Not a moment too soon did Ugh leap and crouch beside the mound, but even his mortal peril did not destroy his hardihood. Even as he eluded the rush, he swung his club and brought it down with all his might as the brute swept by, seeking, by some chance, to stun him. It was not to be, nor, because of an amazing happening, was Ugh in further peril. It was the strange chance in a thousand, but the club, driven so hardly by that enormous, muscular arm, came fairly down upon the sharp point of one of the great horns and, dense and tough as was its fibre, split and impaled itself and was wrenched from the grip of Ugh as the beast crashed by. And then followed a grotesque spectacle.
Stunned, dazed, crazed with the pain of the benumbing blow, the urus galloped blindly about in circles, bellowing and almost bleating and shaking its great head. The impaled club was flung off at last, flying a score of yards, and, a moment later, the beast, regaining his senses, went dashing off in the direction already taken by the flying herd. So ended the urus hunt. We had failed, but that hunt, in its indirect results, was vast in its effects upon the future of the Cave men.
Ugh regained his weapon, split at its end, and, as we gathered again, stood gazing upon it ruefully. We wandered away to where the creek of the valley entered the river, and found crayfish and the eggs of waterfowl, and feasted merrily, and lay there resting in a place where the sun shone warm on the rocks.
But Ugh could not keep his eyes from his split club. It was rent fairly across the middle of its heavier end for a length of more than a foot from its head, and he, with his strong hands, could pull the sides an inch or two apart. Woof stood beside him, and as Ugh thus strained the wood until there was an opening, Woof, in sheer sport, dropped into the inviting space a great flake of flint which had parted from the rock and lay there ready to his hand. As Ugh, surprised, released the parts they clashed together upon the flint and held it there, for the wood was tough of fibre and had a vicious springiness. There, held strongly and tenaciously in the jaws of the cleft club, was the broad, heavy flint flake, its sharp edges outstanding inches on either side. In the hand of Ugh was a rude axe, the first whose handle was ever clutched by man!
We all stood looking curiously at this strange mingling of wood and stone, when Ugh, with a hoarse cry, swung it aloft and waved it above our heads in mock threatening and shouted “Kill!” Well might he yell out “Kill!” We knew it could do that were the stone but firmly fixed, and we all alike yelled, but wondered at it. The stone was left in the club just as it had been gripped and so was carried back with us. More than it did the others, the stone and wood so seemingly grown together in what might be a mighty weapon, fascinated me. For the split club with a stone—already we sometimes, by signs, exchanged things in the beginning of all barter—I gave Ugh my own fine club, and my new possession I carried with me to my cave that night. A dim idea of something great was forming in my mind. Could the stone be held there always, what a weapon I would have! I smote with the rude axe, and unshattered and unmoved it bit deep into thick tree bark. With repeated strokes the axe stone loosened a little in its accidental socket and I was troubled. I strained it into proper bearing in the cleft again and studied how to make it permanently firm. The problem was still with me when I reached our cave with Woof. It came to me to tie the axe as we tied things, with sinews—for we had, somehow, learned how to make a knot—and with sinew I toiled long beside the fire until I had bound, with my utmost straining strength, and firmly fastened together the intersection of the rugged flake of stone and the tough wood. Then I ran out and down the path in the moonlight and tried the axe recklessly upon a tree trunk and found the stone immovable. It could not be wrenched nor sprung from the eye. I had an axe! The axe, mightiest weapon and implement in the hand of man for thousands of years to come, had been invented by chance, and rudely, in a single day. The age of wood and the club alone had passed. The Age of Stone had come!
So I alone had the axe, and soon, in our hunting as in the littler things, like the getting away of a vine in our paths through the forest, as compared with the axe the club was a feeble thing. The sharp stone could shear the little things, and the sharp and heavy stone, driven deeply, could bring death where the club might only stun or bruise. With the axe I could readily open a way along the thick skin of a slain thing, making easy the stripping for the flint flakes, and with the axe I could divide the body. We must all have axes! With my own I split the ends of other clubs, and flint flakes were sought to bind in them, and soon all grown males of our kith and kin bore axes as did I. But, oddly enough, there was no axe possessed in all the clan quite so hard and rightly shaped and keen as mine. Nature had made, accidentally, a better axe than we, in our crude and bungling way, could fashion at the time. Yet we were better equipped now than ever before for either hunt or fray, though there came soon a miserable time when we almost lost our courage and were fearful in our coming and going.
There was a broad and pleasant wide-open space, almost a plain, in the near forest which was our nearest and favoured hunting ground. It was acres in extent and upon it were hosts of berry bushes and little nut thickets, in which harboured many hares and small game of all sorts, and also birds that ran upon the ground where were nuts, which were good to eat. Food of some kind we always found there. In the midst of this small plain uprose, as if all out of space, though near the mountains, a long, huge rock, perhaps some twenty feet in height, and with sides so sheer that none except a man or other climbing animal could reach the top. But some great upheaval had split this monster rock crosswise, and so there gapped through it a passageway, broad at one end and narrowing at the other, the space between the walls filled with soil up to the level of the land about. There stood this strange split rock, almost in the midst of this little plain, of so much importance to us, but which now we dared not enter. There had come there one of the things we feared and had made it his chosen haunt.
What brought the cave bear to our hunting place no one could tell. It may have been the berries or the roots or some whim of the beastly savage brain. We had, shudderingly, to hunt around but not near the little plain, and in my own heart a great anger was growing. “Why? Why?” I said in my dull brain.
Whatever the cause, there he was, and one day, when two of the cave men had ventured a little way in the bushes, one of them was smitten down by a huge paw, and the other heard but one gasp in the bushes as he fled. Daily, watching from the treetops which fringed the place, could we see the hulking monster as he ranged the open spaces or went toward his lair, to be lost there for a while. And near that thicket lair rose the vast rock.
One night we were together, a company of us, in the great cave of Hair and Gurr, and we were hungry, because we had come from bad hunting toward the north. We could have found more had we not feared to invade the bushy plain, and I could have howled aloud in anger, for I was half famished. I thought of the purple berries and the sweet nuts and the sucking roots and the little things to kill, and I sulked off alone and dared and ventured in my mind, and there came the thought, a thing so dreadful that I gasped in the thinking of it, yet which clung to me as fiercely as cling the vines which bear the blood-red blossoms on the rocks. And my dreams came to a red climax the next day, when one man, venturing into the borders of the plain, just narrowly escaped the monster. All through the night I tossed fitfully, and again the desperate fancy gripped me. I leaped to my feet and swung my axe and yelled out “Bear” and “Kill!” and Woof awakened and leaped in alarm, and laughed when he saw that I seemed raving. Sometimes Cave men had madness.