Stories of the Cave People

by Mary Marcy

And so the boy came to be called One Ear. It was impossible to forget one so distinctly different from other members of the tribe of Cave People and so, when One Ear was later captured by the Arrow Folk during a raid made on the people of the Hollow, One Ear was long mourned and thought of by the tribe.

Now he was come back to his own people. And in the light made by the flames of the fire, the Cave People saw that he bore many of the strange darts that the enemy had used with so much skill and accuracy. The Cave People were almost afraid of him, but One Ear at once showed himself friendly and busied himself in helping to build coverings of sticks and brush and leaves to form huts for the tribe.

The night was very dark and the Cave People were worn and weary and very much afraid. They knew very little about the life and the woods and the things that surrounded them. When a man stumbled over a loose stone and slipped and fell, the Cave People believed that some of the tribe’s numerous enemies had wrought the evil.

Little they understood of the causes of the natural events that occurred around and to them. And so they peopled the woods, the Hollow, the night and all things with spirits or evil ghosts that sought to do them harm.

There were terrors everywhere, both the enemies which they could see and the enemies which they could not see. The enemies who dwelt in in the dead tree trunks that lay upon the ground over which they stumbled, the spirits who were hidden in the stones that scratched their feet, the evil magicworkers who entered their stomachs and made them sick and haunted the feet of the unwary to cause them to faint before the blows of the Arrow People and who sent men and women upon the Long Sleep from which their spirits arose to prowl about over the lands.

Primitive men knew nothing about natural laws. They had no ideas about what caused the rain; therefore, they thought someone made it rain. They knew nothing about the melting of snows upon the mountain tops that flowed downward, swelling the Father of Rivers far beyond “his” banks and thus causing the floods; therefore, some evil enemy wrought the disaster.

They knew truly that men and women did not altogether die. All men possessed two selves—the self with whom you might fight and dance, whom you might touch and see and smell in the light of broad day. Then there was also a spirit self, who came to you in dreams and who worked evil or good unto you.

When a child was lost in the wood and devoured by the wild enemies of the tribe, the people knew that it was an evil spirit that had lured his footsteps into the danger.

It is true, too, that they believed in good spirits; the spirits who sent rain when the earth was parched; the kindly magic-makers who delivered an attacking enemy into your hand to his own disaster, who stood beside you unseen during great dangers and thrust forth obstructions in the paths of those who would take you unawares.

But considered in a broad way, from the viewpoint of primitive man, the world was peopled chiefly with enemies who were down upon you at the slightest opening, who might anywhere and in the strangest form imaginable pounce upon you to your own destruction or disaster.