by Jack London
CHAPTER VIII
Well do I remember that first winter after I left home. I have longdreams of sitting shivering in the cold. Lop-Ear and I sit closetogether, with our arms and legs about each other, blue-faced and withchattering teeth. It got particularly crisp along toward morning. Inthose chill early hours we slept little, huddling together in numbmisery and waiting for the sunrise in order to get warm.
When we went outside there was a crackle of frost under foot. Onemorning we discovered ice on the surface of the quiet water in the eddywhere was the drinking-place, and there was a great How-do-you-do aboutit. Old Marrow-Bone was the oldest member of the horde, and he had neverseen anything like it before. I remember the worried, plaintive lookthat came into his eyes as he examined the ice. (This plaintive lookalways came into our eyes when we did not understand a thing, or whenwe felt the prod of some vague and inexpressible desire.) Red-Eye, too,when he investigated the ice, looked bleak and plaintive, and staredacross the river into the northeast, as though in some way he connectedthe Fire People with this latest happening.
But we found ice only on that one morning, and that was the coldestwinter we experienced. I have no memory of other winters when it was socold. I have often thought that that cold winter was a fore-runner ofthe countless cold winters to come, as the ice-sheet from farther northcrept down over the face of the land. But we never saw that ice-sheet.Many generations must have passed away before the descendants of thehorde migrated south, or remained and adapted themselves to the changedconditions.
Life was hit or miss and happy-go-lucky with us. Little was everplanned, and less was executed. We ate when we were hungry, drank whenwe were thirsty, avoided our carnivorous enemies, took shelter in thecaves at night, and for the rest just sort of played along through life.
We were very curious, easily amused, and full of tricks and pranks.There was no seriousness about us, except when we were in danger or wereangry, in which cases the one was quickly forgotten and the other asquickly got over.
We were inconsecutive, illogical, and inconsequential. We had nosteadfastness of purpose, and it was here that the Fire People wereahead of us. They possessed all these things of which we possessed solittle. Occasionally, however, especially in the realm of the emotions,we were capable of long-cherished purpose. The faithfulness of themonogamic couples I have referred to may be explained as a matter ofhabit; but my long desire for the Swift One cannot be so explained, anymore than can be explained the undying enmity between me and Red-Eye.
But it was our inconsequentiality and stupidity that especiallydistresses me when I look back upon that life in the long ago. Once Ifound a broken gourd which happened to lie right side up and which hadbeen filled with the rain. The water was sweet, and I drank it. I eventook the gourd down to the stream and filled it with more water, some ofwhich I drank and some of which I poured over Lop-Ear. And then I threwthe gourd away. It never entered my head to fill the gourd with waterand carry it into my cave. Yet often I was thirsty at night, especiallyafter eating wild onions and watercress, and no one ever dared leave thecaves at night for a drink.
Another time I found a dry; gourd, inside of which the seeds rattled. Ihad fun with it for a while. But it was a play thing, nothing more. Andyet, it was not long after this that the using of gourds for storingwater became the general practice of the horde. But I was not theinventor. The honor was due to old Marrow-Bone, and it is fair toassume that it was the necessity of his great age that brought about theinnovation.
At any rate, the first member of the horde to use gourds wasMarrow-Bone. He kept a supply of drinking-water in his cave, which cavebelonged to his son, the Hairless One, who permitted him to occupya corner of it. We used to see Marrow-Bone filling his gourd at thedrinking-place and carrying it carefully up to his cave. Imitationwas strong in the Folk, and first one, and then another and another,procured a gourd and used it in similar fashion, until it was a generalpractice with all of us so to store water.
Sometimes old Marrow-Bone had sick spells and was unable to leave thecave. Then it was that the Hairless One filled the gourd for him. Alittle later, the Hairless One deputed the task to Long-Lip, his son.And after that, even when Marrow-Bone was well again, Long-Lip continuedcarrying water for him. By and by, except on unusual occasions, the mennever carried any water at all, leaving the task to the women and largerchildren. Lop-Ear and I were independent. We carried water only forourselves, and we often mocked the young water-carriers when they werecalled away from play to fill the gourds.
Progress was slow with us. We played through life, even the adults, muchin the same way that children play, and we played as none of the otheranimals played. What little we learned, was usually in the course ofplay, and was due to our curiosity and keenness of appreciation. Forthat matter, the one big invention of the horde, during the time I livedwith it, was the use of gourds. At first we stored only water in thegourds--in imitation of old Marrow-Bone.
But one day some one of the women--I do not know which one--filled agourd with black-berries and carried it to her cave. In no time all thewomen were carrying berries and nuts and roots in the gourds. The idea,once started, had to go on. Another evolution of the carrying-receptaclewas due to the women. Without doubt, some woman's gourd was too small,or else she had forgotten her gourd; but be that as it may, she bent twogreat leaves together, pinning the seams with twigs, and carried home abigger quantity of berries than could have been contained in the largestgourd.
So far we got, and no farther, in the transportation of supplies duringthe years I lived with the Folk. It never entered anybody's head toweave a basket out of willow-withes. Sometimes the men and women tiedtough vines about the bundles of ferns and branches that they carried tothe caves to sleep upon. Possibly in ten or twenty generations we mighthave worked up to the weaving of baskets. And of this, one thing issure: if once we wove withes into baskets, the next and inevitable stepwould have been the weaving of cloth. Clothes would have followed, andwith covering our nakedness would have come modesty.
Thus was momentum gained in the Younger World. But we were without thismomentum. We were just getting started, and we could not go far in asingle generation. We were without weapons, without fire, and in theraw beginnings of speech. The device of writing lay so far in the futurethat I am appalled when I think of it.
Even I was once on the verge of a great discovery. To show you howfortuitous was development in those days let me state that had itnot been for the gluttony of Lop-Ear I might have brought about thedomestication of the dog. And this was something that the Fire Peoplewho lived to the northeast had not yet achieved. They were without dogs;this I knew from observation. But let me tell you how Lop-Ear's gluttonypossibly set back our social development many generations.
Well to the west of our caves was a great swamp, but to the south laya stretch of low, rocky hills. These were little frequented for tworeasons. First of all, there was no food there of the kind we ate;and next, those rocky hills were filled with the lairs of carnivorousbeasts.
But Lop-Ear and I strayed over to the hills one day. We would not havestrayed had we not been teasing a tiger. Please do not laugh. It was oldSaber-Tooth himself. We were perfectly safe. We chanced upon him inthe forest, early in the morning, and from the safety of the branchesoverhead we chattered down at him our dislike and hatred. And frombranch to branch, and from tree to tree, we followed overhead, makingan infernal row and warning all the forest-dwellers that old Saber-Toothwas coming.
We spoiled his hunting for him, anyway. And we made him good and angry.He snarled at us and lashed his tail, and sometimes he paused and staredup at us quietly for a long time, as if debating in his mind some way bywhich he could get hold of us. But we only laughed and pelted him withtwigs and the ends of branches.
This tiger-baiting was common sport among the folk. Sometimes half thehorde would follow from overhead a tiger or lion that had ventured outin the daytime. It was our revenge; for more than one member of thehorde, c
aught unexpectedly, had gone the way of the tiger's belly or thelion's. Also, by such ordeals of helplessness and shame, we taught thehunting animals to some extent to keep out of our territory. And then itwas funny. It was a great game.
And so Lop-Ear and I had chased Saber-Tooth across three miles offorest. Toward the last he put his tail between his legs and fled fromour gibing like a beaten cur. We did our best to keep up with him; butwhen we reached the edge of the forest he was no more than a streak inthe distance.
I don't know what prompted us, unless it was curiosity; but afterplaying around awhile, Lop-Ear and I ventured across the open ground tothe edge of the rocky hills. We did not go far. Possibly at no timewere we more than a hundred yards from the trees. Coming around a sharpcorner of rock (we went very carefully, because we did not know what wemight encounter), we came upon three puppies playing in the sun.
They did not see us, and we watched them for some time. They were wilddogs. In the rock-wall was a horizontal fissure--evidently the lairwhere their mother had left them, and where they should have remainedhad they been obedient. But the growing life, that in Lop-Ear and me hadimpelled us to venture away from the forest, had driven the puppies outof the cave to frolic. I know how their mother would have punished themhad she caught them.
But it was Lop-Ear and I who caught them. He looked at me, and then wemade a dash for it. The puppies knew no place to run except into thelair, and we headed them off. One rushed between my legs. I squatted andgrabbed him. He sank his sharp little teeth into my arm, and I droppedhim in the suddenness of the hurt and surprise. The next moment he hadscurried inside.
Lop-Ear, struggling with the second puppy, scowled at me and intimatedby a variety of sounds the different kinds of a fool and a bunglerthat I was. This made me ashamed and spurred me to valor. I grabbed theremaining puppy by the tail. He got his teeth into me once, and then Igot him by the nape of the neck. Lop-Ear and I sat down, and held thepuppies up, and looked at them, and laughed.
They were snarling and yelping and crying. Lop-Ear started suddenly.He thought he had heard something. We looked at each other in fear,realizing the danger of our position. The one thing that made animalsraging demons was tampering with their young. And these puppies thatmade such a racket belonged to the wild dogs. Well we knew them, runningin packs, the terror of the grass-eating animals. We had watched themfollowing the herds of cattle and bison and dragging down the calves,the aged, and the sick. We had been chased by them ourselves, more thanonce. I had seen one of the Folk, a woman, run down by them and caughtjust as she reached the shelter of the woods. Had she not been tired outby the run, she might have made it into a tree. She tried, and slipped,and fell back. They made short work of her.
We did not stare at each other longer than a moment. Keeping tight holdof our prizes, we ran for the woods. Once in the security of a talltree, we held up the puppies and laughed again. You see, we had to haveour laugh out, no matter what happened.
And then began one of the hardest tasks I ever attempted. We started tocarry the puppies to our cave. Instead of using our hands for climbing,most of the time they were occupied with holding our squirming captives.Once we tried to walk on the ground, but were treed by a miserablehyena, who followed along underneath. He was a wise hyena.
Lop-Ear got an idea. He remembered how we tied up bundles of leaves tocarry home for beds. Breaking off some tough vines, he tied his puppy'slegs together, and then, with another piece of vine passed around hisneck, slung the puppy on his back. This left him with hands and feetfree to climb. He was jubilant, and did not wait for me to finish tyingmy puppy's legs, but started on. There was one difficulty, however. Thepuppy wouldn't stay slung on Lop-Ear's back. It swung around to the sideand then on in front. Its teeth were not tied, and the next thing it didwas to sink its teeth into Lop-Ear's soft and unprotected stomach. Helet out a scream, nearly fell, and clutched a branch violently with bothhands to save himself. The vine around his neck broke, and the puppy,its four legs still tied, dropped to the ground. The hyena proceeded todine.
Lop-Ear was disgusted and angry. He abused the hyena, and then wentoff alone through the trees. I had no reason that I knew for wanting tocarry the puppy to the cave, except that I WANTED to; and I stayed bymy task. I made the work a great deal easier by elaborating on Lop-Ear'sidea. Not only did I tie the puppy's legs, but I thrust a stick throughhis jaws and tied them together securely.
At last I got the puppy home. I imagine I had more pertinacity than theaverage Folk, or else I should not have succeeded. They laughed at mewhen they saw me lugging the puppy up to my high little cave, but I didnot mind. Success crowned my efforts, and there was the puppy. He was aplaything such as none of the Folk possessed. He learned rapidly. When Iplayed with him and he bit me, I boxed his ears, and then he did not tryagain to bite for a long time.
I was quite taken up with him. He was something new, and it was acharacteristic of the Folk to like new things. When I saw that herefused fruits and vegetables, I caught birds for him and squirrels andyoung rabbits. (We Folk were meat-eaters, as well as vegetarians, and wewere adept at catching small game.) The puppy ate the meat and thrived.As well as I can estimate, I must have had him over a week. Andthen, coming back to the cave one day with a nestful of young-hatchedpheasants, I found Lop-Ear had killed the puppy and was just beginningto eat him. I sprang for Lop-Ear,--the cave was small,--and we went atit tooth and nail.
And thus, in a fight, ended one of the earliest attempts to domesticatethe dog. We pulled hair out in handfuls, and scratched and bit andgouged. Then we sulked and made up. After that we ate the puppy. Raw?Yes. We had not yet discovered fire. Our evolution into cooking animalslay in the tight-rolled scroll of the future.
