Jack London. Before Adam
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(1907)
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MAP
CHAPTER I
"These are our ancestors, and their history is our
history.
Remember that as surely as we one day
swung down out of the trees and walked upright,
just as surely, on a far earlier day,
did we crawl up out of the sea
and achieve our first adventure on land."
Pictures! Pictures! Pictures! Often, before I learned, did
I wonder whence came the multitudes of pictures that thronged
my dreams; for they were pictures the like of which I had never
seen in real wake-a-day life. They tormented my childhood,
making of my dreams a procession of nightmares and a little
later convincing me that I was different from my kind, a
creature unnatural and accursed.
In my days only did I attain any measure of happiness. My
nights marked the reign of fear--and such fear! I make bold to
state that no man of all the men who walk the earth with me
ever suffer fear of like kind and degree. For my fear is the
fear of long ago, the fear that was rampant in the Younger
World, and in the youth of the Younger World. In short, the
fear that reigned supreme in that period known as the
Mid-Pleistocene.
What do I mean? I see explanation is necessary before I
can tell you of the substance of my dreams. Otherwise, little
could you know of the meaning of the things I know so well. As
I write this, all the beings and happenings of that other world
rise up before me in vast phantasmagoria, and I know that to
you they would be rhymeless and reasonless.
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What to you the friendship of Lop-Ear, the warm lure of
the Swift One, the lust and the atavism of Red-Eye? A screaming
incoherence and no more. And a screaming incoherence, likewise,
the doings of the Fire People and the Tree People, and the
gibbering councils of the horde. For you know not the peace of
the cool caves in the cliffs, the circus of the drinking-places
at the end of the day. You have never felt the bite of the
morning wind in the tree-tops, nor is the taste of young bark
sweet in your mouth.
It would be better, I dare say, for you to make your
approach, as I made mine, through my childhood. As a boy I was
very like other boys--in my waking hours. It was in my sleep
that I was different. From my earliest recollection my sleep
was a period of terror. Rarely were my dreams tinctured with
happiness. As a rule, they were stuffed with fear--and with a
fear so strange and alien that it had no ponderable quality. No
fear that I experienced in my waking life resembled the fear
that possessed me in my sleep. It was of a quality and kind
that transcended all my experiences.
For instance, I was a city boy, a city child, rather, to
whom the country was an unexplored domain. Yet I never dreamed
of cities; nor did a house ever occur in any of my dreams. Nor,
for that matter, did any of my human kind ever break through
the wall of my sleep. I, who had seen trees only in parks and
illustrated books, wandered in my sleep through interminable
forests. And further, these dream trees were not a mere blur on
my vision. They were sharp and distinct. I was on terms of
practised intimacy with them. I saw every branch and twig; I
saw and knew every different leaf.
Well do I remember the first time in my waking life that I
saw an oak tree. As I looked at the leaves and branches and
gnarls, it came to me with distressing vividness that I had
seen that same kind of tree many and countless times n my
sleep. So I was not surprised, still later on in my life, to
recognize instantly, the first time I saw them, trees such as
the spruce, the yew, the birch, and the laurel. I had seen them
all before, and was seeing them even then, every night, in my
sleep.
This, as you have already discerned, violates the first
law of dreaming, namely, that in one's dreams one sees only
what he has seen in his waking life, or combinations of the
things he has seen in his waking life. But all my dreams
violated this law. In my dreams I never saw ANYTHING of which I
had knowledge in my waking life. My dream life and my waking
life were lives apart, with not one thing in common save
myself. I was the connecting link that somehow lived both
lives.
Early in my childhood I learned that nuts came from the
grocer, berries from the fruit man; but before ever that
knowledge was mine, in my dreams I picked nuts from trees, or
gathered them and ate them from the ground underneath trees,
and in the same way I ate berries from vines and bushes. This
was beyond any experience of mine.
I shall never forget the first time I saw blueberries
served on the table. I had never seen blueberries before, and
yet, at the sight of them, there leaped up in my mind memories
of dreams wherein I had wandered through swampy land eating my
fill of them. My mother set before me a dish of the berries. I
filled my spoon, but before I raised it to my mouth I knew just
how they would taste. Nor was I disappointed. It was the same
tang that I had tasted a thousand times in my sleep.
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Snakes? Long before I had heard of the existence of
snakes, I was tormented by them in my sleep. They lurked for me
in the forest glades; leaped up, striking, under my feet;
squirmed off through the dry grass or across naked patches of
rock; or pursued me into the tree-tops, encircling the trunks
with their great shining bodies, driving me higher and higher
or farther and farther out on swaying and crackling branches,
the ground a dizzy distance beneath me. Snakes!--with their
forked tongues, their beady eyes and glittering scales, their
hissing and their rattling--did I not already know them far too
well on that day of my first circus when I saw the
snake-charmer lift them up? They were old friends of mine,
enemies rather, that peopled my nights with fear.
Ah, those endless forests, and their horror-haunted gloom!
For what eternities have I wandered through them, a timid,
hunted creature, starting at the least sound, frightened of my
own shadow, keyed-up, ever alert and vigilant, ready on the
instant to dash away in mad flight for my life. For I was the
prey of all manner of fierce life that dwelt in the forest, and
it was in ecstasies of fear that I fled before the hunting
monsters.
When I was five years old I went to my first circus. I
came home from it sick--but not from peanuts and pink lemonade.
Let me tell you. As we entered the animal tent, a hoarse
roaring shook the air. I tore my hand loose from my father's
and dashed wildly back through the entrance. I collided with
people, fell down; and all the time I was screaming with
terror. My father caught me and soothed me. He pointed to the
crowd of people, all careless of the roaring, and cheered me
with assurances of safety.
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Nevertheless, it was in fear and trembling, and with much
encouragement on his part, that I at last approached the lion's
cage. Ah, I knew him on the instant. The beast! The terrible
one! And on my inner vision flashed the memories of my
dreams,--the midday sun shining on tall grass, the wild bull
grazing quietly, the sudden parting of the grass before the
swift rush of the tawny one, his leap to the bull's back, the
crashing and the bellowing, and the crunch crunch of bones; or
again, the cool quiet of the water-hole, the wild horse up to
his knees and drinking softly, and then the tawny one--always
the tawny one!-- the leap, the screaming and the splashing of
the horse, and the crunch crunch of bones; and yet again, the
sombre twilight and the sad silence of the end of day, and then
the great full-throated roar, sudden, like a trump of doom, and
swift upon it the insane shrieking and chattering among the
trees, and I, too, am trembling with fear and am one of the
many shrieking and chattering among the trees.
At the sight of him, helpless, within the bars of his
cage, I became enraged. I gritted my teeth at him, danced up
and down, screaming an incoherent mockery and making antic
faces. He responded, rushing against the bars and roaring back
at me his impotent wrath. Ah, he knew me, too, and the sounds I
made were the sounds of old time and intelligible to him.
My parents were frightened. "The child is ill," said my
mother. "He is hysterical," said my father. I never told them,
and they never knew. Already had I developed reticence
concerning this quality of mine, this semi-disassociation of
personality as I think I am justified in calling it.
I saw the snake-charmer, and no more of the circus did I
see that night. I was taken home, nervous and overwrought, sick
with the invasion of my real life by that other life of my
dreams.
I have mentioned my reticence. Only once did I confide the
strangeness of it all to another. He was a boy--my chum; and we
were eight years old. From my dreams I reconstructed for him
pictures of that vanished world in which I do believe I once
lived. I told him of the terrors of that early time, of Lop-Ear
and the pranks we played, of the gibbering councils, and of the
Fire People and their squatting places.
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He laughed at me, and jeered, and told me tales of ghosts
and of the dead that walk at night. But mostly did he laugh at
my feeble fancy. I told him more, and he laughed the harder. I
swore in all earnestness that these things were so, and he
began to look upon me queerly. Also, he gave amazing garblings
of my tales to our playmates, until all began to look upon me
queerly.
It was a bitter experience, but I learned my lesson. I was
different from my kind. I was abnormal with something they
could not understand, and the telling of which would cause only
misunderstanding. When the stories of ghosts and goblins went
around, I kept quiet. I smiled grimly to myself. I thought of
my nights of fear, and knew that mine were the real
things--real as life itself, not attenuated vapors and surmised
shadows.
For me no terrors resided in the thought of bugaboos and
wicked ogres. The fall through leafy branches and the dizzy
heights; the snakes that struck at me as I dodged and leaped
away in chattering flight; the wild dogs that hunted me across
the open spaces to the timber--these were terrors concrete and
actual, happenings and not imaginings, things of the living
flesh and of sweat and blood. Ogres and bugaboos and I had been
happy bed-fellows, compared with these terrors that made their
bed with me throughout my childhood, and that still bed with
me, now, as I write this, full of years.
CHAPTER II
I have said that in my dreams I never saw a human being.
Of this fact I became aware very early, and felt poignantly the
lack of my own kind. As a very little child, even, I had a
feeling, in the midst of the horror of my dreaming, that if I
could find but one man, only one human, I should be saved from
my dreaming, that I should be surrounded no more by haunting
terrors. This thought obsessed me every night of my life for
years--if only I could find that one human and be saved!
I must iterate that I had this thought in the midst of my
dreaming, and I take it as an evidence of the merging of my two
personalities, as evidence of a point of contact between the
two disassociated parts of me. My dream personality lived in
the long ago, before ever man, as we know him, came to be; and
my other and wake-a-day personality projected itself, to the
extent of the knowledge of man's existence, into the substance
of my dreams.
Perhaps the psychologists of the book will find fault with
my way of using the phrase, "disassociation of personality." I
know their use of it, yet am compelled to use it in my own way
in default of a better phrase. I take shelter behind the
inadequacy of the English language. And now to the explanation
of my use, or misuse, of the phrase.
It was not till I was a young man, at college, that I got
any clew to the significance of my dreams, and to the cause of
them. Up to that time they had been meaningless and without
apparent causation. But at college I discovered evolution and
psychology, and learned the explanation of various strange
mental states and experiences. For instance, there was the
falling-through-space dream--the commonest dream experience,
one practically known, by first-hand experience, to all men.
This, my professor told me, was a racial memory. It dated
back to our remote ancestors who lived in trees. With them,
being tree-dwellers, the liability of falling was an
ever-present menace. Many lost their lives that way; all of
them experienced terrible falls, saving themselves by clutching
branches as they fell toward the ground.
Now a terrible fall, averted in such fashion, was
productive of shock. Such shock was productive of molecular
changes in the cerebral cells. These molecular changes were
transmitted to the cerebral cells of progeny, became, in short,
racial memories. Thus, when you and I, asleep or dozing off to
sleep, fall through space and awake to sickening consciousness
just before we strike, we are merely remembering what happened
to our arboreal ancestors, and which has been stamped by
cerebral changes into the heredity of the race.
There is nothing strange in this, any more than there is
anything strange in an instinct. An instinct is merely a habit
that is stamped into the stuff of our heredity, that is all. It
will be noted, in passing, that in this falling dream which is
so familiar to you and me and all of us, we never strike
bottom. To strike bottom would be destruction. Those of our
arboreal ancestors who struck bottom died forthwith. True, the
shock of their fall was communicated to the cerebral cells, but
they died immediately, before they could have progeny. You and
I are descended from those that did not strike bottom; that is
why you and I, in our dreams, never strike bottom.
And now we come to disassociation of personality. We never
have this sense of falling when we are wide awake. Our
wake-a-day personality has no experience of it. Then--and here
the argument is irresistible--it must be another and distinct
personality that falls when we are asleep, and that has had
experience of such falling--that has, in short, a memory of
past-day race experiences, just as our wake-a-day personality
has a memory of our wake-a-day experiences.
It was at this stage in my reasoning that I began to see
the light. And quickly the light burst upon me with dazzling
brightness, illuminating and explaining all that had been weird
and uncanny and unnaturally impossible in my dream experiences.
In my sleep it was not my wake-a-day personality that took
charge of me; it was another and distinct personality,
possessing a new and totally different fund of experiences,
and, to the point of my dreaming, possessing memories of those
totally different experiences.
What was this personality? When had it itself lived a
wake-a-day life on this planet in order to collect this fund of
strange experiences? These were questions that my dreams
themselves answered. He lived in the long ago, when the world
was young, in that period that we call the Mid-Pleistocene. He
fell from the trees but did not strike bottom. He gibbered with
fear at the roaring of the lions. He was pursued by beasts of
prey, struck at by deadly snakes. He chattered with his kind in
council, and he received rough usage at the hands of the Fire
People in the day that he fled before them.
But, I hear you objecting, why is it that these racial
memories are not ours as well, seeing that we have a vague
other-personality that falls through space while we sleep?
And I may answer with another question. Why is a
two-headed calf? And my own answer to this is that it is a
freak. And so I answer your question. I have this
other-personality and these complete racial memories because I
am a freak.
But let me be more explicit.
The commonest race memory we have is the
falling-through-space dream. This other-personality is very
vague. About the only memory it has is that of falling. But
many of us have sharper, more distinct other-personalities.
Many of us have the flying dream, the pursuing-monster dream,
color dreams, suffocation dreams, and the reptile and vermin
dreams. In short, while this other-personality is vestigial in
all of us, in some of us it is almost obliterated, while in
others of us it is more pronounced. Some of us have stronger
and completer race memories than others.
It is all a question of varying degree of possession of
the other-personality. In myself, the degree of possession is
enormous. My other-personality is almost equal in power with my
own personality. And in this matter I am, as I said, a freak--a
freak of heredity.
I do believe that it is the possession of this
other-personality--but not so strong a one as mine--that has in
some few others given rise to belief in personal reincarnation
experiences. It is very plausible to such people, a most
convincing hypothesis. When they have visions of scenes they
have never seen in the flesh, memories of acts and events
dating back in time, the simplest explanation is that they have
lived before.
But they make the mistake of ignoring their own duality.
They do not recognize their other-personality. They think it is
their own personality, that they have only one personality; and
from such a premise they can conclude only that they have lived
previous lives.
But they are wrong. It is not reincarnation. I have
visions of myself roaming through the forests of the Younger
World; and yet it is not myself that I see but one that is only
remotely a part of me, as my father and my grandfather are
parts of me less remote. This other-self of mine is an
ancestor, a progenitor of my progenitors in the early line of
my race, himself the progeny of a line that long before his
time developed fingers and toes and climbed up into the trees.
I must again, at the risk of boring, repeat that I am, in
this one thing, to be considered a freak. Not alone do I
possess racial memory to an enormous extent, but I possess the
memories of one particular and far-removed progenitor. And yet,
while this is most unusual, there is nothing over-remarkable
about it.
Follow my reasoning. An instinct is a racial memory. Very
good. Then you and I and all of us receive these memories from
our fathers and mothers, as they received them from their
fathers and mothers. Therefore there must be a medium whereby
these memories are transmitted from generation to generation.
This medium is what Weismann terms the "germplasm." It carries
the memories of the whole evolution of the race. These memories
are dim and confused, and many of them are lost. But some
strains of germplasm carry an excessive freightage of
memories--are, to be scientific, more atavistic than other
strains; and such a strain is mine. I am a freak of heredity,
an atavistic nightmare--call me what you will; but here I am,
real and alive, eating three hearty meals a day, and what are
you going to do about it?
And now, before I take up my tale, I want to anticipate
the doubting Thomases of psychology, who are prone to scoff,
and who would otherwise surely say that the coherence of my
dreams is due to overstudy and the subconscious projection of
my knowledge of evolution into my dreams. In the first place, I
have never been a zealous student. I graduated last of my
class. I cared more for athletics, and--there is no reason I
should not confess it--more for billiards.
Further, I had no knowledge of evolution until I was at
college, whereas in my childhood
and youth I had already lived in my dreams all the
details of that other, long-ago life. I
will say, however, that these details were mixed and
incoherent until I came to know the
science of evolution. Evolution was the key. It gave the
explanation, gave sanity to the
pranks of this atavistic brain of mine that, modern and
normal, harked back to a past
so remote as to be contemporaneous with the raw
beginnings of mankind.
For in this past I know of, man, as we to-day know him,
did not exist. It was in the period of his becoming that I must
have lived and had my being.
CHAPTER III
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The commonest dream of my early childhood was something
like this: It seemed that I was very small and that I lay
curled up in a sort of nest of twigs and boughs. Sometimes I
was lying on my back. In this position it seemed that I spent
many hours, watching the play of sunlight on the foliage and
the stirring of the leaves by the wind. Often the nest itself
moved back and forth when the wind was strong.
But always, while so lying in the nest, I was mastered as
of tremendous space beneath me. I never saw it, I never peered
over the edge of the nest to see; but I KNEW and feared that
space that lurked just beneath me and that ever threatened me
like a maw of some all-devouring monster.
This dream, in which I was quiescent and which was more
like a condition than an experience of action, I dreamed very
often in my early childhood. But suddenly, there would rush
into the very midst of it strange forms and ferocious
happenings, the thunder and crashing of storm, or unfamiliar
landscapes such as in my wake-a-day life I had never seen. The
result was confusion and nightmare. I could comprehend nothing
of it. There was no logic of sequence.
You see, I did not dream consecutively. One moment I was a
wee babe of the Younger World lying in my tree nest; the next
moment I was a grown man of the Younger World locked in combat
with the hideous Red-Eye; and the next moment I was creeping
carefully down to the water-hole in the heat of the day.
Events, years apart in their occurrence in the Younger World,
occurred with me within the space of several minutes, or
seconds.
It was all a jumble, but this jumble I shall not inflict
upon you. It was not until I was a young man and had dreamed
many thousand times, that everything straightened out and
became clear and plain. Then it was that I got the clew of
time, and was able to piece together events and actions in
their proper order. Thus was I able to reconstruct the vanished
Younger World as it was at the time I lived in it--or at the
time my other-self lived in it. The distinction does not
matter; for I, too, the modern man, have gone back and lived
that early life in the company of my other-self.
For your convenience, since this is to be no sociological
screed, I shall frame together the different events into a
comprehensive story. For there is a certain thread of
continuity and happening that runs through all the dreams.
There is my friendship with Lop-Ear, for instance. Also, there
is the enmity of Red-Eye, and the love of the Swift One. Taking
it all in all, a fairly coherent and interesting story I am
sure you will agree.
I do not remember much of my mother. Possibly the earliest
recollection I have of her--and certainly the sharpest--is the
following: It seemed I was lying on the ground. I was somewhat
older than during the nest days, but still helpless. I rolled
about in the dry leaves, playing with them and making crooning,
rasping noises in my throat. The sun shone warmly and I was
happy, and comfortable. I was in a little open space. Around
me, on all sides, were bushes and fern-like growths, and
overhead and all about were the trunks and branches of forest
trees.
Suddenly I heard a sound. I sat upright and listened. I
made no movement. The little noises died down in my throat, and
I sat as one petrified. The sound drew closer. It was like the
grunt of a pig. Then I began to hear the sounds caused by the
moving of a body through the brush. Next I saw the ferns
agitated by the passage of the body. Then the ferns parted, and
I saw gleaming eyes, a long snout, and white tusks.
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It was a wild boar. He peered at me curiously. He grunted
once or twice and shifted his weight from one foreleg to the
other, at the same time moving his head from side to side and
swaying the ferns. Still I sat as one petrified, my eyes
unblinking as I stared at him, fear eating at my heart.
It seemed that this movelessness and silence on my part
was what was expected of me. I was not to cry out in the face
of fear. It was a dictate of instinct. And so I sat there and
waited for I knew not what. The boar thrust the ferns aside and
stepped into the open. The curiosity went out of his eyes, and
they gleamed cruelly. He tossed his head at me threateningly
and advanced a step. This he did again, and yet again.
Then I screamed...or shrieked--I cannot describe it, but
it was a shrill and terrible cry. And it seems that it, too, at
this stage of the proceedings, was the thing expected of me.
From not far away came an answering cry. My sounds seemed
momentarily to disconcert the boar, and while he halted and
shifted his weight with indecision, an apparition burst upon
us.
She was like a large orangutan, my mother, or like a
chimpanzee, and yet, in sharp and definite ways, quite
different. She was heavier of build than they, and had less
hair. Her arms were not so long, and her legs were stouter. She
wore no clothes--only her natural hair. And I can tell you she
was a fury when she was excited.
And like a fury she dashed upon the scene. She was
gritting her teeth, making frightful grimaces, snarling,
uttering sharp and continuous cries that sounded like "kh-ah!
kh-ah!" So sudden and formidable was her appearance that the
boar involuntarily bunched himself together on the defensive
and bristled as she swerved toward him. Then she swerved toward
me. She had quite taken the breath out of him. I knew just what
to do in that moment of time she had gained. I leaped to meet
her, catching her about the waist and holding on hand and
foot--yes, by my feet; I could hold on by them as readily as by
my hands. I could feel in my tense grip the pull of the hair as
her skin and her muscles moved beneath with her efforts.
As I say, I leaped to meet her, and on the instant she
leaped straight up into the air, catching an overhanging branch
with her hands. The next instant, with clashing tusks, the boar
drove past underneath. He had recovered from his surprise and
sprung forward, emitting a squeal that was almost a trumpeting.
At any rate it was a call, for it was followed by the rushing
of bodies through the ferns and brush from all directions.
From every side wild hogs dashed into the open space--a
score of them. But my mother swung over the top of a thick
limb, a dozen feet from the ground, and, still holding on to
her, we perched there in safety. She was very excited. She
chattered and screamed, and scolded down at the bristling,
tooth-gnashing circle that had gathered beneath. I, too,
trembling, peered down at the angry beasts and did my best to
imitate my mother's cries.
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From the distance came similar cries, only pitched deeper,
into a sort of roaring bass. These grew momentarily louder, and
soon I saw him approaching, my father--at least, by all the
evidence of the times, I am driven to conclude that he was my
father.
He was not an extremely prepossessing father, as fathers
go. He seemed half man, and half ape, and yet not ape, and not
yet man. I fail to describe him. There is nothing like him
to-day on the earth, under the earth, nor in the earth. He was
a large man in his day, and he must have weighed all of a
hundred and thirty pounds. His face was broad and flat, and the
eyebrows over-hung the eyes. The eyes themselves were small,
deep-set, and close together. He had practically no nose at
all. It was squat and broad, apparently with-out any bridge,
while the nostrils were like two holes in the face, opening
outward instead of down.
The forehead slanted back from the eyes, and the hair
began right at the eyes and ran up over the head. The head
itself was preposterously small and was supported on an equally
preposterous, thick, short neck.
There was an elemental economy about his body--as was
there about all our bodies. The chest was deep, it is true,
cavernously deep; but there were no full-swelling muscles, no
wide-spreading shoulders, no clean-limbed straightness, no
generous symmetry of outline. It represented strength, that
body of my father's, strength without beauty; ferocious,
primordial strength, made to clutch and gripe and rend and
destroy.
His hips were thin; and the legs, lean and hairy, were
crooked and stringy-muscled. In fact, my father's legs were
more like arms. They were twisted and gnarly, and with scarcely
the semblance of the full meaty calf such as graces your leg
and mine. I remember he could not walk on the flat of his foot.
This was because it was a prehensile foot, more like a hand
than a foot. The great toe, instead of being in line with the
other toes, opposed them, like a thumb, and its opposition to
the other toes was what enabled him to get a grip with his
foot. This was why he could not walk on the flat of his foot.
But his appearance was no more unusual than the manner of
his coming, there to my mother and me as we perched above the
angry wild pigs. He came through the trees, leaping from limb
to limb and from tree to tree; and he came swiftly. I can see
him now, in my wake-a-day life, as I write this, swinging along
through the trees, a four-handed, hairy creature, howling with
rage, pausing now and again to beat his chest with his clenched
fist, leaping ten-and-fifteen-foot gaps, catching a branch with
one hand and swinging on across another gap to catch with his
other hand and go on, never hesitating, never at a loss as to
how to proceed on his arboreal way.
And as I watched him I felt in my own being, in my very
muscles themselves, the surge and thrill of desire to go
leaping from bough to bough; and I felt also the guarantee of
the latent power in that being and in those muscles of mine.
And why not? Little boys watch their fathers swing axes and
fell trees, and feel in themselves that some day they, too,
will swing axes and fell trees. And so with me. The life that
was in me was constituted to do what my father did, and it
whispered to me secretly and ambitiously of aerial paths and
forest flights.
At last my father joined us. He was extremely angry. I
remember the out-thrust of his protruding underlip as he glared
down at the wild pigs. He snarled something like a dog, and I
remember that his eye-teeth were large, like fangs, and that
they impressed me tremendously.
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His conduct served only the more to infuriate the pigs. He
broke off twigs and small branches and flung them down upon our
enemies. He even hung by one hand, tantalizingly just beyond
reach, and mocked them as they gnashed their tusks with
impotent rage. Not content with this, he broke off a stout
branch, and, holding on with one hand and foot, jabbed the
infuriated beasts in the sides and whacked them across their
noses. Needless to state, my mother and I enjoyed the sport.
But one tires of all good things, and in the end, my
father, chuckling maliciously the while, led the way across the
trees. Now it was that my ambitions ebbed away, and I became
timid, holding tightly to my mother as she climbed and swung
through space. I remember when the branch broke with her
weight. She had made a wide leap, and with the snap of the wood
I was overwhelmed with the sickening consciousness of falling
through space, the pair of us. The forest and the sunshine on
the rustling leaves vanished from my eyes. I had a fading
glimpse of my father abruptly arresting his progress to look,
and then all was blackness.
The next moment I was awake, in my sheeted bed, sweating,
trembling, nauseated. The window was up, and a cool air was
blowing through the room. The night-lamp was burning calmly.
And because of this I take it that the wild pigs did not get
us, that we never fetched bottom; else I should not be here
now, a thousand centuries after, to remember the event.
And now put yourself in my place for a moment. Walk with
me a bit in my tender childhood, bed with me a night and
imagine yourself dreaming such incomprehensible horrors.
Remember I was an inexperienced child. I had never seen a wild
boar in my life. For that matter I had never seen a
domesticated pig. The nearest approach to one that I had seen
was breakfast bacon sizzling in its fat. And yet here, real as
life, wild boars dashed through my dreams, and I, with
fantastic parents, swung through the lofty tree-spaces.
Do you wonder that I was frightened and oppressed by my
nightmare-ridden nights? I was accursed. And, worst of all, I
was afraid to tell. I do not know why, except that I had a
feeling of guilt, though I knew no better of what I was guilty.
So it was, through long years, that I suffered in silence,
until I came to man's estate and learned the why and wherefore
of my dreams.
CHAPTER IV
There is one puzzling thing about these prehistoric
memories of mine. It is the vagueness of the time element. I lo
not always know the order of events;--or can I tell, between
some events, whether one, two, or four or five years have
elapsed. I can only roughly tell the passage of time by judging
the changes in the appearance and pursuits of my fellows.
Also, I can apply the logic of events to the various
happenings. For instance, there is no doubt whatever that my
mother and I were treed by the wild pigs and fled and fell in
the days before I made the acquaintance of Lop-Ear, who became
what I may call my boyhood chum. And it is just as conclusive
that between these two periods I must have left my mother.
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I have no memory of my father than the one I have given.
Never, in the years that followed, did he reappear. And from my
knowledge of the times, the only explanation possible lies in
that he perished shortly after the adventure with the wild
pigs. That it must have been an untimely end, there is no
discussion. He was in full vigor, and only sudden and violent
death could have taken him off. But I know not the manner of
his going--whether he was drowned in the river, or was
swallowed by a snake, or went into the stomach of old
Saber-Tooth, the tiger, 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 never told me. For that matter I doubt if
she had a vocabulary adequate to convey such information.
Perhaps, all told, the Folk in that day had a vocabulary of
thirty or forty sounds.
I call them SOUNDS, rather than WORDS, because sounds they
were primarily. They had no fixed values, to be altered by
adjectives and adverbs. These latter were tools of speech not
yet invented. Instead of qualifying nouns or verbs by the use
of adjectives and adverbs, we qualified sounds by intonation,
by changes in quantity and pitch, by retarding and by
accelerating. The length of time employed in the utterance of a
particular sound shaded its meaning.
We had no conjugation. One judged the tense by the
context. We talked only concrete things because we thought only
concrete things. Also, we depended largely on pantomime. The
simplest abstraction was practically beyond our thinking; and
when one did happen to think one, he was hard put to
communicate it to his fellows. There were no sounds for it. He
was pressing beyond the limits of his vocabulary. If he
invented sounds for it, his fellows did not understand the
sounds. Then it was that he fell back on pantomime,
illustrating the thought wherever possible and at the same time
repeating the new sound over and over again.
Thus language grew. By the few sounds we possessed we were
enabled to think a short distance beyond those sounds; then
came the need for new sounds wherewith to express the new
thought. Sometimes, however, we thought too long a distance in
advance of our sounds, managed to achieve abstractions (dim
ones I grant), which we failed utterly to make known to 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 is not known to-day. We could twitch our ears, prick
them up and flatten them 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 for that 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 the
twentieth-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 our friendship. Very early in my life, I separated
from my mother. Possibly this was because, after the death of
my father, she took to herself a second husband. I have few
recollections of him, and they are not of the best. He was a
light fellow. There was no solidity to him. He was too voluble.
His infernal chattering worries me even now as I think of it.
His mind was too inconsequential to permit him to possess
purpose. Monkeys in their cages always remind me of him. He was
monkeyish. That is the best description I can give of him.
He hated me from the first. And I quickly learned to be
afraid of him and his malicious pranks. Whenever he came in
sight I crept close to my mother and clung to her. But I was
growing older all the time, and it was inevitable that I should
from time to time stray from her, and stray farther and
farther. And these were the opportunities that the Chatterer
waited 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 myself given names to the various Folk I was
more closely in contact with, and the "Chatterer" is the most
fitting description I can find for that precious stepfather of
mine. As for me, I have named myself "Big-Tooth." My eye-teeth
were pronouncedly large.)
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But to return to the Chatterer. He persistently terrorized
me. He was always pinching me and cuffing me, and on occasion
he was not above biting me. Often my mother interfered, and the
way she made his fur fly was a joy to see. But the result of
all this was a beautiful and unending family quarrel, in which
I was the bone of contention.