The First Days of Man. Kummer Frederic Arnold
One of the crowd tried to take the stick away from him, but he drew back and hit the other over the head with it and knocked him down. After that the others were afraid of him, and let him alone. And although the Ape-People had no language, and did not know how to speak as we do, they used different kinds of cries and grunts, when they were angry, or cold, or afraid. When anything frightened them, they uttered a cry that sounded like "Adh!", and because they said this whenever the Ape-Man with the club came among them, it grew to be a sort of name for him, and he shouted it out to terrify them, when he made his way through the woods.
After a while, others of the apes got clubs too, and used them to fight with, but except the stones they sometimes threw, Adh's stick was the very first weapon used by Man.
Mother Nature was satisfied with her new Man, so far as he had gone, but she knew that he would have to suffer, if he was to learn, and although she did not like to make him suffer, she had to do it.
"You can blow all you like, Cold," she said. "I want my people to suffer. Pain is not a pleasant thing, but it is only through pain that they will ever learn."
CHAPTER V
THE CAVE AND THE FISH
A cold wind blew through the valley where the Ape-Men lived, and the trees and bushes were brown and bare of fruit. The rays of the Sun, which used to come down straight and hot all day, now shone slantwise, because the Earth had been tipped over, and they seemed to have very little warmth. The days, too, were shorter, and the nights were longer, and cold. All the Ape-Men were obliged to huddle together in their beds of grass to keep warm. They did not know that Mother Nature had tipped over the Earth to make Winter and Summer, but they were very uncomfortable, and they did not like it.
But the worst thing of all was, that there was almost nothing to eat. Always before there had been some kind of fruit, or berries, all the year round. Now they were able to find only a few nuts, and the sweet bulbs which grew at the roots of certain plants, and the smaller animals got most of these. Even the nesting birds they sometimes caught and ate had gone where it was warmer. Pretty soon there was nothing to eat at all, and the Ape-Men were starving.
Adh, who had begun to think a little, puzzled about this for a long time, but could not understand it. Of course, if the Ape-People had stored up food, during the Summer, they would have had something to eat, when the cold weather came, but they had never thought of doing such a thing, because there had usually been enough to eat, before. Now they did not know what to do, and as they could no longer find any food in the valley, they gradually wandered off, down toward the low, hot jungle-lands from which they had come. Here they found things to eat, but they also found lions and great sabre-toothed tigers and other fierce beasts to eat them, and as they had long ago forgotten their old trick of living and sleeping and seeking safety from their enemies in the tree-tops, it was not long before they were all eaten up.
When the Sun saw this, he was very much surprised.
"Look, Mother Nature," he said. "Your Ape-People have all been eaten up."
"You are wrong, Sun," replied Mother Nature. "Adh and the ape woman he has taken for his wife are still in the valley. He was the only one who had learned to think, so the others were of no use and I had to get rid of them. Before long the children of Adh and his wife will fill the valley with a race of Men, and from there they will spread all over the Earth."
Adh did not go with the others for two reasons. The first was that they did not like him, because he made them afraid of him, and so they went away without him. The second reason was, that Adh's wife had a tiny baby boy to nurse and take care of, and it was easier, to stay where they were, than to wander off through the jungles. Now that all the others had gone, Adh managed to find enough roots and nuts to keep himself and his little family alive.
Soon after the others had left, it began to rain, and every day the cold rain beat down on Adh and his family and drenched them. Even their grass nest under the boughs of a thick tree, was turned into a pool of mud and water, on which the sun never shone to dry it and keep it warm. Cold and Rain were making the new Ape-Man suffer, as Mother Nature had told them to do. Adh, as he wandered about the valley hunting for a little food, tried very hard to think of a way to keep himself and his family comfortable, but no new ideas came to him. Occasionally he managed to catch a young bird, which he greedily devoured, but they were very scarce and hard to find.
"Look at the stupid creature," laughed the Sun, peeping for a moment through the heavy rain-clouds. "He hasn't sense enough to find a hole in the rocks, where he would be dry and warm."
Mother Nature did not answer. Instead, she waited until she saw Adh climbing over the rocks at the upper end of the valley, searching for the nests of wild birds he sometimes found there. Then she called Cold to her.
"Blow your hardest for a few moments, Cold," she said.
Cold puffed out his cheeks and blew a freezing blast down the valley, and all the falling drops of Rain turned to bits of ice, like hail, which cut Adh's shoulders and arms and back, and hurt him, in spite of his thick coat of hair. To escape from the storm, he ran beneath some overhanging rocks, and suddenly found himself in a little cave, its floor covered with soft dry moss. Here he was quite safe from the hail and rain, and he was very much pleased.
While he was standing in the cave, Adh suddenly had another thought. He wished that his wife and child were with him. And no sooner had he thought of them than he dashed out of the cave, and forgetting all about the hail and rain, he ran to the nest in the grass where they lay trying to keep warm, and brought them as fast as he could back to the nice dry cave. And this cave was Man's very first home.
"You see," said Mother Nature to the Sun, "whenever I want my new Man to think, I send him some kind of trouble. If I hadn't made him hungry, he would never have got the idea of pulling the bunch of fruit out of the tree with his stick, and now, because I made him cold and wet, he has found himself a home."
"What are you going to make him do next?" asked the Sun.
"Wait and see," said Mother Nature. "But don't forget that I have given him a wife and child to think about, now, and he will do more, on their account, than he would ever do, alone, for in his simple way, he loves them."
"What is Love?" asked the Sun.
"It is one of the great laws of the Universe, that God has made, a feeling, or instinct, that causes all His creatures to want a mate to live with, and thus have children. If it were not for this law, there would never be any children, and all the living creatures on the Earth would disappear in a very little while."
"This Love must be a very queer thing," said the Sun. "I do not understand it."
"And yet, Sun, you will see, some day, that it is the most wonderful law that God has made. Without it, Man would never amount to anything at all. From now on my creature Adh is going to think of doing a great many things, because of his wife and child, that he would not think of doing without them."
When Adh got his wife and child into the cave, they were no longer cold and wet, but they were still very hungry, and all day long the Ape-Man wandered through the valley, looking for something to eat. Sometimes, when all he could find was a few dried berries, or a handful of little grains from the tall grasses that grew here and there, he would carry them back to his wife, instead of eating them himself. In the past, before he had any wife, he would never have thought of such a thing as going hungry for the sake of some one else, but now it was different; he thought of his wife and child.
At last there came a day when from morning to night he could not find a single scrap of food. Everything was gone, and he was weak from hunger. He went down to the shore of the little lake that lay in the bottom of the valley, and throwing himself on the ground, drank as much water as he could, to fill his empty stomach. Then he sat up and stared at the cold, grey sky, not knowing what to do. Presently he saw a great bird, like a fish-hawk, swoop down to the surface of the lake, and rise a moment later with a shining fish in its claws. Then, as Adh watched, another hawk flew up and tried to take the fish away from the first one. The two birds screamed and tore at each other, and as they fought, the fish the first one had been carrying fell to the ground close to where Adh was sitting.
He walked over to where it