I took my larger net into my boat and rowed out with it and anchored it with a stone at the end of a rope of skin above a deep place in the lake where I knew the pike were most abundant. I let down the net, which was a pouch-like thing, baited in the centre and which would upon the swift pulling of a cord of hide enclose whatever was close above it. It was lined with many sharp barbed hooks, to assist the chance of capture in the struggles of the fish to break away. I waited a time for the bait fastened upon the hoop-net to attract the fish, and then lifted the net sharply. It came only a little way; it had somehow caught upon the bottom. I was enraged at the happening. Pull strongly as I dared, I could not release the net. There was but one thing to do: I must dive from the boat and free the thing, no feat for one who could swim like a beaver. The day was very warm; I was impatient and excited; I could dry happily, when I rose, in the sun, and so I dived with my tough garb still upon me. Down to the net I went and learned in a moment what had happened. There was some sort of narrow jagged opening, reaching downward perhaps a yard in the rocky bottom, and into this hole the net had fallen, catching and entangling itself upon the spurlike protuberances which extended from the sides of the little chasm. It appeared to be twisted, and impaled about and upon two of these. I tugged and strained, but my efforts at its dislodgment failed, while my breath was almost exhausted. I must go to the top for air before I could do more. Then, as I made one last desperate attempt before rising, my foot slipped with the effort and I slid downward into the hole and into the anchored net itself! I was suffocating; I strove to swim upward, but was held back; the strong sharp hooks had caught in my clothing in a score of places, at which I plucked with the fierceness of despair. Then I strived to tear away my skin garments, but was already too weak for that. I could endure the strain upon my lungs no longer. I opened my mouth gaspingly, and the water rushed in. I was drowning!

I yet struggled for a moment or two, and then became quiescent, I know not why. A thousand thoughts came to me. I had heard it said—and the wise ones of the tribe said—that it had been so from the beginning, that to the drowning always comes in an instant the memory of all things of importance which may have happened in his lifetime. It was so with me. How many things I had forgotten! I lived my life over again in what must have been but a moment. Then came the present. I thought of my immediate clan—ill could they afford the loss of Scar, the hunter—I thought of the black sorrow of Elka. I thought of my people and of the time when they would so increase that all men would be lifted, because men had come together in a city—the first the world had ever known! Of things such as these I thought. Then all became dreamy and very pleasant.

CHAPTER XI
THE ARMOURERS

I was aroused by the sound of a strange hammering, blows following each other rapidly and with a quality of sound it seemed to me I had never heard before. It was not like that of stone upon wood or of stone upon stone, but had at times a faint ring, a something altogether unfamiliar. I had been sleeping peacefully in the sun, lying in the grass of a plot among bushes which grew in a valley-like gorge between rocky walls and having many boulders scattered about upon its surface. I sprang to my feet and emerged from the bushes to discover the cause of the curious hammering, and recognized the scene, though somewhat slowly. The Hammer was at work with two companions, and I knew that I should have been helping him had I not become tired and gone to the sunny spot in the bushes to rest and sleep a little.

The Hammer—he had gained the name because he was, nowadays, doing little else than swing his big stone hammer in seeking to acquire what had never been much sought before—saw me approaching and hailed me boisterously: “Ho! Did you sleep, Scar, big laggard? Here is more mauling for you.”

There was mauling to be done, assuredly. All three of the men were at work, standing beside a flat boulder upon which they were seeking to pound to little fragments uneven chunks of rock, which, from their shape, must have been somehow broken from a larger body. As I drew nearer I saw that among the fragments the men were thus seeking to pulverize, there appeared lumps and shreds and strips of a substance which did not break beneath the blows, though it might bend and flatten. Then what remained of the daze of my sleeping went away in a moment and I knew the why and wherefore of what was here before me. The red substance was the thing Hammer had found in the pronged rock and was copper, as we came to call it, something now most precious to us and in the getting of which we were all assisting Hammer to the utmost. What arrow-heads and spear-heads he had given us! There had been never others to equal them.

It had been a curious discovery and one unlikely to have been made by other than this Hammer, friend and hut-mate of mine, and the shrewdest and most thinking man among us. He, who was ever alert to discover the reason of what was unusual, was attracted one day by the appearance of a particular boulder in the valley. It was different from the others in that it had upon it many outstanding points and bulges, as if the stone were harder in those spots and had yielded less to the chippings of the cold, heat and storms or whatever might make it grow smaller with time. He picked a small rock from the ground and struck a heavy blow upon one slender projection, longer than his hand, thinking to break it off, but it did not break; it only bent instead. Then, indeed, was the curiosity of Hammer aroused mightily. He would have that strange projection! Fiercely and strenuously he pounded upon it, and very wearily, at last, for he had set himself a serious task, though he finally succeeded in loosening the prong from the rock after long battering of it back and forth. He held in his hand something well worthy of his study.

Hammer brought to our hut the red piece, which surely was not of the rock itself, and much we considered of what it might be and of what use it could be made to us. That last thought took but little time. Hammer decided it:

“It will not break,” he said; “it will only bend, and that not easily, yet it may be hammered into many shapes. Such hammering it shall have. I will make a spear-head such as men have never seen!” He took the fragment of metal and one of the heaviest of our stone hammers and went with them to the hard flat boulder in the ravine and there began his pounding.

All that afternoon came to our ears in the village the sound of the hammering at the rock. I did not go there, for I had other things to do out in the lower hills where I had seen a group of little deer, and where I thought I might get a chance at one as they came from the wood at sundown. I got none, and darkness had come when I reached our hut again and found Hammer by the fire, whereon he had roasted meat, which tasted good to both of us. I asked concerning his labour, and he showed me the piece of copper.