In the Morning of Time

by Sir Charles G. D. Roberts

On their return to the Caves, Grôm gave the strange woman and her baby to his faithful slave Ook-ootsk, who accepted the gift with enthusiasm because, being a Bow-leg, he had not been allowed to take any of the Cave Women to wife. He lavished his attentions upon the unhappy stranger, but he could make no more of her speech than Grôm had done. The girl A-ya, however, in a moment of peculiar insight had gathered, or thought she gathered, from the stranger’s signs, that the dreadful and destroying Thing was something that flew––therefore, a great flesh-eating bird. But she gathered, also, that it was something which in some way bore a resemblance to fire––for the woman, after getting over her first terror of the dancing flames, kept pointing to them and then to her wounds in a most suggestive way. This, however, as Grôm rather scornfully pointed out, was too absurd. There was nothing that could be in the least like fire itself; and the wounds of the fugitives had no likeness whatever to the corrosive bites of the 204 flame. A-ya took the correction submissively, but held her own thought; and when a day or two later, events proved her to have been right, she discreetly refrained from calling her lord’s attention to the fact––a point upon which Grôm was equally reserved.

With so provocative a mystery waiting to be solved, Grôm could not long rest idle. Had she not known well it would be a waste of breath, A-ya would have tried to dissuade him from the perilous, and to her mind profitless, adventure. It was one she shrank from in spite of her tried courage and her unwavering trust in Grôm’s prowess. The mystery of it daunted her. She feared it in the same way that she feared the dark. But she kept her fears to herself, and claimed her long-established right to go with Grôm on the expedition. Grôm was willing enough, for there was no one whose readiness and nerve, in a supreme crisis, he could so depend upon, and he wanted her close at hand with her fire-basket. There was nothing to keep her at home, as the children were looked after by Ook-ootsk.

It was a very little party which started southward from the Caves––simply Grôm, A-ya, young Mô, and a dwarfish kinsman of Grôm’s, named Loob, who was the swiftest runner in the tribe and noted for his cunning as a scout. He could go through underbrush like a shadow, and hide where there was apparently no hiding-place, making himself indistinguishable from the surroundings like a squatting partridge. Each one carried a bow, two light spears, and a club––except 205 A-ya, who had no club, and only one spear. The weapon she chiefly relied upon was the bow, which she loved with passion. She considered herself the inventor of it; and in the accuracy of her shooting she outdid even Grôm. In addition to these weapons, each member of the party except the leader himself carried a fire-basket, in which a mass of red coals mixed with punk smouldered in a bed of moist clay.

The little expedition traveled Indian file, Grôm leading the way, with A-ya at his heels, then Loob the Scout, and young Mô bringing up the rear. They had started about dawn, when the first of the morning rose was just beginning to pale the cave-mouth fires. They traveled swiftly, but every two hours or so they would make a brief halt beside a spring to drink and breathe themselves and to look to the precious fires in the fire-baskets. When it wanted perhaps an hour of noon, they came to a little patch of meadow surrounding a solitary Judas-tree covered with bloom. Here they built a fire, for the replenishing of the coals in the fire-baskets, and as a menace to prowling beasts. Then they dined on their sun-dried meat and on ripe plantains gathered during the journey. Having dined, the three younger members of the party stretched themselves out in the shade for their noon sleep, while Grôm, whose restless brain never suffered him to sleep by day, kept watch, and pondered the adventure which lay before them.

As Grôm sat there, ten or a dozen paces from the fire, absorbed in thought, his eyes gradually focussed 206 themselves upon a big purple-and-lemon orchid bloom, which glowed forth conspicuously from the rank green jungle-growth fringing the meadow. The gorgeous bloom seemed to rise out of a black, curiously gnarled elbow of branch or trunk which thrust itself out through the leafage. Grôm’s eyes dwelt for a time, unheeding, upon this piece of misshapen tree trunk. Suddenly he saw the blackness wink. His startled vision cleared itself instantly, and revealed to him the hideous, two-horned mask of a black rhinoceros, peering forth just under the orchid blossom.

Grôm’s first impulse was to wake the sleepers with a yell and shepherd them to refuge in the tree––for the gigantic woolly rhinoceros, with his armor of impenetrable hide, was a foe whom Man had not yet learned to handle with any certainty. But a deeper instinct held Grôm motionless. He knew that the monster, whose eyesight was always dim and feeble, could not see him distinctly, and was in all probability staring in stupid wonder at the dancing flames of the camp-fire. As long as no smell of man should reach the brute’s sensitive nostrils to rouse its rage, it was not likely to charge. There was no wind, and the air about him was full of the spicy bitterness of the wood-smoke. Grôm decided that the safest thing was to keep perfectly still and wait for the next move in the game to come from the monster. He devoutly trusted that the sleepers behind him were sleeping soundly, and that no one would wake and sit up to attract the monster’s attention. 207

Grôm could now see plainly that it was the fire, and not himself, which the rhinoceros was staring at. The shifting flames, and the smell of the smoke, apparently puzzled it. After a moment or two, it took a step forward, so that half of its huge, black, shaggy bulk projected from the banked greenery as from a frame. Then it stood motionless, blinking its little malignant eyes, till the silent suspense grew to be a strain even upon Grôm’s well-seasoned nerves.

At last a large stick, laid across the fire, burned through and fell apart. The flames leapt upwards with redoubled vigor, preceded by a volley of crackling sparks. Knowing the temper of the rhinoceros, Grôm expected it to fly into a fury and charge upon the fire at once. His mouth opened, indeed, for the yell of warning which should wake the sleepers and send them leaping into the tree. But he checked himself in time. The monster, for once in its life, seemed to be abashed. The curling red flames were too elusive a foe for it. With a grunt of uneasiness, it drew back into the leafage; and in a moment or two Grôm heard the giant bulk crashing off through the jungle at a gallop. The unwonted sensation of alarm, once yielded to, had swollen to a panic, and the dull-witted brute fled on for a mile or more before it could forget the cause of its terror.

That afternoon toward sundown the expedition reached the point where the fugitive had made her appeal to Grôm. For fear of giving information to the unknown enemy, no fires were lighted. The night 208 was passed in a dense and lofty tree-top. For Grôm, strung up with excitement, suspense and curiosity, there was little sleep. For the most part he perched on his woven platform with his arms about his knees, listening to the sounds of the night––the occasional sudden rush of a hunting beast, the agonized scream and scuffle, the gurglings and noisy slaverings that told of the unseen tragedies enacted far down in the murderous dark. But there was no sound novel to his own experience. Once there came a scratching of claws and a sniffing at the base of the tree.

But Grôm dropped a live coal from his fire-basket, and chanced to make a lucky shot. With a snarl some heavy body bounced away from the tree. The coal then fell into a tuft of dry grass, which flared up suddenly. Grôm had a glimpse of huge shapes and startled, savage eyes backing away from the circle of light. The blaze died down as quickly as it had arisen; and thereafter the night prowlers kept at a distance from the tree. But the sleepers had all been thoroughly aroused and till dawn they sat discussing, for the hundredth time, the chances of the morrow’s venture.