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
Soon they came, several hundred of them, the young men with their
weapons, the old men, the women and children bringing the pottery
bowls, the furs and skins, the food. They left the brush huts they had
been living in, and swarmed down the slope of the hillside like so many
bees. Whenever the early tribes got tired of living in one place, and
decided to find another home, they moved like this, in a great swarm,
just as bees do when the hive becomes overcrowded, and some must seek
a new place to live in. Later on, when there were many more people on
the earth, these great movements or migrations of tribes and races were
made by hundreds of thousands, and even millions, wandering through the
country for thousands of miles, destroying everything in their path,
and finally coming to rest in a new home, and founding a new nation.
Ban and his people moved slowly toward the sea, hunting and camping
as they went. At last one day they came to the seashore, and stood
on the smooth white sand, gazing at the ocean in wonder. They saw no
one about, and there was very little to eat, so they set out along the
shore, hoping to find a better place to make a camp.
For two days they wandered along the ocean, shooting wild-fowl,
catching some turtles, and killing a few seals they saw on the rocks.
When they found they could not drink the ocean water, some of them
wanted to go back to the hills, but Ban would not let them.
"Let us keep on," he said. "Somewhere there will be water we can
drink." So they went on, slaking their thirst with the blood of the
birds and animals they killed, or with rainwater they found in hollows
in the rocks.
On the third day, some of Ban's men, who had been going on ahead, came
back, and said that they saw smoke rising into the air, far up the
beach. They thought it might come from the fires of one of the other
valley tribes, on a hunting trip. Ban gave the order to hurry on.
Soon they came to a point of rocks, on which there were many seals.
Far out on the point they saw some men, hunting them. Ban's people set
up a great shout to these men, who stood looking at them in surprise.
Ban and some of his fighters called to the strangers, and the men
on the rocks called back, but neither could understand what the
others said, for in all the many years the children of Ka-Ma and Tula
had lived by the sea, they had made a new language for themselves,
different from the language of the people of the valley. When the hill
people heard these strange words, and saw the grass-cloth clothing the
sea people wore, they knew them to be strangers, and not of the valley
tribe. This at once made them enemies, and they began to throw stones
at them with their slings, and to shoot at them with arrows, and hurl
their spears.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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