Tales of Space and Time
until the rabbits came out to play. There were no men thereabouts, and
the rabbits were heedless. He threw a smiting-stone he had made and got
a kill.
That night they made a fire from flint sparks and bracken fronds, and
talked and caressed by it. And in their sleep Uya's spirit came again,
and suddenly, while Ugh-lomi was trying to fight vainly, the foolish
flint on the stick came into his hand, and he struck Uya with it, and
behold! it killed him. But afterwards came other dreams of Uya--for
spirits take a lot of killing, and he had to be killed again. Then after
that the stone would not keep on the stick. He awoke tired and rather
gloomy, and was sulky all the forenoon, in spite of Eudena's kindliness,
and instead of hunting he sat chipping a sharp edge to the singular
flint, and looking strangely at her. Then he bound the perforated flint
on to the stick with strips of rabbit skin. And afterwards he walked up
and down the ledge, striking with it, and muttering to himself, and
thinking of Uya. It felt very fine and heavy in the hand.
Several days, more than there was any counting in those days, five days,
it may be, or six, did Ugh-lomi and Eudena stay on that shelf in the
gorge of the river, and they lost all fear of men, and their fire burnt
redly of a night. And they were very merry together; there was food
every day, sweet water, and no enemies. Eudena's knee was well in a
couple of days, for those ancient savages had quick-healing flesh.
Indeed, they were very happy.
On one of those days Ugh-lomi dropped a chunk of flint over the cliff.
He saw it fall, and go bounding across the river bank into the river,
and after laughing and thinking it over a little he tried another. This
smashed a bush of hazel in the most interesting way. They spent all the
morning dropping stones from the ledge, and in the afternoon they
discovered this new and interesting pastime was also possible from the
cliffbrow. The next day they had forgotten this delight. Or at least, it
seemed they had forgotten.
But Uya came in dreams to spoil the paradise. Three nights he came
fighting Ugh-lomi. In the morning after these dreams Ugh-lomi would walk
up and down, threatening him and swinging the axe, and at last came the
night after Ugh-lomi brained the otter, and they had feasted. Uya went
too far. Ugh-lomi awoke, scowling under his heavy brows, and he took his
axe, and extending his hand towards Eudena he bade her wait for him
upon the ledge. Then he clambered down the white declivity, glanced up
once from the foot of it and flourished his axe, and without looking
back again went striding along the river bank until the overhanging
cliff at the bend hid him.
Two days and nights did Eudena sit alone by the fire on the ledge
waiting, and in the night the beasts howled over the cliffs and down the
valley, and on the cliff over against her the hunched hyaenas prowled
black against the sky. But no evil thing came near her save fear. Once,
far away, she heard the roaring of a lion, following the horses as they
came northward over the grass lands with the spring. All that time she
waited--the waiting that is pain.
And the third day Ugh-lomi came back, up the river. The plumes of a
raven were in his hair. The first axe was red-stained, and had long dark
hairs upon it, and he carried the necklace that had marked the favourite
of Uya in his hand. He walked in the soft places, giving no heed to his
trail. Save a raw cut below his jaw there was not a wound upon him.
"Uya!" cried Ugh-lomi exultant, and Eudena saw it was well. He put the
necklace on Eudena, and they ate and drank together. And after eating he
began to rehearse the whole story from the beginning, when Uya had cast
his eyes on Eudena, and Uya and Ugh-lomi, fighting in the forest, had
been chased by the bear, eking out his scanty words with abundant
pantomime, springing to his feet and whirling the stone axe round when
it came to the fighting. The last fight was a mighty one, stamping and
shouting, and once a blow at the fire that sent a torrent of sparks up
into the night. And Eudena sat red in the light of the fire, gloating on
him, her face flushed and her eyes shining, and the necklace Uya had
made about her neck. It was a splendid time, and the stars that look
down on us looked down on her, our ancestor--who has been dead now these
fifty thousand years.
II--THE CAVE BEAR
In the days when Eudena and Ugh-lomi fled from the people of Uya towards
the fir-clad mountains of the Weald, across the forests of sweet
chestnut and the grass-clad chalkland, and hid themselves at last in the
gorge of the river between the chalk cliffs, men were few and their
squatting-places far between. The nearest men to them were those of the
tribe, a full day's journey down the river, and up the mountains there
were none. Man was indeed a newcomer to this part of the world in that
ancient time, coming slowly along the rivers, generation after
generation, from one squatting-place to another, from the
south-westward. And the animals that held the land, the hippopotamus and
rhinoceros of the river valleys, the horses of the grass plains, the
deer and swine of the woods, the grey apes in the branches, the cattle
of the uplands, feared him but little--let alone the mammoths in the
mountains and the elephants that came through the land in the
summer-time out of the south. For why should they fear him, with but the
rough, chipped flints that he had not learnt to haft and which he threw
but ill, and the poor spear of sharpened wood, as all the weapons he had
against hoof and horn, tooth and claw?
Andoo, the huge cave bear, who lived in the cave up the gorge, had never
even seen a man in all his wise and respectable life, until midway
through one night, as he was prowling down the gorge along the cliff
edge, he saw the glare of Eudena's fire upon the ledge, and Eudena red
and shining, and Ugh-lomi, with a gigantic shadow mocking him upon the
white cliff, going to and fro, shaking his mane of hair, and waving the
axe of stone--the first axe of stone--while he chanted of the killing
of Uya. The cave bear was far up the gorge, and he saw the thing
slanting-ways and far off. He was so surprised he stood quite still upon
the edge, sniffing the novel odour of burning bracken, and wondering
whether the dawn was coming up in the wrong place.
He was the lord of the rocks and caves, was the cave bear, as his
slighter brother, the grizzly, was lord of the thick woods below, and as
the dappled lion--the lion of those days was dappled--was lord of the
thorn-thickets, reed-beds, and open plains. He was the greatest of all
meat-eaters; he knew no fear, none preyed on him, and none gave him
battle; only the rhinoceros was beyond his strength. Even the mammoth
shunned his country. This invasion perplexed him. He noticed these new
beasts were shaped like monkeys, and sparsely hairy like young pigs.
"Monkey and young pig," said the cave bear. "It might not be so bad. But
that red thing that jumps, and the black thing jumping with it yonder!
Never in my life have I seen such things before!"
He came slowly along the brow of the cliff towards them, stopping thrice
to sniff and peer, and the reek of the fire grew stronger. A couple of
hyaenas also were so intent upon the thing below that Andoo, coming soft
and easy, was close upon them before they knew of him or he of them.
They started guiltily and went lurching off. Coming round in a wheel, a
hundred yards off, they began yelling and calling him names to revenge
themselves for the start they had had. "Ya-ha!" they cried. "Who can't
grub his own burrow? Who eats roots like a pig?... Ya-ha!" for even in
those days the hyaena's manners were just as offensive as they are now.
"Who answers the hyaena?" growled Andoo, peering through the midnight
dimness at them, and then going to look at the cliff edge.
There was Ugh-lomi still telling his story, and the fire getting low,
and the scent of the burning hot and strong.
Andoo stood on the edge of the chalk cliff for some time, shifting his
vast weight from foot to foot, and swaying his head to and fro, with his
mouth open, his ears erect and twitching, and the nostrils of his big,
black muzzle sniffing. He was very curious, was the cave bear, more
curious than any of the bears that live now, and the flickering fire and
the incomprehensible movements of the man, let alone the intrusion into
his indisputable province, stirred him with a sense of strange new
happenings. He had been after red deer fawn that night, for the cave
bear was a miscellaneous hunter, but this quite turned him from that
enterprise.
"Ya-ha!" yelled the hyaenas behind. "Ya-ha-ha!"
Peering through the starlight, Andoo saw there were now three or four
going to and fro against the grey hillside. "They will hang about me now
all the night ... until I kill," said Andoo. "Filth of the world!" And
mainly to annoy them, he resolved to watch the red flicker in the gorge
until the dawn came to drive the hyaena scum home. And after a time they
vanished, and he heard their voices, like a party of Cockney
beanfeasters, away in the beechwoods. Then they came slinking near
again. Andoo yawned and went on along the cliff, and they followed. Then
he stopped and went back.
It was a splendid night, beset with shining constellations, the same
stars, but not the same constellations we know, for since those days all
the stars have had time to move into new places. Far away across the
open space beyond where the heavy-shouldered, lean-bodied hyaenas
blundered and howled, was a beechwood, and the mountain slopes rose
beyond, a dim mystery, until their snow-capped summits came out white
and cold and clear, touched by the first rays of the yet unseen moon. It
was a vast silence, save when the yell of the hyaenas flung a vanishing
discordance across its peace, or when from down the hills the trumpeting
of the new-come elephants came faintly on the faint breeze. And below
now, the red flicker had dwindled and was steady, and shone a deeper
red, and Ugh-lomi had finished his story and was preparing to sleep, and
Eudena sat and listened to the strange voices of unknown beasts, and
watched the dark eastern sky growing deeply luminous at the advent of
the moon. Down below, the river talked to itself, and things unseen went
to and fro.
After a time the bear went away, but in an hour he was back again. Then,
as if struck by a thought, he turned, and went up the gorge....
The night passed, and Ugh-lomi slept on. The waning moon rose and lit
the gaunt white cliff overhead with a light that was pale and vague. The
gorge remained in a deeper shadow and seemed all the darker. Then by
imperceptible degrees, the day came stealing in the wake of the
moonlight. Eudena's eyes wandered to the cliff brow overhead once, and
then again. Each time the line was sharp and clear against the sky, and
yet she had a dim perception of something lurking there. The red of the
fire grew deeper and deeper, grey scales spread upon it, its vertical
column of smoke became more and more visible, and up and down the gorge
things that had been unseen grew clear in a colourless illumination. She
may have dozed.
Suddenly she started up from her squatting position, erect and alert,
scrutinising the cliff up and down.
She made the faintest sound, and Ugh-lomi too, light-sleeping like an
animal, was instantly awake. He caught up his axe and came noiselessly
to her side.
The light was still dim, the world now all in black and dark grey, and
one sickly star still lingered overhead. The ledge they were on was a
little grassy space, six feet wide, perhaps, and twenty feet long,
sloping outwardly, and with a handful of St. John's wort growing near