In the Morning of Time

by Sir Charles G. D. Roberts

Mounting the steep hillside behind the Caves, Grôm turned into a high, winding ravine, and was soon lost to the sight of the tribe. The ravine, the bed of a long-dry torrent, climbed rapidly, bearing around to the eastward, and brought him at length to a high plateau on a shoulder of the mountain. At the back of the plateau the mountain rose again, abruptly, to one of those saw-tooth pinnacles which characterized this range. At the base of the steep was a narrow fissure in the rock-face, leading into a small grotto which Grôm had discovered on one of his hunting expeditions. He had used it several times already as a retreat when tired of the hubbub of the tribe and anxious to ponder in quiet some of the problems which for ever tormented his fruitful brain.

Absorbed in meditations upon his new weapons, Grôm set himself to build a small fire before the entrance of the grotto. The red coals from his fire-basket he surrounded and covered with dry grass, dead twigs, and small sticks. Then, getting down upon all 185 fours, he blew long and steadily into the mass till the smoke which curled up from it was streaked with thin flames. As the flames curled higher, his ears caught the sound of something stirring within the cave. He looked up, peering between the little coils of smoke, and saw a pair of eyes, very close to the ground, glaring forth at him from the darkness.

With one hand, he coolly but swiftly fed the fire to fuller volume, while with the other he reached for and clutched his club. The eyes drew back slowly to the depths of the cave. Appearing not to have observed them, Grôm piled the fire with heavier and heavier fuel, till it was blazing strongly and full of well-lighted brands. Then he stood up, seized a brand, and hurled it into the cave. There was a harsh snarl, and the eyes disappeared, the owner of them having apparently shrunk off to one side.

A moment or two later the interior was suddenly lighted up with a smoky glare. The brand had fallen on a heap of withered grass which had formerly been Grôm’s couch. Grôm set his teeth and swung up his club; and in the same instant there shot forth two immense cave-hyenas, mad with rage and terror.

The great beasts were more afraid of the sudden flare within than of the substantial and dangerous fire without. The first swerved just in time to escape the fire, and went by so swiftly that the stroke of Grôm’s club caught him only a light, glancing blow on the rump. But the second of the pair, the female, was too close behind to swerve in time. She dashed 186 straight through the fire, struck Grôm with all her frantic weight, knocked him flat, and tore off howling down the valley, leaving a pungent trail of singed fur on the air.

Uninjured save for an ugly scratch, which bled profusely, down one side of his face, Grôm picked himself up in a rage and started after the fleeing beasts. But his common sense speedily reasserted itself. He grunted in disgust, turned back to the fire, and was soon absorbed in new experiments with the bow. As for the blaze within the cave, he troubled himself no more about it. He knew it would soon burn out. And it would leave the cave well cleansed of pestilential insects.

All that afternoon he experimented with his bundle of shafts, to find what length and what weight would give the best results. One of the arrows he shattered completely, by driving it, at short range, straight against the rock-face of the mountain. Two others he lost, by shooting them, far beyond his expectations, over the edge of the plateau and down into the dense thickets below him, where he did not care to search too closely by reason of the peril of snakes. The bow, as his good luck would have it, though short and clumsy was very strong, being made of a stick of dry upland hickory. And the cord of raw hide was well-seasoned, stout and tough; though it had a troublesome trick of stretching, which forced Grôm to restring it many times before all the stretch was out of it.

Having satisfied himself as to the power of his bow 187 and the range of his arrows, Grôm set himself next to the problem of marksmanship. Selecting a plant of prickly pear, of about the dimensions of a man, he shot at it, at different ranges, till most of its great fleshy leaves were shredded and shattered. With his straight eye and his natural aptitude, he soon grasped the idea of elevation for range, and made some respectable shooting. He also found that he could guide the arrow without crooking his finger around it. His elation was so extreme that he quite forgot to eat, till the closing in of darkness put an end to his practice. Then, piling high his fire as a warning to prowlers, he squatted in the mouth of the cave and made his meal. For water he had to go some little way below the lip of the plateau; but carrying a blazing balsam-knot he had nothing to fear from the beasts that lay in ambush about the spring. They slunk away sullenly at the approach of the waving flame.

That night Grôm slept securely, with three fires before his door. Every hour or two, vigilant woodsman that he was, he would wake up to replenish the fires, and be asleep again even in the act of lying down. And when the dawn came red and amber around the shoulder of the saw-toothed peak, he was up again and out into the chill, sweet air with his arrows.

The difficulty which now confronted him was that of giving his shafts a penetrating point. Being of a very hard-fibered cane, akin to bamboo, they would take a kind of splintering-point of almost needle sharpness. But it was fragile; and the cane being hollow, 188 the point was necessarily on one side, which affected the accuracy of the flight. There were no flints in the neighborhood, or slaty rocks, which he could split into edged and pointed fragments. He tried hardening his points in the fire; but the results were not altogether satisfactory. He thought of tipping some of the shafts with thorns, or with the steely points of the old aloe leaves; but he could not, at the moment, devise such a method of fixing these formidable weapons in place as would not quite destroy their efficiency. Finally he made up his mind that the thing to use would be bone, ground into a suitable shape between two stones. But this was a matter that would have to await his return to the Caves, and would then call for much careful devising. For the present he would perforce content himself with such points as he had fined down and hardened in the fire.