Days Before history. H. R. Hall
twice as wide across as Uncle John’s walking-stick could measure.
And Uncle John said: “Yes, that is one place; but, if you look about, you will find several more.”
So the boys hunted about, and they found nine or ten more of the pits; and then they came back to where Uncle John was sitting and asked him to tell them about these old dwellings. But he said they must wait a little while, because he had something else for them to see first.
As they walked homeward over the heath, they came to a place where the cart-tracks went down to the sand-pits, and the way was bare and rough. And Uncle John said: “Now which of you boys has got eyes in his head? Within a dozen yards of where we are standing I have dropped something which once belonged to one of the men of the pit-dwellings. Sixpence for the boy who finds it!”
Then they all began to hunt round, but no one could find anything. So Uncle John said: “It is something made of flint-stone. The man to whom it belonged used to shoot with it.” And he kept on saying, while they were looking about: “Dick is hot” or “Joe is warm,” just as if they were playing at Hide the Thimble.
At last Joe called out, “I’ve got it!” and he came running up with an arrow-head chipped out of grey flint; and the others crowded round to look at it. And Uncle John showed them how carefully it had been chipped, and how sharp the point and edges were, although it was hundreds and hundreds of years old.
And he cut a strong little shoot off a hazel tree, and shortened it, and split it at the end, and showed them how he supposed the man who made the arrow all that long time ago had fixed it to its shaft.
Then he took out sixpence, and said to Joe, “If you might choose, which would you rather have? The sixpence or the arrow-head?”
And Joe said, “The arrow-head, ever so much rather!”
But Uncle John said, “You mayn’t choose now, so take your sixpence. But I’ll tell you what: if you three boys would like to know more about the pit-dwelling people, and about their houses, and how they hunted and all that, I have a book at home in which there is a lot about these things; and I think it would be a good way of filling up some of your spare time these holidays if we were to have some reading out of the book now and then. You might try your hands at building a hut, to see if you could do it as well as the pit-dwelling people did. And you might make some bows and arrows, and even have a try at chipping out flint arrow-heads. We might have a shooting match with the bows and arrows, with another sixpence for the prize. Or, better still, we might have for a prize this flint arrow-head of mine that Joe is so fond of; and give it to the boy who knows most about what we have been reading, when we come to the end of the holidays.”
They all agreed that that would be rather a good way of amusing themselves, if the book were interesting. But by the time they got home it was too late to begin; so the reading had to be put off until the next day.
On the next day Joe and David went up to Uncle John’s house. As it was a wet afternoon they sat indoors. On the table there was a large brown book; and as soon as they had settled themselves, Uncle John took up the book and began to read.
Chapter the Second
THE STORY OF TIG: Tig’s Birthday and his Home
ONCE upon a time, a very long time ago, there was a boy called Tig. When the story begins, Tig was only a baby; he was four, or nearly four. To tell the truth, he did not quite know when his birthday was. He did not have a proper birthday every year. Nobody kept birthdays when Tig was little, because people had not any names for the months, as we have now.
They talked about the hot-time and the cold-time, two times instead of four seasons; and if you could have spoken their language, and had asked Gofa, Tig’s mother, when Tig’s birthday was, she would have said, “One day in the cold-time.”
When Tig was born, he lived first of all in a little house which had only one room in it. It was rather like a cellar, because it was dug out of the ground.
There were no windows in the house. There was only one doorway, and it was a hole, like the mouth of a burrow; and Tig’s father and mother, and any of their friends who came to visit them, had to crawl in and out on all-fours. At night, when the family were all inside, Tig’s father used to set up a big stone against the entrance-hole. He used to say in fun that this was to keep out the wolves and the bears. But neither bears nor wolves had much chance to get in, because there was a high paling of posts that surrounded all the huts. The big door-stone was always kept inside the hut, so that it was handy if ever they wanted to block the doorway against anybody during the daytime.
The fireplace was in the middle of the floor, and there was a hole in the roof to let the smoke out. In the daytime the hole in the roof made a kind of window. The roof was made of branches of trees. These were supported on the ground by a foundation of thick flat stones and pieces of turf, and were overlaid with smaller branches and turves and a rough thatch of reeds.
Here Tig’s father, who was called Garff, and Gofa, Tig’s mother, lived nice and snug in the cold-time. They had no bedsteads nor tables nor chairs nor chests of drawers. But they had plenty of skins of wild horses and cows and deer, and wolf-skins and bear-skins, instead of beds and chairs; and Tig’s own sleeping-cot was a skin of a little bear that Garff had killed on purpose for him. Their other belongings were of a useful sort, not large and heavy like furniture, but such things as cooking pots, the mealing-stone for crushing corn, and the big wooden mortar in which grain or acorns could be pounded into flour.
In summer-time they used to find the dug-out hut too hot to live in, and besides, they had to take their cattle out to fresh pastures. So they, and their friends who lived in the other huts close by, used to pack up their skin rugs and all their other belongings, and travel to another part of the hill country. Some of the men used to march on in front, with their spears and bows and arrows ready, in case they were to meet any wild beasts. Then came the rest of the men and the boys with the dogs, driving the cattle along; and after them the old men and the women and children, with more armed men to bring up the rear. The women carried the skins and the cooking pots and the food; and almost every one had a baby bound on to her back. The food was carried in baskets, and the bigger children helped to carry the baskets. The smaller children had no loads to carry, except their dolls and playthings which they hugged in their arms as they walked along beside their mothers.
The people left the huts and marched down the hill. Then they crossed the river, wading into the water at a shallow place. But the little children had to be carried over; and Tig was carried over by his mother every time until after he was seven.
The tribe used to take a whole day in travelling to the camping-place; and when they got there at last, they used to make a new fire, and light bonfires in the open, and cook their supper, and sleep in tents and booths about the fires.
Up on the hill-side, at the edge of the forest, where the ground had been partly cleared, was the place of the first summer camp. The summer huts were built above ground, of branches of trees, wattled with withies and twigs, and daubed with clay. Sometimes a man had only to repair the hut that he had lived in the summer before. But even if he had to build a new one, it was not such hard work as to build a winter hut. Before a man began to build his summer hut, he picked out a tree with a straight trunk to act as the main support of his hut. He used the tree as a centre pillar to hold up his roof-beams. If he built his summer hut in the open, away from the trees, he set up a pole for a roof-tree. We still talk of living under our own roof-tree, just as those people did long ago.
The fireplaces were made out-of-doors. If they had been indoors, the huts would often have been burned down. Probably they often were burned down even then. So whatever