by Jack London
CHAPTER XVII
It was in the early fall of the following year that it happened. Afterhis failure to get the Swift One, Red-Eye had taken another wife; and,strange to relate, she was still alive. Stranger still, they had a babyseveral months old--Red-Eye's first child. His previous wives had neverlived long enough to bear him children. The year had gone well for allof us. The weather had been exceptionally mild and food plentiful. Iremember especially the turnips of that year. The nut crop was also veryheavy, and the wild plums were larger and sweeter than usual.
In short, it was a golden year. And then it happened. It was in theearly morning, and we were surprised in our caves. In the chill graylight we awoke from sleep, most of us, to encounter death. The SwiftOne and I were aroused by a pandemonium of screeching and gibbering. Ourcave was the highest of all on the cliff, and we crept to the mouth andpeered down. The open space was filled with the Fire People. Their criesand yells were added to the clamor, but they had order and plan, whilewe Folk had none. Each one of us fought and acted for himself, and noone of us knew the extent of the calamity that was befalling us.
By the time we got to stone-throwing, the Fire People had massed thickat the base of the cliff. Our first volley must have mashed some heads,for when they swerved back from the cliff three of their number wereleft upon the ground. These were struggling and floundering, and onewas trying to crawl away. But we fixed them. By this time we males wereroaring with rage, and we rained rocks upon the three men that weredown. Several of the Fire-Men returned to drag them into safety, but ourrocks drove the rescuers back.
The Fire People became enraged. Also, they became cautious. In spite oftheir angry yells, they kept at a distance and sent flights of arrowsagainst us. This put an end to the rock-throwing. By the time halfa dozen of us had been killed and a score injured, the rest of usretreated inside our caves. I was not out of range in my lofty cave, butthe distance was great enough to spoil effective shooting, and the FirePeople did not waste many arrows on me. Furthermore, I was curious.I wanted to see. While the Swift One remained well inside the cave,trembling with fear and making low wailing sounds because I would notcome in, I crouched at the entrance and watched.
The fighting had now become intermittent. It was a sort of deadlock. Wewere in the caves, and the question with the Fire People was how to getus out. They did not dare come in after us, and in general we would notexpose ourselves to their arrows. Occasionally, when one of them drew inclose to the base of the cliff, one or another of the Folk would smasha rock down. In return, he would be transfixed by half a dozen arrows.This ruse worked well for some time, but finally the Folk no longer wereinveigled into showing themselves. The deadlock was complete.
Behind the Fire People I could see the little wizened old hunterdirecting it all. They obeyed him, and went here and there at hiscommands. Some of them went into the forest and returned with loads ofdry wood, leaves, and grass. All the Fire People drew in closer. Whilemost of them stood by with bows and arrows, ready to shoot any of theFolk that exposed themselves, several of the Fire-Men heaped the drygrass and wood at the mouths of the lower tier of caves. Out of theseheaps they conjured the monster we feared--FIRE. At first, wisps ofsmoke arose and curled up the cliff. Then I could see the red-tonguedflames darting in and out through the wood like tiny snakes. The smokegrew thicker and thicker, at times shrouding the whole face of thecliff. But I was high up and it did not bother me much, though it stungmy eyes and I rubbed them with my knuckles.
Old Marrow-Bone was the first to be smoked out. A light fan of airdrifted the smoke away at the time so that I saw clearly. He broke outthrough the smoke, stepping on a burning coal and screaming withthe sudden hurt of it, and essayed to climb up the cliff. The arrowsshowered about him. He came to a pause on a ledge, clutching a knob ofrock for support, gasping and sneezing and shaking his head. He swayedback and forth. The feathered ends of a dozen arrows were sticking outof him. He was an old man, and he did not want to die. He swayed widerand wider, his knees giving under him, and as he swayed he wailed mostplaintively. His hand released its grip and he lurched outward to thefall. His old bones must have been sadly broken. He groaned and strovefeebly to rise, but a Fire-Man rushed in upon him and brained him with aclub.
And as it happened with Marrow-Bone, so it happened with many of theFolk. Unable to endure the smoke-suffocation, they rushed out to fallbeneath the arrows. Some of the women and children remained in the cavesto 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 secondtier of caves. It was while they were climbing up with their grass andwood, that Red-Eye, followed by his wife, with the baby holding to hertightly, made a successful flight up the cliff. The Fire-Men must haveconcluded that in the interval between the smoking-out operations wewould remain in our caves; so that they were unprepared, and theirarrows did not begin to fly till Red-Eye and his wife were well up thewall. When he reached the top, he turned about and glared down at them,roaring and beating his chest. They arched their arrows at him, andthough he was untouched he fled on.
I watched a third tier smoked out, and a fourth. A few of the Folkescaped up the cliff, but most of them were shot off the face of it asthey strove to climb. I remember Long-Lip. He got as far as my ledge,crying piteously, an arrow clear through his chest, the feathered shaftsticking out behind, the bone head sticking out before, shot through theback as he climbed. He sank down on my ledge bleeding profusely at themouth.
It was about this time that the upper tiers seemed to empty themselvesspontaneously. Nearly all the Folk not yet smoked out stampeded up thecliff at the same time. This was the saving of many. The Fire Peoplecould not shoot arrows fast enough. They filled the air with arrows, andscores of the stricken Folk came tumbling down; but still there were afew who reached the top and got away.
The impulse of flight was now stronger in me than curiosity. The arrowshad ceased flying. The last of the Folk seemed gone, though there mayhave been a few still hiding in the upper caves. The Swift One and Istarted to make a scramble for the cliff-top. At sight of us a greatcry went up from the Fire People. This was not caused by me, but by theSwift One. They were chattering excitedly and pointing her out to oneanother. They did not try to shoot her. Not an arrow was discharged.They began calling softly and coaxingly. I stopped and looked down. Shewas afraid, and whimpered and urged me on. So we went up over the topand plunged into the trees.
This event has often caused me to wonder and speculate. If she werereally of their kind, she must have been lost from them at a time whenshe was too young to remember, else would she not have been afraid ofthem. On the other hand, it may well have been that while she was theirkind she had never been lost from them; that she had been born in thewild 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 themthan did I.
We lived through a day of terror. Most of the survivors fled toward theblueberry swamp and took refuge in the forest in that neighborhood. Andall day hunting parties of the Fire People ranged the forest, killing uswherever they found us. It must have been a deliberately executed plan.Increasing beyond the limits of their own territory, they had decided onmaking a conquest of ours. Sorry the conquest! We had no chance againstthem. 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 lastrefuge, only to be surrounded and killed, family by family. We saw muchof this during that day, and besides, I wanted to see. The Swift One andI never remained long in one tree, and so escaped being surrounded. Butthere seemed no place to go. The Fire-Men were everywhere, bent on theirtask of extermination. Every way we turned we encountered them, andbecause of this we saw much of their handiw
ork.
I did not see what became of my mother, but I did see the Chatterer shotdown out of the old home-tree. And I am afraid that at the sight I did abit of joyous teetering. Before I leave this portion of my narrative, Imust tell of Red-Eye. He was caught with his wife in a tree down by theblueberry swamp. The Swift One and I stopped long enough in our flightto 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 arrowsinto it. They always picked up their arrows when they fell back toearth. I could not see Red-Eye, but I could hear him howling fromsomewhere in the tree.
After a short interval his howling grew muffled. He must have crawledinto a hollow in the trunk. But his wife did not win this shelter. Anarrow brought her to the ground. She was severely hurt, for she madeno 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 theFire-Men. They gathered about her and laughed at her--even as Lop-Earand I had laughed at the old Tree-Man. And even as we had poked him withtwigs and sticks, so did the Fire-Men with Red-Eye's wife. They pokedher with the ends of their bows, and prodded her in the ribs. But shewas poor fun. She would not fight. Nor, for that matter, would she getangry. She continued to crouch over her baby and to plead. One of theFire-Men stepped close to her. In his hand was a club. She saw andunderstood, but she made only the pleading sounds until the blow fell.
Red-Eye, in the hollow of the trunk, was safe from their arrows. Theystood together and debated for a while, then one of them climbed intothe tree. What happened up there I could not tell, but I heard him yelland saw the excitement of those that remained beneath. After severalminutes his body crashed down to the ground. He did not move. Theylooked at him and raised his head, but it fell back limply when they letgo. Red-Eye had accounted for himself.
They were very angry. There was an opening into the trunk close to theground. They gathered wood and grass and built a fire. The Swift Oneand 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 quickenough. Red-Eye's flying body landed in the midst of them.
He was in a frightful rage, smashing about with his long arms right andleft. He pulled the face off one of them, literally pulled it off withthose gnarly fingers of his and those tremendous muscles. He bit anotherthrough the neck. The Fire-Men fell back with wild fierce yells, thenrushed upon him. He managed to get hold of a club and began crushingheads like eggshells. He was too much for them, and they were compelledto fall back again. This was his chance, and he turned his back uponthem and ran for it, still howling wrathfully. A few arrows sped afterhim, but he plunged into a thicket and was gone.
The Swift One and I crept quietly away, only to run foul of anotherparty of Fire-Men. They chased us into the blueberry swamp, but we knewthe tree-paths across the farther morasses where they could not followon the ground, and so we escaped. We came out on the other side into anarrow strip of forest that separated the blueberry swamp from the greatswamp that extended westward. Here we met Lop-Ear. How he had escapedI cannot imagine, unless he had not slept the preceding night at thecaves.
Here, in the strip of forest, we might have built tree-sheltersand settled down; but the Fire People were performing their work ofextermination thoroughly. In the afternoon, Hair-Face and his wife fledout from among the trees to the east, passed us, and were gone. Theyfled silently and swiftly, with alarm in their faces. In the directionfrom 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 foundtheir way across the swamp.
The Swift One, Lop-Ear, and I followed on the heels of Hair-Face and hiswife. When we came to the edge of the great swamp, we stopped. We didnot know its paths. It was outside our territory, and it had been alwaysavoided by the Folk. None had ever gone into it--at least, to return.In our minds it represented mystery and fear, the terrible unknown. AsI say, we stopped at the edge of it. We were afraid. The cries of theFire-Men were drawing nearer. We looked at one another. Hair-Faceran out on the quaking morass and gained the firmer footing of agrass-hummock a dozen yards away. 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 passedbeyond Hair-Face a hundred yards and gained a much larger hummock. Bythe time Lop-Ear and I had caught up with her, the Fire-Men appearedamong the trees. Hair-Face's wife, driven by them into panic terror,dashed after us. But she ran blindly, without caution, and broke throughthe crust. We turned and watched, and saw them shoot her with arrows asshe sank down in the mud. The arrows began falling about us. Hair-Facehad 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 Istrive to remember, I have a riot of unrelated impressions and a loss oftime-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 invariablytake the form of nightmare. For untold ages, oppressed by protean fear,I am aware of wandering, endlessly wandering, through a dank and soggywilderness, where poisonous snakes struck at us, and animals roaredaround us, and the mud quaked under us and sucked at our heels.
I know that we were turned from our course countless times by streamsand lakes and slimy seas. Then there were storms and risings of thewater over great areas of the low-lying lands; and there were periods ofhunger and misery when we were kept prisoners in the trees for days anddays by these transient floods.
Very strong upon me is one picture. Large trees are about us, and fromtheir branches hang gray filaments of moss, while great creepers, likemonstrous serpents, curl around the trunks and writhe in tangles throughthe 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 ofall this are a dozen of us. We are lean and wretched, and our bones showthrough our tight-stretched skins. We do not sing and chatter and laugh.We play no pranks. For once our volatile and exuberant spirits arehopelessly subdued. We make plaintive, querulous noises, look at oneanother, and cluster close together. It is like the meeting of thehandful 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 outwhere a low range of hills ran down to the bank of the river. It was ourriver emerging like ourselves from the great swamp. On the south bank,where the river had broken its way through the hills, we found manysand-stone caves. Beyond, toward the west, the ocean boomed on the barthat lay across the river's mouth. And here, in the caves, we settleddown in our abiding-place by the sea.
There were not many of us. From time to time, as the days went by, moreof the Folk appeared. They dragged themselves from the swamp singly, andin 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 hadsurvived the frightful journey.
I shall not tell in detail of the years we lived by the sea. It wasnot a happy abiding-place. The air was raw and chill, and we sufferedcontinually from coughing and colds. We could not survive in such anenvironment. True, we had children; but they had little hold on lifeand died early, while we died faster than new ones were born. Our numbersteadily diminished.
Then the radical change in our diet was not good for us. We got fewvegetables and fruits, and became fish-eaters. There were mussels andabalones and clams and rock-oysters, and great ocean-crabs that werethrown upon the beaches in stormy weather. Also, we found several kindsof seaweed that were good to eat. But the ch
ange in diet caused usstomach troubles, and none of us ever waxed fat. We were all lean anddyspeptic-looking. It was in getting the big abalones that Lop-Ear waslost. One of them closed upon his fingers at low-tide, and then theflood-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 theclosing shell of an abalone.
The Swift One and I managed to bring up one child, a boy--at least wemanaged to bring him along for several years. But I am quite confidenthe could never have survived that terrible climate. And then, one day,the Fire People appeared again. They had come down the river, not on acatamaran, but in a rude dug-out. There were three of them that paddledin it, and one of them was the little wizened old hunter. They landed onour 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. Shewhimpered and cried and was restless all that night. In the morning shetook 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 (allthat was left of the horde) that remained behind in the caves. There wasno 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 thesea. The Folk were not constituted for the coast-dwelling life.
We travelled south, for days skirting the great swamp but neverventuring into it. Once we broke back to the westward, crossing a rangeof 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 strongwinds that seemed never to cease from blowing. We turned back across themountains, travelling east and south, until we came in touch with thegreat swamp again.
Soon we gained the southern extremity of the swamp, and we continued ourcourse south and east. It was a pleasant land. The air was warm, and wewere again in the forest. Later on we crossed a low-lying range of hillsand found ourselves in an even better forest country. The farther wepenetrated from the coast the warmer we found it, and we went on and onuntil 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 fromthe horde. This river we crossed on logs, landing on side at the largebluff. High up on the bluff we found our new home most difficult ofaccess and quite hidden from any eye beneath.
There is little more of my tale to tell. Here the Swift One and I livedand reared our family. And here my memories end. We never made anothermigration. I never dream beyond our high, inaccessible cave. And heremust 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 ofthe life of Big-Tooth, rather, who is my other-self, and not my realself, but who is so real to me that often I am unable to tell what age Iam living in.
I often wonder about this line of descent. I, the modern, amincontestably a man; yet I, Big-Tooth, the primitive, am not a man.Somewhere, and by straight line of descent, these two parties to my dualpersonality were connected. Were the Folk, before their destruction,in the process of becoming men? And did I and mine carry through thisprocess? On the other hand, may not some descendant of mine have gonein to the Fire People and become one of them? I do not know. There is noway of learning. One thing only is certain, and that is that Big-Toothdid stamp into the cerebral constitution of one of his progeny all theimpressions of his life, and stamped them in so indelibly that the hostsof intervening generations have failed to obliterate them.
There is one other thing of which I must speak before I close. It is adream that I dream often, and in point of time the real event must haveoccurred during the period of my living in the high, inaccessible cave.I remember that I wandered far in the forest toward the east. There Icame upon a tribe of Tree People. I crouched in a thicket and watchedthem at play. They were holding a laughing council, jumping up and downand screeching rude choruses.
Suddenly they hushed their noise and ceased their capering. They shrankdown in fear, and quested anxiously about with their eyes for a way ofretreat. 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 oneof them. At his heels, on stringy bended legs, supporting herself withknuckles to the ground on either side, walked an old female of the TreePeople, his latest wife. He sat down in the midst of the circle. I cansee him now, as I write this, scowling, his eyes inflamed, as he peersabout him at the circle of the Tree People. And as he peers he crooksone monstrous leg and with his gnarly toes scratches himself on thestomach. He is Red-Eye, the atavism.