The Story of Ab: A Tale of the Time of the Cave ManWaterloo, Stanley
Science
The Story of Ab: A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man
Waterloo, Stanley
Prehistoric peoples -- Fiction; Science fiction
One day Ab went into Old Mok's cave grumbling. "I shot an arrow into a
great deer," he said, "and I was close and shot it with all my force, but
the beast ran before it fell and we had far to carry the meat. I tore the
arrow from him and the blood upon the shaft showed that it had not gone
half way in. I looked at the arrow and there was a jagged point uprising
from its side. How can a man drive deeply an arrow which is so rough? Are
you getting too old to make good spears and arrows, Mok?" And the man
fumed a little. Old Mok made no reply, but he thought long and deeply
after Ab had left the cave. Certainly Ab must have good arrows! Was there
any way of bettering them? And, the next day, the crippled old man might
have been seen looking for something beside the creek where it found its
exit from the valley. There were stones ground into smoothness tossed up
along the shore and the old man studied them most carefully. Many times
he had bent over a stream, watching, thinking, but this time he acted. He
noted a small sandstone block against which were rasping stones of harder
texture, and he picked this from the tumbling current and carried it to
his cave. Then, pouring a little water upon a depression in the stone's
face, he selected his best big arrowhead and began rubbing it upon the
wet sandstone. It was a weary work, for flint and sandstone are different
things and flint is much the harder, but there came a slow result.
Smoother and smoother became the chipped arrowhead, and two days
later--for all the waking hours of two days were required in the weary
grinding--Old Mok gave to Ab an arrow as smooth of surface and keen of
edge as ever flew from bow while stone was used. And not many years
passed--as years are counted in old history--before the smoothed stone
weaponhead became the common property of cave men. The time of chipped
stone had ended and that of smoothed stone had begun. There was no space
between them to be counted now. One swiftly became the other. It was a
matter of necessity, this exhibition of enterprise and sense by the early
man in the prompt general utilization of a new discovery. And not alone
in the improvements in means which came when men of the hunting type were
so gathered in a community were the bow and the smoothed implements,
though these were the greatest of the discoveries of the epoch. The
fishermen who went to the river were not content with the raft-like
devices of the aquatic Shell People and learned, in time, that hollowed
logs would float and that, with the aid of fire and flint axes, a great
log could be hollowed. And never a Phoenician ship-builder, never a
Fulton of the steamer, never a modern designer of great yachts, stood
higher in the estimation of his fellows than stood the expert in the
making of the rude boats, as uncouth in appearance as the river-horse
which sometimes upset them, but from which men could, at least, let down
their lines or dart their spears to secure the fish in the teeming
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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