Grôm, who was now sole chief and master of the tribe, signed every raft to push out into deep water, beyond reach of further attack. With all responsibility now upon his shoulders, he had little time to grieve for the death of Bawr, who, after all, had died greatly, as a Chief should. The rafts were now traveling inland at a fair rate, on the last half-hour of the flood; and, as the estuary narrowed rapidly above their 293 starting-place, he hoped to be able, during the slack of tide, to work the clumsy rafts well over towards the northern shore before getting caught in the full strength of the ebb. As he studied out this problem, and urged the warriors to their utmost effort on the heavy and awkward pole-paddles, he kept puzzling all the time over the great mystery. What was it that swept even the mighty mammoths before its face? How should he name the Fear?
Then all at once, when the rafts were about three or four hundred yards out from shore, he saw. A low cry of wonder broke from his lips, and was reechoed in chorus from all the burdened rafts.
Down over the heights where the Cave Folk had been dwelling, up along the beach from which the rafts had just escaped, in countless ravening, snapping swarms, poured hyenas by the myriad––huge hyenas, bigger than the mightiest timber wolves, their deep-jowled heads carried close to the ground. It was clear in a moment that they were mad with hunger, driven by nothing but their own raging appetites. They fled from nothing, but some of them stopped, in struggling masses, to devour the bodies of the beasts which they found slain, while the rest poured on insatiably, to pull down by sheer weight of numbers and the might of their bone-crushing jaws the mightiest of the monsters which fled before them. Here and there a mammoth cow, maddened by the slaughter of her calf, or an old rhinoceros bull, indignant at being hunted by such vermin, would turn and run amuck through the 294 mass, stamping them out by the hundred. But this made no impression at all, either upon their numbers or the rage of their hunger, and in a few minutes the colossus, its feet half eaten off, would come crashing down, to be swarmed over and disappear like a fat grub in an ant-heap. Here and there, too, a mammoth, more sagacious than its fellows, would wade out belly deep into the water––upon finding its escape cut off––and stand there plucking its foes one by one from the shore to trample them under its feet, screaming shrill triumph.
Grôm turned with a deep breath from the unspeakable spectacle, looked across to the green line of the opposite shore, and thanked his unknown gods that it was so far off. With that great river rolling its flood between, he thought the Tribe might rest secure from these fiends and once more build up its fortunes.
CHAPTER XIV
THE LAKE OF LONG SLEEP
Driven from their home beside the Bitter Water by the great migration of the beasts, the Tribe of the Cave Folk, diminished in numbers and stricken in spirit, had escaped on rafts across the broad river-estuary which washed the northern border of their domain. There they had found a breathing-space, but it had proved a perilous one. The whole region north of the estuary was little better than a steaming swamp, infested with poisonous snakes and insects, and with strange monsters, survivals from a still earlier age, whose ferocity drove the Cave Folk back to their ancestral life in the tree-tops. Under these conditions it was all but impossible to keep alight the sacred fires––as precious to the tribe as life itself––which they had brought with them in their flight upon the rafts. And Grôm, the Chief, saw his harassed people in danger of sinking back into the degradation from which his discovery and conquest of fire had so wonderfully uplifted them.
From the top of a solitary jobo tree, which towered above the rank surrounding jungle, Grôm could make out what looked like a low bank of purple cloud along the western and north-western horizon. As it was always there, whenever he climbed to look at it, he 296 concluded that it was not a cloud-bank, but a line of hills. Where there were hills there might be caves. In any case, the People must have some better place to inhabit than this region of swamps and monsters. The way to that blue line of promise lay across what would surely be the path of the migrating beasts, if they should take it into their heads to swim across the river. The possibility was one from which even his resolute spirit shrank. But he felt that he must face any risk in the hope of winning his way to those cloudy hills. Within an hour of his reaching this decision the Tribe of the Cave Folk was once more on the march.