V
HUNTING AN ECHO
To the Cave People, dreams were chief among the great mysteries. None of the strange occurrences of the world about them, so filled them with wonder and awe, as the deeds they performed and the adventures they encountered while their bodies lay wrapped in sleep. Often it was difficult for them to separate the dream world from the world of reality. This may account for the reports of those anthropologists who charge savage tribes with being the most amazing liars in the world. It may be that some of these primitive men and women have merely related the remarkable exploits of their dreams which they were not always able to distinguish clearly from their actual experiences.
Often a Cave Man might go forth alone in the night, and after traveling a journey of many suns, slay fearlessly all the members of a hostile tribe, while he slept securely in his cave. But when he reported his dream adventures to his wife, she refused often to believe them. Whenever she stirred during the night, she had found him at her side. Or perhaps she had groaned through the long darkness, with the colic that comes from too much eating of the early fruit. This she made known to the dreamer. Indeed he had slumbered peacefully through all her trouble!
Again, when a Cave Dweller fell asleep beside his brothers and dreamed of dispatching the sabre-toothed tiger with a single blow, the whole tribe was ready to assure him, in the language of the Cave People, that he had not moved from his resting place, but had slept continually. This was all very strange.
When the fire dashed through the sky, during a storm, or the waters of the river climbed up over the banks and flooded the woods, they were not so wonderful as these dream things.
Many men and women of the tribe had closed their eyes in the long sleep, but when the Cave People slumbered, the dead came back again, to journey and hunt the forests with their brothers and sisters. And so, in time, the Cave People came to believe that their friends, who had deserted the body, still lived. That they had, themselves, fought and hunted while their bodies slept, the Cave People well knew, and that the dead come back again, they knew also, for they had seen and spoken with them in their dream journeyings.
This was the origin of the idea of spirit, at first only dim and confused but gathering strength as the years rolled away. The seed of the idea of immortality sprang also from the dreams of primitive man. Though the sabre-toothed tiger devoured a brother he would surely return again. They had seen these things with their own eyes, in dreams.