In the Morning of Time

by Sir Charles G. D. Roberts

But pondering over the little one with bent brows, and with deep eyes full of visions, he conceived such an ambition as had perhaps never before entered into the heart of man. It was that this child might grow up to achieve some wonderful thing, as he himself had done, for the advancement of his people. Of this baby, child of the woman toward whom he felt emotions so new and so profound, he had a premonition that new and incalculable things would come.

One day Grôm was following the trail of a deer some distance up the valley. Skilled hunter that he was, he could read in the trail that his quarry was not far ahead, and also that it had not yet taken alarm. He followed cautiously, up the wind, noiseless as a leopard, his sagacious eyes taking note of every detail about him.

Presently he came to a spot where the trail was broken. There was a twenty-foot gap to the next hoofprints, and these went off at right angles to the direction which the quarry had hitherto been pursuing. Grôm halted abruptly, slipped behind a tree, crouched, 126 and peered about him with the tense vigilance of a startled fox. He knew that something had frightened the deer, and frightened it badly. It behooved him to find out what that something was.

For some minutes he stood motionless as the trunk against which he leant, searching every bush and thicket with his keen gaze, and sniffing the air with expert nostrils. There was nothing perceptible to explain that sudden fright of the deer. He was on the point of slipping around the trunk to investigate from another angle. But stop! There on a patch of soil where some bear had been grubbing for tubers he detected a strange footprint. Instantly, he sank to the ground, and wormed his way over, silently as a snake, to examine it.

It was a human footprint, but much larger than his own, or those of his tribe; and Grôm’s beard, and the stiff hairs on the nape of his corded neck, bristled with hostility at the sight of it.

The toes of this portentous print were immensely long and muscular, the heel protruded grotesquely far behind the arch of the foot, which was low and flat. The pressure was very marked along all the outer edge, as if the author of the print had walked on the outer sides of his feet. To Grôm, who was an adept in the signs of the trail, it needed no second look to be informed that one of the Bow-legs had been here. And the trail was not five minutes old.

Grôm slipped under the nearest bushes, and writhed forward with amazing speed in the direction indicated 127 by the strange footprint, pausing every other second to look, sniff the air, and listen. The trail was as clear as daylight to him. Suddenly he heard voices, several of them, guttural and squealing, and stopped again as if turned to stone. Then another voice, at which he started in amazement. It was Mawg’s, speaking quietly and confidentially. Mawg, then, had gone over to the Bow-legs! Grôm’s forehead wrinkled. A-ya had been right. He ought to have killed the traitor. He writhed himself into a dense covert, and presently, over the broken brink of a vine-draped ledge, was able to command a view of the speakers.

They were five in number, and grouped almost immediately below him. Four were of the Bow-legs, squat, huge in the shoulder, long-armed, flat-skulled, of a yellowish clay color, with protruding jaws, and gaping, pit-like, upturned nostrils to their wide, bridgeless noses. Grôm’s own nose wrinkled in disgust as the sour taint of them breathed up to him.

They were all armed with spears and stone-headed clubs, such as their people had been unacquainted with up to the time of their attack upon the Tribe of the Little Hills. It was apparent to Grôm that the renegade Mawg, who towered among them arrogantly, had been teaching them what he knew of effective weapons.

Having no remotest comprehension of the language of the Bow-legs––which Mawg was speaking with them––Grôm could get little clue to the drift of their 128 talk. They gesticulated frequently toward the east, and then again toward the caves at the valley-mouth, so Grôm guessed readily enough that they were planning something against his people.