Cave dwellers -- Juvenile literature; Prehistoric peoples -- Juvenile literature
Now he was come back to his own people. And in the light made by the
flames of the fire, the Cave People saw that he bore many of the strange
darts that the enemy had used with so much skill and accuracy. The Cave
People were almost afraid of him, but One Ear at once showed himself
friendly and busied himself in helping to build coverings of sticks and
brush and leaves to form huts for the tribe.
The night was very dark and the Cave People were worn and weary and very
much afraid. They knew very little about the life and the woods and the
things that surrounded them. When a man stumbled over a loose stone and
slipped and fell, the Cave People believed that some of the tribe’s
numerous enemies had wrought the evil.
Little they understood of the causes of the natural events that occurred
around and to them. And so they peopled the woods, the Hollow, the night
and all things with spirits or evil ghosts that sought to do them harm.
There were terrors everywhere, both the enemies which they could see and
the enemies which they could not see. The enemies who dwelt in in the
dead tree trunks that lay upon the ground over which they stumbled, the
spirits who were hidden in the stones that scratched their feet, the
evil magicworkers who entered their stomachs and made them sick and
haunted the feet of the unwary to cause them to faint before the blows
of the Arrow People and who sent men and women upon the Long Sleep from
which their spirits arose to prowl about over the lands.
Primitive men knew nothing about natural laws. They had no ideas about
what caused the rain; therefore, they thought someone made it rain. They
knew nothing about the melting of snows upon the mountain tops that
flowed downward, swelling the Father of Rivers far beyond “his” banks
and thus causing the floods; therefore, some evil enemy wrought the
disaster.
They knew truly that men and women did not altogether die. All men
possessed two selves—the self with whom you might fight and dance, whom
you might touch and see and smell in the light of broad day. Then there
was also a spirit self, who came to you in dreams and who worked evil or
good unto you.
When a child was lost in the wood and devoured by the wild enemies of
the tribe, the people knew that it was an evil spirit that had lured his
footsteps into the danger.
It is true, too, that they believed in good spirits; the spirits who
sent rain when the earth was parched; the kindly magic-makers who
delivered an attacking enemy into your hand to his own disaster, who
stood beside you unseen during great dangers and thrust forth
obstructions in the paths of those who would take you unawares.
But considered in a broad way, from the viewpoint of primitive man, the
world was peopled chiefly with enemies who were down upon you at the
slightest opening, who might anywhere and in the strangest form
imaginable pounce upon you to your own destruction or disaster.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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