"Violence," said O'Hara, "but not the implied violence of our corrupted European customs, not the ring and the finger, not the bridal veil--actual violence, the club and the ripping hands, and finally submission to the master sex, was implicit in their rituals as it was in their lives constantly. The original combat in that snow-packed amphitheater actually was our marriage by their custom, later consecrated in the chants outside the cavern. Neither a ceremony taken lightly--and not one forgotten readily. Not a blurred memory of dress uniforms and flowers but as sacred, I think. And vastly more impressive. As for courtship, as we know it, what is it but a rather futile attempt at premarital adjustment? Nedra had watched me kill the saber-tooth, and while I claim no valiance in it she had thought it admirable. She'd wanted me. I'd proved myself sufficiently before her people in the amphitheater. It was that simple. "But with passion and loyalty and respect--which she demanded that I earn--did not come tenderness. Not then or ever. I had to learn that lesson. Nedra was not for the meek. And weakness would have sickened her. It was, I confess, disturbing to learn that I must always be on guard, that between us there could be no gentleness, that the carved wooden club, the symbol of marriage, must ever be ready to strike, but once I had got over my namby-pamby notions, I found myself--well, smug about it. I too could rule my cave." Yes, a cave-dwelling people, said O'Hara, but not quite so primitive as he had supposed. It was on his third day with the clan, after he and Nedra had at last emerged from the nuptial cavern--O'Hara could follow the language by now, usually getting it the second or third time that something was said to him--that he discovered a facet of their culture that amazed him. He had gone with the gray-haired leader of the ceremonial chant, called simply the Elder--men's names, he was to learn, were functional, last names inconsequential--just beyond the chasm of the caves along a mountain trail with a group of children who were hauling fallen timber, when from a bank of dense ferns a giant bear reared up, a bear resembling the Kodiak that O'Hara had known in Siberia, beyond the Atomic Curtain, but vastly larger, an immense shaggy beast, awing, the rumble of the thunder in its throat. The children froze. And before O'Hara could get out the .38 strapped inside his jacket, the Elder stepped forward, leveled his fist and fired--the spurt of smoke and flame and the sharp clack of firearms--then continuing boldly to advance, pouring shot after shot into the massive animal until it toppled. O'Hara's surprise was intense. "I did not know you had these weapons," he said, and the Elder smiled. It was a .45 revolver, the butt of it worn smooth through countless decades of use, a type of gun that O'Hara had never seen.