Of laws or government we had little, though we usually recognized a sort of chief, a man not regularly elected but coming to the place by a sort of general admission, because of his own good qualities, or his shrewdness. To old Rolf, our leader, I was the main support and aid in most of what he sought to accomplish, first because I was the strongest of our clan and the greatest ranger of the forest and most careless of risk, and more, it may be, since I was a silent man, unmated and unlikely to be fooled or thwarted. We were friends, and, after a fashion, as I have said, he relied upon me much. We did not need laws greatly, even such as were observed by the more savage tribes of which we had heard. In such ease did we live that there was no battling for food or clothing and, if sometimes there was rivalry for the possession of a woman, she was left to decide the matter herself, and it was rarely that the loser complained when he thus had two against him. We were not all of an aggressive ancestry, as was plain, though, on occasion, we could show courage. We were bold either in or upon the water--I have seen a man kill a shark with a flint knife, and have seen another dive many times in treacherous eddies to bring upward and to life again one which had gone down stunned from a blow--but very rarely were there affrays, and few cared to face the dangerous forest creatures; I alone rejoiced in that. It may be that I was of a different breed from my companions, that there was a strain in me of some far back marauder of the region from which our tribe had come. Of that I cannot tell; I only know that I liked the forest better than the water, and the hunting better than the fishing. Much was I relied upon for meat and skins, for which I received oysters and fish and oil and many other things I needed, such as weapons of flint and whatever else I lacked in my living. Always I hunted alone. Not much did most of the shell-fish people think. Each day sufficed for itself, though a little they regarded the strange things that no man may understand. Our dead, we knew, would not come back to us, yet we had regard for the bodies, and buried them deeply beneath great heaps of stones in a rocky place not far from the village. We did not want wolves to get them, and there was, besides, another feeling which I cannot explain. One of the old men said that the dead would come back after many years, but none of us believed him. If it were so, why did not those who died very long ago appear? And why should we die at all? But upon these matters we did not think much. We ate and slept.