I had wandered far along the river bank and was sitting foolishly upon a rock and playing with a piece of wood which had floated down and stranded. It was a stout thing, larger at one end than the other, and very heavy. The crook of my broken thumb, as it lay pressed against the palm, left a space beneath, and through this space I idly thrust the small end of the wood. Thus my fingers were above on one side of the club and my thumb upon the other, bearing hardly when I chose, for I could press the thumb down strongly, though I could scarcely raise the end. It was a new sensation which came to interest me suddenly. I could clasp the stick with my fingers clutching the other side and I could do things with it. I whirled the club about my head and smote the bushes and broke them easily. It was wonderful! Never before had fingers and thumb of ape accomplished a grip together! The club was hard and heavy, yet in my strong grasp it was but a plaything. It delighted me. I would take it with me. That was well. I started toward my glade, for night was coming and I had eaten enough. I took a path which ran through hollows and beside a long rocky upheaval in which were many abruptly ending defiles where, sometimes, I had caught small animals which could not climb the smooth, steep sides. I heard a rustling in one of these and thought that I had some prize assured. The entrance was but a few feet wide and the passage, as I knew, ended in a sheer height. I followed the defile to the end, but could find no living thing. The sound which had attracted me may have been made by some large bird which had flown before I entered. I turned toward the entrance again, but stopped with fear in my heart, from what I saw. I knew that death was close to me. I yelled aloud at first in my terror and then became suddenly quiet. That was the way with most of us big males of the apes in great emergencies. We became, when fatally at bay, sullen, desperate things. I would die fighting. The hair upon me bristled. It was the great wolf. A gaunt and fearful creature was the wolf of the time, one we tree people fled from when we met him in the forest; and when he and others of his kind gathered sometimes and ran in packs, even the urus or the mighty aurochs ran fast and far, for few animals, even among the greatest, could face the onslaught of the pack. As for one of us apes, when he met a wolf singly, grapple as he might and tear with his shorter teeth, the wolf’s jaws ever, somehow, found the neck, and that was the end. For me there was no escape. The great wolf rushed upon me and leaped high at my throat.