At work in the shell beds we were indeed expert, either in the digging at low tide or in the dredging from boats with rakes made of wood with teeth of stag’s horn, and at the fishing, as well, we were all skilful. The big fish were no safer from us than were the smaller ones. Those which were accustomed to come to the surface of the water we hunted with javelins barbed with bone. To the end of the javelin’s shaft would be attached a strong cord at the end of which was fastened securely an inflated bladder. The javelin we could throw to a long distance and with the greatest surety, and the fishing with it was most successful. The impaled fish might dive deeply, but the wind-filled bladder would pull upward and, as the fish neared the surface, reveal his whereabouts; another javelin cast into him would make his diving still more difficult until, at last, he became exhausted and, so, easily speared. Sometimes not the javelin, but the bow, would be used in this sort of fishing. There were the leister or fish trap, too, which was of service and of course, and, chiefly, the barbed bone hooks we used upon our lines. We were an indolent people, we of the kitchen middens, yet we might have been still more so had there been caves along the shore such as we knew were inhabited by those who lived in other regions, but there were no such natural homes to occupy, and we must build our own shelters against wild beasts and winter’s cold. This was by no means difficult, for driftwood and the wood of the forest were at our hands, and our homes were but rude ones, varying in size according to the number in the family, some built up squarely, but most of them not unlike my own in shape. In summer they were not uncomfortable, and in winter they were covered with sods or earth, and were kept warmer by a skin across the entrance and the burning of beech sticks in shells filled with oil from the seal or certain fish. Sometimes in winter, too, blocks of ice would be built up into an enclosure of the huts, keeping out the cold as well as could anything else. Fuel of all kinds was about us, but we paid little attention to our fires in any weather. We had become hardened to the climate.
To the south our land was endless, so far as we could tell, but we knew its boundaries well to the north and east and west. To the west were the blending seas; the Kattegat lay east of us, with no great island in sight, but with many little islets along the shore. Upon these islets a few of our people lived since the shell beds were beside and among them, and there was gained an added degree of safety from any sudden danger. It was easy to row to the nearby shore for hunting or for any other purpose.
Toward the north our peninsula gradually lessened in width until it ended in the Skagen Rock. Between us and the rock was a weary distance, along which, not near together, but wherever the shell beds were, lived other clans of our race, with whom we had slight dealing.
Of laws or government we had little, though we usually recognized a sort of chief, a man not regularly elected but coming to the place by a sort of general admission, because of his own good qualities, or his shrewdness. To old Rolf, our leader, I was the main support and aid in most of what he sought to accomplish, first because I was the strongest of our clan and the greatest ranger of the forest and most careless of risk, and more, it may be, since I was a silent man, unmated and unlikely to be fooled or thwarted. We were friends, and, after a fashion, as I have said, he relied upon me much. We did not need laws greatly, even such as were observed by the more savage tribes of which we had heard. In such ease did we live that there was no battling for food or clothing and, if sometimes there was rivalry for the possession of a woman, she was left to decide the matter herself, and it was rarely that the loser complained when he thus had two against him. We were not all of an aggressive ancestry, as was plain, though, on occasion, we could show courage. We were bold either in or upon the water—I have seen a man kill a shark with a flint knife, and have seen another dive many times in treacherous eddies to bring upward and to life again one which had gone down stunned from a blow—but very rarely were there affrays, and few cared to face the dangerous forest creatures; I alone rejoiced in that. It may be that I was of a different breed from my companions, that there was a strain in me of some far back marauder of the region from which our tribe had come. Of that I cannot tell; I only know that I liked the forest better than the water, and the hunting better than the fishing. Much was I relied upon for meat and skins, for which I received oysters and fish and oil and many other things I needed, such as weapons of flint and whatever else I lacked in my living. Always I hunted alone.
Not much did most of the shell-fish people think. Each day sufficed for itself, though a little they regarded the strange things that no man may understand. Our dead, we knew, would not come back to us, yet we had regard for the bodies, and buried them deeply beneath great heaps of stones in a rocky place not far from the village. We did not want wolves to get them, and there was, besides, another feeling which I cannot explain. One of the old men said that the dead would come back after many years, but none of us believed him. If it were so, why did not those who died very long ago appear? And why should we die at all? But upon these matters we did not think much. We ate and slept.
Dull, though, as were usually the people of the clan, the strange and mysterious would sometimes arouse as it alarmed them. There was one time when even the bravest of the hunters feared to venture deeply into the forest at night, especially toward a little lake to the west where the urus were accustomed to feed and beside which, on the north, was a stretch of forest with dim winding paths beneath the shadow of its dense foliage and many pools fringed with the rich grass the urus liked. Concerning this forest strange tales began to go about in the clan. There was a ghostlike monster there—perhaps the thing that made the wind bring pestilence and death as it had once in the past—a great white shape that moved about in the dark alleys of the forest, and which was not a thing to be wisely faced by man. More than one of the hunters declared he had seen the white thing, and the people dreaded to enter the woods in search of fruit or nuts and roots. Over all this I puzzled much. What could the white thing be? After much persuasion, I induced Leuk, one of the hunters, to go with me at night to learn, if we might, what was the mystery. It was with difficulty that I secured his company, but, in truth, I did not greatly care to go alone. There are many things of which we do not know. It was somewhat of a dark night on which we went, but I knew that the moon would rise in time and that we could see about us more distinctly. It did not take us long to reach the lake, and there we waited, hidden in a thicket by its shore.
From the forest near us came many sounds. There were the “pad-padding” along of the smaller hunting creatures, calls of the night birds and sometimes the snarl of the prowling wood-cat, but above these and continuous was another noise, one of crashing of branches in the thickets as some large body passed through them, and the thud of ponderous feet and frequent husky gruntings. I knew that the urus were feeding in the glades.
Very near us was an opening, or rather a sort of indentation, in the forest, and across this in the dimness we could see dark shadows passing, though we could not distinguish what they were. After a time these moving shadows disappeared. And then, all at once, loomed up a great white shape, passing, without a sound it seemed, across the glade!
Leuk sank shudderingly to the ground, and I, with a feeling in my belly and throat I did not like, stood gazing at where the ghostly thing had disappeared. We did not speak; we but waited in wonder and, it may be, with not a little apprehension; and as we thus waited the moon rose, and through the open space to the eastward poured her light upon the lake and its surroundings, making all nearly light as day. And then, almost at the moment, emerged with stately tread from the forest into the glade again, a majestic snow-white urus!
Our fear was gone, but it was succeeded by a great astonishment. Who had ever before seen the marvel of a white urus? I had, it is true, seen a white crow, and once a snow-white beaver, and knew that such things happened, but such freak of what makes living things was a wonder on such a scale. However, the mystery was solved and the fear which was undefined departed from the clan, though it was long before the more timid lingered much about the pleasant lake. Greatly did I desire the skin of the white urus, but he had drifted away with his companions and I never saw him again. The needless scare had taught the people no lesson. They had still the dread of the mysterious.