by Jack London
CHAPTER IV
There is one puzzling thing about these prehistoric memories of mine. Itis the vagueness of the time element. I lo not always know the order ofevents;--or can I tell, between some events, whether one, two, or fouror five years have elapsed. I can only roughly tell the passage of timeby judging the changes in the appearance and pursuits of my fellows.
Also, I can apply the logic of events to the various happenings. Forinstance, there is no doubt whatever that my mother and I were treedby the wild pigs and fled and fell in the days before I made theacquaintance of Lop-Ear, who became what I may call my boyhood chum. Andit is just as conclusive that between these two periods I must have leftmy mother.
I have no memory of my father than the one I have given. Never, inthe years that followed, did he reappear. And from my knowledge of thetimes, the only explanation possible lies in that he perished shortlyafter the adventure with the wild pigs. That it must have been anuntimely end, there is no discussion. He was in full vigor, and onlysudden and violent death could have taken him off. But I know notthe manner of his going--whether he was drowned in the river, or wasswallowed by a snake, or went into the stomach of old Saber-Tooth, thetiger, is beyond my knowledge.
For know that I remember only the things I saw myself, with my own eyes,in those prehistoric days. If my mother knew my father's end, she nevertold me. For that matter I doubt if she had a vocabulary adequate toconvey such information. Perhaps, all told, the Folk in that day had avocabulary of thirty or forty sounds.
I call them SOUNDS, rather than WORDS, because sounds they wereprimarily. They had no fixed values, to be altered by adjectives andadverbs. These latter were tools of speech not yet invented. Insteadof qualifying nouns or verbs by the use of adjectives and adverbs, wequalified sounds by intonation, by changes in quantity and pitch,by retarding and by accelerating. The length of time employed in theutterance of a particular sound shaded its meaning.
We had no conjugation. One judged the tense by the context. We talkedonly concrete things because we thought only concrete things. Also, wedepended largely on pantomime. The simplest abstraction was practicallybeyond our thinking; and when one did happen to think one, he was hardput to communicate it to his fellows. There were no sounds for it. Hewas pressing beyond the limits of his vocabulary. If he invented soundsfor it, his fellows did not understand the sounds. Then it was that hefell back on pantomime, illustrating the thought wherever possible andat the same time repeating the new sound over and over again.
Thus language grew. By the few sounds we possessed we were enabled tothink a short distance beyond those sounds; then came the need for newsounds wherewith to express the new thought. Sometimes, however, wethought too long a distance in advance of our sounds, managed to achieveabstractions (dim ones I grant), which we failed utterly to make knownto other folk. After all, language did not grow fast in that day.
Oh, believe me, we were amazingly simple. But we did know a lot that isnot known to-day. We could twitch our ears, prick them up and flattenthem down at will. And we could scratch between our shoulders with ease.We could throw stones with our feet. I have done it many a time. And forthat matter, I could keep my knees straight, bend forward from the hips,and touch, not the tips of my fingers, but the points of my elbows,to the ground. And as for bird-nesting--well, I only wish thetwentieth-century boy could see us. But we made no collections of eggs.We ate them.
I remember--but I out-run my story. First let me tell of Lop-Ear and ourfriendship. Very early in my life, I separated from my mother. Possiblythis was because, after the death of my father, she took to herself asecond husband. I have few recollections of him, and they are not of thebest. He was a light fellow. There was no solidity to him. He was toovoluble. His infernal chattering worries me even now as I think ofit. His mind was too inconsequential to permit him to possess purpose.Monkeys in their cages always remind me of him. He was monkeyish. Thatis the best description I can give of him.
He hated me from the first. And I quickly learned to be afraid of himand his malicious pranks. Whenever he came in sight I crept close to mymother and clung to her. But I was growing older all the time, and itwas inevitable that I should from time to time stray from her, and strayfarther and farther. And these were the opportunities that the Chattererwaited for. (I may as well explain that we bore no names in those days;were not known by any name. For the sake of convenience I have myselfgiven names to the various Folk I was more closely in contact with,and the "Chatterer" is the most fitting description I can find for thatprecious stepfather of mine. As for me, I have named myself "Big-Tooth."My eye-teeth were pronouncedly large.)
But to return to the Chatterer. He persistently terrorized me. He wasalways pinching me and cuffing me, and on occasion he was not abovebiting me. Often my mother interfered, and the way she made his furfly was a joy to see. But the result of all this was a beautiful andunending family quarrel, in which I was the bone of contention.
No, my home-life was not happy. I smile to myself as I write the phrase.Home-life! Home! I had no home in the modern sense of the term. My homewas an association, not a habitation. I lived in my mother's care, notin a house. And my mother lived anywhere, so long as when night came shewas above the ground.
My mother was old-fashioned. She still clung to her trees. It is true,the more progressive members of our horde lived in the caves above theriver. But my mother was suspicious and unprogressive. The trees weregood enough for her. Of course, we had one particular tree in which weusually roosted, though we often roosted in other trees when nightfallcaught us. In a convenient fork was a sort of rude platform of twigsand branches and creeping things. It was more like a huge bird-nest thananything else, though it was a thousand times cruder in the weaving thanany bird-nest. But it had one feature that I have never seen attached toany bird-nest, namely, a roof.
Oh, not a roof such as modern man makes! Nor a roof such as is made bythe lowest aborigines of to-day. It was infinitely more clumsy than theclumsiest handiwork of man--of man as we know him. It was put togetherin a casual, helter-skelter sort of way. Above the fork of the treewhereon we rested was a pile of dead branches and brush. Four or fiveadjacent forks held what I may term the various ridge-poles. These weremerely stout sticks an inch or so in diameter. On them rested the brushand branches. These seemed to have been tossed on almost aimlessly.There was no attempt at thatching. And I must confess that the roofleaked miserably in a heavy rain.
But the Chatterer. He made home-life a burden for both my mother andme--and by home-life I mean, not the leaky nest in the tree, but thegroup-life of the three of us. He was most malicious in his persecutionof me. That was the one purpose to which he held steadfastly for longerthan five minutes. Also, as time went by, my mother was less eager inher defence of me. I think, what of the continuous rows raised by theChatterer, that I must have become a nuisance to her. At any rate, thesituation went from bad to worse so rapidly that I should soon, of myown volition, have left home. But the satisfaction of performing soindependent an act was denied me. Before I was ready to go, I was thrownout. And I mean this literally.
The opportunity came to the Chatterer one day when I was alone in thenest. My mother and the Chatterer had gone away together toward theblueberry swamp. He must have planned the whole thing, for I heard himreturning alone through the forest, roaring with self-induced rage as hecame. Like all the men of our horde, when they were angry or were tryingto make themselves angry, he stopped now and again to hammer on hischest with his fist.
I realized the helplessness of my situation, and crouched trembling inthe nest. The Chatterer came directly to the tree--I remember it was anoak tree--and began to climb up. And he never ceased for a moment fromhis infernal row. As I have said, our language was extremely meagre, andhe must have strained it by the variety of ways in which he informed meof his undying hatred of me and of his intention there and then to haveit out with me.
As he climbed to the fork, I fled out the great horizontal
limb. Hefollowed me, and out I went, farther and farther. At last I was outamongst the small twigs and leaves. The Chatterer was ever a coward, andgreater always than any anger he ever worked up was his caution. He wasafraid to follow me out amongst the leaves and twigs. For that matter,his greater weight would have crashed him through the foliage before hecould have got to me.
But it was not necessary for him to reach me, and well he knew it, thescoundrel! With a malevolent expression on his face, his beady eyesgleaming with cruel intelligence, he began teetering. Teetering!--andwith me out on the very edge of the bough, clutching at the twigs thatbroke continually with my weight. Twenty feet beneath me was the earth.
Wildly and more--wildly he teetered, grinning at me his gloating hatred.Then came the end. All four holds broke at the same time, and I fell,back-downward, looking up at him, my hands and feet still clutching thebroken twigs. Luckily, there were no wild pigs under me, and my fall wasbroken by the tough and springy bushes.
Usually, my falls destroy my dreams, the nervous shock being sufficientto bridge the thousand centuries in an instant and hurl me wide awakeinto my little bed, where, perchance, I lie sweating and trembling andhear the cuckoo clock calling the hour in the hall. But this dream of myleaving home I have had many times, and never yet have I been awakenedby it. Always do I crash, shrieking, down through the brush and fetch upwith a bump on the ground.
Scratched and bruised and whimpering, I lay where I had fallen. Peeringup through the bushes, I could see the Chatterer. He had set up ademoniacal chant of joy and was keeping time to it with his teetering.I quickly hushed my whimpering. I was no longer in the safety of thetrees, and I knew the danger I ran of bringing upon myself the huntinganimals by too audible an expression of my grief.
I remember, as my sobs died down, that I became interested in watchingthe strange light-effects produced by partially opening and closing mytear-wet eyelids. Then I began to investigate, and found that I was notso very badly damaged by my fall. I had lost some hair and hide, hereand there; the sharp and jagged end of a broken branch had thrust fullyan inch into my forearm; and my right hip, which had borne the bruntof my contact with the ground, was aching intolerably. But these, afterall, were only petty hurts. No bones were broken, and in those days theflesh of man had finer healing qualities than it has to-day. Yet itwas a severe fall, for I limped with my injured hip for fully a weekafterward.
Next, as I lay in the bushes, there came upon me a feeling ofdesolation, a consciousness that I was homeless. I made up my mind neverto return to my mother and the Chatterer. I would go far away throughthe terrible forest, and find some tree for myself in which to roost. Asfor food, I knew where to find it. For the last year at least I hadnot been beholden to my mother for food. All she had furnished me wasprotection and guidance.
I crawled softly out through the bushes. Once I looked back and saw theChatterer still chanting and teetering. It was not a pleasant sight. Iknew pretty well how to be cautious, and I was exceedingly careful onthis my first journey in the world.
I gave no thought as to where I was going. I had but one purpose, andthat was to go away beyond the reach of the Chatterer. I climbed intothe trees and wandered on amongst them for hours, passing from tree totree and never touching the ground. But I did not go in any particulardirection, nor did I travel steadily. It was my nature, as it was thenature of all my folk, to be inconsequential. Besides, I was a merechild, and I stopped a great deal to play by the way.
The events that befell me on my leaving home are very vague in my mind.My dreams do not cover them. Much has my other-self forgotten, andparticularly at this very period. Nor have I been able to frame up thevarious dreams so as to bridge the gap between my leaving the home-treeand my arrival at the caves.
I remember that several times I came to open spaces. These I crossed ingreat trepidation, descending to the ground and running at the top of myspeed. I remember that there were days of rain and days of sunshine, sothat I must have wandered alone for quite a time. I especially dreamof my misery in the rain, and of my sufferings from hunger and how Iappeased it. One very strong impression is of hunting little lizards onthe rocky top of an open knoll. They ran under the rocks, and most ofthem escaped; but occasionally I turned over a stone and caught one. Iwas frightened away from this knoll by snakes. They did not pursueme. They were merely basking on flat rocks in the sun. But such was myinherited fear of them that I fled as fast as if they had been after me.
Then I gnawed bitter bark from young trees. I remember vaguely theeating of many green nuts, with soft shells and milky kernels. And Iremember most distinctly suffering from a stomach-ache. It may have beencaused by the green nuts, and maybe by the lizards. I do not know. ButI do know that I was fortunate in not being devoured during the severalhours I was knotted up on the ground with the colic.