find the origin of this delightful hunger smell. For a long time he sat there under the cliff, his nostrils working furiously to catch every subtler scent of this enticing odor. His ears were cocked forward as if he hoped that they too might help him locate the source of this wonderful food smell.
As for the wolf-dog cubs, they were famished too, and the odor was just as overpowering to them. Their feet once more on the ground, they paid small heed to the restraining fingers about their necks. Their black noses were pointed up the wind and they were sniffing eagerly and whining too and saliva was dripping from their mouths.
Although none of the three knew it, they were for the first time smelling roasted meat. Somewhere down there in the valley animals had been trapped in the lava, killed and cooked, but since no one of the hairy boy’s tribe had ever mastered fire he did not know what cooked meat really was. He did know, however, as he sat there on the ledge, that never in his life had he smelled anything that made him so hungry as this odor did; indeed it was so overpowering that it presently made him forget the wolf cubs, the danger of the Fire Demon in the volcano, the fear that was always constant in his people of going very far from the cave or sheltering rock save in packs or droves, and everything else, and almost before he knew what he was about he began to climb from the shelf or rock under the cliff and make his way down the hillside into the steam filled valley of the hot lava, a place where he never in the world would have had the courage or temerity to venture were it not for that intoxicating odor that grew stronger and stronger into his nostrils as he descended the hillside.
CHAPTER II
THE FIRE DEMON
The hairy boy followed the wolf cubs. These half famished animals, once released, were even quicker than he was in scrambling off of the ledge and down the hillside. The boy watched them go and followed after them at a remarkably swift pace considering his short legs. He walked stooped over as if his massive shoulders and head were too heavy for his stocky legs to carry, and when he scrambled over rocks he occasionally stooped very low and used his long arms as forelegs, resting the weight of his body on clenched hands, the knuckles of which were used as the soles of his forefeet. But this was only occasionally. He preferred to walk on two feet, although it did seem to be an effort. He did not know, of course, that he was only a few thousand years removed from ancestors who walked on four feet and lived in trees and that his group of hairy men were only just learning, comparatively speaking, to stand erect.