In the Morning of Time Part 19

"If the water is not too deep, couldn't you push with your long spear?" suggested the girl.

Acting at once on the suggestion, Grom leaned over the edge and thrust the spear straight downwards. But he could find no bottom.

"It is too deep," said he, "but I'll find a way."

As he stood near the forward end of the raft he began sweeping the spear in a wide arc through the water, as if it were a paddle, but with the idea merely of testing the resistance of the water. Poor subst.i.tute as the spear was for a paddle or an oar, his great strength made up for its inefficiency, and after a few sweeps he was astonished and delighted to notice that the head of the raft had swung away from him, so that it was heading for the sh.o.r.e from which they had come.

He pondered this in silence for a little, then stepped over to the other side and repeated the experiment. After several vigorous efforts the unwieldy craft yielded. Its head swung straight, and then, very gradually, toward the other side. Yes, there was no doubt about it. He had found a way of influencing their direction.

"I am going to take you over to the other sh.o.r.e," he announced proudly.

And now, laboring in a keen excitement, he set himself to carry out his boast. First he so overdid it that he made the raft turn clean about and head upstream. He puzzled over this for a time, but at length got it once more headed in the direction which he wished it to take. Then he found that he could keep it to this direction--more or less--by taking a few strokes on one side, then hurriedly crossing to take a few strokes on the other. And in this way they began once more to approach the other bank. The process, however, was slow; and Grom presently concluded that it was wasteful. He hit upon the idea of setting A-ya and Loob together to stroking with their spears on one side, while he, with his great strength, balanced their effort on the other. Whereupon the sluggish craft woke up a little and began to make perceptible progress, on a slant across the current toward sh.o.r.e.

"I have found it!" he exclaimed in exultation. "On this thing we can travel over the water where we will."

"But not against the current," objected A-ya, whose enthusiasm was a little damped by the fact that she did not like the look of that further sh.o.r.e.

"That will come in time," declared Grom confidently.

"Here's something coming now," announced Loob, springing to his feet and grabbing his bow. At the same moment the flat, villainous head of a big crocodile shot up over the edge of the raft, and its owner, with enormous jaws half open, started to scramble aboard.

A-ya's bow was bent as swiftly as Loob's, and the two arrows sped together, both into the monster's gaping gullet. Amazed at this reception it shut its jaws with a loud snap, halted and came on again.

Then a stab of Grom's great spear caught it full in the eye, and this wound struck fear into its dull mind. It rolled back hastily into the water and sank, leaving a foamy wake of blood behind it.

By this time they were getting nearer the other sh.o.r.e. But on close view, Grom was bound to admit that it was not alluring. It was so low as to be all awash, and fringed deep with towering reeds, which were traversed by narrow lanes of water. Of dry land there was none to be seen.

"Oh, we don't want to go ash.o.r.e there!" protested A-ya fervently. As she spoke a hideous head, with immense, round, bulging eyes and long, beak-like mouth arose over the sedge tops on a long, swaying neck and stared at them fixedly.

"No, we don't," said Grom, with decision, making haste to swing the head of the raft once more out into the channel. They were pursued by a dense crowd of mosquitoes, voracious and venomous, which followed them to mid-stream and kept tormenting them till an up-river gust blew them off.

Grom made up his mind that the exploration of that unknown sh.o.r.e could wait a more convenient season. He was now deeply absorbed in the complex problem of directing and managing his raft. As he pulled his spear through the water, and noted the additional effect of its flat head, the conception came to him of something that would get a more propulsive grip upon the water than was possible to a round pole.

Furthermore, he was quick to realize that the immense, shapeless ma.s.s of debris on which they were traveling might be replaced by something light and manageable which he would make by lashing some trimmed trunks together with lengths of bamboo to give additional buoyancy. As he brooded this in silence, with that deep, inward look in his eyes which always kept A-ya from breaking in upon his vision, he came to the idea of a formal raft, and a formal paddle. And to this he added, with a full sense of its value, A-ya's suggestion that this new structure might very well be pushed along, in shallow water, with a pole. Having thought this out, he drew a deep breath, looked up, and met A-ya's eyes with a smile. His eager desire now was to get back home and put his new scheme into execution.

"Where are we going now?" asked A-ya.

Grom looked about him wildly--at the sky, at the far-off hills on their right, at the course of the stream, which had changed within the past few miles. His sense of direction was unerring.

"This river," he answered, "flows towards the rising sun, and must empty into the bitter waters not more than a day or a half day from the Caves. We are going home. We will come again to look for arrows in a new raft which I will make."

As he spoke, Loob's spear darted down beside the raft, and came up with a big, silvery fish writhing upon it. He broke its neck with a blow and laid the prize at A-ya's feet.

"I wish we had fire with us, to cook it with," said she.

"On the new raft, as I will make it," said Grom, "that may very well be. Our journey will be safe and easy, and the good fire we will have always with us."

CHAPTER XIII

THE FEAR

The People of the Caves were beginning to dread their good fortune.

Plenty was being showered upon them with so lavish and sudden a hand that they looked at it askance, distrustful of the unsought-for largess. For a week or more their hunting-grounds had been swarming with game, in amazing and daily increasing numbers, till there was little more of chance or of excitement in the hunt than in plucking a ripe mango from its branch. It was game of the choicest kinds, too--deer of many varieties, and antelope, and the little wild horse whose flesh they accounted such a delicacy. They slew, and slew, and their cooking-fires were busy night and day, and the flesh they could not devour was dried in the sun in long strips or smoked in the reek of green-wood fires. They feasted greedily, but there was something sinister in the whole matter, something ominous; and they would stop at times to wonder anxiously what stroke of fate could be hanging over the Caves.

During the past day or two, moreover, there had been a disquieting influx of those great and fierce beasts which the Cave Men were by no means anxious to hunt. The giant white and the woolly rhinoceros had arrived by the score in the dense thickets of the steaming savannah which unrolled its green-and-yellow breadths along the southward base of the downs. These half-blind brutes appeared to be waging a dreadful and doubtful war with the red herds of those monstrous, cone-horned survivals from an earlier age, the Arsinotheria, who had ruled the reeking savannah for countless cycles. The roar and trampling of the struggle came up from time to time to the dwellers in the Caves, when the hot breeze came up from the southward.

What concerned the Cave Folk far more than any near-sighted and blundering rhinoceros, however malignant, was the sudden arrival of the great red bears, the black lions, the grinning and implacable saber-tooth tigers, and giant black-gray wolves which hunted in small, handy packs of six or seven in number. All these, the dread foes of Man for as long as tradition could remember, had been mercifully few and scattered. Now, in a night, they had become as common as conies; and not a child could be allowed to play beyond shelter of the cave-mouth fires, not a woman durst venture to the spring without a brightly blazing fire-brand in her hand. Yet--and this seemed to the Tribe the most portentous sign of all--these blood-thirsty beasts appeared to have lost much of their ancient hostility to Man. They were all well fed, of course, their accustomed prey being now so abundant that they had little more to do than put forth an armed paw and seize it. But they all seemed uneasy and half-cowed, as if weighed down by a menace which they did not know how to face. When a man confronted them, the fiercest of them made way with a deprecating air, as if to say that they had troubles enough on their minds.

Bawr, the Chief, and Grom, his right hand and his counselor, stood upon the bare green ridge above the Cave-mouth, and stared down anxiously upon the sun-drenched plain. Of old it had taken keen eyes to discern the varied life which populated its bamboo-thickets and cane-choked marshes. Now it was as thronged as the home pastures of a cattle-farm. Here and there a battle raged between such small-brained brutes as the white rhinoceros and the cone-horned monster; but for the most part there was an apprehensive sort of truce, the different kinds of beasts keeping as far as possible to themselves.

Further out in the plain pastured a herd of gigantic creatures such as neither Bawr nor Grom had ever seen before. A pair of rhinoceros looked like pygmies beside them. They were both tall and ma.s.sive, of a dark mud-color, with colossal heads, no necks whatever, huge ears that flapped like wings, immensely long, up-curving tusks of gleaming yellow--mighty enough to carry a bison cradled in their curve--and it seemed to the astonished watchers on the ridge that from the snout of each monster grew a great snake, which reared itself into the air, and waved terribly, and pulled down the tops of trees for the monster's food.

It was the Cave Man's first view of the Mammoth--which had not yet developed the s.h.a.ggy coat it was later to grow on the cold sub-Artic plains.

Recovering at length from his amazement, Bawr remarked:

"They seem to have two tails, those new beasts--a little tail behind, in the usual place, and a very big tail in front, which they use as a hand. They are very many, and very terrible. Do you think it is they who are driving all these other beasts upon us to overwhelm us?"

Grom thought long before replying.

"No," said he, "they are not flesh-eaters. See! They do not heed the other beasts. They eat trees. And they, too, seem restless. I think they are themselves driven. But what dreadful beings must be they who can drive them!"

"If they are driven over us," muttered Bawr, "they will grind us and our fires into the dust."

"It must be men," mused Grom aloud, "men far mightier than ourselves and so countless that the hordes of the Tree Men would seem a handful in comparison. Only men, or G.o.ds, and in swarms like locusts, could so drive all these mighty beasts before them as a child drives rabbits."

"Before they come," said Bawr, dropping his great craggy chin upon his breast, "the People of the Caves will be trodden out. Whither can we escape from such foes? We will build great fires before the caves, and we will go down fighting, as befits men."

He lifted his maned and ma.s.sive head, and shook his great spear defiantly at the unknown doom that was coming up from the south. But Grom's eyes were sunken deep under his brows in brooding thought.

"There is one way, perhaps," he said at length. "We have learned to journey on the water. We must build us rafts, many rafts, to carry all the tribe. And when we can no longer hold our fires and our caves we will push out upon the water, and perhaps make our way to that blue sh.o.r.e yonder, where they cannot follow us."

"The waves, and the monsters of the waves, will swallow us up,"

suggested Bawr.

"Some of us, perhaps many of us," agreed Grom. "But many of us will escape, to keep the tribe-fires burning, if the G.o.ds be kind upon that day and bind down the winds till we get over. If we stay here we shall all die."

"It is well," grunted Bawr, turning to hurry down the steep. "We will build rafts. Let us hasten."

On the beach below the Caves the Men of the Tribe worked furiously, dragging the trunks of trees together at the water's edge, lashing them with ropes of vine and cords of hide, and laboriously lopping some of the more obstructive branches by the combined use of fire and split stones. The women, and the lame slave Ook-ootsk--with the old men, who, though their hearts were still high, were too frail of their hands for such a heavy task as raft-building--remained before the Caves under the command of A-ya, Grom's mate. They had enough to do in feeding the chain of fires, keeping the children out of danger, and fighting back with spear and arrow the ever-encroaching mob of wild-eyed beasts. The beasts feared the fires, and feared the human beings who leaped and screamed and smote from among the fires. But still more they seemed to fear some unknown thing behind them. For a time, however, the crackling flames and the biting shafts proved a sufficient barrier, and the motley but terrifying invaders went sheering off irresolutely to westward over the downs.

Down by the edge of the tide the raft-builders worked under Grom's guidance. The broad water--some four or five miles across--was the tidal estuary of a great river which flowed out of the north-west. Its br.i.m.m.i.n.g current bore down from the interior jungles the trunks of many uprooted trees, which the tides of the estuary hurled back and strewed along the beach. The raft-builders, therefore, had plenty of material to work with. And the fear that lay chill upon their hearts urged them to a diligence that was far from their habit.