The Story of Ab: A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man

by Stanley Waterloo

But this man in the valley was young and very strong, with tissues to be renewed, and the physical man within him clamored and demanded. He must eat. He ran forward and around, anxiously observant, and soon learned that at the western end of the valley, where the little creek tumbled through a rocky cut into a lower level, there was easy exit from the fire-encompassed and protected area. He clambered along the creek's rough, descending side. He emerged upon an easier slope and then found it possible to climb the hillside to the plane of the great wood. There must, he thought, be food of some sort, even for a man with only Oak's knife in his possession! There was the forest and there were nuts. He was in the forest soon, among the gray-trunked, black-mottled beeches and the rough brown oaks. He found something of what he sought, the nuts lying under shed leaves, though the supply was scant. But nuts, to the cave man, made moderately good food, supplying a part of the sustenance he required, and Ab ate of what he could find and arose from the devouring search and looked about him.

He was weaponless, save for the knife, and a flint knife was but a thing for closest struggle. He longed now for his ax and spear and the strong bow which could hurt so at a distance. But there was one sort of weapon to be had. There was the club. He wandered about among the tops of fallen trees and wrenched at their dried limbs, and finally tore one away and broke off, later, with a prying leverage, what made a rough but available club for a cave man's purposes. It was much better than nothing. Then began a steady trot toward what should be fair life again. There were vague paths through the forest made by wild beasts. As he moved the man thought deeply.

He thought of the fire-wall, and could not with all his reasoning determine upon the cause of its existence, and so abandoned the subject as a thing, the nub of which was unreachable. That was the freshest object in his mind and the first to be mentally disposed of. But there were other subjects which came in swift succession. As he went along with a dog's gait he was not in much terror, practically weaponless as he was. His eye was good and he was going through the forest in the daylight. He was strong enough, club in hand, to meet the minor beasts. As for the others, if any of them appeared, there were the trees, and he could climb. So, as he trotted he could afford to think.

And he thought much that day, this perplexed man, our grandfather with so many "greats" before the word. He had nothing to divert him even in the selection of the course toward his cave. He noted not where the sun stood, nor in what direction the tiny head-waters of the rivulets took their course, nor how the moss grew on the trees. He traveled in the wood by instinct, by some almost unexplainable gift which comes to the thing of the woods. The wolf has it; the Indian has it; sometimes the white man of to-day has it.

As he went Ab engaged in deeper and more sustained thought than ever before in all his life. He was alone; new and strange scenes had enlarged his knowledge and swift happenings had made keener his perceptions. For days his entire being had been powerfully affected by his meeting with Lightfoot at the Feast of the Mammoth and the events which had followed that meeting in such swift succession. The tragedy of Oak's death had quickened his sensibilities. Besides, what had ensued latest had been what was required to make him in a condition for the divination of things. The wise agree that much stimulant or much deprivation enables the brain convolutions to do their work well, though deprivation gets the cleaner end. The asceticism of Marcus Aurelius was productive of greater results than the deep drinking of any gallant young Roman man of letters of whom he was a patron. The literature of fasting thinkers is something fine. Ab, after exerting his strength to the utmost for days, had not eaten of flesh, and the strong influences to which he was subjected were exerted upon a man still, practically, fasting. For a time, the rude and earth-born child of the cave was lifted into a region of comparative sentiment and imagination. It was an experience which affected materially all his later life.

Ever to the trotting man came the feelings which must follow fierce love and deadly action and vague remorse and fear of something indefinable. He saw the face and form of Lightfoot; he saw again the struggle, death-ending, with the friend of youth and of mutual growing into manhood. He remembered dimly the half insane flight, the leaps across the dreaded morass and, more distinctly, the chase by the wolves. The aspect of the Fire Country and of all that followed his awakening was, of course, yet fresh in his mind. He was burdened.

Ever uprising and oppressing above all else was the memory of the man he had killed and buried, covering the face first, so that it might not look at him. Was Oak really dead? he asked himself again! Had not he, Ab, as soon as he slept again, seen, alive and well, the close friend of his? He clung to the vision. He reasoned as deeply as it was in him to reason.

As he struggled in his mind to obtain light there came to him the fancy of other things dimly related to the death mystery which had perplexed him and all his kind. There must be some one who made the river rise and fall or the nut-bearing forest be either fruitful or the hard reverse. Who and what could it be? What should he do, what should all his friends do in the matter of relation to this unknown thing?

With this day and hour did not come really the beginning of Ab's thought upon the subject of what was, to him and those he knew, the supernatural. He had thought in the past--he could not help it--of the shadow and the echo. He remembered how he and Oak had talked about the echo, and how they had tried to get rid of the thing which had more than once called back to them insolently across the valley. Every word they shouted this hidden creature would mockingly repeat and there was no recourse for them. They had once fully armed themselves and, in a burst of desperate bravery, had resolved to find who and what the owner of this voice was and have, at least, a fight. They had crossed the valley and ranged about the woodland whence the voice seemed to have come, but they never found what they sought!

The shadow which pursued them on sunny afternoons had puzzled them in another way. Very persistent had been the flat, black, earth-clinging and distorted thing which followed them so everywhere. What was this black, following thing, anyhow, this thing which swung its unsubstantial body around as one moved but which ever kept its own feet at the feet of the pursued, wherever there was no shade, and which lay there beside one so persistently?