Stories of the Cave People

by Mary Marcy

Big Foot boasted with a loud voice and bullied the children and spoke soft words to the women, while he glared at the young men and urged them into the forest to hunt for food. Always he kept his poisoned darts at his side and he managed to secure for himself the tenderest portion of the young goats which the people had discovered leaping and running wild amid the sharp slopes and crags of the mountains.

So the tribe grew weary of his sorry ruling and there was much fighting and discord, which laid them open to the attacks of their many enemies.

Without doubt Big Foot was possessed of much cunning, for while other men of the tribe were as strong of limb and as fleet of foot, Big Foot was more powerful than they. Longer was his arm because he had learned first how to make and to wield his great bow and arrows almost as well as young One Ear, who had escaped from the Arrow Throwers and returned to his own people, the Cave Dwellers, bringing knowledge of the weapons of these strange enemies.

The Cave Dwellers had paused in their journeyings and battlings northward, on the banks of the lake that shone like white fire When the sun beat down upon its rolling surface. The way was new to them and unknown dangers threatened everywhere and they had utmost need to walk warily, lest a new tribe descend upon them with some new weapon of destruction and turn them back into the dangers they had outstripped.

Instead of holding the people together with wise words and instead of preparing to search out the lands to prepare for the strange evils that lie in wait for primitive man whenever he travels beyond the ways of his experience, Big Foot caused nothing but conflict. It was only his superior skill in the use of the flint-tipped arrows, which the Cave People were acquiring very rapidly, that prevented him from being slain by the members of the tribe.

Then it was that One Ear dreamed a dream. He thought that his spirit had journeyed far into the spirit world where it encountered the spirit of Strong Arm. And Strong Arm had spoken with One Ear, sending words of wisdom to the people of the tribe. He had called Big Foot the enemy of the Cave People. And when he wakened in the morning, One Ear remembered his dream. So he gathered all the people together and told them these things. And no man or woman among them knew that he spoke only of a dream. They believed that the spirit of Strong Arm still lived and that the things in One Ear’s dream had actually occurred.

So the Cave People chattered together and gesticulated and stole the fresh meat Big Foot had hidden in his cave and menaced him from cover by shaking their clubs and growling like angry dogs. Big Foot fled to his branch hut, where he glared at the members of the tribe and waved his long arrows.

The Cave People had long respected the words of Strong Arm and when they heard what he had spoken to One Ear in a dream, they hated Big Foot more fiercely than ever.

At last Big Foot returned to the people of the tribe, many of whom were sitting about a wood fire, and he spoke to them, trying to gain their good will and attempting to show them that none was so swift, so strong or so brave as he. But the people screamed “Strong Arm! Strong Arm!” to remind Big Foot that the old chief had spoken against him.

And Big Foot grew frantic with the rage that came upon him. He seized the club of Strong Arm which had been given to Laughing Boy in order that he might derive from it some of the virtue of bravery which his father, Strong Arm, had possessed. Big Foot spat upon it and crushed it beneath a great stone; then he hurled the shattered fragments far out into the green waters of the lake.