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The Story of Ab

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[Illustration: GREAT TRUNK SHOT DOWNWARD AND BACKWARD PICKED UP THE MAN
AND HURLED HIM YARDS AWAY]




THE STORY OF AB

A TALE OF THE TIME OF THE CAVE MAN

BY

STANLEY WATERLOO

1905


Author of "A Man and a Woman," "An Odd Situation," etc.




INTRODUCTION.


This is the story of Ab, a man of the Age of Stone, who lived so long ago
that we cannot closely fix the date, and who loved and fought well.

In his work the author has been cordially assisted by some of the ablest
searchers of two continents into the life history of prehistoric times.
With characteristic helpfulness and interest, these already burdened
students have aided and encouraged him, and to them he desires to express
his sense of profound obligation and his earnest thanks.

Once only does the writer depart from accepted theories of scientific
research. After an at least long-continued study of existing evidence and
information relating to the Stone Ages, the conviction grew upon him that
the mysterious gap supposed by scientific teachers to divide Paleolithic
from Neolithic man never really existed. No convulsion of nature, no new
race of human beings is needed to explain the difference between the
relics of Paleolithic and Neolithic strugglers. Growth, experiment,
adaptation, discovery, inevitable in man, sufficiently account for all
the relatively swift changes from one form of primitive life to another
more advanced, from the time of chipped to that of polished implements.
Man has been, from the beginning, under the never resting, never
hastening, forces of evolution. The earth from which he sprang holds the
record of his transformations in her peat-beds, her buried caverns and
her rocky fastnesses. The eternal laws change man, but they themselves do
not change.

Ab and Lightfoot and others of the cave people whose story is told in the
tale which follows the author cannot disown. He has shown them as they
were. Hungry and cold, they slew the fierce beasts which were scarcely
more savage than they, and were fed and clothed by their flesh and fur.
In the caves of the earth the cave men and their families were safely
sheltered. Theirs were the elemental wants and passions. They were
swayed by love, in some form at least, by jealousy, fear, revenge, and by
the memory of benefits and wrongs. They cherished their young; they
fought desperately with the beasts of their time, and with each other,
and, when their brief, turbulent lives were ended, they passed into
silence, but not into oblivion. The old Earth carefully preserved their
story, so that we, their children, may read it now.

S. W.




CONTENTS.

CHAPTER.

I. THE BABE IN THE WOODS.

II. MAN AND HYENA.

III. A FAMILY DINNER.

IV. AB AND OAK.

V. A GREAT ENTERPRISE.

VI. A DANGEROUS VISITOR.

VII. THE UNEXPECTED HAPPENS.

VIII. SABRE-TOOTH AND RHINOCEROS.

IX. DOMESTIC MATTERS.

X. OLD MOK, THE MENTOR.

XI. DOINGS AT HOME.

XII. OLD MOK'S TALES.

XIII. AB'S GREAT DISCOVERY.

XIV. A LESSON IN SWIMMING.

XV. A MAMMOTH AT BAY.

XVI. THE FEAST OF THE MAMMOTH.

XVII. THE COMRADES.

XVIII. LOVE AND DEATH.

XIX. A RACE WITH DREAD.

XX. THE FIRE COUNTRY.

XXI. THE WOOING OF LIGHTFOOT.

XXII. THE HONEYMOON.

XXIII. MORE OF THE HONEYMOON.

XXIV. THE FIRE COUNTRY AGAIN.

XXV. A GREAT STEP FORWARD.

XXVI. FACING THE RAIDER.

XXVII. LITTLE MOK.

XXVIII. THE BATTLE OF THE BARRIERS.

XXIX. OLD HILLTOP'S LAST STRUGGLE.

XXX. OUR VERY GREAT GRANDFATHER.




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

BY SIMON HARMON VEDDER

"HIS GREAT TRUNK SHOT DOWNWARD AND BACKWARD, PICKED UP THE MAN, AND
HURLED HIM YARDS AWAY"

MAP

"AB SEIZED UPON TWO OF THE SNARLING CUBS, AND OAK DID THE SAME"

"AB SPRANG TO HIS FEET, AND DREW HIS ARROW TO THE HEAD"

"THE YOUNG MEN CALLED TO HER, BUT SHE MADE NO ANSWER. SHE BUT FISHED AWAY
DEMURELY"

"AB STOOD THERE WEAPONLESS, A CREATURE WANDERING OF MIND"

"WITH A GREAT LEAP HE WENT AT AND THROUGH THE CURLING CREST OF THE YELLOW
FLAME!"

"THE GIRL COWERED BEHIND A REFUGE OF LEAVES AND BRANCHES"

"UPON THE STRONG SHAFT OF ASH THE MONSTER WAS IMPALED"




THE STORY OF AB.




CHAPTER I.


THE BABE IN THE WOODS.

Drifted beech leaves had made a soft, clean bed in a little hollow in a
wood. The wood was beside a river, the trend of which was toward the
east. There was an almost precipitous slope, perhaps a hundred and fifty
feet from the wood, downward to the river. The wood itself, a sort of
peninsula, was mall in extent and partly isolated from the greater forest
back of it by a slight clearing. Just below the wood, or, in fact, almost
in it and near the crest of the rugged bank, the mouth of a small cave
was visible. It was so blocked with stones as to leave barely room for
the entrance of a human being. The little couch of beech leaves already
referred to was not many yards from the cave.

On the leafy bed rolled about and kicked up his short legs in glee a
little brown babe. It was evident that he could not walk yet and his lack
of length and width and thickness indicated what might be a babe not more
than a year of age, but, despite his apparent youth, this man-child
seemed content thus left alone, while his grip on the twigs which had
fallen into his bed was strong, as he was strong, and he was breaking
them delightedly. Not only was the hair upon his head at least twice as
long as that of the average year-old child of today, but there were downy
indications upon his arms and legs, and his general aspect was a swart
and rugged one. He was about as far from a weakly child in appearance as
could be well imagined and he was about as jolly a looking baby, too, as
one could wish to see. He was laughing and cooing as he kicked about
among the beech leaves and looked upward at the blue sky. His dress has
not yet been alluded to and an apology for the negligence may be found in
the fact that he had no dress. He wore nothing. He was a baby of the time
of the cave men; of the closing period of the age of chipped stone
instruments; the epoch of mild climate; the ending of one great animal
group and the beginning of another; the time when the mammoth, the
rhinoceros, the great cave tiger and cave bear, the huge elk, reindeer
and aurochs and urus and hosts of little horses, fed or gamboled in the
same forests and plains, with much discretion as to relative distances
from each other.

It was some time ago, no matter how many thousands of years, when the
child--they called him Ab--lay there, naked, upon his bed of beech
leaves. It may be said, too, that there existed for him every chance for
a lively and interesting existence. There was prospect that he would be
engaged in running away from something or running after something during
most of his life. Times were not dull for humanity in the age of stone.
The children had no lack of things to interest, if not always to amuse,
them, and neither had the men and women. And this is the truthful story
of the boy Ab and his playmates and of what happened when he grew to be a
man.

It is well to speak here of the river. The stream has been already
mentioned as flowing to the eastward. It did not flow in that direction
regularly; its course was twisted and diverted, and there were bays and
inlets and rapids between precipices, and islands and wooded peninsulas,
and then the river merged into a lake of miles in extent, the waters
converging into the river again. So it was that the banks in one place
might form a height and in another merge evenly into a densely wooded
forest or a wide plain. It was so, too, that these conditions might exist
opposite each other. Thus the woodland might face the plain, or the
precipice some vast extending marsh.

To speak further of this river it may be mentioned, incidentally, that
to-day its upper reaches still exist and that the relatively small stream
remaining is called the Thames. Beside and across it lies the greatest
city in the world and its mouth is upon what is called the English
Channel. At the time when the baby, Ab, slept that afternoon in his nest
in the beech leaves this river was not called the Thames, it was only
called the Running Water, to distinguish it from the waters of the coast.
It did not empty into the British Channel, for the simple and sufficient
reason that there was no such channel at the time. Where now exists that
famous passage which makes islands of Great Britain, where, tossed upon
the choppy waves, the travelers of the world are seasick, where Drake and
Howard chased the Great Armada to the Northern seas and where, to-day,
the ships of the nations are steered toward a social and commercial
center, was then good, solid earth crowned with great forests, and the
present little tail end of a river was part of a great affluent of the
Rhine, the German river famous still, but then with a size and sweep
worth talking of. Then the Thames and the Elbe and Weser, into which
tumbled a thousand smaller streams, all went to feed what is now the
Rhine, and that then tremendous river held its course through dense
forests and deep gorges until it reached broad plains, where the North
Sea is to-day, and blended finally with the Northern Ocean.

The trees which stood upon the bank of the great river, or which could be
seen in the far distance beyond the marsh or plain, were not all the same
as now exist. There was still a distinctive presence of the towering
conifers, something such as are represented in the redwood forests of
California to-day, or, in other forms, in some Australian woods. There
was a suggestion of the fernlike but gigantic age of growth of the
distant past, the past when the earth's surface was yet warm and its air
misty, and there was an exuberance of all plant and forest growth,
something compared with which the growth in the same latitude, just now,
would make, it may be, but a stunted showing. It is wonderful, though,
the close resemblance between most of the trees of the cave man's age, so
many tens of thousands of years ago, and the trees most common to the
temperate zone to-day. The peat bogs and the caverns and the strata of
deposits in a host of places tell truthfully what trees grew in this
distant time. Already the oak and beech and walnut and butternut and
hazel reared their graceful forms aloft, and the ground beneath their
spreading branches was strewn with the store of nuts which gave a portion
of food for many of the beasts and for man as well. The ash and the yew
were there, tough and springy of fiber and destined in the far future to
become famous in song and story, because they would furnish the wood from
which was made the weapon of the bowman. The maple was there with all its
symmetry. There was the elm, the dogged and beautiful tree-thing of
to-day, which so clings to life and nourishes in the midst of unwholesome
city surroundings and makes the human hive so much the better. There were
the pines, the sycamore, the foxwood and dogwood, and lime and laurel and
poplar and elder and willow, and the cherry and crab apple and others of
the fruit-bearing kind, since so developed that they are great factors in
man's subsistence now. It was a time of plenty which was riotous. There
remained, too, a vestige of the animal as well as of the vegetable life
of the remoter ages. There were strange and dangerous creatures which
came sometimes up the river from its inlet into the ocean. Such events
had been matters of interest, not to say of anxiety, to Ab's ancestors.

The baby lying there among the beech leaves tired, finally, of its cooing
and twig-snapping and slept the sleep of dreamless early childhood. He
slept happily and noiselessly, but when he at last awoke his demeanor
showed a change. He had nothing to distract him, unless it might be the
breaking of twigs again. He had no toys, and, being hungry, he began to
yell. So far as can be learned from early data, babies, when hungry, have
always yelled. And, of old, as to-day, when a baby yelled, the woman who
had borne it was likely to appear at once upon the scene. Ab's mother
came running lightly from the river bank toward where the youngster lay.
She was worthy of attention as she ran, and this is but a bungling
attempt at a description of her and of her dress.

It should be explained here, with much care and caution, that the mother
of Ab moved in the best and most exclusive circles of the time. She
belonged to the aristocracy and, it may be added, regarding this fine
lady personally, that she had the weakness of paying much attention to
her dress. She was what might properly be called a leader of society,
though society was at the time somewhat attenuated, families living,
generally, some miles apart, and various obstacles, chiefly in the form
of large, man-eating animals, complicating the matter of paying calls. As
for the calls themselves, they were nearly as often aggressive as social,
and there is a certain degree of difference between the vicious use of a
flint ax and the leaving of a card with a bending lackey. But all this
doesn't matter. The mother of Ab belonged to the very cream of the cream,
and was dressed accordingly. Her garb was elegant but simple; it had,
first, the one great merit, that it could easily be put on or taken off.
It was sustained with but a single knot, a bow-knot--they had learned to
make a bow-knot and other knots in the stone age, for, because of the
manual requirements for living, they were cleverer fumblers with their
fingers than we are now--and the lady here described had tied her knot in
a manner not to be excelled by any other woman in all the fiercely
beast-ranged countryside.

The gown itself was of a quality to please the eye of the most carping.
It was made from the skins of wolverines, and was drawn in loosely about
the waist by a tied band, but was really sustained by a strip of the skin
which encircled the left shoulder and back and breast. This left the
right arm free from all encumbrance, a matter of some importance, for to
be right-handed was a quality of the cave man as of the man today. We
should have a grudge against them for this carelessness, and should, may
be, form an ambidextrous league, improving upon the past and teaching and
forcing young children to use each hand alike.

The garment of wolverine skins, sewed neatly together with thread of
sinews, was all the young mother wore. Thus hanging from the shoulder and
fully encircling her, it reached from the waist to about half way down
between the hips and the knees. It was as delightful a gown as ever was
contrived by ambitious modiste or mincing male designer in these modern
times. It fitted with a free and easy looseness and its colors were such
as blended smoothly and kindly with the complexion of its wearer. The fur
of the wolverine was a mixed black and white, but neither black nor white
is the word to use. The black was not black; it was only a swart sort of
color, and the white was not white; it was but a dingy, lighter contrast
to the darker surface beside it. Yet the combination was rather good.
There was enough of difference to catch the eye and not enough of
glaringness to offend it. The mother of Ab would be counted by a wise
observer as the possessor of good taste. Still, dress is a small matter.
There is something to say about the cave mother aside from the mere
description of her gown.




CHAPTER II.


MAN AND HYENA.

It is but an act of simple gallantry and justice to assert that the cave
woman had a certain unhampered swing of movement which the modern woman
often lacks. Without any reflection upon the blessed woman of to-day, it
must be said truthfully that she can neither leap a creek nor surmount
some such obstacle as a monster tree trunk with a close approach to the
ease and grace of this mother who came bounding through the forest. There
was nothing unknowing or hesitant about her movements. She ran swiftly
and leaped lightly when occasion came. She was lithe as the panther and
as careless of where her brown feet touched the ground.

The woman had physical charms. She was of about the average size of
womanhood as we see it embodied now, but her waist was not compressed at
an unseemly angle, and much resembled in its contour that of the Venus of
Milo which has become such a stock example of the healthfully
symmetrical. Her hair was brown and long. It was innocent of knot or coil
or braid, and was transfixed by no abatis of dangerous pins. It was not
parted but was thrown straight backward over the head and hung down
fairly and far between brown shoulders. It was a fine head of hair; there
could be no question about that. It had gloss and color. Captious
critics, reasoning from the standpoint of another age, might think it
needed combing, but that is only a matter of opinion. It was tangled
together in a compact and fluffy mass, and so did not wander into the
woman's eyes, which was a good thing and a great convenience, for bright
eyes and unobstructed vision were required in those lively days.

The face of this lady showed, at a glance, that no cosmetic had ever been
relied upon to give it an artificial charm. As a matter of fact it would
have been difficult to use cosmetics upon that face in the modern way,
for there was a suggestion of something more than down upon the
countenance, and there were certain irregularities of facial outline so
prominent that such details as the little matter of complexion must be
trifling. The eyes were deep set and small, the nose was short and thick
and possessed a certain vagueness of outline not easy of description. The
upper lip was excessively long and the under lip protruding. The chin was
well defined and firm. The mouth was rather wide, and the teeth were
strong and even, and as white as any ivory ever seen. Such was the face,
and there may be added some details of interest about the figure. The
arms of this fascinating woman were perfectly proportioned. They were
adapted to the times and were very beautiful. Down each of them from
shoulder to elbow ran a strip of short dark hair. From either hand ran
upward to the elbow another strip of hair, and the two, meeting at the
elbow, formed a delightful little tuft reminding one of what is known as
a "widow's peak," or that little point which grows down so charmingly on
an occasional woman's forehead. Her biceps were tremendous, as must
necessarily be the case with a lady accustomed to swing from limb to limb
along the treetops. Her thumb was nearly as long as her fingers, and the
palms of her hands were hard. Her legs were like her arms in their degree
of muscular development and hairy adornment. She had beautiful feet. It
is to be admitted that her heels projected a trifle more than is counted
the ideal thing at the present day, and that her big toe and all the
other toes were very much in evidence, but there is not one woman in
ten thousand now who could as handily pick up objects with her toes as
could the mother of the baby Ab. She was as brown as a nut, with the tan
of a half tropical summer, and as healthy a creature, from tawny head to
backward sloping heel, as ever trod a path in the world's history. This
was the quality of the lady who came so swiftly to learn the nature of
her offspring's trouble. Ladies of that day attended, as a rule, to the
wants of their own children. A wet nurse was a thing unknown and a dry
one as unthought of. This was good for the children.

The woman made a dive into the little hollow and picked the babe from its
nest of leaves and tossed him up lightly, and at once his crying ceased,
and his little brown arms went around her neck, and he cooed and prattled
in very much the same fashion as does a babe of the present time. He was
content, all in a moment, yet some noise must have aroused him, for, as
it chanced, there was great need that this particular babe at this
particular moment should have awakened and cried aloud for his mother.
This was made evident immediately. As the woman tossed him aloft in her
arms and cuddled him again there came a sound to her ears which made her
leap like some wilder creature of the forest up to a little vantage
ground. She turned her head, and then--you should have seen the woman!

Very nearly above them swung down one of the branches of a great beech
tree. The mother threw the child into the hollow of her left arm, and
leaped upward a yard to catch the branch with her right hand. So she hung
dangling. Then, instantly, holding him firmly by one arm in her left
hand, she lowered the child between her legs and clasped them about him
closely. And then, had it been your fortune to be born in those times,
you might have seen good climbing. With both her strong arms free, this
vigorous matron ran up the stout beech limb which depended downward from
the great bole of the tree until she was twenty feet above the ground,
and then, lifting herself into a comfortable place, in a moment was
sitting there at ease, her legs and one arm coiled about the big branch
and a smaller upstanding one, while the other arm held the brown babe
close to her bosom.

This charming lady of the period had reached her perch in the beech tree
top none too soon. Even as she swung herself into place upon the huge
bough, there came rushing across the space beneath, snarling, smelling
and seeking, a brute as foul and dangerous as could be imagined for
mother and son upon the ground. It was of a dirty dun color, mottled and
striped with a lighter but still dingy hue. It had a black, hoggish nose,
but there were fangs in its great jaws. It resembled a huge wolf, save as
to its massiveness and club countenance, It was one of the monster hyenas
of the time, a beast which must have been as dangerous to the men then
living as any animal except the cave tiger and the cave bear. Its
degenerate posterity, as they shuffle uneasily back and forth when caged
to-day, are perhaps not less foul of aspect, but are relatively pygmies.
Doubtless the brute had scented the sleeping babe, and, snarling aloud in
its search, had waked it, inducing the cry which proved the child's
salvation.

The beast scented immediately the prey above him and leaped upward
ferociously and vainly. Was the woman thus beset thus holding herself
aloft and with her child upon one arm in a state of sickening anxiety?
Hardly! She but encircled the supporting branch the closer, and laughed
aloud. She even poked one bare foot down at the leaping beast, and waved
her leg in provocation. At the same time there was no doubt that she was
beset. Furthermore she was hungry, and so she raised her voice, and sent
out through the forest a strange call, a quavering minor wail, but
something to be heard at a great distance. There was no delay in the
response, for delays were dangerous when cave men lived. The call was
answered instantly and the answering cry was repeated as she called
again, the sound of the reply approaching near and nearer all the time.
All at once the manner of her calling changed; it was an appeal no
longer; it was a conversation, an odd, clucking, penetrating speech in
the shortest of sentences. She was telling of the situation. There was
prompt reply; the voice seemed suddenly higher in the air and then came,
swinging easily from branch to branch along the treetops, the father of
Ab, a person who felt a natural and aggressive interest in what was going
on.

To describe the cave man it is, it may be, best of all to say that he was
the woman over again, only stronger, longer limbed and deeper chested,
firmer of jaw and more grim of countenance. He was dressed almost as she
was. From his broad shoulder hung a cloak of the skin of some wild beast
but the cord which tied it was a stout one, and in the belt thus formed
was stuck a weapon of such quality as men have rarely carried since. It
was a stone ax; an ax heavier than any battle-ax of mediaeval times, its
haft a scant three feet in length, inclosing the ax through a split in
the tough wood, all being held in place by a taut and hardened mass of
knotted sinews. It was a fearful weapon, but one only to be wielded by
such a man as this, one with arms almost as mighty as those of the
gorilla.

The man sat himself upon the limb beside his wife and child. The two
talked together in their clucking language for a moment or two, but few
words were wasted. Words had not their present abundance in those days;
action was everything. The man was hungry, too, and wanted to get home as
soon as possible. He had secured food, which was awaiting them, and this
slight, annoying episode of the day must be ended promptly. He clambered
easily up the tree and wrenched off a deadened limb at least two yards in
length, then tumbling back again and passing his wife and child along the
main branch, he swung down to where the leaping beast could almost reach
him. The heavy club he carried gave him an advantage. With a whistling
sweep, as the hyena leaped upward in its ravenous folly, came this huge
club crashing against the thick skull, a blow so fair and stark and
strong that the stunned beast fell backward upon the ground, and then,
down, lightly as any monkey, dropped the cave man. The huge stone ax went
crashing into the brain of the quivering brute, and that was the end of
the incident. Mother and child leaped down together, and the man and
woman went chattering toward their cave. This was not a particularly
eventful day with them; they were accustomed to such things.

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