Two of the openings of the hills we explored most thoroughly that day. They were not at a great distance from each other and were very much alike—narrow gorges or ravines with narrow bottoms and almost perpendicular sides. We found nothing to even remind us of the sort of rock in which Hammer had discovered copper in the first place. We took up our march again and, just at nightfall, came to an opening, not so narrow and gloomy in appearance as the others. This we would explore in the morning, and so we lay down for the night before a little fire we had built. It was early autumn and was not cold.
The old men in the tribe do not all have the same thoughts as to dreams, the things which come in the night when one is sleeping and make him think he is alive at some other place, or, at least, seeing and doing other things than those which are. Those whom I think are the most sensible say that dreams are as nothing, but others say that they mean much and may speak of the past or even foretell what is to come. I know nothing of it, but I know that I dreamed much as I lay beside the fire that night, and that I thought myself, first, in a land of lakes and strange abodes supported above the water, and that, later, I was again searching with Hammer for the rocks with the red metal in them. I dreamed, too, that we came to a small round mountain that was made up altogether of copper, and that all around it was more of the copper made into spears and arrow-heads and knives and axes and all manner of other things we needed in our huts. It was a very foolish dream, but it made me pleased when I woke in the night, though, as I have said, I had no faith in such things.
It was a wonderfully shining morning which came to us and, as we ate, I still kept my high spirits from the dream and was so filled with cheer and made such buoyant talk that Hammer said I must have arisen early and gone into the forest and eaten of a root which, it was said, would make men laugh. I cared not. I was most courageous and full of lightness. I felt that the Things, the makers of happenings, in which we believed a little, though heeding little as well, were going to smile upon us some time that day. Of this I spoke afterward to Hammer many times.
We started up the opening in the hills, and the prospect was fairer than we had seen yet. It was not a gorge, but wide enough to be almost like a narrow ascending valley, and its sides were not perpendicular, but sloping and bearing many stunted oaks and pines, and shrubbery, as did the bottom. Over the bottom were distributed boulders of all sizes, and some of them appeared certainly not to have come from the mountainsides adjoining, so different were they in appearance from the rock of the sloping walls. Such a thing I had often seen, however, and I thought little of it. Hardly had we entered the gap than we began testing the rocks with our heavy hammers, battering away at them until the moss and incrustations of any kind were knocked away and the nature of the rocks made clear to us. Our hammers, which I have not yet described, were most excellent for this. They were of much weight and of the hardest kind of stones of proper size that we could find in our region. These stones, half as large as a man’s head, we had grooved around, after much labour in the chipping, and, fitting in the grooves and holding firmly, had laid withes of the toughest willow, which were twisted into handles of the length we wanted. So we made hammers which would crush the common rock most easily. Never were better hammers than these of the hard, unbreaking porphyry and greenstone, though these were not the names we called them, if, indeed, we gave them names at all. It was sufficient that they served our purpose well. So we hammered our way up the slope, but found nothing to reward us. At midday we rested for a time and ate, and then took up our testing again, not far from each other, with Hammer, as it chanced, a little in the lead. We had not gone half a furlong when there came from him the longest, loudest and most ear-splitting yell I had ever heard. I was with him in a moment.
Hammer was standing beside a rock of about the height of his shoulder. It was, in a general way, not unlike the rocks through which we had passed, but it had the difference that it was not altogether smooth of surface and that here and there upon it obtruded lumps and points. One of these points Hammer had smitten in his testing and now it glittered in the sun, a spike of purest copper! There could be no mistake about it. We had found what we were seeking. In that one rock, could we but in any way break it apart, were hundreds of the new and amazing weapons which were such prizes. We attacked the most obtruding and slender and most promising of the outstanding parts with our great hammers, working most feverishly until we sweated like the wild boar at the end of the long hunt. I won in the race, and very proud I was. The spikelike mass upon which I hammered, beating it back and forth and this way and that, parted at last from the mass and fell to the ground only a moment before that upon which Hammer had been spending his mighty blows. We had what would make a spear-head apiece, enough in themselves to have made our journey worth while!
All day we laboured, beating off some half-score of the red protuberances, and then, to breathe ourselves, went farther up the somewhat narrowing valley to learn whether or not there were other rocks of the kind which meant so much to us. One other we found, to our great delight, but one only, though we followed the defile until it lost itself in what was little more than a crevice in the now close looming mountainside.
We resolved that for two days we would labour on the rocks and that then we would return to the village, where Hammer would work upon the copper we had gained, and I would return with others to do what we could with further hammering of the two rocks and make, perhaps, some further search. That plan we did not carry out. It was about the middle of the afternoon of the first of these two days when I heard from the forest of beech and oak which lay at the foot of the slope the call of the grouse—doubtless feeding on the many nuts. We had, in our excitement and absorption, been eating only of the dried food we had brought with us, and my stomach clamoured for roasted grouse as soon as the cries of the birds reached me. It affected Hammer as it did me, and I took my bow and arrows from where they were left at our sleeping place and crept into the forest. There were grouse in abundance there and soon I had a pair big enough and fat enough to satisfy even such labourers as we with a supper worth the eating. I had gone well into the wood in my hunting, and now strode swiftly toward the gap, paying little attention to what was about me. So carelessly did I walk that I stumbled sharply against a small rock which lay half hidden beneath the brown leaves which were beginning to fall thickly. I glanced downward at the obstacle, which was a flattish stone not a quarter of a yard across, and, I know not why, save that I was at this time curious about all rocks, stooped and turned it over. Its bottom, clean upon the sand, was red! It was copper! Then went out from me a yell which could by no means have been less mighty than was that of Hammer when he had found the rich rock in the defile. He could have heard me from anywhere. His answering shout came back, and soon he was with me looking upon what I had discovered. We stood there silently for a moment and then involuntarily looked about us. Among the beech leaves on every side lay smaller or greater rocks of similar kind. We turned some of them over. They were copper, seemingly almost pure and not so great of size that they could not be beaten apart. Then, it seems to me, that for a time we lost our senses. We shouted to each other without meaning and capered about like wolves in the moonlight. We could not but know that a new thing, one of the greatest ever known, had come to men, and that we and our tribe would be the first to own it in abundance. No longer at this time would we trifle with the two rocks in the valley!
Long we talked that night beside our fire, glorying in our good fortune and wondering, too, not a little, how it could be that copper should exist in such a form. Much we speculated and suggested of this strange thing which had brought such fortune to us. Hammer thought it possible that the red metal was something which grew of itself where there were the things in the earth and water which gave such growth, whatever it was it needed for its formation and sustenance, but in this I could not agree with him. I could not believe that anything that was hard as rock and did not change its shape as the trees and plants did, could really grow of itself. I believed that all solid things must have been so always and that, if they were found out of what seemed to have been their place, they must have been moved by something else, it might be by men—though that could hardly be so with huge rocks—or by great floods, or, it might be, by the ice, which, in ages gone, had crept down from the far north and pushed many things before it. No one could tell. Perhaps the copper had not moved far at most. It might have come down from the mountains. We ended the talk as vain; it was sufficient that we had found what we sought. We had much to do on the morrow.
At daylight we took up our journey for the village, carrying with us only what we had beaten from the rocks, and one of the smallest of the fragments we had found among the beeches and oaks. Henceforth our work with copper was to be in a different way. We had reasoned upon it and had decided what we would do. At first it had seemed wise to move our belongings to where the metal lay to our hand, but there were other things to be considered.
The mouth of the wide ravine where Hammer had found the first red-pronged rock, near a blasted and hollow tree trunk, faced the village squarely, and, fortunately for him, there also stood near an almost square boulder of the hardest stone, of about half its height, which served him as an anvil. Such another rock it would be hard to find in a convenient locality, and we had seen none like it in the beech wood or in the ravine of the two rocks on which we had been working. It would cost labour to transport the metal from the wood to the village, but, once it was there, it would be where we could most easily convert it into weapons. We would be near the village and all its conveniences, and, besides, we would be where those would come who wished to barter, as we knew they must in time. Little traffic had there been between the tribes, however friendly they might be, at any time, for the things possessed were very much alike and, besides, the bartering was something new. Our ancestors did not barter. They took what they wanted or, if not strong enough, must go without it. Relations had changed, and now men were engaged in fighting each other only part of the time. Now a new reason for trade had come, and we felt its importance and its promise. So it was resolved between us that the forging should be done in the ravine facing the village, and the copper brought from where we had found it in the wood. We could use our little horses.