CHAPTER XVIIITHE ISLAND MENTherewere twenty-two men and eight women in Tul-Ab's little party. The great log canoe had been crowded.The place where they landed was a little harbour at the mouth of a small river, with high cliffs on either side of it, and a narrow beach at their feet. They managed to catch some fish in the bay without much trouble, and to find dry brushwood for fire, but there was no water to drink, except the little they had found in the hollows in the rocks, left there from the rainstorm of the night before. The shallow caves in which they slept were only holes in the rock.When morning came, Tul-Ab and some of his men began to climb up the cliffs, in search of water, and a place to make a camp. They did not like the small caves along the shore; they wanted to be higher up, where they would be safe fromattack, and where they could build brush huts of the kind they had always lived in.They found a smooth grassy place at the top of the cliffs, from which they could look far out over the sea. There were no trees on the cliff top, but only some low bushes. A stream, however, came from the rocks higher up and crossing the little plateau, tumbled over the edge of the cliffs into the sea. All over the surface of the plateau were many flat rocks, some small, some very large and heavy. An easy path down the side of the cliff led to the beach below, where they had spent the night.Tul-Ab and his men were troubled, because they found nothing about them the way it had been in their other home. There were no trees on the cliff tops with which to build huts; they saw some, on the hills further back, but they were small and stunted. Nowhere did they see any of the marsh grasses and reeds they had used so much in making their houses. Yet they liked the place they had found for a camp, because it was high and safe from attack, in case Ban and his hill men should come after them from the othershore. Tul-Ab looked about and saw nothing but rocks, and the thought came to him, why not build houses for themselves out of these rocks.He picked out a great flat boulder near the stream, and he and his men dragged up other boulders, and arranged them in the form of a square. On these they placed more stones, choosing the flat ones, until they had built four walls, as high as their heads. In one of the walls they left a hole for a door, placing over its top a long, flat stone, to keep the wall above from falling down. The front wall they built higher than the back, so that the roof of the house would slant, to make the rain run off.The roof bothered Tul-Ab a great deal. If he had had reeds and marsh grass, he would have known what to do, but he could find none. With his men he went farther up the hillside and cut down many of the short stunted trees, and these they laid side by side across the walls of the house to make a roof. There were spaces between these logs, through which rain would come, so they cut sods of earth from the grassy surface of the plateau, and covered the roof with a thicklayer of them, with flat stones on top to hold the sods in place. When the house was done, Tul-Ab took it for his home, for he was the chief, and he also took one of the women for his wife.When the first stone house had been built, the little tribe built others, until there was room for all to sleep protected from the rain. Not knowing what wild animals, or even men, might live in the woods further back from the shore, they also built a stone wall across the neck of the plateau, so that on one side their camp was protected by the cliffs leading down to the ocean, and on the other, by this wall of stone. They brought great piles of firewood into the camp for cooking the fish they caught, and the waterfowl they shot with bows and arrows, along the shores of the little bay at the foot of the cliffs. Every day the men went out hunting and fishing in the canoe, sometimes on the ocean, when it was smooth, and at others, on the bay, or up the river which ran into it. They could not go up this river very far, because of the rocks in it, which made rapids, over which the boat could not pass. But they often went beyond the rapids on foot, andbrought back wild hogs, and many small furry animals they had never seen before, and sometimes bears and horned deer.Having no marsh grass from which to weave cloth, the tribe began once more to use skins and furs for clothing, and to eat more meat, and less fish, than they had eaten in their old home. The country of the sea people had been flat and marshy, while that of the valley tribes was hilly and far from the sea, but in the new home of Tul-Ab and his tribe, they found both the hills and the sea, close together, and so they grew to be like both the sea folk, and the people of the valley and the hills from which they had first come.Already, in building things of stone, they had done something that men had never done before. Instead of living in caves, or brush huts, they had built houses of stone, and a stone fort. This was a new thing, and from it they began to learn to be carpenters. As the tribe got larger, and more houses were built, they found they could make the roof logs fit closer together by chipping off the two sides of them, and so they made thefirst hewn timbers. It was not long, before they found they could split the logs with stone wedges, and in this way make rough planks, or boards. These boards they fastened to cross pieces with wooden pegs, to make doors for their houses to keep out the wind and snow and rain.The women they had brought with them had children, and these children grew up and had more children, and before very long there were many hundred people in the tribe, and their stone huts dotted the cliffs as far as the eye could see. When they found there was not room enough behind the first wall for the growing village, they built another and longer wall, further back from the sea, for they were always afraid of being attacked, on account of the way their former village had been destroyed. Only the very oldest men remembered this now, but they told the story to the younger men, around the fires at night, and when these grew old, they told it to their children and grandchildren, so that it became a legend in the tribe that they had come from another country, where enemies lived who might attack them. A watchman stood day and nighton the cliffs, looking out over the sea, ready to light signal fires, in case he saw boats coming toward them from across the water.The island people found plenty of flint, out of which to make weapons and tools for working wood, and they were very skilful fishermen, and also great hunters with the bow and arrow. As they made hunting trips far back into the country, they found many different kinds of wood for making bows and small canoes, but no reeds were to be found, so they forgot the art of making basket work. Neither did they find any clay, for a long time, and when the few bowls and jars they had brought with them were broken, they made drinking cups of the horns of animals, or of wood. They still used smoked meat and fish, but they knew nothing about planting and growing grains to make bread.These people were great workers in wood and stone. They worshipped the Sun, and built a temple to him of huge upright stones, set in a wide circle, with a flat altar stone in the middle, on which they placed their offerings of meat and fish. These offerings they burnt with fire, becausethe priests of the temple told them it pleased the Sun to smell the smoke of the burning flesh as it rose up in the sky. Twice in the year they had great feasts. One was when the days began to get longer, in the spring, and fruits and flowers began to grow. This time is in March, and we call it the vernal equinox, because then the days and nights are of equal length, and equinox means equal nights. From then on, until June, the days grow longer and the nights grow shorter. From June till September, the nights grow longer and the days shorter, until once more they are the same length, and this is called the autumnal equinox. Then the island tribe held another festival, the feast of the harvest. After that the nights began to grow still longer, and the days shorter, because the sun was going away from them more and more, all through the cold winter. Even to-day we remember these two festivals, by offerings of flowers in the spring, at Easter time, and by the harvest feasts which country people still hold in some places at the end of the summer, when the harvests are gathered in.The island people built their houses and temples of stone. With wood they at first made only roofs and doors, but it was not long before they began to use it for building other things, such as boats. They found no big trees of soft wood on the rocky hillsides, out of which they could make large canoes. So they hewed planks out of the smaller trees, and built the first wooden ships made by man. They could not be called ships, at first, for they were only small boats, but as time went on they built them larger and larger until they would carry forty or fifty men.Modor was the first man to build one of these boats and he was a skilful carpenter. He hewed a long heavy keel for his boat out of a tree trunk, and at each end he set up a stout post, one for the stem, the other for the stern. Wooden braces, or knees, as they are called, fastened by pegs, held the posts to the keel. Modor's tools were heavy stone axes, wedges of stone to split planks with, saws, made of jagged, toothed pieces of flint, with wooden handles bound to them, sharp flint knives for making wooden pegs, and drills, for boring holes for the pegs. With such roughtools it was not easy for Modor and his companions to build a boat, but they were strong and patient, and worked very hard.After the stem and stern posts had been fastened in place, ribs were pegged to the keel to form the frame of the boat. These curved ribs they made in two ways. One was to hew them from the crooked limbs of trees. The other was to take straight pieces of wood and soak them for many days in water, until the wood became soft and pliable, and then bend them to shape, and tie them that way with leather cords while they dried.When the ribs had been fastened to the keel with wooden pegs, long strips of wood were bent around the tops of the ribs, from the stem post to the stern post, and fastened to each rib with a peg. This made the framework of the boat, and now it had to be covered with planks.Modor and his helpers took the split boards they had made and bent them over the framework, with a peg at each rib to hold them, and in this way covered the whole framework of the boat. Of course a boat built in this rough way would not be water-tight; there were many jointsand seams between the rough planking through which water would leak. But Modor had found, oozing from the pine trees, a black, sticky sort of gum or pitch, and this, with soft fibres from the bark of trees, he used to calk his boat and make it tight. The way he did this was to heat the pitch in a large shell, dip the fibres in it, and then drive them into the cracks with a stone wedge. In this way, after many trials, Modor at last got his boat so that it would not leak.He built a deck of wood over the forward part of the boat, and across the middle part he put five board seats. These seats were for the paddlers to sit on, but the paddles were so long, in order to reach the water, that they were like oars, and it was hard to handle them against the ocean waves. So Modor drove pegs into the edges or gunwales of the boat to hold the oars in place, and men thus began to row boats, instead of paddling them, as they had their canoes and rafts.As we have seen, the tribe had almost forgotten how to weave, because they no longer had the tough marsh grasses to make cord from. But Modor twisted the fibres from the bark of certaintrees into strong cords, and took them to some of the old women, who knew how to weave, and they wove him a sail from them. Then he put a mast in the middle of his boat, with a pole or yard across it, and hung the sail from this yard, with strong cords tied to its lower corners to hold it down.In this boat Modor and his companions made many voyages along the coast, fishing, and hunting. On one of these trips he found a marsh covered with reeds and rushes, but he did not gather them, for the tribe had no use for them now. On another voyage Modor's boat was carried by the wind across the water to a low shore. It was the same shore from which Tul-Ab and his companions had fled hundreds of years before. When Modor's boat came in sight of the beach, he saw many men running along the sand, waving their spears and shouting. Several canoes crowded with fighting men came out from the shore. Then Modor lowered the sail of his boat, and the rowers bent to their oars, and soon left the canoes and the shore far behind.When Modor got back to the village he toldthe old men what he had seen, and that night around the camp fires they told again the story of Tul-Ab, and sang a song about him, and his coming to the island.The next day the chief of the tribe, whose name was Gudr, told the watchers on the cliffs to be very careful, and to keep their eyes always on the sea, for he feared that the people from across the water might come to attack them. But for a long time none came.Other men in the tribe also built boats like the one made by Modor, larger ones, and they carved the heads of animals, or birds, or fish, out of wood, and fastened them at the bows of their boats, and this was the first use of figureheads, which you can see on some sailing ships even now. They painted the boats with red, and yellow and blue earths, mixed with fish oil, and stained the sails different colours with the juices of berries and plants.One day, while digging along the bottom of the cliffs for red earth with which to make paint for his boat, Modor came across a lump of something that he at first thought was stone. It wasyellow in colour, and very heavy. He laid it on a rock, and beat it with the head of his axe, expecting it would break. But instead of breaking, it flattened out, and began to shine, where the axe head struck it, like the rays of the sun. Modor was very much pleased with his find, because it was so pretty, and he beat it out into a thin strip, and rubbed it bright with a stone, and bent it like a bracelet about his upper arm. His companions, when they saw it, liked its pretty, bright colour, but beyond that, they paid no attention to it. They did not know that Modor was the first man in the world to discover a metal. The bracelet he had bent around his arm was made of pure gold.
CHAPTER XVIIITHE ISLAND MENTherewere twenty-two men and eight women in Tul-Ab's little party. The great log canoe had been crowded.The place where they landed was a little harbour at the mouth of a small river, with high cliffs on either side of it, and a narrow beach at their feet. They managed to catch some fish in the bay without much trouble, and to find dry brushwood for fire, but there was no water to drink, except the little they had found in the hollows in the rocks, left there from the rainstorm of the night before. The shallow caves in which they slept were only holes in the rock.When morning came, Tul-Ab and some of his men began to climb up the cliffs, in search of water, and a place to make a camp. They did not like the small caves along the shore; they wanted to be higher up, where they would be safe fromattack, and where they could build brush huts of the kind they had always lived in.They found a smooth grassy place at the top of the cliffs, from which they could look far out over the sea. There were no trees on the cliff top, but only some low bushes. A stream, however, came from the rocks higher up and crossing the little plateau, tumbled over the edge of the cliffs into the sea. All over the surface of the plateau were many flat rocks, some small, some very large and heavy. An easy path down the side of the cliff led to the beach below, where they had spent the night.Tul-Ab and his men were troubled, because they found nothing about them the way it had been in their other home. There were no trees on the cliff tops with which to build huts; they saw some, on the hills further back, but they were small and stunted. Nowhere did they see any of the marsh grasses and reeds they had used so much in making their houses. Yet they liked the place they had found for a camp, because it was high and safe from attack, in case Ban and his hill men should come after them from the othershore. Tul-Ab looked about and saw nothing but rocks, and the thought came to him, why not build houses for themselves out of these rocks.He picked out a great flat boulder near the stream, and he and his men dragged up other boulders, and arranged them in the form of a square. On these they placed more stones, choosing the flat ones, until they had built four walls, as high as their heads. In one of the walls they left a hole for a door, placing over its top a long, flat stone, to keep the wall above from falling down. The front wall they built higher than the back, so that the roof of the house would slant, to make the rain run off.The roof bothered Tul-Ab a great deal. If he had had reeds and marsh grass, he would have known what to do, but he could find none. With his men he went farther up the hillside and cut down many of the short stunted trees, and these they laid side by side across the walls of the house to make a roof. There were spaces between these logs, through which rain would come, so they cut sods of earth from the grassy surface of the plateau, and covered the roof with a thicklayer of them, with flat stones on top to hold the sods in place. When the house was done, Tul-Ab took it for his home, for he was the chief, and he also took one of the women for his wife.When the first stone house had been built, the little tribe built others, until there was room for all to sleep protected from the rain. Not knowing what wild animals, or even men, might live in the woods further back from the shore, they also built a stone wall across the neck of the plateau, so that on one side their camp was protected by the cliffs leading down to the ocean, and on the other, by this wall of stone. They brought great piles of firewood into the camp for cooking the fish they caught, and the waterfowl they shot with bows and arrows, along the shores of the little bay at the foot of the cliffs. Every day the men went out hunting and fishing in the canoe, sometimes on the ocean, when it was smooth, and at others, on the bay, or up the river which ran into it. They could not go up this river very far, because of the rocks in it, which made rapids, over which the boat could not pass. But they often went beyond the rapids on foot, andbrought back wild hogs, and many small furry animals they had never seen before, and sometimes bears and horned deer.Having no marsh grass from which to weave cloth, the tribe began once more to use skins and furs for clothing, and to eat more meat, and less fish, than they had eaten in their old home. The country of the sea people had been flat and marshy, while that of the valley tribes was hilly and far from the sea, but in the new home of Tul-Ab and his tribe, they found both the hills and the sea, close together, and so they grew to be like both the sea folk, and the people of the valley and the hills from which they had first come.Already, in building things of stone, they had done something that men had never done before. Instead of living in caves, or brush huts, they had built houses of stone, and a stone fort. This was a new thing, and from it they began to learn to be carpenters. As the tribe got larger, and more houses were built, they found they could make the roof logs fit closer together by chipping off the two sides of them, and so they made thefirst hewn timbers. It was not long, before they found they could split the logs with stone wedges, and in this way make rough planks, or boards. These boards they fastened to cross pieces with wooden pegs, to make doors for their houses to keep out the wind and snow and rain.The women they had brought with them had children, and these children grew up and had more children, and before very long there were many hundred people in the tribe, and their stone huts dotted the cliffs as far as the eye could see. When they found there was not room enough behind the first wall for the growing village, they built another and longer wall, further back from the sea, for they were always afraid of being attacked, on account of the way their former village had been destroyed. Only the very oldest men remembered this now, but they told the story to the younger men, around the fires at night, and when these grew old, they told it to their children and grandchildren, so that it became a legend in the tribe that they had come from another country, where enemies lived who might attack them. A watchman stood day and nighton the cliffs, looking out over the sea, ready to light signal fires, in case he saw boats coming toward them from across the water.The island people found plenty of flint, out of which to make weapons and tools for working wood, and they were very skilful fishermen, and also great hunters with the bow and arrow. As they made hunting trips far back into the country, they found many different kinds of wood for making bows and small canoes, but no reeds were to be found, so they forgot the art of making basket work. Neither did they find any clay, for a long time, and when the few bowls and jars they had brought with them were broken, they made drinking cups of the horns of animals, or of wood. They still used smoked meat and fish, but they knew nothing about planting and growing grains to make bread.These people were great workers in wood and stone. They worshipped the Sun, and built a temple to him of huge upright stones, set in a wide circle, with a flat altar stone in the middle, on which they placed their offerings of meat and fish. These offerings they burnt with fire, becausethe priests of the temple told them it pleased the Sun to smell the smoke of the burning flesh as it rose up in the sky. Twice in the year they had great feasts. One was when the days began to get longer, in the spring, and fruits and flowers began to grow. This time is in March, and we call it the vernal equinox, because then the days and nights are of equal length, and equinox means equal nights. From then on, until June, the days grow longer and the nights grow shorter. From June till September, the nights grow longer and the days shorter, until once more they are the same length, and this is called the autumnal equinox. Then the island tribe held another festival, the feast of the harvest. After that the nights began to grow still longer, and the days shorter, because the sun was going away from them more and more, all through the cold winter. Even to-day we remember these two festivals, by offerings of flowers in the spring, at Easter time, and by the harvest feasts which country people still hold in some places at the end of the summer, when the harvests are gathered in.The island people built their houses and temples of stone. With wood they at first made only roofs and doors, but it was not long before they began to use it for building other things, such as boats. They found no big trees of soft wood on the rocky hillsides, out of which they could make large canoes. So they hewed planks out of the smaller trees, and built the first wooden ships made by man. They could not be called ships, at first, for they were only small boats, but as time went on they built them larger and larger until they would carry forty or fifty men.Modor was the first man to build one of these boats and he was a skilful carpenter. He hewed a long heavy keel for his boat out of a tree trunk, and at each end he set up a stout post, one for the stem, the other for the stern. Wooden braces, or knees, as they are called, fastened by pegs, held the posts to the keel. Modor's tools were heavy stone axes, wedges of stone to split planks with, saws, made of jagged, toothed pieces of flint, with wooden handles bound to them, sharp flint knives for making wooden pegs, and drills, for boring holes for the pegs. With such roughtools it was not easy for Modor and his companions to build a boat, but they were strong and patient, and worked very hard.After the stem and stern posts had been fastened in place, ribs were pegged to the keel to form the frame of the boat. These curved ribs they made in two ways. One was to hew them from the crooked limbs of trees. The other was to take straight pieces of wood and soak them for many days in water, until the wood became soft and pliable, and then bend them to shape, and tie them that way with leather cords while they dried.When the ribs had been fastened to the keel with wooden pegs, long strips of wood were bent around the tops of the ribs, from the stem post to the stern post, and fastened to each rib with a peg. This made the framework of the boat, and now it had to be covered with planks.Modor and his helpers took the split boards they had made and bent them over the framework, with a peg at each rib to hold them, and in this way covered the whole framework of the boat. Of course a boat built in this rough way would not be water-tight; there were many jointsand seams between the rough planking through which water would leak. But Modor had found, oozing from the pine trees, a black, sticky sort of gum or pitch, and this, with soft fibres from the bark of trees, he used to calk his boat and make it tight. The way he did this was to heat the pitch in a large shell, dip the fibres in it, and then drive them into the cracks with a stone wedge. In this way, after many trials, Modor at last got his boat so that it would not leak.He built a deck of wood over the forward part of the boat, and across the middle part he put five board seats. These seats were for the paddlers to sit on, but the paddles were so long, in order to reach the water, that they were like oars, and it was hard to handle them against the ocean waves. So Modor drove pegs into the edges or gunwales of the boat to hold the oars in place, and men thus began to row boats, instead of paddling them, as they had their canoes and rafts.As we have seen, the tribe had almost forgotten how to weave, because they no longer had the tough marsh grasses to make cord from. But Modor twisted the fibres from the bark of certaintrees into strong cords, and took them to some of the old women, who knew how to weave, and they wove him a sail from them. Then he put a mast in the middle of his boat, with a pole or yard across it, and hung the sail from this yard, with strong cords tied to its lower corners to hold it down.In this boat Modor and his companions made many voyages along the coast, fishing, and hunting. On one of these trips he found a marsh covered with reeds and rushes, but he did not gather them, for the tribe had no use for them now. On another voyage Modor's boat was carried by the wind across the water to a low shore. It was the same shore from which Tul-Ab and his companions had fled hundreds of years before. When Modor's boat came in sight of the beach, he saw many men running along the sand, waving their spears and shouting. Several canoes crowded with fighting men came out from the shore. Then Modor lowered the sail of his boat, and the rowers bent to their oars, and soon left the canoes and the shore far behind.When Modor got back to the village he toldthe old men what he had seen, and that night around the camp fires they told again the story of Tul-Ab, and sang a song about him, and his coming to the island.The next day the chief of the tribe, whose name was Gudr, told the watchers on the cliffs to be very careful, and to keep their eyes always on the sea, for he feared that the people from across the water might come to attack them. But for a long time none came.Other men in the tribe also built boats like the one made by Modor, larger ones, and they carved the heads of animals, or birds, or fish, out of wood, and fastened them at the bows of their boats, and this was the first use of figureheads, which you can see on some sailing ships even now. They painted the boats with red, and yellow and blue earths, mixed with fish oil, and stained the sails different colours with the juices of berries and plants.One day, while digging along the bottom of the cliffs for red earth with which to make paint for his boat, Modor came across a lump of something that he at first thought was stone. It wasyellow in colour, and very heavy. He laid it on a rock, and beat it with the head of his axe, expecting it would break. But instead of breaking, it flattened out, and began to shine, where the axe head struck it, like the rays of the sun. Modor was very much pleased with his find, because it was so pretty, and he beat it out into a thin strip, and rubbed it bright with a stone, and bent it like a bracelet about his upper arm. His companions, when they saw it, liked its pretty, bright colour, but beyond that, they paid no attention to it. They did not know that Modor was the first man in the world to discover a metal. The bracelet he had bent around his arm was made of pure gold.
THE ISLAND MEN
Therewere twenty-two men and eight women in Tul-Ab's little party. The great log canoe had been crowded.
The place where they landed was a little harbour at the mouth of a small river, with high cliffs on either side of it, and a narrow beach at their feet. They managed to catch some fish in the bay without much trouble, and to find dry brushwood for fire, but there was no water to drink, except the little they had found in the hollows in the rocks, left there from the rainstorm of the night before. The shallow caves in which they slept were only holes in the rock.
When morning came, Tul-Ab and some of his men began to climb up the cliffs, in search of water, and a place to make a camp. They did not like the small caves along the shore; they wanted to be higher up, where they would be safe fromattack, and where they could build brush huts of the kind they had always lived in.
They found a smooth grassy place at the top of the cliffs, from which they could look far out over the sea. There were no trees on the cliff top, but only some low bushes. A stream, however, came from the rocks higher up and crossing the little plateau, tumbled over the edge of the cliffs into the sea. All over the surface of the plateau were many flat rocks, some small, some very large and heavy. An easy path down the side of the cliff led to the beach below, where they had spent the night.
Tul-Ab and his men were troubled, because they found nothing about them the way it had been in their other home. There were no trees on the cliff tops with which to build huts; they saw some, on the hills further back, but they were small and stunted. Nowhere did they see any of the marsh grasses and reeds they had used so much in making their houses. Yet they liked the place they had found for a camp, because it was high and safe from attack, in case Ban and his hill men should come after them from the othershore. Tul-Ab looked about and saw nothing but rocks, and the thought came to him, why not build houses for themselves out of these rocks.
He picked out a great flat boulder near the stream, and he and his men dragged up other boulders, and arranged them in the form of a square. On these they placed more stones, choosing the flat ones, until they had built four walls, as high as their heads. In one of the walls they left a hole for a door, placing over its top a long, flat stone, to keep the wall above from falling down. The front wall they built higher than the back, so that the roof of the house would slant, to make the rain run off.
The roof bothered Tul-Ab a great deal. If he had had reeds and marsh grass, he would have known what to do, but he could find none. With his men he went farther up the hillside and cut down many of the short stunted trees, and these they laid side by side across the walls of the house to make a roof. There were spaces between these logs, through which rain would come, so they cut sods of earth from the grassy surface of the plateau, and covered the roof with a thicklayer of them, with flat stones on top to hold the sods in place. When the house was done, Tul-Ab took it for his home, for he was the chief, and he also took one of the women for his wife.
When the first stone house had been built, the little tribe built others, until there was room for all to sleep protected from the rain. Not knowing what wild animals, or even men, might live in the woods further back from the shore, they also built a stone wall across the neck of the plateau, so that on one side their camp was protected by the cliffs leading down to the ocean, and on the other, by this wall of stone. They brought great piles of firewood into the camp for cooking the fish they caught, and the waterfowl they shot with bows and arrows, along the shores of the little bay at the foot of the cliffs. Every day the men went out hunting and fishing in the canoe, sometimes on the ocean, when it was smooth, and at others, on the bay, or up the river which ran into it. They could not go up this river very far, because of the rocks in it, which made rapids, over which the boat could not pass. But they often went beyond the rapids on foot, andbrought back wild hogs, and many small furry animals they had never seen before, and sometimes bears and horned deer.
Having no marsh grass from which to weave cloth, the tribe began once more to use skins and furs for clothing, and to eat more meat, and less fish, than they had eaten in their old home. The country of the sea people had been flat and marshy, while that of the valley tribes was hilly and far from the sea, but in the new home of Tul-Ab and his tribe, they found both the hills and the sea, close together, and so they grew to be like both the sea folk, and the people of the valley and the hills from which they had first come.
Already, in building things of stone, they had done something that men had never done before. Instead of living in caves, or brush huts, they had built houses of stone, and a stone fort. This was a new thing, and from it they began to learn to be carpenters. As the tribe got larger, and more houses were built, they found they could make the roof logs fit closer together by chipping off the two sides of them, and so they made thefirst hewn timbers. It was not long, before they found they could split the logs with stone wedges, and in this way make rough planks, or boards. These boards they fastened to cross pieces with wooden pegs, to make doors for their houses to keep out the wind and snow and rain.
The women they had brought with them had children, and these children grew up and had more children, and before very long there were many hundred people in the tribe, and their stone huts dotted the cliffs as far as the eye could see. When they found there was not room enough behind the first wall for the growing village, they built another and longer wall, further back from the sea, for they were always afraid of being attacked, on account of the way their former village had been destroyed. Only the very oldest men remembered this now, but they told the story to the younger men, around the fires at night, and when these grew old, they told it to their children and grandchildren, so that it became a legend in the tribe that they had come from another country, where enemies lived who might attack them. A watchman stood day and nighton the cliffs, looking out over the sea, ready to light signal fires, in case he saw boats coming toward them from across the water.
The island people found plenty of flint, out of which to make weapons and tools for working wood, and they were very skilful fishermen, and also great hunters with the bow and arrow. As they made hunting trips far back into the country, they found many different kinds of wood for making bows and small canoes, but no reeds were to be found, so they forgot the art of making basket work. Neither did they find any clay, for a long time, and when the few bowls and jars they had brought with them were broken, they made drinking cups of the horns of animals, or of wood. They still used smoked meat and fish, but they knew nothing about planting and growing grains to make bread.
These people were great workers in wood and stone. They worshipped the Sun, and built a temple to him of huge upright stones, set in a wide circle, with a flat altar stone in the middle, on which they placed their offerings of meat and fish. These offerings they burnt with fire, becausethe priests of the temple told them it pleased the Sun to smell the smoke of the burning flesh as it rose up in the sky. Twice in the year they had great feasts. One was when the days began to get longer, in the spring, and fruits and flowers began to grow. This time is in March, and we call it the vernal equinox, because then the days and nights are of equal length, and equinox means equal nights. From then on, until June, the days grow longer and the nights grow shorter. From June till September, the nights grow longer and the days shorter, until once more they are the same length, and this is called the autumnal equinox. Then the island tribe held another festival, the feast of the harvest. After that the nights began to grow still longer, and the days shorter, because the sun was going away from them more and more, all through the cold winter. Even to-day we remember these two festivals, by offerings of flowers in the spring, at Easter time, and by the harvest feasts which country people still hold in some places at the end of the summer, when the harvests are gathered in.
The island people built their houses and temples of stone. With wood they at first made only roofs and doors, but it was not long before they began to use it for building other things, such as boats. They found no big trees of soft wood on the rocky hillsides, out of which they could make large canoes. So they hewed planks out of the smaller trees, and built the first wooden ships made by man. They could not be called ships, at first, for they were only small boats, but as time went on they built them larger and larger until they would carry forty or fifty men.
Modor was the first man to build one of these boats and he was a skilful carpenter. He hewed a long heavy keel for his boat out of a tree trunk, and at each end he set up a stout post, one for the stem, the other for the stern. Wooden braces, or knees, as they are called, fastened by pegs, held the posts to the keel. Modor's tools were heavy stone axes, wedges of stone to split planks with, saws, made of jagged, toothed pieces of flint, with wooden handles bound to them, sharp flint knives for making wooden pegs, and drills, for boring holes for the pegs. With such roughtools it was not easy for Modor and his companions to build a boat, but they were strong and patient, and worked very hard.
After the stem and stern posts had been fastened in place, ribs were pegged to the keel to form the frame of the boat. These curved ribs they made in two ways. One was to hew them from the crooked limbs of trees. The other was to take straight pieces of wood and soak them for many days in water, until the wood became soft and pliable, and then bend them to shape, and tie them that way with leather cords while they dried.
When the ribs had been fastened to the keel with wooden pegs, long strips of wood were bent around the tops of the ribs, from the stem post to the stern post, and fastened to each rib with a peg. This made the framework of the boat, and now it had to be covered with planks.
Modor and his helpers took the split boards they had made and bent them over the framework, with a peg at each rib to hold them, and in this way covered the whole framework of the boat. Of course a boat built in this rough way would not be water-tight; there were many jointsand seams between the rough planking through which water would leak. But Modor had found, oozing from the pine trees, a black, sticky sort of gum or pitch, and this, with soft fibres from the bark of trees, he used to calk his boat and make it tight. The way he did this was to heat the pitch in a large shell, dip the fibres in it, and then drive them into the cracks with a stone wedge. In this way, after many trials, Modor at last got his boat so that it would not leak.
He built a deck of wood over the forward part of the boat, and across the middle part he put five board seats. These seats were for the paddlers to sit on, but the paddles were so long, in order to reach the water, that they were like oars, and it was hard to handle them against the ocean waves. So Modor drove pegs into the edges or gunwales of the boat to hold the oars in place, and men thus began to row boats, instead of paddling them, as they had their canoes and rafts.
As we have seen, the tribe had almost forgotten how to weave, because they no longer had the tough marsh grasses to make cord from. But Modor twisted the fibres from the bark of certaintrees into strong cords, and took them to some of the old women, who knew how to weave, and they wove him a sail from them. Then he put a mast in the middle of his boat, with a pole or yard across it, and hung the sail from this yard, with strong cords tied to its lower corners to hold it down.
In this boat Modor and his companions made many voyages along the coast, fishing, and hunting. On one of these trips he found a marsh covered with reeds and rushes, but he did not gather them, for the tribe had no use for them now. On another voyage Modor's boat was carried by the wind across the water to a low shore. It was the same shore from which Tul-Ab and his companions had fled hundreds of years before. When Modor's boat came in sight of the beach, he saw many men running along the sand, waving their spears and shouting. Several canoes crowded with fighting men came out from the shore. Then Modor lowered the sail of his boat, and the rowers bent to their oars, and soon left the canoes and the shore far behind.
When Modor got back to the village he toldthe old men what he had seen, and that night around the camp fires they told again the story of Tul-Ab, and sang a song about him, and his coming to the island.
The next day the chief of the tribe, whose name was Gudr, told the watchers on the cliffs to be very careful, and to keep their eyes always on the sea, for he feared that the people from across the water might come to attack them. But for a long time none came.
Other men in the tribe also built boats like the one made by Modor, larger ones, and they carved the heads of animals, or birds, or fish, out of wood, and fastened them at the bows of their boats, and this was the first use of figureheads, which you can see on some sailing ships even now. They painted the boats with red, and yellow and blue earths, mixed with fish oil, and stained the sails different colours with the juices of berries and plants.
One day, while digging along the bottom of the cliffs for red earth with which to make paint for his boat, Modor came across a lump of something that he at first thought was stone. It wasyellow in colour, and very heavy. He laid it on a rock, and beat it with the head of his axe, expecting it would break. But instead of breaking, it flattened out, and began to shine, where the axe head struck it, like the rays of the sun. Modor was very much pleased with his find, because it was so pretty, and he beat it out into a thin strip, and rubbed it bright with a stone, and bent it like a bracelet about his upper arm. His companions, when they saw it, liked its pretty, bright colour, but beyond that, they paid no attention to it. They did not know that Modor was the first man in the world to discover a metal. The bracelet he had bent around his arm was made of pure gold.