He looked doubtfully at that, but just then the littlest crowed, and the next to the littlest laughed, and the eldest put a stick upon the fire and set up a warmer light. A thing happened. The man’s look softened and mellowed. He felt within something that he had never felt before. He grunted, took up the knife again and chipped with vigour. The woman said nothing for a time, then she spoke somewhat dreamily. “One hunt alone—get tired. Two hunt together, good—good.... Two stay together—two and children.” She moved nearer to him. “Good?” she repeated on an at once insisting and questioning note.
The man sharpened and sharpened the flint knife. Mental processes were as yet somewhat snail-like and it took time to measure a large, new proposition. He looked at the woman, and back into the cave and down over the turning forest, and then at the woman again. Again his face broke slowly into that dusky, promising warmth. “Pretty good,” he said, and began to fashion from a bit of wood a handle for his knife.
CHAPTER III
BIG TROUBLE
Rudely constructed, shed-like, or nondescript, the long communal houses lay like dark beads in a landscape of green, in a warm, temperate clime. In front stretched a fen, and beyond the fen flowed a river. To right and left and in the background waked and slumbered the forest, chief possessor yet of the earth. Before the houses that were large enough and long enough to lodge, when they chose to stay indoors, several hundred women, men, and children, ran a strip of naked, sun-baked earth. Here the children played, and here went on industrial processes, and here were held, beneath one huge tree, the general councils, pow-wows, folk-meets.
The people of the long houses ate fish which they caught by means of weirs and with harpoons and hooks fashioned from bone. They ate in their season fruits and nuts, and they were acquainted with certain mealy roots and seeds of grasses. They ate those animal denizens of forest or plain that they could kill with club and spear or take in pit and snare. In times of scarcity they ate flesh food of a low order. In times of huge scarcity, when it was that or the wasting away of the group and its passage into the land of death, they might slay and eat the aged of their own kind.
In the matter of weapons the people of the long houses yet depended upon the spear, but were upon the threshold of the bow and arrow. In the heat of summer they wore brief garments of woven grass; in the colder weather they garbed themselves in skins sewed with a bone needle and a fibre thread. Year by year, life by life, they were moulding a flexible, strong, not unmusical language. They could count beyond ten. Simple calculations were coming into the scope of most. Here and there finer brains undertook calculations not quite so simple. They used a ceremonial burial of the dead, and they placed beside the body weapons and other objects which might be useful in some vague other world. They observed the moon and the larger stars, and to every single thing under heaven they attributed a will to save or to damn. They had a body of customs, not yet stiffened into law. Women, the makers and possessors of children, the original devisers of houses and clothes and such things, the earliest lawgivers and gatherers of people into societies, were yet, through the greater range of matters, the authoritative sex. They were the mothers, the instinctively turned to even after childhood, the dimly deified. But men were powerful encroachers, and they encroached.
To the two alike had once fallen the fierce, the incessant warfare against their old kindred the beasts. Now, the women abetting, the men had almost taken over that department of living. Men were the manufacturers of spear and spearhead, the experimenters with stone axe and stone knife. They were the steady feelers toward bow and arrow, the chief hunters now of dangerous beasts, strengthening in muscle, gaining in height, careless of inflicted pain, watchers of flowing blood, quarrellers with chance—met other hunting bands from other long houses, adventurous, bold, standing by wide rivers, meditating a raft, a boat, or from hill-tops watching the climbing stars, roaming afar from the houses and returning. Wilder than his mate was the male and more violent, as became one who had nothing to do with children. Nor he, nor she, believed that he had anything to do with children—nor with the making of them, nor with the owning them after they were made.
A cluster of women came down to the bank of one of the ribbon-like water-courses winding through the fen. Here was a bed of clay. The women carried a number of uncertainly shaped vessels of plaited rush and osier. These they laid upon the earth, and sitting down by the stream, fell to dashing water over the clay, and, when the latter was sufficiently softened, to gathering it up and kneading it with the hands. When the mass was very smooth and plastic, each woman took one of the osier shapes, set it between her knees, and began to daub it within and without with clay. They wet their hands and worked with palm and fingers and thumb, and also with a spatula-like piece of wood, bringing the clay into one surface, smoothing and finishing it off. When bowl and jar were dried in the sun, then water might be carried without grave loss and meat might be cooked without the osiers burning in the fire. An idea came to one of the women. She took a mound of wet clay and with her hands and the spatula she worked until she had a bowl of the clay itself without any osier inner walls. “Ha!” she cried. “Look!” Setting the bowl aside in the sun, she took more clay and made a jar-like shape. The other women suspended work to watch her. They leaned forward, interest in their eyes. An old woman, sitting by, watching not working,—old Aneka the Wise Woman,—made a sound of approval. “Good!” said Aneka. “It is good to think and to put one thing and another thing together! Now you can make pots without braiding reeds.”
Back on the sun-hardened strip before the houses a fire was burning. At a fair distance from this rose a young tree and to the tree was tied a creature with his wolf descent written plain. A woman came from the nearest house, in her hands a piece of raw meat. When the wild dog saw the meat he made a bound and strained fiercely at the thongs which held him. The woman laid the meat upon the ground, not far from the fire. Then she took a billet of wood and, passing before the tied creature, showed it to him not once but many times. This done, she placed the piece of wood upon the ground as far from him in the one direction as was the piece of meat in the other. Next in order, she took a long, stout stick, seasoned and sharpened, and striking one end into the embers, watched it until it was aflame. All this time the half-dog, half-wolf, was making a noise. Woman, dog, meat, stick, and fire had for observers a number of naked children. Now she turned upon these and ordered them within the house, and when they protested and went reluctantly, she threatened them with voice and stick. The ground clear, the woman, the burning stick in her hand, went and untied the creature to be tamed. He sprang at her, but she lunged as fiercely with the brand, and he gave back and cowered. She spoke in a voice of command, pointed out the billet of wood, and spoke again. The creature gathered himself together and made a leap—toward the piece of meat. She was there before him, squarely between him and it, the burning wood sending forth sparks. Again he gave back and hung uncertain, growling deeply. She gestured for the twentieth time toward the bit of wood. “Bring me that! Then you shall eat.” He would have liked to tear her into pieces, but after many minutes of this work,—rushes toward the meat, beatings-back with stick and voice and eye,—he brought her the billet of wood. “Good! Now, go eat!”
East of the long houses spread a space of earth firmer than the neighbouring fen, more open than the neighbouring forest. Three women were here. They had wooden staves, and at the end of each was bound at right angles a large, rudely sharpened flint. With these the women were loosening the fat, black earth. Beside them lay a heap of roots and plants taken from the forest.