Then she drew the stick a long way round.
“This is sleep,” she said. “This place here is waking, and breakfast. And then next the sun will be at the top of the sky again. And we will have dinner in the same fashion. And this is right for you. But what to do with the child I don’t know, unless I keep her practising from the time the sun is at the top of the sky until it is at the bottom. For if she can’t play when she grows up, what will people think?”
Now, while she said this, the Prehistoric Woman had been sitting with the stick on which the flesh had been roasted held straight up in her fingers, resting in the middle of the ring which she had made in the salt. And by now the moon was high and white in the sky. And the Man saw that the moon-shadow of the stick fell on the circle from its centre to beyond its edge. And presently he stretched out his hand and took the stick from her, and held it so and sat very still, thinking, thinking, thinking....
“Faddie,” said Vertebrata—she called him that for loving—“Faddie, will you make me a little bow and arrow and scrape ’em white?”
But her father did not hear her, and instead of answering he sprang up and began drawing on the soft earth before the cave a deep, deep circle, and he ran for the long stick that had carried his game-bag over his shoulder, and in the middle of the earth circle he set the stick.
“Watch a thing!” he cried.
Vertebrata and her mother, understanding little but trusting much, sat by his side. And together in the hot, white night the three watched the shadow of the stick travel on the dial that they had made. Of course there was no such thing as bed-time then, and Vertebrata usually sat up until she fell over asleep, when her mother carried her off to her little bed of skins; but this night she was so excited that she didn’t fall over. For the stick-shadow moved like a finger; like, indeed, a living thing that had been in the world all the time without their knowing. And they watched it while it went a long way round the circle. Then her mother said, “Nonsense, Vertebrata, you must be sleepy now whether you know it or not,” and she put her to bed, Vertebrata saying all the way that she was wide awake, just like in the daytime. And when her mother went back outside the cave, the Man looked up at her wonderfully.
“Trachystomata,” said he (which is to say “siren”), “if the sun-shadow will do the same thing as the moon-shadow, we have found a way to make Vertebrata practise enough.”
In the morning when Vertebrata came out of the cave—she woke alone and dressed alone, just like being grown-up—she found her mother and her father down on their hands and knees, studying the circle in the soft earth and the long sun-shadow of the stick. And her mother called her and she went running to her. And her mother said:—
“Now we will have breakfast, dear, and then you get your pipes and come here and practise. And when you begin, we will lay a piece of bone where the shadow stands, and when I feel the feeling of enough, I will tell you, and you will stop practising, and we will lay another piece of bone on that shadow. And after this you will always practise from one bone to another, forever.”