ned in the caves to strangle to death, but the
majority met death outside.
When the Fire-Men had in this fashion cleared the first
tier of caves, they began making arrangements to duplicate the
operation on the second tier of caves. It was while they were
climbing up with their grass and wood, that Red-Eye, followed
by his wife, with the baby holding to her tightly, made a
successful flight up the cliff. The Fire-Men must have
concluded that in the interval between the smoking-out
operations we would remain in our caves; so that they were
unprepared, and their arrows did not begin to fly till Red-Eye
and his wife were well up the wall. When he reached the top, he
turned about and glared down at them, roaring and beating his
chest. They arched their arrows at him, and though he was
untouched he fled on.
I watched a third tier smoked out, and a fourth. A few of
the Folk escaped up the cliff, but most of them were shot off
the face of it as they strove to climb. I remember Long-Lip. He
got as far as my ledge, crying piteously, an arrow clear
through his chest, the feathered shaft sticking out behind, the
bone head sticking out before, shot through the back as he
climbed. He sank down on my ledge bleeding profusely at the
mouth.
It was about this time that the upper tiers seemed to
empty themselves spontaneously. Nearly all the Folk not yet
smoked out stampeded up the cliff at the same time. This was
the saving of many. The Fire People could not shoot arrows fast
enough. They filled the air with arrows, and scores of the
stricken Folk came tumbling down; but still there were a few
who reached the top and got away.
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The impulse of flight was now stronger in me than
curiosity. The arrows had ceased flying. The last of the Folk
seemed gone, though there may have been a few still hiding in
the upper caves. The Swift One and I started to make a scramble
for the cliff-top. At sight of us a great cry went up from the
Fire People. This was not caused by me, but by the Swift One.
They were chattering excitedly and pointing her out to one
another. They did not try to shoot her. Not an arrow was
discharged. They began calling softly and coaxingly. I stopped
and looked down. She was afraid, and whimpered and urged me on.
So we went up over the top and plunged into the trees.
This event has often caused me to wonder and speculate. If
she were really of their kind, she must have been lost from
them at a time when she was too young to remember, else would
she not have been afraid of them. On the other hand, it may
well have been that while she was their kind she had never been
lost from them; that she had been born in the wild forest far
from their haunts, her father maybe a renegade Fire-Man, her
mother maybe one of my own kind, one of the Folk. But who shall
say? These things are beyond me, and the Swift One knew no more
about them than did I.
We lived through a day of terror. Most of the survivors
fled toward the blueberry swamp and took refuge in the forest
in that neighborhood. And all day hunting parties of the Fire
People ranged the forest, killing us wherever they found us. It
must have been a deliberately executed plan. Increasing beyond
the limits of their own territory, they had decided on making a
conquest of ours. Sorry the conquest! We had no chance against
them. It was slaughter, indiscriminate slaughter, for they
spared none, killing old and young, effectively ridding the
land of our presence.
It was like the end of the world to us. We fled to the
trees as a last refuge, only to be surrounded and killed,
family by family. We saw much of this during that day, and
besides, I wanted to see. The Swift One and I never remained
long in one tree, and so escaped being surrounded. But there
seemed no place to go. The Fire-Men were everywhere, bent on
their task of extermination. Every way we turned we encountered
them, and because of this we saw much of their handiwork.
I did not see what became of my mother, but I did see the
Chatterer shot down out of the old home-tree. And I am afraid
that at the sight I did a bit of joyous teetering. Before I
leave this portion of my narrative, I must tell of Red-Eye. He
was caught with his wife in a tree down by the blueberry swamp.
The Swift One and I stopped long enough in our flight to see.
The Fire-Men were too intent upon their work to notice us, and,
furthermore, we were well screened by the thicket in which we
crouched.
Fully a score of the hunters were under the tree,
discharging arrows into it. They always picked up their arrows
when they fell back to earth. I could not see Red-Eye, but I
could hear him howling from somewhere in the tree.
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After a short interval his howling grew muffled. He must
have crawled into a hollow in the trunk. But his wife did not
win this shelter. An arrow brought her to the ground. She was
severely hurt, for she made no effort to get away. She crouched
in a sheltering way over her baby (which clung tightly to her),
and made pleading signs and sounds to the Fire-Men. They
gathered about her and laughed at her--even as Lop-Ear and I
had laughed at the old Tree-Man. And even as we had poked him
with twigs and sticks, so did the Fire-Men with Red-Eye's wife.
They poked her with the ends of their bows, and prodded her in
the ribs. But she was poor fun. She would not fight. Nor, for
that matter, would she get angry. She continued to crouch over
her baby and to plead. One of the Fire-Men stepped close to
her. In his hand was a club. She saw and understood, but she
made only the pleading sounds until the blow fell.
Red-Eye, in the hollow of the trunk, was safe from their
arrows. They stood together and debated for a while, then one
of them climbed into the tree. What happened up there I could
not tell, but I heard him yell and saw the excitement of those
that remained beneath. After several minutes his body crashed
down to the ground. He did not move. They looked at him and
raised his head, but it fell back limply when they let go.
Red-Eye had accounted for himself.
They were very angry. There was an opening into the trunk
close to the ground. They gathered wood and grass and built a
fire. The Swift One and I, our arms around each other, waited
and watched in the thicket. Sometimes they threw upon the fire
green branches with many leaves, whereupon the smoke became
very thick.
We saw them suddenly swerve back from the tree. They were
not quick enough. Red-Eye's flying body landed in the midst of
them.
He was in a frightful rage, smashing about with his long
arms right and left. He pulled the face off one of them,
literally pulled it off with those gnarly fingers of his and
those tremendous muscles. He bit another through the neck. The
Fire-Men fell back with wild fierce yells, then rushed upon
him. He managed to get hold of a club and began crushing heads
like eggshells. He was too much for them, and they were
compelled to fall back again. This was his chance, and he
turned his back upon them and ran for it, still howling
wrathfully. A few arrows sped after him, but he plunged into a
thicket and was gone.
The Swift One and I crept quietly away, only to run foul
of another party of Fire-Men. They chased us into the blueberry
swamp, but we knew the tree-paths across the farther morasses
where they could not follow on the ground, and so we escaped.
We came out on the other side into a narrow strip of forest
that separated the blueberry swamp from the great swamp that
extended westward. Here we met Lop-Ear. How he had escaped I
cannot imagine, unless he had not slept the preceding night at
the caves.
Here, in the strip of forest, we might have built
tree-shelters and settled down; but the Fire People were
performing their work of extermination thoroughly. In the
afternoon, Hair-Face and his wife fled out from among the trees
to the east, passed us, and were gone. They fled silently and
swiftly, with alarm in their faces. In the direction from which
they had come we heard the cries and yells of the hunters, and
the screeching of some one of the Folk. The Fire People had
found their way across the swamp.
The Swift One, Lop-Ear, and I followed on the heels of
Hair-Face and his wife. When we came to the edge of the great
swamp, we stopped. We did not know its paths. It was outside
our territory, and it had been always avoided by the Folk. None
had ever gone into it--at least, to return. In our minds it
represented mystery and fear, the terrible unknown. As I say,
we stopped at the edge of it. We were afraid. The cries of the
Fire-Men were drawing nearer. We looked at one another.
Hair-Face ran out on the quaking morass and gained the firmer
footing of a grass-hummock a dozen yards away.
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His wife did not follow. She tried to, but shrank back
from the treacherous surface and cowered down.
The Swift One did not wait for me, nor did she pause till
she had passed beyond Hair-Face a hundred yards and gained a
much larger hummock. By the time Lop-Ear and I had caught up
with her, the Fire-Men appeared among the trees. Hair-Face's
wife, driven by them into panic terror, dashed after us. But
she ran blindly, without caution, and broke through the crust.
We turned and watched, and saw them shoot her with arrows as
she sank down in the mud. The arrows began falling about us.
Hair-Face had now joined us, and the four of us plunged on, we
knew not whither, deeper and deeper into the swamp.
CHAPTER XVIII
Of our wanderings in the great swamp I have no clear
knowledge. When I strive to remember, I have a riot of
unrelated impressions and a loss of time-value. I have no idea
of how long we were in that vast everglade, but it must have
been for weeks. My memories of what occurred invariably take
the form of nightmare. For untold ages, oppressed by protean
fear, I am aware of wandering, endlessly wandering, through a
dank and soggy wilderness, where poisonous snakes struck at us,
and animals roared around us, and the mud quaked under us and
sucked at our heels.
I know that we were turned from our course countless times
by streams and lakes and slimy seas. Then there were storms and
risings of the water over great areas of the low-lying lands;
and there were periods of hunger and misery when we were kept
prisoners in the trees for days and days by these transient
floods.
Very strong upon me is one picture. Large trees are about
us, and from their branches hang gray filaments of moss, while
great creepers, like monstrous serpents, curl around the trunks
and writhe in tangles through the air. And all about is the
mud, soft mud, that bubbles forth gases, and that heaves and
sighs with internal agitations. And in the midst of all this
are a dozen of us. We are lean and wretched, and our bones show
through our tight-stretched skins. We do not sing and chatter
and laugh. We play no pranks. For once our volatile and
exuberant spirits are hopelessly subdued. We make plaintive,
querulous noises, look at one another, and cluster close
together. It is like the meeting of the handful of survivors
after the day of the end of the world.
This event is without connection with the other events in
the swamp. How we ever managed to cross it, I do not know, but
at last we came out where a low range of hills ran down to the
bank of the river. It was our river emerging like ourselves
from the great swamp. On the south bank, where the river had
broken its way through the hills, we found many sand-stone
caves. Beyond, toward the west, the ocean boomed on the bar
that lay across the river's mouth. And here, in the caves, we
settled down in our abiding-place by the sea.
There were not many of us. From time to time, as the days
went by, more of the Folk appeared. They dragged themselves
from the swamp singly, and in twos and threes, more dead than
alive, mere perambulating skeletons, until at last there were
thirty of us. Then no more came from the swamp, and Red-Eye was
not among us. It was noticeable that no children had survived
the frightful journey.
I shall not tell in detail of the years we lived by the
sea. It was not a happy abiding-place. The air was raw and
chill, and we suffered continually from coughing and colds. We
could not survive in such an environment. True, we had
children; but they had little hold on life and died early,
while we died faster than new ones were born. Our number
steadily diminished.
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Then the radical change in our diet was not good for us.
We got few vegetables and fruits, and became fish-eaters. There
were mussels and abalones and clams and rock-oysters, and great
ocean-crabs that were thrown upon the beaches in stormy
weather. Also, we found several kinds of seaweed that were good
to eat. But the change in diet caused us stomach troubles, and
none of us ever waxed fat. We were all lean and
dyspeptic-looking. It was in getting the big abalones that
Lop-Ear was lost. One of them closed upon his fingers at
low-tide, and then the flood-tide came in and drowned him. We
found his body the next day, and it was a lesson to us. Not
another one of us was ever caught in the closing shell of an
abalone.
The Swift One and I managed to bring up one child, a
boy--at least we managed to bring him along for several years.
But I am quite confident he could never have survived that
terrible climate. And then, one day, the Fire People appeared
again. They had come down the river, not on a catamaran, but in
a rude dug-out. There were three of them that paddled in it,
and one of them was the little wizened old hunter. They landed
on our beach, and he limped across the sand and examined our
caves.
They went away in a few minutes, but the Swift One was
badly scared. We were all frightened, but none of us to the
extent that she was. She whimpered and cried and was restless
all that night. In the morning she took the child in her arms,
and by sharp cries, gestures, and example, started me on our
second long flight. There were eight of the Folk (all that was
left of the horde) that remained behind in the caves. There was
no hope for them. Without doubt, even if the Fire People did
not return, they must soon have perished. It was a bad climate
down there by the sea. The Folk were not constituted for the
coast-dwelling life.
We travelled south, for days skirting the great swamp but
never venturing into it. Once we broke back to the westward,
crossing a range of mountains and coming down to the coast. But
it was no place for us. There were no trees--only bleak
headlands, a thundering surf, and strong winds that seemed
never to cease from blowing. We turned back across the
mountains, travelling east and south, until we came in touch
with the great swamp again.
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Soon we gained the southern extremity of the swamp, and we
continued our course south and east. It was a pleasant land.
The air was warm, and we were again in the forest. Later on we
crossed a low-lying range of hills and found ourselves in an
even better forest country. The farther we penetrated from the
coast the warmer we found it, and we went on and on until we
came to a large river that seemed familiar to the Swift One. It
was where she must have come during the four years' absence
from the harde. This river we crossed on logs, landing on side
at the large bluff. High up on the bluff we found our new home
most difficult of access and quite hidden from any eye beneath.
There is little more of my tale to tell. Here the Swift
One and I lived and reared our family. And here my memories
end. We never made another migration. I never dream beyond our
high, inaccessible cave. And here must have been born the child
that inherited the stuff of my dreams, that had moulded into
its being all the impressions of my life--or of the life of
Big-Tooth, rather, who is my other-self, and not my real self,
but who is so real to me that often I am unable to tell what
age I am living in.
I often wonder about this line of descent. I, the modern,
am incontestably a man; yet I, Big-Tooth, the primitive, am not
a man. Somewhere, and by straight line of descent, these two
parties to my dual personality were connected. Were the Folk,
before their destruction, in the process of becoming men? And
did I and mine carry through this process? On the other hand,
may not some descendant of mine have gone in to the Fire People
and become one of them? I do not know. There is no way of
learning. One thing only is certain, and that is that Big-Tooth
did stamp into the cerebral constitution of one of his progeny
all the impressions of his life, and stamped them in so
indelibly that the hosts of intervening generations have failed
to obliterate them.
There is one other thing of which I must speak before I
close. It is a dream that I dream often, and in point of time
the real event must have occurred during the period of my
living in the high, inaccessible cave. I remember that I
wandered far in the forest toward the east. There I came upon a
tribe of Tree People. I crouched in a thicket and watched them
at play. They were holding a laughing council, jumping up and
down and screeching rude choruses.
Suddenly they hushed their noise and ceased their
capering. They shrank down in fear, and quested anxiously about
with their eyes for a way of retreat. Then Red-Eye walked in
among them. They cowered away from him. All were frightened.
But he made no attempt to hurt them. He was one of them. At his
heels, on stringy bended legs, supporting herself with knuckles
to the ground on either side, walked an old female of the Tree
People, his latest wife. He sat down in the midst of the
circle. I can see him now, as I write this, scowling, his eyes
inflamed, as he peers about him at the circle of the Tree
People. And as he peers he crooks one monstrous leg and with
his gnarly toes scratches himself on the stomach. He is
Red-Eye, the atavism.