By Mary Johnston

THE WANDERERS.

THE FORTUNES OF GARIN. Illustrated.

THE WITCH. With frontispiece.

HAGAR.

THE LONG ROLL. The first of two books dealing with the war between the States. With Illustrations in color by N. C. Wyeth.

CEASE FIRING. The second of two books dealing with the war between the States. With Illustrations in color by N. C. Wyeth.

LEWIS RAND. With Illustrations in color by F. C. Yohn.

AUDREY. With Illustrations in color by F. C. Yohn.

PRISONERS OF HOPE. With Frontispiece.

TO HAVE AND TO HOLD. With 8 Illustrations by Howard Pyle, E. B. Thompson, A. W. Betts, and Emlen McConnell.

THE GODDESS OF REASON. A Drama.

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
Boston and New York

THE WANDERERS

COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY MARY JOHNSTON
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published September 1917
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U . S . A

CONTENTS

THE WANDERERS

CHAPTER I
THE FOREST

Trees and trees and trees—a world of trees! Little size and middle size and giant size, short and tall, slender and thick, broad-leafed, narrow-leafed, rough-barked, smooth-barked, dark green, bright green, one solid hue, or spangled or variegated with many-coloured flowers, trees that bore nuts, trees that bore fruit, and trees starkly idle and useless to a frugivorous folk! Trees and trees and trees—trees leaning their heads against one another, trees pressing side to side, trees tied together by the endless vines going looping through the world; trees and trees and trees! Overhead, through the network, showed small pieces of sky; big pieces of sky were seen only when you came to streams. Sunlight struck down in flakes or darts, never as brightness formless and unconfined. At night, looking up from the nestlike arrangements of sticks and forest débris heaped between the forks of trees, three or four stars might be seen at once. The host of stars was rarely seen. The big animals, going down to the wider streams to drink, might see the heavens, but, as a general thing, the tree-folk saw only the forest. As a general thing. Occasionally, in their lives, the horizon inexplicably widened or the zenith went up higher. The big animals stood and walked so that their eyes were not of much use when it came to things on top. The tree-folk had learned how to get about differently, and they had hands, and they stood more or less uprightly, and they used their eyes so that they saw things on top as well as things around them, and they were beginning to think, and they had great curiosity.

She swung herself down from bough to bough until she touched the black loam and the trampled plants beneath the tree. She had a young one clinging to her neck. The tree was a bad tree. It had rocked and shaken and made a noise all night. She was so angry with it that she turned and struck it with her hands and feet. Then she settled the young one upon her shoulder and went off to a thicket where grew very good fruit.

But the day had begun wrong. A lot of other folk were there, too, and they tried to push her away, and though she got her breakfast it was a poor one, and the crowd was a quarrelsome, scolding crowd. She went off and sat down under a tree and looked at them. A thing happened that, in her individual experience, had never happened before. She experienced a distinct feeling of being outside of it all—not outside with a sense of injury, but quite calmly outside. She criticized the tree-folk.

The young one drummed against her breast with its feet. She pulled it down from her shoulder, and it lay upon her knees, and she smiled at it, and it smiled at her. She was very fond of it. All the tree-folk smiled with a kind of grimacing smile, using only the lips. But now this morning a second thing happened. She smiled with her eyes. It gave her a very singular feeling, a feeling that linked itself with the earlier one.

This tree was thin-topped. Looking up, she saw quite unusual pieces of sky. Across the largest a white cloudlet went sailing. The folk in the fruit thicket fell into a tremendous quarrel, yelling at one another. She scrambled to her feet and made the sound that meant, “Get on my back and hold tight! We are going to travel.” The young one obeyed and the two set forth.

Trees, trees, trees, trees! fighting for breathing space, shouldering away their fellows, sucking each its hardest from the earth, striving each its hardest, out with its arms, up with its head, up to the light! and all tied together, tied together with endlessly looping ropes, green and brown and grey, cupped and starred and fringed with purple and orange and white and scarlet! Over all and from all the creepers stretched and dangled. Trees and trees and trees! helplessly many, chained each to the other. Sometimes she and the young one travelled in the trees and over the stretched brown ropes, and sometimes she made her way through the cane and fern and wild and varied growths that overspread the fat black earth out of which had burst the trees. The coloured birds whistled and shrieked, and now and again, in the green gloom, she heard tree-folk calling and answering. But she avoided the tree-folk. She was still critical.

It grew dark in the universal forest. The red and green and orange birds ceased whistling, and the insect people whirring and chirping. The butterflies went to their bark homes.

“Uuugh!” she said,—which meant, “Lightning will flash and thunder will roll, trees will snap, water will come down, and the air will grow cold!”

It all happened, just in that order. She and the young one found an overhanging rock with a rock floor beneath. They crept into the opening that was like the jaws of a monster, and cowered, their faces down. Ugh! the light in sheets and the noise! There was not, this time, much water. She hated water when it came like this, cold and stinging, just as she loved it when it presented itself in pools when one was thirsty and hot with racing through trees. She had not as yet worked it out that it was lovely or hateful according to the angle from which it was approached, that the water apparently did not plan what it should do nor how it should come, and that it was you yourself who accomplished that partition into qualities. If she reasoned at all, it was to the effect that the water very actively cared, now hating and now helping. The young one whimpered and whimpered, and it irritated her, and she beat it. Yelling, it rolled away from her to the other end of the rock floor. And then the bright light and the horrible noise stopped, and the water ceased to dash against her like cold, wet leaves, and the sun came out sudden and strong, and a snake crept over the rock, coiled and darted its head above the young one that was lying sobbing to itself. She saw the snake and she screeched with terror, then she leaped and caught it with both hands just below the head that was flat and pointed like a leaf and dragged it away from the young one. It writhed and lashed about and struck at her, but she held it tighter and tighter, and trampled it with her feet, and choked it until it was dead. Then she flung it from her, over the rock, and shivered with her shoulders, and then she gathered up the young one, and the two travelled on.

They travelled nearly all day, seeing nothing but trees and the plants that hid the soil from sight, and the inhabitants of trees and the folk whose feet had always to be upon the earth. The world was anything but unpopulous. There were beings who flew and beings who climbed and beings who crept or glided, and beings who walked four-footed, and the tree-folk who both walked and climbed. When she came to the hot, still, narrow streams which she crossed by means of the festooned creepers, she saw beings who swam.

It grew late. Where was any space for the shadow of a tree to fall, it fell. Always the world was quiet in the great heat of the middle day. Evening was the time when all the world began to talk at once—all, that is, but the big animals. They waited for full night, and then they roared—they roared! The tree-folk were afraid of the big animals, dreadfully afraid.

The young one was hungry. She pulled it across her shoulder to her breast and gave it milk, and at the next fruit tree they came to she stopped and got her own supper. By the time this was done it was almost night. Before her there showed an opening where grass grew. It sloped to a stream and it supported two or three tall, creeper-clad trees. Through the bushes about the supper tree came a curious, dancing light. Observing this, she followed the instinct of all tree-folk and crept forward to see what might be seen.

One of the trees had been struck by lightning, and it had fallen upon the earth. It lay there all its length, and it was afire. She and the young one sat beneath the bushes and watched it with awed interest. In their history, tree-folk had met with this phenomenon often enough to learn that you must not touch, that you must not even go very close. When you did so, it was worse than all kinds of big animals!

The flame flickered in and out among the branches and ran along the trunk. A light smoke curled up, and she could hear the tree talking. It made a crackling talk. The burning mass warmed and lit the dusk. She and the young one were so interested that they went closer and closer. It occurred to her to find out how close you could go. So she went cautiously, cautiously, very close indeed. Up to a certain point that was pleasant enough, but one step farther on it began to sting. She jerked back, frightened, but fascinated. Now again it was pleasant. It seemed that it was angry only when you came too close. Keep a little away and it was the best of friends! She and the young one sat on the ground and thought about it. A long, broken bough, slender and bare as a bamboo, happened to lie there, one end touching the fiery tree, the other close to her hand. Her hand chanced to close upon it, as it might have closed upon creeper or young bough in the trees. Something more happened. She lifted this stick with the fire at one end like a pennant, lifted it and moved it to and fro, the fire making lines and circles in the air.

Her brain worked. The stick gave her a long arm, an arm much longer than anybody else’s, with active, bright fingers at the end of it. If you could take it with you— No one had ever thought of carrying the bright, stinging thing.... The flame blew down the stick toward her and she was horribly frightened. Dropping the bough she picked up the young one and fled.

In the shortest of times it was dark night. Day stayed only where was the red, stinging thing. She was in a region of cane and bush. That was not safe—she and the young one must get back to tree-land. And then, just as she was puckering her brows over this, she heard the big animal.

The big animal came against her through the canes. She caught the rustling sound they made when they were brushed aside, and she heard breathing and she saw eyeballs in the dark. Screeching, she turned with the young one and ran. There were no trees, no trees—no safety—only blind, exceeding terror! The big animal was coming—the big animal was coming—it was sending its voice before it. The young one, screeching too, gripped her fast. She tore through the cane, back the way she had come, and the big animal with glaring eyes rushed after her. It was coming in bounds—closer, oh, closer! She broke through the cane, into that open space where the tree still burned. The pursuer came after her and the young one. It was big and hungry. She felt its hot breath. Face over shoulder, she saw its bared teeth. She found a voice that was human; she shrieked. Along the ground lay the brand that, a while ago, she had lifted and waved. It was shorter than it had been, but yet it was fit for use. She snatched it up, turned and thrust it, flaming, against the muzzle of the big animal. She made deliberate use of fire. The beast that was after her roared and drew back, then made to come on again. With all her strength she fought it over the eyes with fire. Roaring with pain, it turned and fled. She threw down the flaming staff, and with the young one on her back, chattering wildly, never stopped until the forest was about her, until, finding a tree with a sinewy, swinging curtain of vine, she had drawn herself and the young one up from bough to bough, up to where, on high, in the comfortable fork of two great branches, she reached what she esteemed as safety.

Night passed, dawn came. It came still and red, with a mist over a water where long-legged, long-billed, scarlet-and-white bird people waded about. They fished or stood on one leg pondering the universe, or not pondering it, as you choose. She and the young one looked down a clear forty feet and saw great roots of trees and between them black, yielding earth. The light strengthened, and they leaped and slid and swung out of this tree into another, and then another, and so they went by trees and trees and trees until they came to firm ground and saw below them bushes with fruit. The young one locked its hands about her neck and she sprang and swung, now upon this bough, now with this liana between her hands. So they came to the ground and the fruit bushes that were all covered with bloomy, purple orbs. It was a good and quiet breakfast. There were creeping folk and flying folk in this part of the world, but she saw and heard no tree-folk.

She and the young one sat down upon the ground. The young one fell to pulling at some tufts of grass, patting them and making its own range of sounds, but she sat with her chin on her knees and her eyes down. Yet another thing was happening. All tree-folk, of course, remembered; even the big animals did that; everybody did it. But they did not know that they remembered; they never gave the matter a thought. To their apprehension, each day was taken up de novo. But now not only did she remember, but she was aware that she remembered. Not clearly, of course, only vaguely, but still aware. She was going over, she was returning to a time that was not this present time. The big animal, his eyes and claws and teeth—the bright thing jumping up and down and climbing over the tree on the ground—the feel of it, pleasant when you were a little way off, but the most dreadful bite of all if you touched it!... Back of the bright thing was the storm, and the snake that had tried to bite the young one, and back of that was the poor breakfast, and the quarrelsome crowd of tree-folk, and how strange and unfamiliar they had all of a sudden looked to her. And back of that—but she could not go any farther back. It was as though there were a deep stream, and the creeper that had stretched across was broken....

It was the bright thing to which she returned most fully—the bright thing and the stick. Beneath the fruit trees lay enough of broken and dead wood. Her hand went out to the nearest piece, which she lifted and with some delight brandished. She spoke. As yet her language was almost as limited as that of the big animals, but what she meant was, “I have a long arm!—a longer arm than anybody else’s!” Three or four feet away a lizard lay on a stone. She touched it with the stick. Then, as it raised its head, she struck with force and killed it. This result caused her to chatter with surprise. She had not been angry with the lizard—she had not laid hand or foot upon it. The long arm had killed it—but she had moved the long arm. She knew certain aspects of death well enough. That lizard, no more than the snake of yesterday, would run about again!

She sat and thought. Then she took the stick and, rising, struck with it at a cluster of purple fruit which had been beyond reach. The fruit came tumbling down upon the grass. The long arm was good, then, for that, too.

Out of the wood came one of the tree-folk—one of the other kind, the kind that did not carry young ones around with them, the kind into which half of the young ones grew. He was at some distance, and did not at once see her. She stood and watched him coming.

The two were about of a height, but the other kind—because it did not have young ones, and did not have to spend much of its time gambolling with young ones and watching young ones, because it roamed more, because it had, perhaps, a certain surplus of explosive energy which set it to contending with its fellows or sent it, day and night, howling and racing through the trees, because of this and because of that—the other kind was ahead in muscular development. Muscular development meant a heightened muscular sense. The other kind had, undoubtedly, a somewhat greater delight in movement and action, from which, in the fulness of time, might spring a certain initiative in enterprise, and a vast and various network of results. The kind that had young ones, nursed them and carried them about, had its superiorities, too, due again to a range of matters beyond its present comprehension. But neither of them knew about his or her own or the other’s superiorities. They were a very simple folk—tree-folk.

The other kind now saw her, and after an instant of gazing, came on. Although she had been so critical, yesterday, of the tree-folk, she found—measuring by her standards—she found this one rather a strong and comely individual. She had travelled, relatively speaking, a long way without any other company than the young one. She certainly experienced a sensation of friendliness.

The two stood jabbering at the edge of the wood. She had dropped the stick, but now she stooped and picking it up flourished it about and with the end struck off a cluster of fruit. Parade and showing off—however they got into the world, here they were! The other kind gave a deep screech of surprise, then stood, spellbound, watching this so marvellous performance, then by degrees, became wildly excited. He put out both hands, seized the stick, and tried to take it from her. There was much wood upon the ground, but he could not conceive that any other piece would serve. She had the only stick.

She resisted, and they quarrelled, both clutching the stick, jabbering each at the other. Both put forth force to keep the thing that knocked down fruit. But there was actually more strength in his long arms and large hands than in hers. He wrested the stick from her and grinned with delight in its possession.

It is probable that, of late, changes had been occurring among the particles of his own brain. Probably he, too, had been making discoveries. Neither the one nor the other might corner discovery. At any rate, he now began to experiment with the stick. He knocked from the tree all the purple fruit in reach, and then he sat down upon the ground and with the end of the staff scraped at the earth and beat the grass flat. His interest in what he was doing grew and grew. She had gone away, sulking, to the young one. But it was impossible long to resist the fascination of this new extension of power. She came and sat down in the grass and watched. She was friendly again, and he, too, having the stick, was gracious. He was a young, strong, well-looking member of the tree-folk. Lying about were some small stones, miniature boulders. He struck the end of the stick beneath one of these, put his weight upon the other end, and lifted the stone out of its bed. The lever was here. Both of them jabbered with excitement. There were other stones. She wanted to disturb one, too, and she came across and put her hand upon the stick. “Let me!” meant the sound which she uttered. But he jabbered back, and shook her off, and went on turning over stones. Very angry, she returned to the charge, and, watching her chance, suddenly jerked the stick from him. He sprang to his feet and seized it again. She screamed at him and held it stubbornly—a good, thick piece of wood it was! The other kind, now in a violent passion, tugged and wrenched until he got it from her. Then, with suddenness, he found yet another use for a piece of wood. He knocked her down with it, and when, with a cry of fury, she rose to her feet, he repeated the action.

CHAPTER II
THE CAVE

The rocks rose in tiers to a stark height above the dark and tangled wood. From their feet sloped away to the floor of mould a runway of stones great and small. Long ago, long, long ago, water had honeycombed the cliff.

A great stone, shaped like a fir-cone, masked half the cave mouth. A gnarled, rock-clinging tree helped with the other half. When the cave woman had found food and would bring it home, she looked first for the tree and then for the stone.

Sometimes, for a long while, food was easy to get—that is to say, comparatively easy. Then, for a long time, food might be hard to get. There were times when food-getting took strength and cunning and patience in excess. Such was this time, and it had lasted long. So long had it lasted that everything in the world seemed to be hungry.

The cone-shaped stone and the ragged tree kept full sunshine from the cave, but a fair amount entered in shafts and splashes. Four children played in the light and shadow. Naked, with sticks and stones and a snare made from the red fibre of a vine, they played at being hunters. They jumped and dodged and screamed; they hid behind outcropping folds of rock; now one was the quarry and now another. When they tired of that, they sat down and tossed and caught round, shining pebbles, brought to them by the mother from a stream she had crossed. After a time they grew hungry and easily angered. One struck another and they fought. That over, a common void and weakness drew them again together. The sun was getting low, the orange light going away from the littered cavern floor. They felt cold. Back in the cave was heaped dry wood from the floor of the forest, and to one side, guarded by a circle of flat stones, a little fire was burning. Never were the children to burn too great a fire, and never were they to let what was there go out! Now they sat around it whimpering. The oldest crawled into the dimness of the cavern and, bringing back an armful of small sticks, put two crosswise in the flame. Warmth was good, and the flickering light did for sunbeams. Three sat hunched around the fire, while the littlest one lay and sucked its thumb for lack of other food, and went at last to sleep. The next to the littlest nodded, nodded, and then it, too, slept, close to the littlest for warmth. The eldest was a girl and the next a boy. Shag-haired, naked, lean, they watched and fed the fire, and with growing hunger watched the entrance. Daylight grew colder and thinner. They got up and went to the cave mouth. The tree and the cone-shaped rock blocked vision. The lawgiver had forbidden the four to show themselves on the farther side of the tree and the rock. If they did, all the ill of the world would fall upon them. At least, they knew that the lawgiver’s hand would fall upon them.

The two children went back into the cave. In a corner lay a pile of skins—both short hair and thick fur. They took two of these and wrapped themselves in them. The light grew colder and thinner. They were so hungry that tears came out of their eyes. The littlest one waked and cried.

The two eldest wandered again to the cave mouth. They wanted so badly to see if the provider were coming. From the other side of the big stone they could look down the runway of stones, they could see some way into the wood. They stood and stared at the concealing face of the big stone and the concealing, twisted trunk of the tree, and the tears ran down their cheeks. The feet of the eldest one moved uncertainly, then with more assurance. She moved out of the cave mouth and around the great stone, beckoning to the next eldest to follow. He ran after her. Shag-haired, with skins from the heap gathered around them, they came in front of the masking stone and tree. Here the light was stronger, was as yet quite strong.

They looked down the stony slope, and they peered under the thick trees at its base, but nowhere could they see the provider. She had been gone a long time. The world looked cold and harsh and terrifying to the children.... Yet it was hard to go back into the cave, when, if they stayed out here, they might the sooner see the provider. They stayed, two small shapes huddled at the top of the runway of stones.

Something moved in the wood below. Bushes and little trees bent this way or that. Something that was strong was moving. The children’s mouths opened, they raised themselves to their knees. The bushes shook again and nearer to the stony slope; there was heard the snapping of a branch. The children scrambled to their feet. The provider must not see them out here—if she did, there would be blows. The thought arrived, maybe it was not the provider! Terror took them—they turned in haste. One struck foot against a root of a tree, was thrown down, delaying both. Open-mouthed, they looked over shoulder, and saw that it was not the provider.

A man with a great fell of hair, with a club and with a skin filled with stones for throwing, came from the deep wood into the straggling growth at the base of the tiers of rock. Hunter on his own account, and fierce from lack of luck, he had pushed from his own lair farther in this direction than he had ever done before. Such was the adversity of the times that all hunters, human or brute, must widen their hunting-grounds. This hunter had widened his. He was, moreover, a strong hunter and quick of eye. And yet so bad were the times that he often went hungry—as now.

Clear of the great wood, he came before the line of cliffs that he had not seen before. Hereabouts was strange to him. He stood still, and his gaze swept the rocks. Presently it fell upon the two human children at the top of the runway. He stared, resting on his club. Then, from the wood ahead, some sound that he knew how to interpret caught his ear. He bent his head aside. The sound came again. His eye saw the light disturbance of the undergrowth. Doe and fawn, he caught their movement, doe and fawn passing that way. Instantly, he was hunter of flesh, hunter upon their trail. As he had come, so he vanished. The children saw only the stony way and the wood again. A panic took them; they turned, and, crying out, rushed past the stone and the twisted tree, back into the cave.

The light lowered still. Out of the wood to the base of the cliffs and then to the stony runway came another hunter. This one, too, had had scant luck—roving all day, and now with naught to show but nuts and roots and of these none too many. She carried them slung in a skin. She had a club and a snare of green withes. She wore upon her body, for warmth and for protection against the thorns and briars of the world, the pelt of some forest beast. She was largely made and strong, and down her back fell a mass of darkly red and tangled hair. She climbed the runway. The children, cowering beside the fire, saw her at the cave mouth, and set up a yelping welcome.

Seated upon the cavern floor, she took up and suckled the littlest one. Such scarcity was there that she herself was hungry, and there was not much milk. The littlest one fretted yet when she pushed it away. She broke the nuts she had brought between two stones. The roots she pounded and shredded. She and her young had supper. No one had food enough to satisfy. They ate greedily what there was, to the last kernel and shred. Language was a scanty thing. Uncombined guttural or high-pitched sounds answered well enough for three fourths of communication. But they had a certain number of words of action, relation, and naming. Mother and children talked together after a fashion. The children talked of food, more food. She answered sharply, then gave the youngest her breast again, then sat with her chin upon her knees, staring into the flame. The younger children slept at last, lying upon and under the skins in the corner of the cave. The eldest stayed for a time by the fire and the brooding form of the mother. The eldest looked at the flame and the shadows that chased one another around the cave, and at the black cave mouth. She was not going to tell the lawgiver about the other hunter, for that would be to say that she had gone out of the cave, beyond the hiding rock and tree. Avoid your penalties—outwit your karma—was a policy attempted as early and earlier than that. The lawgiver herself often attempted it, as had done the mother and lawgiver before her.

The provider lifted her head from her knees, banked the ashes over the red embers, and gave utterance to a row of half-articulate sounds that meant, “Dead tired.—Hunting all day without luck.—Hard world.—Go to sleep!” So saying, she got to her feet and, moving to the cave mouth, looked out into the darkness. Hard-to-get-food meant all kinds of added insecurities. She went in front of the tree and stone and looked down the runway and to either hand along the base of the cliff. Not one of her senses took alarm. It was a quiet night, without sight or sound or scent or forward-reaching touch of any hurtful approach. Returning to the cave, she moved past the red eye of the fire to the heap of skins. The girl was already there. Mother and children lay wreathed together under the pelts. At hand rested the club and a pile of stones, and lightwood waited by the covered embers.

The still night went by. Howsoever heavy the provider’s sleep, the first light wakened her, when, cool and grey, it came creeping into the cavern. The elder children she shook awake. The littlest one waked of its own accord and began a wailing crying. She suckled it, and it stilled itself for a time. The girl and boy scraped away the ashes and put fresh sticks upon the fire. But there was no breakfast for them nor for the provider. The latter took her long, heavy, and knotted club, took the skin shaped to hold matters or food or missiles, and the flint flake chipped to the semblance of a knife blade. She threatened the children with beatings if they left the cave, and then left it herself and passed down the runway of stones into the forest where even the trees looked hungry.

All day long the children waited, now so pinched with hunger that it was a pity to see their faces. They did not play much to-day; they quarrelled and wept, and lay by the smouldering fire, their elfish faces hidden upon their thin arms. Once the boy and girl went out of the cave mouth and peered cautiously around the edge of the great stone. They saw nothing, neither the provider coming back, nor the hunter of yesterday, nor any moving thing but the tree-tops shaken by the wind, and some round white clouds adrift in the sky, and an eagle soaring above the cliff-tops, looking, too, for food.

Came a splendour of sunset, beating against the tiers of rock, making them red and purple. The provider emerged from the wood, and over her shoulder hung spoil and food—hung a game bird of the largest kind, a wattled, bronze-feathered colossus among birds! The dark red mass of her hair mingled with its plumage. Triumph breathed around her; she set her foot lightly on lichen and stone.

She had tied leaves and moss so that blood might not fall from the borne victim. When she came to the runway, when she was about to mount the stony slope, she noticed red drops. Leaves and moss had slipped. Furrows came into her brow. She drew her prey before her and adjusted that covering. The light was withdrawing. Though she turned and looked at her backward-stretching path, she could not tell in the dimness of the world if there were other drops of blood, if there were downy feathers. Dusk was growing—she was savage from famine—home was up there and her hungry brood. She hoped for the best, hoped that there were about no prowlers of dangerous size, and set her foot upon the incline that led to her door. The children, looking out, saw her coming....

They built the fire up until it crackled and flung light into all but the deepest crannies of the cave. How warm it was, how genial! They plucked the bird, and air streaming in at the entrance blew the bronze feathers about. The uses of fire were many and good,—meat was better brought near to fire, left there for a time. They put the meat upon a flat stone and shoved it into a ring of ardent heat, and presently it was improved to their taste. The provider, with her sharpened flake of stone, divided the bird part from part. The hungry family ate, tearing tissue and sinew with sharp teeth, sucking the juices. Even the littlest one was given a bone to do what it might with. At last they had dined, and there was little of the bird that was left. They gnawed the great bones clean. Only the feathers blew about in the night air as the flame blew, and the smoke flattened itself against cavern roof and wall.

For all the gaping, black cave mouth, the inrushing night air, the smoke and litter of the cavern, here was cheer within, light, warmth, intimacy, coziness, home! The littlest one lay and laughed and crowed. The next to the littlest got up and leaped about with the leaping shadows. The two biggest gathered together the beautiful feathers that had clothed the dinner. They did not know what they should do with them, but they were treasures none the less. The provider, the cave-user, the home-maker, stretched herself by the fire. Rest was earned, good rest, and presently sleep! She lay relaxed, and in her attitude, her crossed legs and outflung arms, was something of the grace of a great cat of the forest. The firelight reddened all the cave save that oblong, ragged, black aperture where was passage in and out. Here the black night showed and here swirled the wind. “Ow! Ow!” laughed and mowed and clamoured to itself the child who danced with the shadows.

The provider raised herself upon her elbow, then sat upright. A far, thin noise had caught her ear. With a gesture of her clenched hand she brought to an end the sound that the child was making. Now was only the crackle of the fire and the strong whisper of the wind.... It was the wind that brought again the other sound. The provider heard it, thin and far yet, but growing articulate. At a bound she was upon her feet.

Body slanted forward, hands behind her ears, she stood in the cave mouth, hearkening. She left the cave, passed between the covering rock and twisted tree, and stood at the top of the runway up which at sunset she had toiled, the great bird upon her back. The night was black and starry. The wind brought again the noise. Now it was fully articulate. At this point in her history she had not formally named, perhaps, those enemies that she heard. But for all that, she knew well enough who they were. They were wolves.

Back in the cave the lawgiver obtained silence from her brood. She regarded the heap of firewood, then, working with dispatch, dragged dead boughs and rotting bark toward the cave mouth. The two more able of her young helped. All heard the sound now, and there was grey fear in the cave. From wall to wall they laid a line of fuel. Behind it, the cavern was spacious enough; there were loose stones of a size for casting, and these were brought together in a heap. There was the club, and there was the sharpened flake of stone that made a fair knife. And there were the provider’s own strength and instinct. Fight for your young! Lives for number like the leaves of the wood had woven firmly that pattern and dyed it to stay.

She stood between the unkindled wood and the black night and listened to the sound, whether it swelled or sank. The children cowered together by the cave hearth. Perhaps the pack would go by—perhaps it did not savour the blood dropped from the bird.

That proved to be a vain hope. Length by length the baying came loud and near. She heard the assembly at the foot of the runway, and the stealthy, crowding push upon the stones.... The provider became the defender.

A brand from the hearth fired the guardian line. The flame ran like a serpent from point to point. The leader of the pack, appearing between the cone-shaped stone and the twisted tree, was met by what he hated and did not understand, by what was ever too strong for wolves. He snapped and sprang, but the fire cast him back.

The wolves crowded the top of the runway, they jostled one another before the cave mouth. In the out-shot, quivering, murky light their movement was one to dizzy the eye. They padded to right and left, investigating the base of the cliff; they leaped at its face, found footing in root or fissure, wreathed the orifice whence poured the red light behind which was prey. The light upon their yellow-grey bodies, moving, twining, leaping, gave them, too, a semblance as of fire. They made a violent noise, violent and dogged. The wolf-world was hungry. Fire—they hated fire, screening their prey! But fire might die—wolves had that wisdom. Wait, and watch chances! They waited, leaping like dun waves, like solid, forky flames, and always their yelling made a whirlpool in the else silent night.

Fire might die—the defender, too, knew that! She looked down upon the dwindling heap of firewood, and upon the children who clutched her by the knees. Then she thrust them away, selected a fagot and mended a place that was thin. It seemed to her that she had done all this before, and that living had in it much of agony.

Fire leaped and played and sang. Rose and yellow and blue, its forky shapes held the cave, a zone of magic between wolf and savage, brute and human. Fire blossomed and bloomed from all that was given it, bough and branch and log. It played merrily, it sang clearly; with a thousand well-shaped weapons it said No! to the famished pack. But when less was given it, and less and less, its blossoms withered and its weapons were lowered. The defender nursed her resources, but it grew that the line of fire was narrower. A wolf, huge and lean, made a bound and well-nigh cleared it. Well-nigh, but not quite! Singed and howling, he made back to his fellows. The defender hurled stones after. Her arm was not a weakling’s arm. The stones fell with bruising weight, and with the weight, to the wolves, of supernatural powers. Moreover, she fed to the fire a prized and until now withheld great knot of pine, dragged to the cave from a lightning-riven tree. Up roared the fire, with strong, new weapons. The pack, howling, momentarily daunted, dragged back from the cave mouth. She heard the stones of the runway give beneath the outward-pushing feet, go rolling down the slope. For one suffocating instant of hope doom was seen as a figure in retreat ... then doom stood its ground, then doom waited still, before the cave mouth.

The points of flame sank, the fat pine burned away. The defender took her club; the lawgiver commanded the children into the bottom, low and dark, of the cavern; the provider could provide no further. The mother did not reason about it, but there would be fight in the cave until all was done. She took the stone knife between her teeth. Her teeth were strong and white; her eyes held a red gleam, her dark red hair seemed to bristle upon her head.... A wolf leaped again, coming over the dying fire-weapons. She swung the great club—the skull cracked beneath it—the wolf fell down and moved no more. Again a respite, then two came. The club rose, descended—rose, descended. She drove the stone knife in through the eyes of the one who came closest, teeth seizing the skin with which she was girt. Her victims lay before her, but she was one and the pack were fifty. Fearful noise, wavering light, blind, swift, unreckoning action, and some knowledge that presently would come, blood-red and terrific, the end of the world....

Without the cavern, the face of the cliff in which it was hollowed ran brokenly up to a wild and broken hill-brow. Here this crest retreated, and here it overhung. Ice had passed over it, and there had been left huge boulders. Now one of these, balanced to a hair, resting on the cliff edge, was pushed from its place and started upon a journey. With a grinding and a shouting noise, with a belting cloud of earth and rock particles, with huge weight and momentum it came down among, it came down upon, the wolves. It slew and maimed, catching and pinning wolves beneath it; it almost spanned the top of the runway; if made a terror as of thunderbolts; it thrust down the slope; it scattered and spilled the hunting pack! With long-drawn yelling the units fled. Elsewhere might be release from hunger. Here was blank enmity and power, and staying further was no good. Pattering and pushing, they passed down the stony slope, into the thick forest. Their long-drawn crying died away. Another part of the world for them, and other prey!

The hunter who had prized the boulder over the cliff was pleased with the thundering commotion he had made, and with the success of the raid. Now he climbed down the face of the cliff to the long shelter line formed by the jutting rock. Here was the boulder he had toppled over! He patted it with his hand and he kicked with his foot the body of a wolf that projected from beneath. The night had but a late-risen waning moon, but so clear was the air, and so good was the eyesight of hunters accustomed by day and by night to the roof of the sky, that the man saw as though he had been cat or owl. He gazed down the runway and recognized the outstretched finger of wood where, two suns ago, he had paused and looked this way, and then had followed the doe and fawn. He had slain both and eaten his fill. He carried now, wrapped in fawn skin, strips of meat. He also had a knife of flaked stone. After that chase and after a gorging feast and sleep in a hole that he had found in this same long-continuing fastness line of rock and hill, he had remembered the children he had seen before the doe went by.... These were fresh hunting-fields to him. He knew better the lower ground, near the quarter where the sun rose, where pushed a turbid, great river. But to eat in these days, one must wander afar! For a long while he had seen few beings of his own kind. This cave region was new to him. He knew little of caves, and though he made a lair where it was convenient to do so, and though, through considerable periods of time, he might return to it at night, he had not acquired the habit of a fixed abode. The male of his kind was restless and a wanderer.

The boulder which he had thrown down almost hid the cave mouth. But now from one side stole forth a diffused red light. Smoke, too, was in his nostrils. Grasping his club more closely, he rounded the corner of the stone and having done so was fairly in the cave. He discovered there what he may be said to have expected to discover—a woman and her children. It was the female of his kind that found or made substantial lairs.

The defender had put upon the fire the last scrapings of her heap of wood. Rose and gold and violet, the flames lit the cavern. They showed her, still with her club and knife, and her young ones by the wall, and the heap of skins, and the stone hearth. It was cold without, it was warm within; dark without, light within. He had never seen so noble a lair! He spoke—chiefly by gestures, but also with words. She answered with gestures and words. “I threw the boulder down,” he said. “Wolves dead!”

He gazed around the place that was warm and dry and pleasant. He gazed at the woman. She stood upon the younger side of prime, as did he. He dropped his club; he came across, and with a smoothing motion ran his hand along her arm. She made no objection to that; she looked at him with eyes out of which had died the red rage....

Dawn broke and lit the world in front of the tiers of rock. Those within the cavern stirred from sleep. The man and the woman went forth together, found dead wood and brought it in under the rock. Embers were left beneath the ashes. They made up the fire and they broiled the strips of meat that the man had wrapped in the fawn skin. Woman and children and man had breakfast.

That over, the two went out and looked at the boulder, and by dint of the strength of both dragged and pried from under it the slain wolves. Scavenger birds were circling overhead, or watching from tree-tops.... That morning they worked hard, stripping with flake knives the skins from the wolves. They cut meat in thin pieces and hung these in sun and wind over a horizontal pole set between two vertical ones. The elder children watched, frightening the birds with cries and flung stones. Finally, the man and woman bore the carcasses some distance from the cave and dropped them over a precipitous place into the wood below. Now let the birds strip the bones!

The man and the woman waited to see them come sailing, then they turned back to the cavern. As they went they talked amicably together. The man pointed out, over the forest-top, the quarter whence he had come. He said the word of this part of the world for “river,” and spread his arms to show that it was a great river, flowing through low country. He did not well know cave countries; he showed that by the way he looked at the rocks.

They lived and feasted, slept and were warm three days in the cavern at the top of the runway. Then it became necessary again to get food. The provider and her guest hunted long hours, and came to the cave at dusk, carrying a beaver that they had trapped. Again the cavern knew food and contentment. They ate, and then they slept, with the red eye of the fire never quite closing through the night. The next day there was still food.

The provider lay by the fire in her cave and looked at the man. He sat in the entrance so that he could get the light, and with a stone in one hand and a piece of flint in the other, he was striking such pieces from the latter as would leave it edged and pointed. He was a strong man. More than that, he had a rudimentary good temper, though on occasions he could also show himself violent, crafty, and selfish. The provider possessed like qualities.

The two older children came from a trickling spring three stone-throws away. The lawgiver let them go that far from the cave. When food grew easier to get, and all the world of tooth and claw less keenly dangerous, she would take them, grown older and bigger, with her when she hunted—give them training, looking to their hunting in their turn. The two, pausing beside the man, watched him use flint and hand-stone. He was not fierce with the children; he laughed and spoke in a friendly voice.

The provider’s experience had been with fiercer men, who struck aside the children. The last one had done so, indeed, had well-nigh killed the child that was then the littlest. He had lived in the cave three days, and then had burst away, following a hunting woman who had chanced to pass that way. The provider had been glad when he was gone. That was a long while ago—a good long time, many moons before the littlest one came....

She could not well remember how that man had looked—but he had not been like this one. This one seemed like one who had been here before, and that for a long time. Yet that was not true, and no one stayed for a long time. In her world, as she knew it, men made a roving folk. This cave, that lair of brush and stretched skins, received them for a time—short time. Then they went, quitting women and the young of women that, together, made the only stable society.

The provider looked around her cavern. She thought of the wolves, then, with a backward stretch of her mind, of the bear she had fought and taken this cavern from. In between the two points of time she had fought many beasts. She had hunted in fair weather and foul. At times, being afar, she had doubted ever seeing again the cavern and her young. And she had held the cavern, as the other night, from attackers.... She gazed deeply upon the man sitting in the cave entrance.... Children, and feeding them, and keeping them fast from being slain. Children, and finding them food, and thrusting away their foes. Her own food, too, and her own foes. She thought again of the wolves, and of how he had thrown down the boulder, and of how much easier the hunting was with two than alone. Within her breast was born a warm, an aching desire for companionship. She thought, “If he would stay—not being fierce.”

She looked at the fire; then, raising herself upon her arm, laid sticks upon it so that the cave should still glow. She did this without reasoning, but when it was done she looked from the mended flame to the man who had been here now four days. He sat in the cave entrance and chipped and chipped at his flint knife. As he worked he made a humming sound to himself.... You could pen a child within the cave and keep it there, but you could not pen a man. To have him stay he must want to stay.... Her own desire that he should stay grew wider and deeper.

The provider raised herself and went and sat down also in the entrance. She looked at his work, and again without reasoning she admired it aloud. “Good knife!” she said. “Plenty flint here!”

He nodded his head and went on working and humming. Presently, one side being chipped sufficiently, he turned the knife in his hand, rested, and looked out of the cave mouth. The leaves of the forest below were growing brown, were dropping upon the chill earth. He looked over his shoulder at the fire in the rock chamber and the pile of skins. “Good warm here!” he said.

She nodded, then waved her hand toward the world beneath. “Soon all cold. But warm here. Good here.” She turned her body toward the cave. “Children good!”

He looked doubtfully at that, but just then the littlest crowed, and the next to the littlest laughed, and the eldest put a stick upon the fire and set up a warmer light. A thing happened. The man’s look softened and mellowed. He felt within something that he had never felt before. He grunted, took up the knife again and chipped with vigour. The woman said nothing for a time, then she spoke somewhat dreamily. “One hunt alone—get tired. Two hunt together, good—good.... Two stay together—two and children.” She moved nearer to him. “Good?” she repeated on an at once insisting and questioning note.

The man sharpened and sharpened the flint knife. Mental processes were as yet somewhat snail-like and it took time to measure a large, new proposition. He looked at the woman, and back into the cave and down over the turning forest, and then at the woman again. Again his face broke slowly into that dusky, promising warmth. “Pretty good,” he said, and began to fashion from a bit of wood a handle for his knife.

CHAPTER III
BIG TROUBLE

Rudely constructed, shed-like, or nondescript, the long communal houses lay like dark beads in a landscape of green, in a warm, temperate clime. In front stretched a fen, and beyond the fen flowed a river. To right and left and in the background waked and slumbered the forest, chief possessor yet of the earth. Before the houses that were large enough and long enough to lodge, when they chose to stay indoors, several hundred women, men, and children, ran a strip of naked, sun-baked earth. Here the children played, and here went on industrial processes, and here were held, beneath one huge tree, the general councils, pow-wows, folk-meets.

The people of the long houses ate fish which they caught by means of weirs and with harpoons and hooks fashioned from bone. They ate in their season fruits and nuts, and they were acquainted with certain mealy roots and seeds of grasses. They ate those animal denizens of forest or plain that they could kill with club and spear or take in pit and snare. In times of scarcity they ate flesh food of a low order. In times of huge scarcity, when it was that or the wasting away of the group and its passage into the land of death, they might slay and eat the aged of their own kind.

In the matter of weapons the people of the long houses yet depended upon the spear, but were upon the threshold of the bow and arrow. In the heat of summer they wore brief garments of woven grass; in the colder weather they garbed themselves in skins sewed with a bone needle and a fibre thread. Year by year, life by life, they were moulding a flexible, strong, not unmusical language. They could count beyond ten. Simple calculations were coming into the scope of most. Here and there finer brains undertook calculations not quite so simple. They used a ceremonial burial of the dead, and they placed beside the body weapons and other objects which might be useful in some vague other world. They observed the moon and the larger stars, and to every single thing under heaven they attributed a will to save or to damn. They had a body of customs, not yet stiffened into law. Women, the makers and possessors of children, the original devisers of houses and clothes and such things, the earliest lawgivers and gatherers of people into societies, were yet, through the greater range of matters, the authoritative sex. They were the mothers, the instinctively turned to even after childhood, the dimly deified. But men were powerful encroachers, and they encroached.

To the two alike had once fallen the fierce, the incessant warfare against their old kindred the beasts. Now, the women abetting, the men had almost taken over that department of living. Men were the manufacturers of spear and spearhead, the experimenters with stone axe and stone knife. They were the steady feelers toward bow and arrow, the chief hunters now of dangerous beasts, strengthening in muscle, gaining in height, careless of inflicted pain, watchers of flowing blood, quarrellers with chance—met other hunting bands from other long houses, adventurous, bold, standing by wide rivers, meditating a raft, a boat, or from hill-tops watching the climbing stars, roaming afar from the houses and returning. Wilder than his mate was the male and more violent, as became one who had nothing to do with children. Nor he, nor she, believed that he had anything to do with children—nor with the making of them, nor with the owning them after they were made.

A cluster of women came down to the bank of one of the ribbon-like water-courses winding through the fen. Here was a bed of clay. The women carried a number of uncertainly shaped vessels of plaited rush and osier. These they laid upon the earth, and sitting down by the stream, fell to dashing water over the clay, and, when the latter was sufficiently softened, to gathering it up and kneading it with the hands. When the mass was very smooth and plastic, each woman took one of the osier shapes, set it between her knees, and began to daub it within and without with clay. They wet their hands and worked with palm and fingers and thumb, and also with a spatula-like piece of wood, bringing the clay into one surface, smoothing and finishing it off. When bowl and jar were dried in the sun, then water might be carried without grave loss and meat might be cooked without the osiers burning in the fire. An idea came to one of the women. She took a mound of wet clay and with her hands and the spatula she worked until she had a bowl of the clay itself without any osier inner walls. “Ha!” she cried. “Look!” Setting the bowl aside in the sun, she took more clay and made a jar-like shape. The other women suspended work to watch her. They leaned forward, interest in their eyes. An old woman, sitting by, watching not working,—old Aneka the Wise Woman,—made a sound of approval. “Good!” said Aneka. “It is good to think and to put one thing and another thing together! Now you can make pots without braiding reeds.”

Back on the sun-hardened strip before the houses a fire was burning. At a fair distance from this rose a young tree and to the tree was tied a creature with his wolf descent written plain. A woman came from the nearest house, in her hands a piece of raw meat. When the wild dog saw the meat he made a bound and strained fiercely at the thongs which held him. The woman laid the meat upon the ground, not far from the fire. Then she took a billet of wood and, passing before the tied creature, showed it to him not once but many times. This done, she placed the piece of wood upon the ground as far from him in the one direction as was the piece of meat in the other. Next in order, she took a long, stout stick, seasoned and sharpened, and striking one end into the embers, watched it until it was aflame. All this time the half-dog, half-wolf, was making a noise. Woman, dog, meat, stick, and fire had for observers a number of naked children. Now she turned upon these and ordered them within the house, and when they protested and went reluctantly, she threatened them with voice and stick. The ground clear, the woman, the burning stick in her hand, went and untied the creature to be tamed. He sprang at her, but she lunged as fiercely with the brand, and he gave back and cowered. She spoke in a voice of command, pointed out the billet of wood, and spoke again. The creature gathered himself together and made a leap—toward the piece of meat. She was there before him, squarely between him and it, the burning wood sending forth sparks. Again he gave back and hung uncertain, growling deeply. She gestured for the twentieth time toward the bit of wood. “Bring me that! Then you shall eat.” He would have liked to tear her into pieces, but after many minutes of this work,—rushes toward the meat, beatings-back with stick and voice and eye,—he brought her the billet of wood. “Good! Now, go eat!”

East of the long houses spread a space of earth firmer than the neighbouring fen, more open than the neighbouring forest. Three women were here. They had wooden staves, and at the end of each was bound at right angles a large, rudely sharpened flint. With these the women were loosening the fat, black earth. Beside them lay a heap of roots and plants taken from the forest.

Beneath a tree sat a lean man watching. In weather such as this, and with no ceremonial toward, the men of the long houses went all but nude. But the lean man dressed every day, and that with punctiliousness and ornamentation. He had this morning, beside other apparel, a string of small, dried gourds passing over one shoulder and under the other. They rattled when he moved.

“Ha!” chanted the hoeing women—

“We are going to see
That which we shall see!
We are going to put
Yuba in the earth!
If she rots there, bad!
If she grows there, good!
Yuba! grow big!
Yuba! make children!
Then shall we eat
Without going to seek.
Then shall we have
Yuba to our hand!
Yuba and her children,
Sweet to the tooth!
Then none will hunger,
Though the fish go away!
Then none will hunger,
Though the men kill no meat!
Then those who laugh,
Saying, ‘What do you do,
Scratching there in the earth?’
They will come to us begging.
They will cry, ‘Give us Yuba!’”

The man with the gourds chose the attitude of contempt before an infant industry. He spoke in a guttural voice. “You are like fish and have no sense! I go into the forest and when I am hungry, I look around me, and I sing, ‘Yuba! Yuba!’ ‘Here I am!’ says Yuba plant. ‘Dig me up!’—But you say, ‘Let us tie Yuba to the houses!’” He shook the gourds. “You are more foolish than the fish. They do not go about to make the river angry. But you go about to make Yuba angry!”

The women leaned upon their hoes and regarded with apprehension the heap of Yuba roots. The sun lay golden all around. “She does not look angry! We think she likes to come near the houses.”

But the man with the gourds remained indignant. “Ha! No, she does not! All kinds of things are coming to be angry with you women!” He shook the rattling string. “What will you give me if I go to the forest and sing and dance for you before Yuba?”

“We are going to dance before her here,” said the farmers. “We are going to make a great Yuba dance!—Why don’t you go hunting? All the men are hunting.”

The sitter under the tree shook from a gourd a number of long and sharp thorns. “Yes, they are hunting! They are hunting Big Trouble. But I, too, hunt Big Trouble, and I hunt better than they.” He spoke with growing unction. “Yesterday I went into the forest. I did not go with others—I went by myself. I found Big Trouble’s footprints. I found where he had broken the canes and laid down. I stuck long thorns in his footprints.” He talked with gestures no less than with words. “I put thorns in the earth where he rolled. So to-day Big Trouble is going like this—” He got up and limped painfully about, then sat down and with his long nail drew a mark across the ground before him. “I did so before his footprints. Now, wherever he goes, the pit is before him! Now they will hunt Big Trouble easily. Now he will go straight to the pit they have made and fall in it.” He fell himself, doubled-up, upon the ground to show the manner of it, then retook his first posture and shook the gourds. “They think they are hunting Big Trouble. But Haki and One Other hunted him first! Now I sit still and wait for the men to come home. They will give me so much meat.” He measured with his arms. “I will burn a part of it for One Other.”

The awe he meant to evoke was faintly apparent. The farmers laughed uneasily, with a catch of the breath. “Don’t put thorns in our footprints!” said one; and another, “Rub out the pit you’ve made before us there!” He smeared it over with the palm of his hand, then shook the gourds and looked sidelong and slily at the working women. “Will you give me Yuba if she stays here and grows for you?”

“Oh, we’ll give you plenty!” answered the farmers. They laughed as they said it, but they laughed uneasily. However, they went on singing, using the first hoes.

“Then none will hunger,
Though the fish go away!
Then none will hunger,
Though the men kill no meat!
Then those who laugh,
Saying, ‘What do you do,
Scratching there in the earth?’
They will creep to us softly,
They will cry, ‘Give us Yuba!’”

Far off, in the deep woods, the men of the long houses were hunting Big Trouble, hunting him far and wide. Big Trouble had chosen to make such a path to the river as brought him into close quarters with the houses. Moreover, on more occasions than one, he had strayed aside from the path; he had come brushing and trampling and ruining against the place itself, all in the dead of night, waking and terrifying! So now Big Trouble was to be killed. To that end, for many days, they had been digging a pit in the wood, deepening and widening the mouth of a gully near to old haunts of Big Trouble. When it was deep enough and sharply shelving enough, they set at the bottom pointed stakes and then they covered all with a net of vines, artfully made to look like the very floor of the forest; strong enough, too, not to give beneath the weight of any slight forest creature. But let Big Trouble try it—! For days, also, they had been talking and training, exercising their muscles, trying their spears and clubs, asking help of the Great Turtle who was mysteriously their especial friend—the Great Turtle at the mouth of the great river, who came from the water and laid her eggs upon the sand. Now they were all in the deep wood, driving Big Trouble, disturbing him with flung club and spear, getting him to go toward the pit. Big Trouble was so big, and covered with such a fell of shaggy, red-brown hair that a flung club or spear troubled him little, and on the whole he was good-natured, and since he did not eat flesh, would not hurt them in turn—not unless they mightily angered him. Then, indeed, he would hunt with a vengeance, filling the air with trumpetings, tearing down the forest, shaking the earth, seizing the unlucky with his trunk and trampling them into an awful pulp! To hunt Big Trouble was to hunt in peril and excitement and with a fearful joy—a hunting that needed beforehand rites and ceremonies, and when it was accomplished, rites and ceremonies.

Women as well as men hunted Big Trouble, though not anything like so many women as men. But when a woman wished to hunt, she hunted; hunted for food now as long since, hunted for joy in activity, danger, and excitement. It was a dwindling custom, but they hunted yet. Half a dozen now stalked Big Trouble with the men and threw their spears against him.

By the time the sun was high, Big Trouble had rolled his bulk very near the hidden pit. He was growing angry. The hunters had now to act with extreme wariness. Just before he reached the pit, he turned. He would go no farther. He stood trumpeting and all the hunters got behind thick trees and crouched trembling. Big Trouble glared with his small, red eyes. Shaggy, with red-brown hair, with hugely long, curving tusks, vast and dusky, the mammoth stood swaying from side to side, growing angrier and angrier, searching with those now vicious, deep-sunk, red eyes. The hunters shrank to be smaller and smaller behind the trees. Their hearts grew small within them. Big Trouble did not mean to go on, had stopped definitely short of the snare! He would stay there for hours, watching, and if any one moved he would make his fearful, trampling rush.... Time passed, much time. The sun that had been up in the plains of the sky began to travel down the sky, down and down the sky. Big Trouble kept as he was; only now and then he trumpeted.

A young man and woman left the screen of a wide-girthed tree. They darted into the open. Big Trouble saw them out of the red corner of his eye. He swung his bulk about and, trumpeting, charged. Immediately the two were behind a greater tree than the first. Big Trouble passed, trumpeting, and the wind of him shook the leaves. Baffled, he stopped and stood swaying, angrier than before, angrier every moment. The two left the second tree and fled before him. He followed, darkness and weight arush through the forest. The man and woman gained the third tree. Big Trouble passed, then he turned. The two left their tree and raced before him, racing straight now to the pit. Big Trouble came after them, and he shook the earth and air. The two took life in their hands, made themselves light, bounded upon and across the roof of vine and leaf. It gave a little beneath their feet, but only a little. As near skimming as might be, they won to the farther side, and with a long cry of triumph rushed to shelter. On, after them, thundered and trumpeted Big Trouble. His forefeet came down upon the roof of the pit; he felt it break beneath him, but could not stop himself. Over and down he plunged, down with a frightful noise. The stakes caught him, the steep sides wedged him in. Big Trouble was not going any more to trouble the long houses.

The two who had toled Big Trouble into the pit marched in triumph back to the houses, at the head of the hunters. The two were big and strong, young, and according to the notions of their people, well-favoured. Back they and all the hunters came, shouting and chanting, through the leafy world with the red sun sinking behind them, and borne along, slung over a pole, the seven-feet-long curved, ivory tusks of Big Trouble. Out to meet them came the too old to hunt and the too young, came the man with the thorns and the gourds, came the women, all who had not hunted. Singing and shouting, the two tides met in the red sunset, beneath the black trees.

“Big Trouble is dead!
He will plague us no more!”

The sun was going down—the hunters were tired, tired! They ate what was given them, fell upon the earth and went to sleep. But the next day the long houses made a feast of commemoration—Big Trouble being gone forever.

Gata, who had hunted Big Trouble and raced over the roof of his pit, left the feasting ring about the council tree. The sun hung low, the river flowed, a crooked brightness. Most of the folk of the long houses were hoarse with singing and shouting, and drowsy with food and drunk with dancing and with a brew that they made out of forest fruits. Many were asleep, others noisy with no reason, others grunting and dull-eyed. Gata had danced, but she had not eaten and drunken to disorder and heaviness. Now she rose and left the feast, for she was tired of it. She expected one to follow. She had been watching Amru where he sat under the tree. Neither had he eaten and drunken and danced to stupidity.

Here and there in the fen were higher places, islands as it were, covered with a short grass. She took a path that led to such a spot. On either hand the reeds stood up, and they waved and sighed in the evening wind. The long houses disappeared from sight. Looking back she saw Amru upon the path.

Here, where it lifted from the fen, the earth rested warm. The sun moved red through a zone of mist. The tall reeds made a wall for the grassy island. Gata and Amru sat facing each other on the round earth, round like a shield, above the fen. A last ray from the sun brightened Gata’s hair that was darkly red. With the flat fen about them, and behind the low forest, they looked larger than life. They leaned toward each other, they pressed their hands together, their bodies together. Lifted by the lifting earth, they looked one piece.

The sun touched the rim of earth and coloured the river through the fen. Gata and Amru lay embraced.

Almost as soon as the sun sank, the moon rose. It came up round and golden—only the people of the long houses did not know gold. Still the folk slept, tumbled like acorns beneath the council tree. A few old people did not sleep, but sat nodding, nodding, and women who had young children did not sleep. But all the strong men slept, some lying like fallen trees, and others snoring and grunting. The man with the gourds, who had watched the farmers, did not sleep. He had a mind and a conscience that often kept him awake. Now, as the moon came up, he wandered forth from the littered strip before the houses. “One Other” often commanded his presence by night. Now he walked by the fen and regarded the moon. The night was hot, but the lean man felt a wildness and exaltation that kept him above the heat. He wore skirt and baldric and headdress of grass and mussel shells and coloured feathers, and he moved at tension through the hot, moist air.

Going so, he overtook another who had left those who gorged upon mammoth meat—Aneka the Wise Woman. He shook his coloured headdress; jealousy stung him. “Ha, Aneka! It is Haki who walks here by night and talks with One Other!—Why do you not stay and watch children so that they do not eat that-which-poisons?”

Aneka, wrinkled and brown, gazed at him and then over the fen to the golden moon. “There is much spite in you, Haki! I am older than you and I walked here first.”

They turned into the path through the fen. Haki waved his arms. “You and all the people cry to the Great Turtle. I cry to One Other!”

“One Other?” asked Aneka. “Where is she?”

Haki looked at her aslant. His voice sank. “Hush! He has gone into the ground for the night. He lives in the sun.”

The long houses used feminine pronouns when they spoke of the supernatural. Aneka stared at Haki. “He?” she said. “How bold are you, O Haki!”

But Haki, having plucked a feather from the future, came back to the present and its so solid seeming realities. A thrill of fear and awe of the Great Turtle ran through him, with thought of what vengeance she might take. “I call to the Great Turtle too!” he said hastily. “One Other and the Great Turtle are friends.”

“Can One Other make children?” asked Aneka.

It was the wall that towered before the male’s assertion of equality. Nothing with the masculine pronoun could do that! The people of the long houses knew all about mating. They had words in plenty for that. But they had no word like “father.” Haki uttered a guttural sound, half despair, half anger. He walked in silence while the moon climbed the sky. Then revolt again raised its head. “One Other will find out how!”

Aneka knew plants that poisoned and plants that healed. Stooping, she gathered a plant that used one way was poisonous and used another was healthful. Aneka was old and knew much. Throughout life she had had a watchful eye and comparing mind. But it was not her way to tell all that she knew.... She gathered stalk and leaf and moved with Haki in silence.

They were now somewhat deep in the fen. Presently, the path curving like a tusk of Big Trouble, they came to the shield-like, lifted place. The moon bathed it white. Clothed in that silver Gata and Amru lay asleep.

The old Wise Woman and the early Medicine Man stood and gazed. The moon looked very large, the fen very wide. The two interlaced figures seemed large with the rest of the world. Aneka and Haki watched awhile, then turned aside without waking the sleepers. Their path, bending, led them again to the edge of the fen, to the quarter whence they had come. Haki walked perhaps cogitating the pair, perhaps cogitating One Other who had gone into the ground for the night, One Other and his possibly developing powers. But Aneka looked over her shoulder at the full, bright moon.

That moon waned and other moons waxed and waned, and Gata and Amru remained companions and most fond of each other. That was not so usual among the people of the long houses. Only at great intervals arose among them some example of enduring attachment between woman and man. So novel was it that when it markedly happened the group paid attention. It was a social phenomenon of the first importance, and though they gave it no such sounding name, and indeed no name at all, they noted it.

For many days after the slaying of Big Trouble, Gata and Amru hunted in company. The forest received them in the morning; they returned at eve, bearing game or wearing trophies to show that certain four-footed enemies of the long houses were enemies no more. The people praised them. Children were told, “Grow up to be like Gata and Amru!”

Moons brightened, moons darkened. At last it was seen that Gata was making a child. After that, as the custom had grown to be, she hunted no more.... Amru was jealous of the child that Gata was making. He felt a fierceness toward it as though it were a man fighting with him for Gata’s favour. From that he passed to anger with Gata herself. Gata could not like Amru as much as Amru liked Gata. She would be showing superiorities! Savage pride was hurt. Amru and Gata had a loud quarrel, after which they parted as companions.

Gata went to the forest and walked there alone. Amru and other men were making a boat. Boats were a mystery belonging to men. Men had had that notion, had experimented with it, and then had declined to share knowledge and honours. Men went ostentatiously apart when they would make a boat. They kept a thicket screen between them and the long houses, and they stationed watchers. The women heard the thud of the falling tree, and they smelled the smoke when began the hollowing process—but for the rest it was a mystery. When the boat was made, it was held to belong to men.

Amru was strong and skilful and many of the folk had a liking for him, and he tended to become a leader. Now with other young men he was making a boat.... Gata walked alone by the edge of the forest. She could see, between her and the river, the curling smoke where the men worked. She carried a spear, and felt no especial terror of the forest. The forest and its creatures composed an old, familiar pattern in her brain. Within her was aglow another ancient pattern....

She sat down between the outcropping roots of a tree. A play of emotions filled her, kept her in a manner of iridescent dream. Around spread the forest floor of perished leaves, multitudinous, layer after layer of perished leaves. Overhead were the green leaves, quivering and thrilling. The savage woman sat and felt, and as best she could thought.... Imagination waked in her. Somewhere or other, she distinctly saw herself, moving beneath the trees, holding against her shoulder the child that would be born. She knew with certainty that she would be fond of it.... After this, she thought of Amru. She sat quite still, her spear beside her, her dark red hair shadowing her face. She felt at once old and young—as though she had lived long, and as though sky and earth were new....

Near the tree grew flowering bushes, and in the branchy mass of one was set a bird’s nest, filled with callow young. Gata fell to watching the nest and the bird that perched beside it. Hunter’s experience, savage experience, gave at wish an immobility of body, a mimicry of rooted life. Gata seemed as unmoving as the trunk of the tree. The nestlings opened their mouths and stirred their unfeathered bodies. The bird spread its wings and went farther into the flowery thicket. When it returned it had food in its beak. It fed its young. In a moment came, too, the male bird—it also bore food and fed the young. The mother bird perched once more beside the nest. The he-bird perched upon a second branch and sang. “Sweet! So sweet!” was its song, and the she-bird and the young birds seemed, liking it, to listen. Gata listened likewise.

The human group by the forest and the fen, as human groups everywhere upon the ancient earth, struggled with mysteries. Why was thus and thus so? Given a fact, what went before the fact, and what was to come out of it? The mind struggled, the mind pondered then as ever, and then as ever small, chance observations might put fire to long and long accumulated fuel.... “Sweet! Sweet!” sang the he-bird, and the she-bird listened, and the young birds opened and shut their mouths and pushed with their wings. Gata sat and watched. A compound happening, seen in her existence a myriad times with the physical eye, now, quietly and easily, took meanings unthought of before. Why did the he-bird bring food to the young birds? Why did the he-bird, as well as the she-bird, watch the nestlings and drive away harm? Why did the one, as well as the other, teach the young birds to fly?... “Sweet! So sweet!” sang the he-bird, and the she-bird listened, and the young birds opened and shut their mouths and pushed with their wings, and all around were the flowering bushes....

Suns rose from the fen and sank behind the forest, and Amru and his fellows finished making their boat. It was a longer boat, a more skilfully made boat than any the houses had yet seen. There was great triumph when, all pushing and pulling and lifting together, the men got it into the narrow stream by which they had worked, and then down this into the wide, slow-flowing river. The next thing was to be an Expedition—a seeing what was up the river, farther than any had yet gone!

Twelve young men went upon the Expedition. They hewed and trimmed saplings with which to pole the boat, for the oar was not yet. The long houses, women and men, watched them depart. It was a high occasion, one that called for vociferation, chanting, laughter, shouts to boat and boatmen until all had dwindled to a dark splinter upon the river, until a horn of the earth came between them and the houses. A number of the men followed along the bank for a distance, but after a time the forest grew chokingly thick and they desisted. Haki, shaking his string of gourds, tossing his arms in the air, went and returned with the followers.... Until the point of earth came between, Gata watched Amru, standing in the boat, in his hands the shaft of a young tree. Gata and Amru had not ended their quarrel.

The horn of earth hid the long houses. The boat could no longer hear the shouting and chanting. The fen dropped away and on both sides of the river stood the forest. It was very thick, it stood knee-deep in black, quaking earth. It dropped upon the flood leaves and petals and withered twigs, dropped them into the boat. The boat with the young men poling moved close to shore. The river was wide, but it looked to these Argonauts wider than wide, wide and fearful! That was ever the way with the impassable, with the heretofore unpassed. They hugged the shore. That was daring enough, so strange as yet was the fact of a boat at all!

After some time they came to the mouth of an affluent of the great river. They knew the nearer bank of this stream; nothing new to be gained by following it in a boat instead of afoot, ashore, among cane and trees! Amru gazed at the farther bank, turning the pole in his hands. He harangued the eleven. The adventurers poled across the affluent, drawing long breaths when it was done. Full of pride, they laughed exultingly. Amru stepped nearer chieftainship.

The twelve kept on, close to the shore, up the wide river. This shore was new. They peered through the rank waterside growth, but they saw nothing that they might not see nearer the long houses. Before the sun set they had gone a considerable distance. They found a bank of sand, and here they beached their boat, and gathering dead wood rubbed sticks together and made a fire. They had dried meat with them and made their supper of this. Night fell. The fire burned on, for protection against the serpent world and the four-footed world. One watched and eleven slept. Morning coming, they roused and had breakfast. In great good spirits they looked at the river and at their boat, the beautiful work of hand and brain! The twelve felt enterprising, gay, and bold. They pushed off the boat, climbed in, took their poles in hand. This day they went a long distance. The river became narrower, the world up here was new. In the afternoon they fastened the boat to a tree, took their spears and hunted meat. Having killed, they made a fire near the boat-tree, cooked and ate. Stars tipped the black trees of the opposing shore, stars mirrored themselves in the stream. One man watched, eleven slept. Dawn came; they sprang up and untied their boat.

Amru looked across the stream. Mist hung upon the opposite bank; then, parting, allowed a vision of a plain-like space of grass backed by hills sharp and soaring against a fleckless sky. Amru stared; then he said, “Let us go across the river,” and turned the sapling in his hand like an oar.

The twelve crossed the river in their hollowed and shaped trunk of a tree. That was a great thing to do and they applauded themselves. Amru felt affection for the boat that had done so well by them. He caressed it with his hand. Suddenly he gave the boat a name. “Tree-with-Legs!” he said. “Ko-te-lo!” and felt pride again in Amru’s prowess.

This shore was higher than that which they had left, higher and less heavily wooded. They found a shelving place up which they lifted and hauled Ko-te-lo. Then, as they rested, sitting around Ko-te-lo, they praised their collective prowess, and one among them said that the Great Turtle had helped them across. But Amru said that before they started he had gone into the forest with Haki and that Haki had sung and danced to One Other who lived in the sun. And then, because Amru felt very bold this morning, he said that One Other was like a man and not like a woman, and that he thought with Haki that it would be One Other who helped with the boat. That was natural, said Amru, since men made and used boats and not women. The Great Turtle was like a woman and helped women. Men wanted some one like men. One Other had a long house in the sun, and spears and clubs and boats—many boats.

The eleven listened, attracted but doubtful, somewhat awed and alarmed. “But he cannot make children—One Other cannot make children!”

Amru felt anger. Having been bold he must become bolder yet—that seemed a necessity in the case. Having entertained the idea of One Other, he must turn the idea away or make of it an inmate, clothe it, and give it powers. He wished to keep authority with the eleven, and it seemed to him that that could not be done if there was retraction. He must yet further aggrandize One Other. “He makes them with his hands,” he said. “He cuts them out of trees and sings to them and they come alive!”

The eleven pondered that. Possibly it might be done. Amru’s words made them see a hugely tall, strong, much-decorated man, a great hunter and spear-thrower, cutting shapes out of trees that presently came alive and stood and walked. Had they not themselves fashioned Ko-te-lo out of a tree? The eleven did not greatly care for Haki, but for Amru who seemed to agree with Haki they did care. They had for Amru a sentiment of admiration. He was treading firmly the unrolling path to chieftaincy. And all the long house men desired claims with which to set off woman’s claim. Their hearts began to lean away from the Great Turtle, toward the big hunter in the sun—he who could make persons.

The sun came up over the hills. They looked at the great ball with a freshened interest. But the landscape grew brighter and gayer and they turned toward more familiar explorations. If they climbed a hill they might see afar. Amru proposed that course and lifted from the boat his spear of tough wood with well-sharpened flint head. The others were content to follow him. They saw that Ko-te-lo was well placed above the water, then, armed with spear and club and flint knife, they took their way up the waves of earth. They might meet serpents and four-footed enemies. They did not look for foes who walked on two feet, and yet these were the ones they met.

Out of a ravine between hills rose a hunting band as well armed as themselves and outweighing them in number. There was some parley, but it led nowhere. The stronger party flung a spear—in a moment began a conflict that grew more and more fierce and red. When it ended four of the twelve lay slain. The eight, whelmed by numbers, lost spear and club and knife, had at last only naked bodies. The eight were captives. They glared, and Amru more redly than any, baring his teeth.

The victor group was one, it seemed, somewhat advanced in the notion of warfare everywhere, upon one’s own kind no less than other kinds. The settlement to which the eight were borne had that aspect. The people were fiercer, wilder than those who dwelled by the great river.

One of the eight died from a spear wound. Another had his brains beaten out one day by an infuriated giant of the tribe. The six in captivity saw three moons appear, wax and wane. Then they escaped—Amru the planner and leader.

A storm came up and blew between them and the tribe among the hills. They got down to the river—they found Ko-te-lo where they had hidden her. The people behind them knew naught of boats or boat-making. The six put off and poled for the other side of the river. A current caught them, carried them down, dashed them against a rock, the storm howling around. Ko-te-lo overturned—one of the six was drowned. The five got their boat righted, entered her again and came at last to their natal side of the flood. They put Ko-te-lo where she could not run away, then they lay down in cane and mire and slept like the dead. The storm beat the woods and roared and howled for a day and a night. They lay close until it was over and the sun shone out and the earth sent up steam. Then the five and Ko-te-lo turned homeward.

They had adventures, but not great adventures, poling down the stream, poling down the stream as fast, as steadily, as the five could go. Between the north bank and the south bank, between the sunset and the morning red, Amru thought of Gata.—Ko-te-lo and the five came in sight of the long houses.

Haki saw the boat upon the distant reaches. Waving his arms, bending and leaping, shrilly chanting, he cried the news. Women, men, children, the place rushed to the water’s edge. The five approaching broke into chanting. With a wild and deep rise and fall and swing of voice, they told the adventures of Ko-te-lo and the twelve. Before Ko-te-lo touched the bank the long houses knew the gist of it—how the twelve had travelled and for so huge distances—the crossing of the water and the naming of Ko-te-lo—the hunters encountered and how they were not stronger men, but more men—the slaying of the four—of the two—captivity—escape—the behaviour of Ko-te-lo—the drowning of the one—the final escape of the five—the journey home. Amru’s voice was the fullest, the most powerful and the richest. “Amru led them!” he chanted, and the four added their strength. “Amru led us!” “All brave men!” chanted Amru, and the four sounded with him. “All brave men!” chanted Amru, “we who are dead and we who are alive!” He stood in the prow of the boat and shook the young tree-trunk in his hand.... The voice of the long houses out-swelled toward Ko-te-lo and Amru and the four. All had been thought dead. To have five—and the five bravest, Amru and the four—was triumph! Ko-te-lo reached the bank amid a frenzy of voices, of gestures of welcome. The long houses would not let the feet of the explorers touch earth.

Triumph meant ceremonial feasting and dancing.... That evening such a feast was toward as had not been since the death of Big Trouble! It was a feast for the return of Amru and the four and likewise it was a birth feast.

The middle house was the greatest, the most substantial, the finest of the structures. Before it stood the carved-upon, the ochre-painted stone, sign and symbol of the Great Turtle. The houses could not remember how long it had been there, it had been there so very long. It had stood there before these houses were built, when they had only very little, rude houses of fresh boughs.

The middle house was high and wide and deep, a brown cavernous interior with a central hearth of stones. Here a fire burned, smoke escaping through a hole in the roof. The entrance to the house gaped wide as a true cavern mouth. Now, seen from within, another fire burned upon the baked earth terrace before the middle house and the other houses. Around this fine in an ellipse went the leaping, the dancing figures of the feasting, the commemorating people of the long houses. From within, from where Gata lay by the fire upon the hearth, it seemed that they went in an endless line, no end, no beginning. Only when the people in the middle house itself came between hearth and entrance-way did she lose the line, the endless line that yet brought Amru, time and time again, before the door. She lay upon wolf-skins, and beside her the day-old babe. Aneka sat by the fire, and women and men and children passed in and out. In the corners of the shadowy house were kept spears and shields and adornments fitted for such occasions. Men came to take these, changing from one dress to another. Without, within, beat the firelight. The house, the night without, were filled with forms, now dark, now bright. The forms had drums and rattles. Bom—Bommm! Bom—Bomm! went the drums.

The ellipse about the fire without broke. It became a serpentine line and entered the middle house. If Amru was a favourite, Gata was no less a favourite. Amru’s triumph for Amru magic—Gata’s triumph for Gata magic! In a world of mother-right, births were births. The dancers danced in the night without; they came with measured pace into the middle house and circled the hearth, the fire, the woman and her babe. Amru danced at the head of the young men.

Gata raised herself upon the wolf-skins. Her eyes dwelled upon Amru, followed Amru as he moved. She, also, had forgotten their quarrel. He seemed her delectable comrade, tall and ruddy, Amru the Great Hunter, Amru the Boat-Maker! The feast was his. The feast was hers. She looked at the babe upon the wolf-skin. The feast was the child’s. The feast was Amru’s, Gata’s, and the child’s. Her eyes shone bright, her cheek was ruddy as Amru’s own. The dancers went around her—they went around her and the hearth and the fire and the child. She looked at Amru, tall and ruddy, dancing there. He was dancing before her; his body swayed like flame, his body rose like flame and touched the roof-pole. She heard a singing of birds, she smelled the flowering bush. Boom! beat the drums. Boom! Boom! The fire swung, the fire climbed.

Gata rose upon her knees. She began to chant. Her voice was rich and full—strength seemed to have come in flood—it seemed that, to-morrow, she might hunt Big Trouble—save that Big Trouble was dead and done with! The drums stopped beating, the ring stood still. Persons yet without the house now came inside. There grew a throng. The fire-shine pushed from the hearth outward. Gata chanted.

“Folk of the Great Turtle—the Turtle who dwells
Both inside and out of her house!”

“She is possessed!” cried the folk. “She is going to tell Truth!”

“Wise is Haki and wise is Aneka, but Wisdom
Drops in the wood for who picks it up!
Where I found Wisdom I lifted it, and bore it by day and by night.
Carrying it safe in the darkness, watching and saying naught.
Now will it live in the light that stirred in the dark,—
Now will I tell you Truth about woman and man and a child.”

Bending, she took the child from the wolf-skin, held it high in her hands. The light leaped and caressed it. The great ring of women and men seemed to come into relation with it; they slanted toward it, it seemed to draw their bodies, to act as a magnet. Gata chanted on.

“Shout and dance, folk of the Turtle! Cry, ‘Gata is Mother!’
True and happy that is—but of this child two are mothers!”

Aneka rose beside her. “She has been given lash-lash to drink! She is singing foolishness! Beat the drums and dance!—Woman, woman, you had better go throw yourself into the river—”

But Gata’s voice sprang still. And the people of the long houses stood like a listening wood. A murmur had arisen, but it passed like a sigh. All hung intent.

“Now, rub the forehead and answer, you who sit by the council tree,
You who say, nodding your heads, ‘Boats are men’s work,
Children are women’s work!’
Now, answer, for I will question you, folk of the Turtle!
From the body of woman comes forth boy and girl—
In my hands lies him who will be a man—
How should a woman make both woman and man?
Woman only?
No wise one among you gives answer,
No woman and no man,
Haki nor Aneka!
Is it not a strange thing, folk of the Turtle?
Now, tell me again and give answer again,
Have you seen how often a child is like to a man,
One child to one man?
Has a man naught to do with a child that is like him—
A child that is like him—”

The people cried out, “Wisdom is on her!” The links of the ring shifted. Amru stood before her. He spoke. “Yes, we have seen. Why is that, Gata? And why are men fond of children?”

Gata, holding the child aloft, rose to her feet. The flame-light wrapped her. It made of her hair a sunrise cloud, it made her flesh like flowers.

“Folk of the Great Turtle—the Turtle that watches the river
Flow into the sea!
Now will I tell you a Truth—a truth that will bind us together.—
Mother is Gata—and mother is Amru!
Mother alike are Gata and Amru!
Amru and Gata came together.
To Gata’s strength Amru gave his strength.
To Amru’s strength Gata gave her strength.
Then the moons rose like dancers out of the fen—
Many round moons—I counted them—many a dancer!
Then came forth him who will dance strongly, who will build boats,
Who will grow like Amru, whom I will name Amru,
For he is Amru!...
What woman have you seen make a child in a world of no men?
I am mother, and Amru—Amru and Gata make children!”

Like a flame she sank from her height, she lay among the wolf-skins, the babe against her knee.

The people of the long houses broke into loud, excited speech. Generations had walked as unconscious observers; now things observed took on order and meaning, came alive. Haki began to chant, and on the wall of the middle house there leaped and danced his tall shadow. Amru sat on the earth floor beside Gata—he put out a finger and touched the babe’s hand.... But Aneka said, “Woman, woman, you had better go throw yourself into the river—”

CHAPTER IV
PROPERTY

The sky hung grey, with wisps of cloud. It vaulted a valley, and was propped by hills, long as billows of the open main. In part the hills stood wooded, in part they wore a robe of grass and stunted bush. The valley had a grassy floor, like a miniature plain. It spread jade-green beneath that sky. Far off soared, darkly purple, one mountain peak.

The huts, round in shape and fairly spacious, were built of upright stakes with an interweaving of wattled reeds. Close at hand huddled sheds and enclosures for flock and herd, and all stood together by the strand of a silver stream. Flock and herd, watched by herdsmen, wandered through the valley or drank at the stream. Near the huts boys were fishing, standing mid-leg in the running water. Seated among pebble and boulder a row of old men watched and with thin voices mocked or encouraged.

Evening drew on and the herdsmen brought the sheep and cattle to the folds. A woman came out of the largest hut, a strong woman with dark-red hair. Hand over eyes, her gaze swept the northern and western horizon. Bare hill met grey sky. She spoke to the herdsmen. They hearkened to her and answered, leaning on their staves. Said one, “We heard nothing and saw nothing at the other end where we were.” Another spoke in a surly voice, “If I were a war-man again and out of this valley, I would not come back!” A third said, “You might see, O Marzumat, from the top of the hill—” The woman nodded and turned away. She called to a boy and a girl at play near the folds, and they ran to her and walked with her.

Near the huts rose a hill, bare to the top, hard in this light as a mountain of jade. The woman and her children climbed it. At the top a wind blew, a swirling, melancholy wind. She looked again from this height, to the north and west. Nothing broke the earth-line, nothing came. The children, too, stared from point to point. The wind blew their hair into their eyes, whipped their bare limbs. They jumped up and down for warmth. “The dark is coming,” said the woman. “Not Saran and the others!”

Said the boy: “Let us go have supper! Bhuto is going to sing to us of how Bin-Bin killed the giantess!”

They went down the hillside. The boy and girl capered and danced upon the path. “Saran will bring me a bow and arrows and a dance-necklace!” cried the first; and “Saran will bring me a dance-necklace and an earring!” answered the second. They turned upon the red-haired woman. “What else will he bring, Mother?”

“Sheep and cattle and men to keep them, spears and shields and pieces of copper, grain and skins, and ornaments to wear.”

The boy danced and capered. “I am going to grow big! I am going to be war-head like Saran my father! I am going to fight other-people! I am going to bring home every kind of thing!”

They came to the level of huts, folds, and whispering stream. Earth and air that had been grey and green were now grey and purple. Fires burned in the larger huts, and the smoke, puffing out of the hole in the thatch, drifted and eddied. A smell of seething flesh wrapped the place. In pots of baked clay women were cooking the meat of sheep and goats.

Young, and in prime, and old, there were many women. Within wall and without wall showed the signs of their industries. They were weavers and made from the hair of the flocks a texture that to an extent took the place of the immemorial garments of beast-skins or of woven grass. They were potters, and they skilfully constructed baskets, great and small. Tanners, their tannery told where it was situated, a little down the stream. Living now upon creatures which they had corralled and mastered, the group, women and men, were mastered by the mastered and become wanderers and pasture-seekers. When this valley showed eaten up and small for the herds, another would be sought. Therefore there was little planting about the reed huts. But what farming and gardening was practised belonged, of old times, to women, and theirs were the stone mills for the bruising and grinding of grain. The indoor gear was counted theirs, and the rule of the house. Women and men, the group reckoned descent and took name from the side of the mother.

The woman who had climbed the hill was a chief woman. There were old women, wrinkled and wise, as there were old men, who sat by the fire or in the sun and were listened to and in much obeyed. But this woman, through native energy and also because she was paired with the strongest man, had achieved authority before she was old. The valley called her Marzumat.

Marzumat had few idle bones in her body. When now she went indoors, into the largest of the huts, she came to the hearth, she helped with the pots of meat. One great pot, steaming like a fire-mountain, must be lifted from the place of mightiest heat. With a rude handle, unwieldy and heated, it presented a weight for strong arms. Marzumat lifted it, swung it clear from the flame, and set it upon the unreddened hearth. With two or three of her fellows she took meal, mixed it with milk and water, made cakes, and, kneeling, baked them upon slabs of stone sunk in coals. Those around her talked; the place was filled with voices. Marzumat could speak on occasion, but to-night she was silent, her mind following Saran and the war-men.

The formless dark came down. Women lighted the torches of resinous wood, and women brought and filled from the huger pots bowls of fire-dried clay and trough-like trenchers of wood, and a woman, standing in the doorway, blew the summoning ram’s horn. All—women, old men and children and the herdsmen—ate together, in this greatest hut where the mess had been cooked, or just without, seated on the ground, in the light of the torches. Noticeably, there lacked young men and men in their prime. Among the herdsmen sat young men and middle-aged men. But certain of these were simple of look or in some way weak or maimed, and others had copper rings about their necks. That meant that the ring-wearers did not belong by nature to the group, but had been seized from some other group. No longer were they hunters or war-men. They were tamed to keeping the flocks and herds of the captors, companions to the weaker and duller of the captors’ own group. The intractable were killed, as were the too weak or dull. Class and caste were in the world.

The fire and the torches threw a smoky and uneven light. The sky hung black and low, a roof of cloud. The stream murmured over pebbles. It was the lambing season, and from the folds rose a continuous low noise, from the ewes and their young. In the circle of fire and torchlight shadows were thrown against the walls. The shadows rose and fell; now they were dwarfs and now they were giants and now they were something in between. The shadows were chiefly those of women. Women forms passed from darkness into light, from light into darkness, from darkness again into light. Marzumat was seated now and the fire-shine struck her brow and breast and knee. Behind her, on the wall, spread and towered her shadow.

Supper eaten, occurred a lingering, for the night was cold and the fire was warm. The smaller children went away, to creep under sheep-skins and fall asleep; the babes were hushed already, except a sick one that wailed in a hut a stone-cast away. A fire burned in the hut, and a woman passed to and fro before it, the babe in her arms. Certain herdsmen went to the folds and pens, others sat still about the fire in the open air. The older children, the old men, the many women remained in the zone of warmth and light. Talk was chiefly of the war-band that had gone forth against other-people dwelling by the purple mountain. Valley people and mountain people each had eyes for an intermediate rolling and verdant, desirable pasturage. Mountain war-men had struck a valley herd that had put hoof into this region, taking the beasts and killing the herdsmen. Now there was to be retaliation, and all the strong men had gone forth to retaliate and something beyond. Not in the memory of the valley people had there been such a Punitive Expedition!

Marzumat’s children, the girl and the boy, hung around a man with pale-blue eyes and a hawk nose and beard and hair as white as the fleece of a lamb. “Bhuto, Bhuto! Sing us about how we used to do!”

Bhuto sang out of the history of the group. In part he knew and in part he made up. He fixed his eyes upon the night beyond the fire, he marked time with a large foot and a veinous hand. He had a sonorous voice, a capacious memory, and a seeing eye. To-night the strain, the wishing-to-know felt throughout the cluster, was apprehended by him more clearly than by most. So his voice deepened, his words rang, the acts he narrated seemed neither far off nor obscure. Presently the whole cluster was listening. Bhuto chanted of long-since raids and war-bands.

The boy and girl sat beside his knees. Bhuto came to a traditional pause. Part one of the ballad was done.

The girl spoke. “Bhuto, why are there no war-women? Why do not women go with war-bands and fight other-people?”

“Once they did,” answered Bhuto. “That was long ago.”

“Why did they stop?”

“It was seen that peoples died—not here a man and here a woman—but peoples.”

“How did they die?”

“They were not born. So it was seen that women must not be killed and killed. So the women and men held a great council, and after that there were war-men, but not war-women.”

“But Bin-Bin killed the giantess—”

“Yes. Every people had a giantess who would not stay at home. The one Bin-Bin killed was a war-head. She was tall as a tree and she could run like a deer and see at night like an owl, and when she shouted the wood shook! But Bin-Bin killed her. Now women all stay with the houses and the flocks and herds. If other-people come here and make fight, they will fight. But they do not make war-bands. Men do that. Men have bows and arrows and shields and spears.”

The girl fell silent, sitting with her chin upon her knees. Bhuto began to chant the second half of the ballad.

A great distance away, as these people counted distance, behind the curtain of hills, at the foot of the mountain peak, the cloud-roofed day and evening had gone after another fashion. It had gone with struggle, fury, jubilation, terror, death, and subjection.

The war-band from the valley numbered a hundred men. The group upon which they fell in the hour before dawn fought back, men and women. But it was taken by surprise and bewildered, and many could not reach their weapons, and many were pierced with spears almost before they rose from sleep. The hundred wrought havoc, slew and bound. When the east showed purple, resistance lay dead, or glared, with tied hands, from a space into which, naked, it had been driven like a beast. The old men, the old women, the young children, were put to death. Many strong men and women lay slain. Resistance, raging, biting at its bonds, came to be the resistance of not more than the hundred could handle as captives. They set the huts afire, but not before there was gathered from them spoil and booty. This group had possessed flocks and herds. Flocks and herds were taken for riches for the group in the valley. The valley men had never before had so complete a victory. This was different from mere raids against herds or herdsmen, or chance contests upon plain or hill, away from the houses, away from the heaped goods!

The attackers sat down and ate and drank and rested from labour in the light of the burning huts, under the shadow of the purple mountain. They rejoiced when they looked at the heap of spoil, and at the sheep and the cattle and the human dead and the captives.

The leader of the hundred was a strong man, tall and ruddy, with the seeming of one who would march in front. In other lives, before war between human beings had well developed, he would have been a leader of the chase, a mighty hunter of the four-footed, a chief in expeditions, explorations. Now he was war-head.

He and all the other men from the valley rested through a smoky, a fire-filled night. When the day came they prepared their leave-taking. Yet another distance away dwelled another group, that, seeing a glow in the night, might send their war-men in strength. War was an endless chain, though these minds were not advanced enough to find that out.

Back among the huts in the valley the night passed, the day following passed, another night passed. The cloud-roof sank to the horizon, the sky above sprang high and clear. Dawn arose with purple figures in the east that looked like girdles and necklaces of tinted shells and pebbles. Dawn in the north and west showed a cool pallor, a blank wall behind the long hills.

The women came singly or in clusters from the huts, the herdsmen from where they had slept apart in a structure built against the sheep-fold, the older children with the women. All looked to the north and west, as they had done many times since the hundred went out. Now they were rewarded—now they saw the war-men coming back!

They saw them upon the top of a bare hill, drawn against the pale wall, and following them captives, and sheep and goats and cattle and asses, and these last heaped and burdened with the lighter spoil. The people of the huts shouted, leaped in the air, clapped their hands together.

“Marzumat! They are coming!”

“Bina! They are coming!”

“Ito! They are coming!”

The war-men had with them horns, a rude drum and cymbals. Faint clangour and blaring fell from the hill-top to the huts by the stream. The frieze showed black against the pale wall, then the east brightened and gave it colour. The line bent, came down over the shoulder of the hill. The horns blew, the cymbals clanged, the drum beat louder and louder. In the huts were yet a drum, cymbals fashioned of copper, ox-horns. The women snatched these—all who could run and hasten poured from the huts by the stream, hurried with cries and music of welcome over the valley floor. They went with a dancing step, and Marzumat at the head lifted the cymbals and clanged them together. The two bands met by the stream, where the mist was slowly lifting.

The war-head’s name was Saran. He and Marzumat met first. “Hail, Saran! Hail, Saran!” she cried with laughter and jubilee. “Hail, Marzumat!” he answered, and shook his copper-pointed spear and struck it against his shield of plaited osier bound with leopard-skin.

All met with acclaim, shouting out triumph and welcome. The older children took part. The native-born herdsmen joined in. Those herdsmen who were born on the farther side of a mountain or a river made slighter welcome. But of these some had been taken young and hardly remembered their own people, and some had been broken in, or, indifferent, took luck as they found it. Besides, the group against which the war-men had gone was not their group, and that being so, was outside their range of sympathies. So the herdsmen, too, shouted.

Of the war-men who had gone forth, seven or eight made no returning. For these the valley, when it had caught breath, burst into ceremonial mourning. Out of the mass sound emerged a sharper crying, a wailing of those most fond of the slain men, mourning that persisted when the other ceased. The other ceased because, death to the contrary, here was so much victory and spoil! Jubilation remounted. In the background rose the lowing and bleating of the captured herds. There was a great, swarming noise, and movement to and fro.

The first welcome gone by, there came into fuller notice the fruits of the raid, the greatest in the memory of the group. Those who had stayed by the huts saw the new flocks and herds, and that possessions would be increased. There would be need of a larger valley, of a plain! Hearts swelled with self-acclaim. The confused bleating and lowing was sweet as flutes and pipes in their ears.

There was pushed forward one part of the human spoil. The war-men exhibited the other-men whom they had taken. New herds would have new herdsmen. Trees that must be hacked down, drudging work that must be done, would not take war-men’s valuable time! Moreover, there was now experienced, and would be further experienced, a dark pleasure in authority, in power exercised over another. So long had human beings had power over beasts that exhilaration was passing from that situation. Authority there had lost its first lusciousness. Once it had had that taste. But with the taking of beings formed like themselves zest had come back to the palate.

The valley group was accustomed to such captives. It was among accepted things that bands of men, roving afar, meeting other bands of men, should capture, when they did not kill, and keep the captured for use. That was old story, old song. The women, the old men, and the striplings made loud admiration over these riches also, and the evidenced prowess of valley men. The swarm worked again and there came into the foreground the before-time obscured, other row of captives.

Silence fell among the valley people, astonishment upon those who had stayed, upon those who had gone, embarrassment. Marzumat was the first to speak. “Women—”

Saran answered with a wave of his arm. “Women we took and brought to you women. We take men to work for us and save us trouble. Now you shall have women to work for you and do as you tell them. Why not?” He spread his arms. “We took them for you, O women,—a gift!”

The throng worked. Insensibly, the women of the group drew together, leaving each woman the side of some man. They became compact, unitary, the woman with the dark-red hair in front. Presently the women of the valley were massed here, the men there. Between stood or lay, fallen upon the ground, the captive women. They were twelve in number.

Marzumat spoke. “Never, O Saran,—never, men of the valley, never, O women, was there heard of such a thing! You have committed evil! Mao-Tan will say to In-Tan, ‘Let us smite them!’”

Her voice rose loudly, her arms were spread to the skies. Behind her the serried women echoed assent. The war-men moved a little, to and fro. “Talk for us, O Saran!”

Marzumat’s voice went on. “Men may take other men. If women, fighting side by side with war-men are killed, they are killed. Mao-Tan says, ‘It cannot be helped.’ But men may not take women and bind them and say to them, ‘Come!’ or ‘Go!’ Mao-Tan!—Mao-Tan!”

Saran faced Marzumat. He threw out his hands. “We took trouble, O Marzumat! We set up a stone and burned food upon it, and poured drink for Mao-Tan. We danced and sang before her. Then we did the same for In-Tan. In-Tan will keep Mao-Tan from being angry. Otherwise she might be angry for a while! But we saw In-Tan sitting like an eagle upon a tree and heard him talking like the wind. He said, O Marzumat, that valley people were his people, and that Mao-Tan was not angry!”

The war-men made a deep, corroborating sound. They had seen the eagle and heard the whistling and searching noise, and Saran’s imagination leading, they had divined the words. A black-bearded man, next to Saran in moral weight, gave articulate testimony. “O women of the valley! In-Tan said that Mao-Tan and he held in hatred other-people, and cared not what befell them, whether they were women or whether they were men!”

Saran continued. “We take men to work for us; why should you not have women to work for you and do as you tell them? They are not our men. They are not our women. Other-group-men, other-group-women! Old Bhuto says that, long-time-ago, it was a new thing to make other-men work for us and be our herdsmen. At first, Bhuto says, we had men who did not like that. But soon they felt like the rest of us.—We thought, O Marzumat, that we would please you! O women of the valley! they can carry water for you and grind the corn. It is pleasant to rest while another works! Many things are right when they are other-people. They will call you ‘mistress’ and do as you tell them—”

The body of the valley women seemed slightly to sway. Two or three voices were lifted. “Let us take them! Let us keep them! There grows so much work to do!” The women and the war-men seemed to slant toward each other.

The black-bearded man spoke again in a loud and cheerful voice. “They are riches, O women! It is pleasant to be saved weariness. It is sweeter than honey and like the wearing of ornaments to sit and see other-people do what we bid! Now men have the most ornaments and rest longer under the trees!”

A woman burst into laughter. “Mao-Tan knows that that is so!”

But Marzumat spoke again. “Men take other-men. But women have not taken other-women. Now, to-day, shall men lay hands upon women and cry, ‘Our prize and our riches’?”

“If we took them, O Marzumat, O women, did we not take them for you? It is your bidding that they will do! They are your prize and your riches! Take them now, and is it not as if you had taken them yonder”—he gestured with his spear toward the purple mountain—“taken them yonder yourselves, and brought them to the valley?”

“What you say is true, O Saran!”

The women behind her echoed, “It is true.” If, then, it was true, and if Mao-Tan was not jealous for women?... Ornaments were desirable, and ease from work was desirable—riches were desirable—and power—power more than anything was desirable!... The soul of Marzumat inclined toward service from those other-women.

“They are a gift!” said Saran. “If Mao-Tan is not angry, why should Marzumat be so?”

Why indeed? Marzumat lifted her hands. “I do not know.—Where are the children of these women?”

“Not all had children.—These people are other-group people. In-Tan does not care for them—Mao-Tan does not care for them! The women are yours. We only took them for you.”

The day was bright and sunny, the valley a cheerful green. The men were back from danger with victory. The valley had new wealth; every one wanted to be rejoicing, to be counting the goods.... The twelve other-group women, young women and women in their prime, stood or crouched, sullen and vengeful in their bonds. Only one spoke. “May our gods slay your gods! May our gods kill and devour your children! Vile, vile,—you are vile and your gods are vile!”

Anger broke against her, anger of women and of men. She had cried out loudly. Moving as she did out of the cluster of her fellows, she had come to face Marzumat and the children of Marzumat. Her arms being bound she could not gesture with hand or finger. But she jerked her head, and her eyes burned toward those she fronted. “Mo-Tal hear me!” she cried. “Slay their gods and them! Mo-Tal! Mo-Tal! Slay their children!”

Marzumat grew all red. Her brows drew together, a vein in her forehead swelled, her nostrils widened, her teeth were uncovered, and her dark-red hair appeared to bristle. She stood for a moment tense and still, then, moving forward, she struck the mountain woman a blow that brought her to the earth. “Mao-Tan turn your talk upon yourself!”

The valley women behind her laughed with anger, and also now with willingness to triumph. “Their gods are not strong like our gods! They can do naught!—Let us keep them and make them work!”

“Agreed!” said Marzumat, the red yet in her face and the vein showing in her forehead.

The lambing season, the spring season, the season of fresh green and of birds that sang from every flowering bush passed into a summer hot and dry. The stream shrank to a silver thread, the flocks found but parched herbage. Sometimes clouds came up, but they never overspread the blue vault. They rolled away, and the earth again lay bare beneath the sun. The sun bleached the huts, turned brown the growth upon the hillsides, and the standing trees. The herdsmen went afar with the bands of the four-footed. The bondwomen carried water over the wide, pebbled stretch from which the stream had gone, or kneeling before hollowed stones, beat and ground the corn into meal. The weather made a fever in the blood. It was weather in which effect followed like a hound at the heels of cause.

A woman stood in the doorway of one of the huts. She looked at the grinding women, but looked somewhat absently. It was not a novelty now—other-group women grinding the valley corn! Presently, however, she remarked an absence. “Where is Gilhumat?”

A woman looked up from the grinding, shaking elf-locks from her eyes. “Endar, the black-bearded, shot an arrow at a great bird. The bird fell over the hill-top. Endar bade Gilhumat stop her grinding and go find the bird.”

The woman in the doorway turned her head over her shoulder. “Marzumat, come hither!”

Marzumat came out of the dusk. “Endar,” said the first woman, “shot a bird and it fell over the hill-top. Endar bade Gilhumat stop her grinding and go find the bird!”

“Where is Endar?”

“Lying under the tree yonder.—There is Gilhumat now!”

They watched Gilhumat coming down the hillside. She bore upon her shoulders a large bird, its plumage showing copper hues in the sun. Marzumat looked at her with her brows knitted, her lips parted. Gilhumat approached the level ground, came upon it, and to the tree under which Endar had stretched his length. She lowered the bird from her shoulder and it lay motionless beside the war-man. Gilhumat returned to her grinding.

The woman with the dark-red hair breathed quickly. Leaving the doorway she moved through the beating sun to the tree where lay Endar. “Endar!”

Endar sat up. “What is it, O Marzumat?”

“When did it begin with valley people that a man, killing meat, can send a woman to bring in that bird or beast? I ask you when, Blackbeard?”

Blackbeard scratched his head. “I was asleep, O Marzumat!—It was not a freewoman, but a bondwoman.”

“Bondwomen are ours, not yours!—O Mao-Tan! a woman to be bidden by a man to do his work and save him trouble! The sky will fall! If it falls or not, O Endar, do that again and valley women will deal with you!”

Saran appeared beside them. “She is angry,” explained Endar, “because I bade one of those mountain women do a small thing! War-men may bring the meat, but they must not put hand in the pot!”

The outer corners of his eyes moved up, his white teeth flashed, he laughed and stretched his arms. The huge muscles showed.

Marzumat’s eyes narrowed. “My heart will not be heavy,” she said, “when Mao-Tan gives Endar to the beasts to eat!”

Endar’s laughter stopped. He put up his arm and with the fingers of the other hand made a sign in the air. “Do not wish evil upon me! In-Tan hear me say it! I will bring the next bird myself!”

The tree under which he lay edged a grove that stretched toward the stream. Marzumat went away into this and Saran moved with her.

“What harm,” said the latter, “if Gilhumat brought the bird that Endar shot? Endar is next to me in the valley.”

His tone was sullen. Marzumat stood still. They were in the heart of the grove, out of earshot unless they raised their voices loudly. The people of the valley had hardly as yet developed restraint in quarrel. But something in this man and woman kept them from shouting each at the other, made them prefer the space of trees to the trodden earth by the huts.

“Ah—ah!” said Marzumat. “You have not set Gilhumat, that is bondwoman to women, to do your work.—But you have followed Maihoma when she was sent at twilight to draw water!”

Saran’s eyes, too, narrowed. “Is a great war-man not to speak to spoil that he brings?”

“‘Spoil’! O Mao—Tan! I wish that you had never brought that ‘spoil’!”

“We brought it. You took it.”

“You speak the truth!—Mao-Tan, Mao-Tan! I wish that the spoil was back in the mountain!”

“Will you, O Marzumat, send it back?”

Marzumat stood with parted lips. Moments went by, leaves dropped in the grove, a bird flew overhead. Through an opening between the trees showed the huts and in the burning sun the bondwomen grinding at the mills.... The woman who, the first day, had called upon her own god to smite the valley people and their children was seen grinding.... “They are useful,” said Marzumat. “But men are not to bid them work. And men are not, O Saran, to follow them in the twilight when they go to draw water!”

Saran’s tanned face paled which was Saran’s way of showing anger. “How will you help that, red-haired one? You have strong arms. But will you bind our arms—mine and Endar’s? Will the valley women bind the war-men’s arms—set them to keeping sheep, away from the huts and the spoil?”

Red flowed over Marzumat’s face and throat and breast. “It is in my mind that we might bind many of you!”

“Not so many that the rest could not loose!” Saran stretched out his arm, regarded the play of muscle. “And we have the spears, the shields, the bows and arrows! Men are stronger to fight than women. As for Mao-Tan—Mao-Tan is very strong, but so is In-Tan. In-Tan has grown as strong as Mao-Tan.”

Out of the blue had come a flash and thunder, a shock unimaged before. Each stared at the other, each pale, each breathing short. Marzumat broke the silence. “What talk is this? The Ji-Ji, the ill spirits, have taken this place!... And all the same, I warn you, O Saran, not to follow Maihoma by twilight or by sunlight!”

With that she burst from the grove, and went over the shadeless earth, past the succession of huts, to the place where the bondwomen were grinding the corn. She spoke to a woman grinding. “You are bondwoman to women, not to men! Why, then, did you hearken to Endar when he called you, or go bring the bird he had shot?”

Gilhumat shook her hair back from her face, straightened her body from the grinding. “Why?... All of you are other-people, hated by Mo-Tal! Bring for Endar?—grind for Marzumat? Where is the difference to Gilhumat?” Her features twitched. “I had rather bring for men than grind for women! Women—women who bind their own hands and eat their own flesh! To do Endar’s bidding?—to do Marzumat’s bidding? Mo-Tal hear me, it hurts less to do the first!”

Marzumat made as if to strike her. “Do that also,” said Gilhumat. “Then weep when evil comes!”

The other withdrew her hand. “I will not strike you for your words, Gilhumat! But if you turn again from the task we set to a task a man sets, I will strike you many times! And what I say to Gilhumat I say to every grinding woman!”

“Say on,” said Gilhumat; and with her handstone crushed the grains of corn spread upon the hollowed surface.

That overheated day went by, another day, other days, and all were heated, with clouds that puffed up from the horizon, deceived and went away, leaving the earth unclad and the sun a fire. A number of valley women, working in the morning in a bean-field, observed a war-man of no great account take a basket of fish from his own shoulders and put it upon those of a bondwoman. That same day Gilhumat was seen to answer Endar’s crooked finger and, leaving her grinding, carry for him the bundle of osiers for mending broken shields. This was told to Marzumat, who gave Gilhumat the promised blows. But that did not turn away the Ji-Ji from the place! She left the punished woman, foaming at her from the ground, and as she entered the great hut saw in the dusk, in the distance, Saran with Maihoma.

That night there broke a great thunderstorm. The Ji-Ji might be praised for bringing rain and coolness, but blamed for the most frightening noises and a sky of white fire! For the night the valley group forgot differences within itself and huddled together in mind as huddled the bodies of the sheep in the folds. All to be thought of was the Ji-Ji, and if the upper spirits would hold back the Ji-Ji from all lengths. The Ji-Ji struck down trees and smote one of the cattle pens. The Ji-Ji threw hugely long, crooked spears of white fire and uttered noises that made women and men and children stop eyes and ears. Then at dawn the Ji-Ji went away.

They left the air cool and bright. Old times seemed to come back to the valley, though new times could not be wholly killed either. Old times thought to-day that new times might be held in bounds.

Copper was wanted by the war-men for spear-heads. Copper was dug out of the hills to the south. Half of the war-men went on an expedition to get copper. They were gone a week. Those who stayed at home seemed in a quiet mood, in what, later in time, might be called a spiritual mood. Back of the grove stood a large, rude, booth-like structure appropriated by valley men to their sole use. Here they kept ritual costumes and here they feathered arrows, and adorned with red and black pigments quiver and shield, and did other work purely pertaining to great hunters whether of beast or man. The men who did not go for copper resorted to this place, returning to the centre at mealtime. Day after day they kept the good mood. The women heard that they were working upon an image of In-Tan. That seemed a good thing to do!