There were hosts of wild things for the hunting, the band had stores of nuts and roots, there were fire and warmth, and the winter passed in comfort for the Cave man. There came the spring and summer and the brown autumn, and in all our wanderings with Six Toes as our head we had fire at need, and the clan flourished beyond the ordinary lot of the wild man of that time. Next to Six Toes, I was the strongest and starkest man among them, and it came to me that, like him, I would take a wife. There was a girl, Black Eye they called her, who was most holding of desire to look upon. She I resolved to take, and I knew, from the looks she sometimes gave me, that she would come willingly. I was content in those days. None other of all the band was so soft of foot as I when need came. I could thread the wood without the crackling of a twig. I could creep as silently as the forest cats which caught the birds upon the ground; I could steal so close to any creature that, if it saw me not, nor smelled me, I could come to stand beside it and impale it with a close driven arrow or even with my spear. So I wanted no clumsy-footed companion with me to mar the outcome when I hunted, and, save when we sought the fiercer creatures, rarely went forth other than alone. One day it chanced that I was creeping upon a flock of ptarmigan feeding in a thicket where were many berries. Already, in another place I had killed a number of them, and cared little whether I shot more of them or not. Glancing about as I so crept along, I saw what interested me. Upon one of the bushes with a foliage darkly green hung great clusters of berries not scarlet, like those the birds ate and which we ate ourselves, but of a purple such as I have never seen before. They were wonderful. Surely, I thought, they must be better than the smaller red things, richer and more luscious. I tasted them and found them sweet and musky and fragrant, and, yielding, I gorged myself from their abundance, and then lay down upon the dry grass in a little open space, to rest and dream, and, it might be, sleep, for there came a sort of languor over me and sleep seemed good. I lay there dozing when I heard a fluttering of birds about me and reached for my bow and tried to rise, but could not. My legs refused to aid me and my arms seemed heavy. There came a doubt upon me. We had learned that there were poison things, though never had I known them in this region, and surely berries so luscious could not be harmful. But I cared not. I seemed in another world. What to me that fruit I had eaten was of the deadly things?