FOOTNOTES:[5]As you may read inThe Voyage of the Beagle.
FOOTNOTES:
[5]As you may read inThe Voyage of the Beagle.
[5]As you may read inThe Voyage of the Beagle.
CHAPTER VII
SHORT, SOMEWHAT DRY, BUT IMPORTANT
Wemust compress into three or four pages the labours and results of four busy months, during which by frequent experiment, and incessant practice these two young creatures worked at, and worked out the mechanics of their discovery.
It was an opportunity of almost incalculable infrequency. Consider, I beseech you. Your savage, a man of a hunting tribe, lives normally from hand to mouth. Is game abundant and his hunting successful he gorges to repletion and sleeps long and heavily. Is food scarce he hunts the harder, sleeps lightly, eats sparingly, and has in prosperity no incentive, and in adversity no leisure for protracted and systematic experiment, even if he should find the impulsewithin himself, and be upheld by the applause and co-operation of his tribe.
It is doubtful if the combination of rare and delicate qualities which go to the making of an inventor present themselves once in a thousand generations of savage men, and how much rarer still must be that general recognition from his fellows without which a savage can effect nothing permanent. Even the privacy, which is hardly less essential than sympathy for a tentative effort, is wanting, for a savage lives in public, and the initial failures of the inventor not seldom in our own times expose him to the pitiless raillery of his contemporaries, a blighting, sterilising ridicule to which the child-nature of primitive man was certainly not less sensitive than are the natures of monkeys, dogs and children.
The steadfast mind that can ignore and outstay the gibes of neighbours is not too common to-day, and was probably very rare indeed in that remote and ancient world of which my tale tells.
That an armourer should work behind locked doors, and that it is folly to show unfinished work to a bairn are excellent adages. But, savages are all bairns; indeed, among primitive peoples the environment is so unfavourable for invention that one might almost say that a savage never invents anything, and even in the case of his stumbling upon a promising novelty, its unfamiliarity condemns it in the eyes of his comrades, if not in his own.
Only in the excessively rare event of a reforming chief can any advance be registered. And how seldom does such a prodigy arise! The stars in their courses fight against such an avatar!—We, the English of the twentieth century, are, take us all round, as open to reason and as receptive to the New Idea as any folk upon this earth, or any that ever trod it; what is more, we are accustomed to reforms, we await them with expectancy if not with equanimity, we know full well that certain of our venerable institutions stand in need of tinkering, but we never dream that the impulse shall come from above. A codifying, or land-transfer-simplifying Lord Chancellor, or a reforming or unifying Archbishop is incredible. The processes by which such men climb to their posts disable their minds from criticising a system which has justified itself in their persons. Nor is it likely that a sachem will be impatient of a state of affairs which has landed him at the summit of his ambitions. A Peter the Great comes but once in an æon.
Here, however, in this snow-bound glen, were just that assemblage of conditions which stimulate and protect the inventor whilst perfecting his invention. The store of frozen bear-meat secured leisure. There had been sufficient initial success to encourage continued experiment. The companionship of two united hearts provided the needful sympathy; nor was the touch of emulation wanting. The august mountainskept the ring, their snowy silence excluding the hee-haws of jealous ignorance.
Heavens, how these children worked!—Size, material, method of use, the best position, trajectories,—everything was an open question; everything had to be mastered by trial, by competition, by comparison. Observe, there was absolutely no past, no tribal lore to handicap or guide. How they chattered! As to arrows, now,—should they head them with bone or with stone?—How fledged?—How straightened?—Of what length?—This brought on the bow, its size, its weight, its parent tree; wych-elm, ash, or cornel?
Pŭl-Yūn leaned to something small and short, handy for wood-work; but after being consistently out-shot by longer weapons of the Master-Girl's choosing, propelled by a longer bow, gave way after some sulking.
He was by way of learning. And so was she, for never again during those fourmonths did she shoot her best in his presence, or to his knowledge. Thenceforward she would essay her longest flights in private, and found that the extreme range which contented her man was far from being the limit of her own bow. But this knowledge she kept to herself.
Pŭl-Yūn was as yet a poor walker, but his infirmity in no wise hindered his archery, rather did it help, in that it tied him to the butts. His industry, his zeal to excel were tremendous, and there was reason that he should toil terribly to perfect himself in this novel art before presenting himself again to his tribe. He had by now determined, at Dêh-Yān's earnest intercession, and as the reasoned result of a couple of months' watching of his shafts, to discard his spears. It was a momentous decision; who shall say what it meant to the war-chief of a small tribe hard-pressed by stronger and better armed neighbours?
Conceive then, this human pair, mereyoungsters according to our reckoning, cut off from the world, applying every faculty which they possessed to the study of their art. Doubt not that when once they had come to an agreement as to details, progress was consistent and rapid; and as week by week their smaller and yet smaller marks were stricken at lengthened ranges, their exultation rose and hardened to solid confidence.
So wore the days and the months of winter.
PURSUED
CHAPTER VIII
THE FLITTING, AND THE FORERUNNER
"Dêh-Yān, we must be going!"
"And thy leg?"
"Ah, yes,—but, stronger or weaker, we must go, or there will be no legs of mine, or of thine, to go upon!"
"Dreams again?—that hare?"
The man nodded sagely and swept the white waste below the cave with apprehensive eyes. There was nothing to be seen. A delaying spring had hardly made itself evident at their height. The lammergeiers in a cleft high overhead, were feeding a single clamorous youngster, a fat, downy chick, but the lammergeier lays its egg in the last days of the old year. The ravens were hard at work upon their nest, the wool was in (winter coat of stone-buck), the firstgreen egg would be laid within the week, for March was wearing according to our modern calendar.
The stream had begun to trickle, the water-ousels were at work, but the larch was still untasselled, and not a flower had yet broken the snow-crust, not even the fringed purple soldanella, or the small pale crocuses at the edges of the drifts. The passes would still be piled deep with soft new falls.
The crossing would be a desperate business as Pŭl-Yūn knew very well. Such a feat had never been essayed so early within human memory; all crossings (and such were rare events) had ever been made in the late autumn when the snows were hard. Yet he was in a fever to be gone, and the woman knew why.
"Thy Little Moons will make an early start of it—some of them at least will be up here presently looking for their lost braves."
"I buried them deeply—many stones didI roll down over them," said the girl gravely, thinking her own thoughts.
"But, their dogs (Good Wolves) will find them, never doubt," remarked Pŭl-Yūn. "It was bad luck thy not killing their dogs the same night. Nay, I do not blame thee. Thou hadst run far and fast, and fought bravely, wonderfully; it makes my heart laugh to think of one woman fighting three braves and bringing away their scalps. Yes, I own thou wast tired out. All the same it was against us, and is against us still, that those three dogs were left to gnaw through their leashes and get away down to the tribe masterless. They will be brought up again and laid on and followed, and if they do not own to the trails of their dead masters, they will own to ours, which is as bad for us. No, we cannot fight the whole of thy tribe, we must be moving, and at once."
This was final. Dêh-Yān, who had put in three whole days at arrow-making, arosewith the last and finest specimen of her art in her hands. It was fledged with the white and black quills of ptarmigan, and pointed with a keen splinter of bone. Holding the venomous looking thing between her hands by point and nock, she straightened a weary back and lifted it towards the Young Moon. "O Totem of my people, and of me, and of my New Thing, grant that this one at the least of all my arrows may serve me at my need!"
They began their packing, a serious affair; their outfit must be cut down to the least, last ounce. It must consist of just food, raw meat, their weapons, the bear-skin to sleep in, and the trophies; no more.
Double-moccasinned they set forth, clothed with deer-skin leggings to the body, dividing the loads between them, an event significant and of the first importance in human history.
"We must march light," said Pŭl-Yūn, and paused. Dêh-Yān frowned, set hermouth, and tossed from the cave-sill the hoard of rock-crystals, amethyst and cairngorm, as dear to a girl of the Magdalanian age as her diamonds to a bride of our own.
"This I willnotleave," continued the man, nodding approval of the accomplished sacrifice of vanities. The thing reserved was the shoulder-blade of the dead bear upon which he, no mean draughtsman, had etched the story of the fight; yet, watching the resolution of his wife to disencumber herself, he presently cast down his achievement, and turned his back to it where it lay.—Yet, as we know, it was not lost: did not the drip from the roof glaze it over and preserve it? Did not the wet floor upon which it lay enclasp and seal it down? Did not a sheet of incrustation fall from the roof and cover it, and finally, in the fulness of time, did not the Professor come fumbling along and find it? And is it not to-day the especial glory and pride of a certain case in a certain University Museum?
Pŭl-Yūn was minded to work up as high as his leg would carry him, and then, after a heavy meal, to make a night of it, coiled up with his wife in that thick, warm, capacious bear-skin in a hole in a drift. "Walk whilst the light lasts and you can see your marks," was his rede. "Who knows what the weather upon the pass may be to-morrow?" It might well be that a "firn" from the south would be blowing on the col, and then they must just lie snug and sleep it out, yes, to the last strip of their meat, if needs were, for to face it would be—death!
Up they trudged, and up, and still up, bowed double beneath their burdens, occasionally stopping to straighten weary backs, always choosing the outcrops of bare rock where such trended upward, but for an hour on end sinking mid-thigh-deep at every toilsome step in soft, new snow. The last of the trees was far below them, even the trailing pine and juniper had given out.They were working up into their first cloud; below the ragged coldness of its moving edge Dêh-Yān turned and took her last look upon the country of her childhood and her folk. There was no regret in her heart; nor any love for any human creature whom she was leaving. Her father she had never known, he had perished young. (Most savages die young—hard is the life and heavy the mortality; the hunter-tribes barely keep up their stocks despite early marriage). Her mother, whom she could just remember, was also dead. Her child-life had been made bitter to her by blows and grinding service rendered to gruff masters and shrewish mistresses. The small girl-child had struggled up; other children died, she survived, being one of the indestructibles, sharpened, hardened, toughened exceedingly by her environment. Such an upbringing, whatsoever else it may do, does not cultivate the affections. How jealous she had been of the boys! How she haddespised the girls, her inferiors in speed and daring! When promoted to the post of Governess, how she had bullied her small charges!
No, she gazed with unshaken bosom and clear eye upon the valleys of her home. The last peep! And there, miles and miles away, and, oh, so far beneath, was a something strung out across a snow-field, a something which would have escaped the best eye in a regiment of modern Alpini—a something which moved slowly, and was withal so faint and so far, that a strand of cobweb seen across a pane at the breadth of a wide room would be cable-broad compared with it. "Wah, we started none too soon," was Pŭl-Yūn's comment, and, leg-weary as he found himself, he kept at it, butting away upward into cloud and falling snow so long as he was sure of his line, then, confident that the advance-party of the Little Moons, supposing that they had got upon the spoor, and meant sticking to it, would not havedaylight to make it good, he bored into the leeside of a big drift, throwing out the loose snow behind him like a dog, and invited Dêh-Yān to accept it as a camp.
Dêh-Yān disliked the idea of camping in the presence of pursuit, but she saw that her man had marched as far as he was able. Moreover, he was now in his element; a brave who had been a member of four war-parties had a right to his opinion as to what other braves would or would not do. "They will follow on to the edge of the cloud," said he. "Above that the new fall will cover our sign, not wholly, but enough to make them call off the dogs when the sun sets. And we—we will be up and off before She rises to-morrow. And I say, Dêh-Yān, I do not like those Good Wolves of thy people."
"Nor I—And if they follow on?"
"They won't. They are wholly out of their country, and I am nearing mine, and have travelled this road before, which noneof them have, as I think—at least none that returned."
"That is so," assented Dêh-Yān. "When I was quite little, two of our young men tried this pass. They never came back. Tell me," she went on, snuggling down into the bear-skin, and feeling the blood begin to move again in her toes. "What brought thee over this awful road?"
"I was out for a wife."
"But were there no girls in the tribes south of you that thou took this high white path?"
"Oh, yes, there are girls everywhere, but the tribes to the south of the Sun-Men, the Hawks and the White Wolf people, are so much stronger than we that we have had to give up going to them for wives. It was our braves who never came back from those journeys."
"Oho! those tribes would not be braver, I think? then, how?"
"They have an all-year-round camp closeto the best quarry of weapon-stone. They have many slaves at work doing nothing else but axe-making, and so are better armed than we. Also they stockade their camps. There is no getting in or getting out of their villages. I think our bows will surprise them." He added, "And now, if thou hast eaten all thou canst, go to sleep. I shall watch, or rather lie awake and listen."
Pŭl-Yūn had out-marched his pursuers, but he had over-marched himself. The pride of manhood kept him going, the same pride forbade him to acknowledge his terrible weariness, but his wife was not deceived.
"I will watch first," she had said, and had insisted upon taking a last look round their hiding-place before turning in. Upon her return she found, as she had anticipated, that her man was sunk in the deepest sleep that nature knows. The Master-Girl nodded, built herself a line of marks, slight, but sufficient, and glided off into the snow-lit night silent as an owl.
At midnight Pŭl-Yūn turned himself and woke with a sense of something lost. He was alone. For some moments his locality, and his very individuality escaped him, so deeply had he plunged, then both returned.
"Dêh-Yān, come in here, it is my watch," he whispered, but there was no reply. The man peered forth into the darkness, and got to his feet armed. His wife was gone. He listened. The night was thick and still, what wind was blowing came up the pass from the glen which they had left. It was bitter cold. Suddenly, from down the pass came one small sound, slight and keen as the squeak of a bat, but it was not the squeak of a bat, and Pŭl-Yūn felt the hairs creep upon his neck, for it was the shrieking yelp of a wolf. Now a wolf is an animal which hunts and lives in a society of its own, a society which has common needs and cooperates in its enterprises. Hence wolves have a multiplicity of cries with which to express their wants and intentions, andmany of these were known to Pŭl-Yūn from childhood. But a wolf, though a villain, is no coward, and rarely, most rarely expresses pain. As a rule, when trapped he dies mute. What meant that single piercing yelp? To the ear and trained imagination of the woodlander it signified a spasm of surprise, despair, disappointment and grief. It was a call to the pack, "To me, my comrades! Haro! I am betrayed!"
That his wife's hand was in it Pŭl-Yūn never doubted, but how deep was her hand in it? and could she withdraw that hand? To have left him asleep and gone off upon a lone hunting at midnight was—it was—like her! But, it was hard upon him, very hard.
He took his weapons, axe and knife, for of what service are arrows in a midnight?—and moved in the direction of the cry. Within a few strides he stumbled upon the first of her marks, then upon a second, laterupon a third. This, then, was no unpremeditated escapade; no, like everything else which she did, this foray towards the camp of the pursuing enemy was a thought-out business.
The snow creaked, something was coming. A quick light breathing, a swift foot, Dêh-Yān was upon him, had caught him silently by the arm, had turned him and was urging him to his top speed. He raced beside her obediently in blind faith, she smelt of wolf and of blood. There was a cry of wolves behind them as they ran, but Dêh-Yān was laughing. The cry, mingled with the shouts of hunters, rose to a crash.
"That is the last of it—they have come upon my kill, and are baying upon the blood. They can carry the line no farther."
She was right, the fierce, wild clamour rose and fell and rose again, but was stationary.
"But, we must be upon the trail. There is no room here for thee and for me." TheMaster-Girl was speaking with quick decision; her husband listened, guessing wildly—they had picked up the marks, had found the snow-camp, she was refolding the bear-skin; he gathered his own affairs and followed her.
"Whither?—thou hast never been this way before, and even I am unsure of our road in this thickness and mirk."
"Anywhereis good—it is sheer death to loiter. We must risk everything upon speed and the chance of a farther snowfall. Run thy best now, I will tell thee more to-morrow."
Hours later in the first grey of a wintry dawn they had halted and dug themselves a second cave. This time they both snuggled within it, and sat panting and weak, listening for sounds of pursuit, and hearing only the ghost-like cackle of the mountain choughs at play amid cloud and falling snow overhead. They had got to their farthest; if followed up and found now they must die.Rest and sleep and food were imperative claims which would take no denials. Snow was falling, they had still a chance. They ate and slept and were not interrupted.
They awoke in an unknown world, small flakes fell steadily and straight, no wind breathed, there was no sun or sign of sun, it was one whiteness of diffused light in which the sense of direction was defeated.
They sate close as snow-bound hares and munched bear-meat, Dêh-Yān telling her story between the mouthfuls.
"After I mounted guard it came to me that my people—I mean the Little Moons—would never have come up so high so early in the season for game. It is no winter-hunting that we saw below us at the edge of the cloud, it is a war-party, and they mean scalps. Also, it seemed to me, even at that distance, I could make out Good Wolf with them."
"Good eyes thou must have!—but, go on."
"Now it came to me that with Good Wolf they could not very well lose our trail, and being on the war-path, all braves too, and marching light, we should not be able to outmarch them, burdened as we are, and—and—"
"And—and—" mimicked the husband, "my wife did not wish to leave her skin behind, eh?"
"We find it useful, thou and I; warm too," murmured the wife, drawing the deep-piled pelt around her lover, and burying her own nose in the soft fur. "But it was not for this skin only, but for two others for which I was taking thought—"
"They are not so furry, those two," chuckled Pŭl-Yūn, pinching her.
"It seemed to me," resumed the Master-Girl sedately, "that if it were a war-party of braves, with Good Wolf, too, our chance was bad, unless—"
"Unless someone somehow foiled ourline?" whispered the man ponderingly. "But how?"
"That was the question. I went down to their camp and made friends with the first Good Wolf that came up to me. There were others, but they were curled up each with his master, this one was the only watch they had set. I listened, I saw. Then I was for coming away, for ten braves and as many Good Wolf are bad company for one girl. But the getting away again was not easy. Gow-Loo's Good Wolf (I knew him, and he me) was suspicious. He walked around my knees so closely I could hardly move my feet. I could not speak to him for fear of rousing the camp. At last, when he had licked my hands, I got him to let me out and to follow. When I had led him a good way, and he was upon my hatchet-hand, and a little in front of me, I killed him. I had not meant him to have spoken, but the light was bad and he was very quick. It cost me two strokes. The rest thou knows."
Pŭl-Yūn did know that his wife had run a frightful risk, and that once again her foresight and cool courage had brought her through. What he did not know was that she owed her life to the fact that her dead enemy's wolf, or wolf-dog, was still ignorant of the art of barking, and had met the night-comer to his masters' camp in the silent fashion of his wild parents. But, the wonder of it! His inmost heart told him that this adventure would have been beyond him: he would not have risked the certainty of being pulled down by wolves, good or bad, and taken from them by their masters to dree a crueller ending at the stake.
Meanwhile snow fell steadily for a day and a night. The fugitives sate close and contrived to keep themselves warm, but their stock of food, howsoever well husbanded, was running out. Their position was already critical, presently it might be desperate, but they were spared the pangs of indecision or of divided counsels. Bothrecognised that their very lives depended upon doing nothing. To exhaust their bodily heat by struggling in deep new drift would be madness. And whither?—Their last mark was lost, they knew not north from south whilst the snow continued falling. No, they must sit it out, even if they starved where they sat.
By the evening of the third day the last of the meat was gone. They were huddling in silence, having discussed the question of eating their leggings and moccasins on the morrow, and agreed to refrain.
"For," said Pŭl-Yūn, "we could never get away from this snow-camp without our leg-gear, so we may as well starve clothed and with a hope in our hearts, as starve two days later half-naked with none." And to this the Master-Girl had agreed.
But the situation was far from cheerful and did not conduce to much conversation.
"Hark!—what is that?"
"Hush, on thy life, hush!—we are well hidden."
During their headlong flight from their first halt, and in the course of the various doublings and subterfuges by which the fugitives had hoped to break the continuity of their trail and baffle their pursuers, these youngsters had most effectually lost their bearings. This, their second, and which threatened to prove itself their final camp, was excavated in the side of one among many round-topped drifts which studded a level plain, or what seemed such, for its limits were hidden, it was probably the frozen surface of some small lake, or such another expanse as the Andermatt valley, a green and pleasant place in the summer months, upon which several lateral glens converged, a haunt of the mountain bison and the tall, wide-antlered stag, but in winter a dreary waste avoided by man and beast.
Yet, something was approaching, for thesnow, frozen crisply by the evening's chill, crunched beneath heavy feet. There was the deep, rhythmical panting of a huge body labouring hugely. What on earth might this be? Four thoroughly frightened human eyes peered forth from the spy-hole left at the mouth of the snow-cave, and beheld—What think ye? A great, bald, black block of a head, maned at the temples and nape and hung with a pair of shield-shaped hairy ears, was butting through the drifts. A coil of bristly trunk was stowed away between a pair of prodigious tusks which showed yellow amid the whiter snows around them. They were as stout as young beeches and curled upon themselves in such wise that their points were useless to the monster who bore them. This had probably been his down-fall; some younger rival with shorter weapons, shorter and lighter, but with points which could be brought to bear, had ousted this patriarch from the herd. Here was a roguemammoth upon his travels, setting the height and width of a mountain range between himself and the scene of his disgrace, a Napoleon on his way to St Helena, diswived, discrowned, a tragedy of brute existence. The great heart was hot within him, he was boiling to avenge his wrongs upon the first creature that he might meet, and meantime was working off his fury in tempestuous exertions. What was a fifty or sixty-mile march to the enormous sinews of limbs seasoned by migrations and combats of a hundred and fifty years? His breath smoked around him as he forged his way along, now pawing the snow under him, now wallowing over it, using his huge belly as a raft.
THE FORERUNNER
Evidently he had fought his fight to a finish, had bellowed, butted and thrust at some more adroit or better-armed youngster (some youth of seventy or eighty summers, maybe), who had worn him down and worsted him, and now, with such holes andrents in his shaggy sides as would have been death to any smaller beast, and were gruesome to see, he had relinquished the partners and pastures of his lusty prime, and was a wanderer upon the face of the earth until death—death which would from henceforth ambush his path and his lying down, for no keenly-interested wives would henceforth watch over his safety. No, with yearly waning powers he must stave off doom as he might, but come it would at length, a grisly onslaught of a horde of lions, a staked pitfall, a snow-hidden morass.
Dêh-Yān shuddered at the sight of his small, red, wicked eye.
"If he gets our wind?" she whispered, in the ghost of a pixie's whisper, and was well pinched for the indiscretion. The giant did not get their wind, he had something else to think of. When he paused for breath close to their cave, they could see the great wall of hairy side twitching with the smart of the raw gashes with which it was scored, therecords of that desperate and final conflict, for it is the law of the elephant herd that a dethroned master-bull shall never retry the issue: once down he is an outcast for the rest of his life, and a terror to the twentieth-century jungle, as his collateral ancestor, the rogue mammoth, was to the bleak tundras and mountain forests which were his home in the age of ice.
It was their first sight of a mammoth, the great beasts were already a dwindling race in the times we tell of, the days of the Magdalanian men.
Presently the silent watchers beheld the great panting hero get his breath and resume his travels. Ploughing, heaving, wading through the snow, he faded from sight and silence returned.
"This may be just the luckiest thing in the world for us," said Pŭl-Yūn, "or on the other hand, the unluckiest."
"Um, yes," assented the Master-Girl, thoughtfully, peering forth upon the trailwhich the passing monster had left. "If he is marching by himself we can take the same line, there is no losingthatspoor. He knows the way, be sure of that, and where he can go we can follow—but, he leaves a blood-sign behind him, see!—If a party of tigers, or of grizzlies, strike that trail they will follow it up on the chance of finding the bull in some drift. Or, those Little Moon braves might happen upon it, eh?"
"In any case we must lie close for to-night, no more dark marches for me! and if the morning shows that the bull is travelling unattended, we will use his trail."
"I begin to think we shall do it after all," smiled Dêh-Yān, a little grimly, perhaps, for though she had kept a stiff mouth all day, the prospect was not encouraging, and she, at least, had no local knowledge to fall back upon even if the weather should take up and let them through.
Fortune smiled upon the youngsters. Morning-light showed them the mammoth-track skinned over with a film of new snow unprinted by the spoor of beast or man. The fall had ceased, the drifts ploughed through and pressed down by the bulk and weight of their forerunner, gave easy passage; something in the contours of the ground seemed familiar to Pŭl-Yūn, who silently took the lead, striding ahead with confidence, and presently, suddenly, the change came, the slope eased off, and the glory of the prospect before her rushed to the eyes of the girl who had been toiling up the last ascent bent beneath her load. She had never been so high before, nor overlooked such an extent of country. It caught her breath.
"Oh, what wide place is this!—And all the hunting-grounds of our people?"
"Not the twentieth part of it!" growled Pŭl-Yūn with a frown. "Have I not told thee how narrow our ground is, and that it grows narrower?"
The Master-Girl sucked in her lips andre-shouldered her pack. "Let us be getting down to them," she said shortly; then, half to herself, "Narrow or broad there shall be room enough for one Little Moon woman—and her bow! But, O Pŭl-Yūn, when thou hast found thy folk, do not quite forget poor Dêh-Yān."
The man fell back a stride and went beside his wife for a while in silence, albeit the going was so good that speech had been easy whilst in Indian file. It came home to him how bitter is the lot of the newly-caught slave-wife among the older women of the tribe, to whom her ignorance, youth and foreignness are subjects for ill-natured merriment and opportunities for spite.
"There shall be no breaking-in for my wife," he said. "Listen!—To-morrow night thou shalt sit upon that bear-skin in my chief's presence. I have said it!"
And all this fuss about crossing one of the lower cols!
Wait, my friend. These young peoplehad neither guides nor porters, nor maps, compass, nor rope, nor ice-axes nor well-nailed, water-tight boots; appointments which make a fairly simple thing of what were otherwise a perilous feat. Moreover this was very early in the season, a time of year when every week makes a difference. The writer of this veracious history of the Old Time has himself seen the farm folk in a Pyrenean glen leave their hay to run shouting at the first tourist of the season who had news of their friends on the other side of the pass. And that was in May.
Nor were the Alps of that Old Time just as we see them to-day. I grant you they had come down in the world since their first glorious Himalayan youth; they no longer towered thirty, thirty-five thousand feet above the sub-tropicalteraiinterspersed with its chain of salt lakes which we now know as the Mediterranean. The worst of the Great Ice Age was over, that grievoustime when half the waters of the oceans were piled in a solid cap around the northern pole, a cap which extended southward in such sort that in Britain everything north of the Thames, and upon the mainland all that is now Germany and Austria, was sealed down beneath a solid sheet which was not melted for twenty thousand years on end. During this time, and for long after the worst of it was over, the Alps and the Tirol were in process of being ground down to something approaching what we see to-day. Their soaring peaks had arrested the cloud-systems of central Europe, and turned France into an arid steppe, the grazing-ground of countless herds of wild horse and gazelle, the clouds had deposited themselves in snow, the hoarded snows had ground down the sides of the giants, pared away their summits and crawled out half across Lombardy in glaciers, which, when they finally receded, left trails of rubbish thirty mileslong, spoils filched from the heights behind them.
The worst of this was over. The Rhone glacier had dwindled somewhat, but still blocked the Wallis. For many generations the shores of the Mediterranean had been peopled in winter by tribes which had each its summer hunting quarters in this or that glen of the hinterland; tribes which had but little knowledge of, and no intercourse with, the people upon the other side of the chain in the glens which feed the headwaters of the Po.
How should they have had?—I am telling a tale of the long ago; much water has run under the bridges since, both those of Avignon and those of Padua, and every gallon of it brought down something from the southern Alps, hence, as nothing rolls uphill, century by century the passes have been growing lower than they were when our two youngsters essayed their adventure.
CHAPTER IX
THE HOME-COMING
Itwas evening, the men of the Sun-Disc Clan had returned from their hunting and fishing. The women and children were squatted about the fires. A clear, peculiar outcry broke from the girl in the tree-top, the watch-woman; just such a cry comes from the sentinel bird of a flock of feeding wild-fowl. The whole community was upon its feet in a moment, peering under arched hands.
Afar off against the yellow side of a dry gully of the foot-hills which arose between the last of the chestnut forest and the first of the spruce were to be descried a couple of moving specks.
They, whoever they might be, were miles away: made visible for a moment by thechance of their crossing a bare rock-face which had caught the last of the sunlight, thrown up distinctly against this ruddy yellow background and defined by the magical clearness of an open sunset following a day of rain.
The braves handled their assegais awaiting the word of the old chief, a ring-man who had taken his first scalp forty years before and wore the necklace of five bears'-claws which testified to participation in a later and yet sterner fight. He gave no order and kept his eyes upon the moving specks.
These had dipped into a hollow. "They have seen our smokes," said he. "If they are friends they will come right on, if they are unfriends they will not show again and the young men must deal with them to-night."
"Who but unfriends would come from that side?" asked a very tall young brave. There was a touch of covert insolence inthe tone although the question was natural enough.
The speaker was a person of some consideration, for when he spoke others held their peace and listened (watching still, be sure).—He was one Honk-Ah, a great-nephew of the old chief, a man of notable activity and more ambition; one who aspired to the deputy-chieftainship; an aspiration which had been kept in check for two years past by the presence of his cousin Pŭl-Yūn, a brave equally active and more popular, less subject to fits of disfiguring passion; a man marked out for leadership as well by his birth—being grandson to the chief-regnant—as by his qualities.
But Pŭl-Yūn had been absent more than six moons, and during the past winter, as the old chief grew stiffer with the rheumatism which is the worst evil of the northern savage, more dreaded than most forms of death,—this youngster had waxed insolent at times, each recurring attack of lumbagomight be the last, the one which would tie the old leader into his final knot, reducing him to a helpless, querulous cripple, and leaving the chieftainship open to the bravest and strongest man of his race.
The chief ignored the question, he was at gaze: yes, the strangers had come into view again, were holding a right line towards the camp-smokes, there was no affectation of concealment, no ruse. Who might they be?
Said the sentinel-girl at length, "These are two braves, for they go side by side at times,—one is shorter than the other by a head. Both are carrying something,—spears, I think,—and other things,—robes."
Said the old chief's head-wife in the spirit of prophecy, "It is my grandson!"
"And the small one, the other?" asked Honk-Ah, raising a doubt which no one was as yet in a position to allay.
There is but little twilight south of the Alps: it was in a thick green dusk thatthe all-but-given-up Pŭl-Yūn strode back into camp with his shorter companion going beside him as an equal and a friend goes. No man of their tribe this;—who then?—a slave? No.—A squaw!
The two, stepping out strongly (they had kept a trot for the avenue) made straight for the tee-pee of the old chief, and saluted the father of the tribe before exchanging a word with any. They also saluted the head-wife, some word of petition and consent passed in dumb show, the skin that hung over the entrance was shifted, in they went and the show was over.
But not the talk. It has been said that the Old English Manorial system assumed that every person in the village was intimately acquainted with the habits, business and doings of every other person in the village—(one might assume the same of villagers to-day with but little injustice). This rule held among those earlier communities from which the mediæval Englishman was remotely descended. Everybody was enormously and unblushingly inquisitive. Why should he not be? When his body was satisfied he had nothing else to think about save the goings-on of his comrades. Hence he (and she) knew to a nicety the precise distance which so-and-so could jump, or swim, or throw; knew the last, least intimate fact about the bodies and minds, the personal peculiarities and habits of each and of all of the tribe, for—and bear this in mind, ye who travel in tubes and have the day mapped out and guarded for you—ignorance of some small particular might at any moment cost life itself.
Your savage is incessantly hunting and being hunted. At any moment in his day his dinner may jump up in front of him and run away. At any moment a huge tawny cat may claim him for her meal. At any moment he may find a spear sticking in the calf of his leg. Such possibilities are calculated to develop the faculty ofattention: from his childhood up he is trained by the hard facts of his life to be as observant as a magpie and as pertinaciously inquisitive as a dog.
And this, methinks, is the place to introduce, an I durst, an excursus upon the Decay of Curiosity, a fine and tempting subject. There can be no sort of doubt that this is one of the vanishing instincts (the senses of locality and smell are others). The adult male European has very little curiosity, if of a fairly good stock and breeding, none at all. His wife, her maid, and the children of both sexes have traces of the faculty more or less pronounced, as being some degrees nearer to the savage. (I prithee madam, thump me not, I speak but the naked truth!) If the antique instinct reappears at intervals, as in Spy-manias, Dreyfus-obsessions and what-not, in modern France, it is less terrible than in that recent past which saw their Law of Suspects and our Popish Plot, and earlierwitch-baitings. Across the Atlantic the defect is less noticeable, indeed one of the less endearing characteristics of Cousin Jonathan is that insatiable and unabashed curiosity which, whether it make for righteousness or no, is the making of the Yellow Press.
With us English the primeval safeguard has almost lapsed. We pride ourselves upon an incurious optimism, the outcome of urban surroundings and long internal peace. Are they yelling murder next door? Let them yell, 'tis no affair of ours; it don't do to interfere—leave it to the police. We have fifty little apothegms to excuse our cowardice or sloth. It has come to this that every time we find ourselves at war (we are still somewhat pugnacious)—it takes the average man of us from six to twelve months to get himself back into the sensitively-apprehensive, warily-cautious skin of his forefather to whom a condition of warfare was normal, who carried a weaponas we carry an umbrella and distrusted every bush. Some of His Majesty's forces never do regain a reasonable and saving curiosity. Middle-aged general officers, especially those who have hung about Windsor and done much reviewing, practically never. This sort go into action wearing white plumes, and insist upon being followed by a mounted orderly with a red-and-white guidon upon his lance. These are they who throw six shells at a wooded height at five miles' range and pronounce it "unoccupied": who excuse outpost duty on Christmas Eve "as a treat to the men," who reduce their superiors to despair, their subordinates to stupor, the operations to a standstill, and who, when sent home as incapable, arouse Society and the Houses upon their noble behalves, and assure the smoking-rooms of the clubs that the Service is going to the deuce.
Many a town-bred private is in his own way as deficient: he makes haste to lose hisregiment upon the march, also himself; then, if it be night, in place of effacing himself and using his wits and his ears, he will strike a match, and the better to advertise his presence, sings for company, being a secret believer in "things in the dark," but an arrant agnostic as to the "hen'my bein' hanywheres abart." Thus poor Tommy knows not that doom hath gone forth until he finds himself being held down and vivisected by the Afridi knife; or, with better luck, stripped of every rag that covers him by a Dutchman.
All which makes most unpleasant reading, but, I put it to you, is it not true?
Agreed then, we have pretty well parted with the acute and rational curiosity which was the first armour of our race.
But, the Sun-Disc folk had it in a highly specialised form, and by the time that that deer-skinportièrehad ceased swinging behind the newcomers, had noticed much, and had actually deduced a good deal of therecent histories of Pŭl-Yūn and his companion, from a stick here and a bundle there, a limp and a side-glance, momentary impressions in the dusk.
"He goes short upon his left leg, and it is no strain," said Honk-Ah.
"He has not gone short of meat—see how heavy he is!—Whoever saw a brave come home from a winter-hunting, or a wife-hunting in such case? La, we were worn away to sinew and bone at our last war-party: but, he—" said an older man, a man of experience, with appropriate gesture.
"But his squaw!" said the women. "To let the Thing walk beside him!—and to hold her head up so! Why, when my man brought me into camp my hands were tied behind my back!"
"And mine," said another, "and my head was broken too, for my man stands no nonsense, I tell you!"
"A broken head!" laughed a third. "It was nigh a broken back in my case. I mindme he laded me down with every single thing he owned and strutted before me like a black-cock in lekking-time! Oh, but wasn't I proud of him!—Fine and mannish he looked when I could get a peep at him, for my head was bent to my knees with my load and the sweat was running into my eyes, I tell you! Ha!" The speaker laughed at the remembrance, just as a prefect chuckles over the lammings he took when a fag.
"Eh, but, what in the world will this mean?" cried all together. "He has divided the loads, and she was carrying—what?It can never be a bear-skin, the thing is plainly impossible. And—look at those silly bags of little feather-ended sticks! and the long ash-sticks!—What foolishness is this?"
"The young chief is no fool."
"They walked well, anyhow."
"Pride, mere pride—they were ready to drop. Could not ye see as much? Think, they are in full winter dress: heavy deer-skin leggings and karosses and all, 'tis plain they have come from high up, somewhere, not over the pass, that is impossible for another three moons yet: they will have felt the heat cruelly all day."
"A likely-looking girl—a Little Moon girl by her gait and colour;—but where can he have picked her up—and where has he been all this while? A brave can't live upon snow, and he has lived well, and upon an enemy's ground. Wah, Pŭl-Yūn is a wise man in some ways,—but a fool in others. He must be mad to set so much by an unproved squaw."
"He has had six months of her in my view," said an old woman, "and, right or wrong, Pŭl-Yūn ever knew his own mind."
"She has bewitched him—he is mad—mad!" muttered Honk-Ah morosely, who saw his deputy-chieftainship slipping through his fingers after seeming safely in hand. The man was not a politic man (from the modern standpoint he was but a youth), hewas a jealous fellow and wont to strike first. It seemed to him that this was his opportunity; he loafed around talking to those whom he believed to be in his interest, in undertones at first, then more loudly. "Who is she?—a Little Moon?—But, that story will not do, for there are none of that tribe on this side of the ranges, and he cannot have passed the ranges this spring. Where has Pŭl-Yūn been?"
This was Mystery the First, an offence in itself in a community which has the right to know the most intimate facts of the life of each of its members. Mystery breeds suspicion and suspicion leads up to distrust and to hate. But in the heart of Honk-Ah hate was already full grown.
"There is something here that the tribe should know," he spoke aloud and his voice carried far. "It seems to us that the Sun-Folk should be told, and told this night, where a brave has been harbouring who hasbeen away, and on an enemy's grounds, for six moons."
"Also," said a young blood who was of Honk-Ah's hunting-party, "we would see more of this squaw whom he brings into camp—or who brings him." A laugh. "Our brother Pŭl-Yūn went forth for a wife" (the word had the secondary meaning of female slave), "but has come back with a master." More laughter.
The silence within the old chief's tee-pee was unbroken for a while, and when the hangingportièremoved it was shifted with the utmost deliberation. The old chief himself came forth followed by Pŭl-Yūn. The elder spoke.
"My young men are noisy to-night. It is not good. My grandson has brought home a wife. He has done well. I say it. Is my nephew's heart black because he has no wife? The passes were open last autumn for him as for my grandson. Let him make his heart white or go forthupon his wife-hunting so soon as he chooses."
"The passes are not open—" interposed Honk-Ah insolently.
"The passes are open to a brave with a big heart,—or, for the matter of that to a brave with a squaw's heart," riposted the old chief severely. "My grandson crossed yesterday; his wife crossed with him."
There was silence, an astounded silence. Honk-Ah felt himself slipping: he must make a push for it. He spoke.
"We do not believe—" he began, but the old chief cut him short,—
"Ibelieve, and that is enough for my people. And, listen to me, Honk-Ah, and you who side with him, for I know what is in your hearts,—this thing shall come to a head, it shall cease, and at once. My grandson Pŭl-Yūn was war-chief when he went forth. Is he weaker, or less brave, or less cunning since he has returned?"
There were mutterings in the darkness. Pŭl-Yūn stepped to the front and spoke: very gently he spoke, but they knew him.
"It is two years since I beat my cousin at the spear-throwing. It has always been the law that one trial is enough. The tribe cannot be always changing its war-chief. But I will put the law out of the question for once, for it is not well that the Sun-Folk should be under a war-chief who is weak of hand, or whom they think is weak of hand. The matter shall be retried. At sunrise to-morrow, as soon as there is full light, let Honk-Ah be ready with his spears and I will be ready with mine. And the man of us two who can throw farthest, and make his point go deepest, he shall be war-chief. I have said."
"It is good," assented Honk-Ah, who had got what he was playing up for, an early trial.
The deer-skin shook, the old chief andPŭl-Yūn had returned to the tee-pee. The knot of mutineers moved slowly off conversing in muttered undertones.
"That is a point to me," said Honk-Ah. "He is fat, he is slow. He was sweating as he marched in, I saw it. And,he carried no spears. I know every assegai of mine by name, and they know me. To-morrow I win!"
CHAPTER X
THE SPEAR-THROWING
Thescene with which the last chapter closed had come as a not unwelcome interruption to a family explanation which had been in progress within the deer-skin hangings of the old chief's tee-pee.
A mother-in-law may be a delightful person, or the reverse. The difficulties and temptations which beset her position are of no modern creation. Are there not ancient wheezes upon this topic in Greek anthologies? I doubt not that these hoary japes were in their day and generation rehashes of Mykenæan jibes still more venerable, for under given circumstances we humans act alike all the world over, and there is no valid reason for assuming that our behaviours and misbehaviours have varied to any great extent during the past hundred thousand years.
Listen to a case in point. A friend of mine with a faculty for getting into and out of places the most tight and remote, once found himself for a whole month dependent upon the hospitality of an African tribe so degraded as to have lost (if it had ever possessed) the art of hut-building. These simple aborigines erected little shelters of small brushwood to windward and slept thereunder. They wore no garments, not even the most exiguous. A rough man, a coarse man, in such company would have discerned nothing but the brutality which he brought with him. He would have mishandled the situation from the first, and, having presently reduced his position to an impossibility, would have taken himself off and returned (with luck) to civilisation with a story of beastly savages, less than half human, no better than the dog-faced baboons of the cliffs.
Not so my friend, who, being an English gentleman of the best type, had no difficultyin adapting himself to the necessities of a novel situation. He took to his hosts, they reciprocated, and he enjoyed the unique opportunity of being admitted to the inner life of a singular and interesting community. He watched and remembered. Among other matters he observed thatthe ladies of this little people had several of the habits, mannerisms and small personal traits of their sisters in good society.
Back to my tale. One of the little ways of mothers-in-law, even of mothers-in-law of family, is to assume a large degree of ignorance upon the part of the bride, and to gently (but firmly) initiate her into the right ways of doing things, and the relative positions and status of the persons of her new circle. I put it diplomatically. I have not used the word "encroach"; I have known a bride return from her honeymoon to findallher bridecake cut up and distributed.
But, conceive the claims of a grandmother-in-law, who was also head-wife of the chief-regnant, a woman of advanced years, of the firmest character, and not unaccustomed to implicit obedience.
This old lady was a rather terrible old lady, and no fool. She detected a Little Moon woman at a glance, as she was likely to do, being a Little Moon woman herself who had come over the pass forty years before with her elbows shackled and a bruise upon the top of her head as big as a fresh-water mussel. Hence a woman of the clan into which she had been born was a quite unmysterious creature, about which she had, as she conceived, nothing to learn. She was for undertaking the usual breaking-in forthwith.
But her grandson Pŭl-Yūn would have none of it. Mildly, but with absolute decision, he postponed the business. "No, my wife shall sit in my presence,—yes, at my desire. Also, she shall eat with me. It is unusual, I admit, but such is Our Rule. You do not understand?—That too, I admit.I am hoping to make things plain presently, but we must start fair, start as we mean to go on. In one word my wife is a Very Great Medicine. I have brought her a long way through deep snow, she is tired. I do not wish her to stand any more to-night, nor answer questions. To-morrow, perhaps. In the meantime, feel this—" the man extended his leg. "It was broken, as thou canst feel—she—my wife there, mended it. I lay more than a whole moon in her hands. She found me so; she left her tribe to come to me; she made me a sound man, as thou canst see. It was great medicine."
"It was great medicine," murmured the old chief, critically fingering the reunited bone. The eyes of the head wife snapped; seldom did a broken leg come so straight as this, but, she would admit nothing. Pŭl-Yūn was speaking.
"That was once, but she has saved my life three times since in battle. I say it. Do not ask how to-night. Yes, this is a bear-skin, the pelt of a very great Man-bear. A Cave Grizzly. I have never seen a greater, but I have seen but few. Possibly my chief, who has seen and handled several bears, has seen a greater Man-bear than this?"
The old chief watched the unrolling of the huge skin and shook his head; no, he had never seen one as wide or so long: it was immense: a winter coat, too, it was the finest skin he had ever handled.
"I did not kill this bear," said his grandson after a dramatic pause.
It was at this juncture that the challenge from without brought these explanations temporarily to a close, and when the men re-entered the tee-pee both felt that they had more momentous matter in hand than the relative positions of the ladies.
Said the old chief, "Thou art in for it now. I would have warned thee hadst thou not spoken so fast. My nephew has a bad heart. While thou wast absent he has been sucking away from me the hearts of myyoung men. Some he has beaten, and some he has bought, and some he has talked over. But, I have kept the place warm for thee. I still dreamed of thy home-coming. Never camest thou to me in sleep as thou wouldst have come hadst thou been dead. But, this challenge and thy taking of it up is a heavy matter. Honk-Ah has come on in his spear-throwing. And he has great store of excellent weapons, well-handled, well-headed, well-balanced. And, where are thine?—Thou hast come home empty-handed. It is not well. But, since thou hast spoken I see no way out of a re-trial."
"Nor I, chief," said Pŭl-Yūn, making low and dutiful obeisance, for the old man's grave slow tones failed to hide a heart shaken by the presence of long-expected and now imminent calamity, his grandson would show courage enough for both,—"Nor would I put it off for a day. Leave my wife and me to look over our weapons. All will go as thou wouldst wish."
And to this the old chief listened with a grunt, a somewhat weak grunt, as his grandson thought. The head-wife was harder to satisfy, a matter which Pŭl-Yūn must take upon himself, as he presently discovered, for her husband sate mute, letting her nag and question whilst Dêh-Yān worked in silence and with despatch. What had come to the old chief? He had not used to be so acquiescent: his grandson turned it over in his mind, nor found any solution, being unacquainted with the premonitory symptoms of age, the indisposition to take a strong line because inward warnings forbid its being followed up effectively. There were few old men among the Sun-Folk. The whole generation between the old chief and the youth of the tribe had perished in a disastrous fight with their southern neighbours some years before; a blow which had necessitated a prompt removal from the disputed hunting-grounds and the stone-quarry, the object of the battle. It was there that thefathers of Pŭl-Yūn and his cousin had fallen. The Sun-Men, in fact, had been a dwindling clan for nearly two generations, always liable to be cut off from their supplies of two necessities, weapon-stone and wives, neither of which could they obtain save at undue risks. Now with savages to dwindle is the precursory process of death. The braves knew this and were restless.
So, during the hard weather of the past winter, the feeling among the young warriors of the tribe that a younger and more active chief was needed had been gathering to a head. There is small reverence for age among the lowest savages: the Eskimo, nearest of existing races to the Old Stone men of whom we are speaking, give little deference to the grey head and the weak hand. Here, among the Sun-Men, the process of supersession was beginning, the new leaf was pushing off the old.
"It seems to me," murmured Dêh-Yān to her husband, "it seems to me that on thisside of the ranges also the young bulls are making ready to drive an old tusker from the herd." Pŭl-Yūn grunted, testing the point of an arrow with his thumb.
But, although he had said nothing, Pŭl-Yūn's eyes and mind were at work, and the impression of instability, of a new spirit among his people since he had last been with them, and of impending and far-reaching changes, lay down with him and arose with him next morning. And was promptly confirmed, for his rival and his rival's backers had been up and out betimes; the lists were already set and the mark fixed, a matter which was the business of the chief alone.
The old chief saw what had been done and nodded acquiescence. It might be that the sceptre was passing from him: he would have one more fight for it, but the fight should be upon ground of his own choosing. He was too great-minded to quibble over trifles, and in truth the lists were well-setand the mark as truly and fairly fixed as he could have desired.
None disputed his position as referee.
The contest would be quite the most solemn and momentous, as well as the most sporting event that had occurred within the memories of the tribe. Honk-Ah, who had been runner-up for the war-chieftainship for two years past, as the old chief had said, had come on in his spear-throwing during the winter, and was believed to have overcast his cousin's best records. If he should succeed to-day it was possible that he would kill two birds with one stone, make a sudden snatch at the head-chieftaincy of the tribe, and that his backing of young braves might support him.
If this occurred, if it came to blows, how would the matter go? The old chief asked himself the question, but got no answer. Of one thing only he was assured, winning or losing he would die a chief.
The mark was a badger-skin kaross fixedupon a wicker fish-trap and set upon a stake as high as a man. The distance was extreme, as Pŭl-Yūn saw at a glance. Forty-five strides is a big, a very big throw with an assegai, if the mark is to be hit and penetrated. As a mere cast, an exhibition of distance-throwing, a man might do more. But this was no fancy-work; by the terms of the wager the mark was to be not merely hit but pierced. A badger's pelt is long in the hair, the skin is of the thickest and toughest of forest trophies. Pŭl-Yūn nodded.
"My cousin has set himself a difficult mark, it is small and it is not easy to pierce. My cousin has plainly improved in his spear-practice since I have been away. Let him begin the play."
The man addressed, Honk-Ah, a lithe, tall brave, naked except for his breech-clout, arose from his heels carrying three spears.
"Shall it be a matter of three spears at this range?" he asked.
"Three will be sufficient," repliedPŭl-Yūn, "and he whose points go farthest through the peltry shall be adjudged winner."
"I am judge," grunted the old chief.
"Without doubt, my father!" assented Pŭl-Yūn. Honk-Ah said nothing, he was balancing a spear as he walked to the throwing crease.
Five paces he passed beyond it, turned upon his heel, paused, measured his distance with his eye from old habit, arose upon his toes, pranced up to his crease with hand and arm at their utmost stretch, shook and flung his assegai.
All eyes followed the weapon, its grey chert head travelled steady as a stone, its five feet of shaft rotating as it flew in such wise that its extremity traversed a small circle. This was how a spear should be thrown, perfect form. How about the aim? The weapon completed its curve, pitched, struck, but did not satisfy the demands of the competition so completely as the thrower's friends could have wished: thedirection was better than good, but the elevation was ever so little too high: the weapon had struck the upper edge of the mark, the shaft swung over and drew the point. The spear lay upon the ground beyond, its head towards the thrower: yet, it was a great throw. As every watcher knew, had the mark been a man that man would have taken a nasty wound.
The thrower, you may be sure, had followed the flight of his assegai no less critically. Without once taking his eye from the mark he took and weighed in hand the spear which he was to throw next, stepped lightly back, took distance, shook, ran and threw. Nor was he below himself, this was better, as good as to direction, and as to elevation somewhat lower than the former. The head penetrated the nether edge of the skin and held, albeit the shaft drooped; thus much only it lacked of perfection, yet, there was not another man in the silent circle of spectators who couldhave done as well. The third and last was a truly fine performance: a centre well driven home, it would have been impossible to better it. The spearman, his hands hanging by his sides surveyed his work frowning slightly, as an expert does who has done well, but whose ambition was to have done better than well; then he slowly raised his chin, folded his arms across his chest and turned to his cousin with the superb and natural scorn of the savage who has no tradition of restraint behind him.
"Is that Honk-Ah's best?" asked Pŭl-Yūn quietly, without rising from his heels. "Let my cousin take his time, the day is still young. Try three more throws, and again three more; it may be that two of thy spears balanced ill, or thy arm was yet stiff from being lain upon. What?—thou art satisfied? Wilt stand by these, nor ask for more, however the matter goes?"
He ceased at a touch of the old chief's hand, and none too soon. Honk-Ah, apassionate and hasty fellow was shaking with anger; he detested his cousin with a bitterness which surprised even himself: he had hated him when he thought him dead, and now, that he had returned from the underworld, as it seemed, to snatch the prize from his grasp, his aversion went near to choking him. Whether Pŭl-Yūn spoke or was silent, sat or stood, he hated him; his least movement, or the absence of movement fed the hate which had been smouldering within him for a year, which had glowed in his bosom all night and now had all-but burst into flame.
It was a full-blown flower of primitive jealousy. The old chief recognised the growth and inwardly shivered, things might yet go ill. Let there be no talk, let Pŭl-Yūn betake himself to his weapons.