The First Days of Man, as Narrated Quite Simply for Young Readers — John Shaqi
The First Days of Man, as Narrated Quite Simply for Young ReadersKummer, Frederic Arnold
General
The First Days of Man, as Narrated Quite Simply for Young Readers
Kummer, Frederic Arnold
Cave dwellers -- Juvenile literature; Prehistoric peoples -- Juvenile literature
Adh did not go with the others for two reasons. The first was that
they did not like him, because he made them afraid of him, and so they
went away without him. The second reason was, that Adh's wife had a
tiny baby boy to nurse and take care of, and it was easier, to stay
where they were, than to wander off through the jungles. Now that all
the others had gone, Adh managed to find enough roots and nuts to keep
himself and his little family alive.
Soon after the others had left, it began to rain, and every day the
cold rain beat down on Adh and his family and drenched them. Even
their grass nest under the boughs of a thick tree, was turned into
a pool of mud and water, on which the sun never shone to dry it and
keep it warm. Cold and Rain were making the new Ape-Man suffer, as
Mother Nature had told them to do. Adh, as he wandered about the
valley hunting for a little food, tried very hard to think of a way
to keep himself and his family comfortable, but no new ideas came to
him. Occasionally he managed to catch a young bird, which he greedily
devoured, but they were very scarce and hard to find.
"Look at the stupid creature," laughed the Sun, peeping for a moment
through the heavy rain-clouds. "He hasn't sense enough to find a hole
in the rocks, where he would be dry and warm."
Mother Nature did not answer. Instead, she waited until she saw Adh
climbing over the rocks at the upper end of the valley, searching for
the nests of wild birds he sometimes found there. Then she called Cold
to her.
"Blow your hardest for a few moments, Cold," she said.
Cold puffed out his cheeks and blew a freezing blast down the valley,
and all the falling drops of Rain turned to bits of ice, like hail,
which cut Adh's shoulders and arms and back, and hurt him, in spite of
his thick coat of hair. To escape from the storm, he ran beneath some
overhanging rocks, and suddenly found himself in a little cave, its
floor covered with soft dry moss. Here he was quite safe from the hail
and rain, and he was very much pleased.
While he was standing in the cave, Adh suddenly had another thought.
He wished that his wife and child were with him. And no sooner had he
thought of them than he dashed out of the cave, and forgetting all
about the hail and rain, he ran to the nest in the grass where they lay
trying to keep warm, and brought them as fast as he could back to the
nice dry cave. And this cave was Man's very first home.
"You see," said Mother Nature to the Sun, "whenever I want my new Man
to think, I send him some kind of trouble. If I hadn't made him hungry,
he would never have got the idea of pulling the bunch of fruit out of
the tree with his stick, and now, because I made him cold and wet, he
has found himself a home."
"What are you going to make him do next?" asked the Sun.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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