“It was a strange thing—the money. It was like the Bug’s songs. It
seemed all right, but it wasn’t, and we were slow to understand.
Dog-Tooth began to gather the money in. He put it in a big pile, in a
grass house, with guards to watch it day and night. And the more money
he piled in the house the dearer money became, so that a man worked a
longer time for a string of money than before. Then, too, there was
always talk of war with the Meat-Eaters, and Dog-Tooth and Tiger-Face
filled many houses with corn, and dried fish, and smoked goat-meat, and
cheese. And with the food, piled there in mountains the people had not
enough to eat. But what did it matter? Whenever the people grumbled too
loudly the Bug sang a new song, and Big-Fat said it was God’s word that
we should kill Meat-Eaters, and Tiger-Face led us over the divide to kill
and be killed. I was not good enough to be a guard and lie fat in the
sun, but, when we made war, Tiger-Face was glad to take me along. And
when we had eaten, all the food stored in the houses we stopped fighting
and went back to work to pile up more food.”
“Then were you all crazy,” commented Deer-Runner.
“Then were we indeed all crazy,” Long-Beard agreed. “It was strange, all
of it. There was Split-Nose. He said everything was wrong. He said it
was true that we grew strong by adding our strength together. And he
said that, when we first formed the tribe, it was right that the men
whose strength hurt the tribe should be shorn of their strength—men who
bashed their brothers’ heads and stole their brothers’ wives. And now,
he said, the tribe was not getting stronger, but was getting weaker,
because there were men with another kind of strength that were hurting
the tribe—men who had the strength of the land, like Three-Legs; who had
the strength of the fish-trap, like Little-Belly; who had the strength of
all the goat-meat, like Pig-Jaw. The thing to do, Split-Nose said, was
to shear these men of their evil strength; to make them go to work, all
of them, and to let no man eat who did not work.
“And the Bug sang another song about men like Split-Nose, who wanted to
go back, and live in trees.
“Yet Split-Nose said no; that he did not want to go back, but ahead; that
they grew strong only as they added their strength together; and that, if
the Fish-Eaters would add their strength to the Meat-Eaters, there would
be no more fighting and no more watchers and no more guards, and that,
with all men working, there would be so much food that each man would
have to work not more than two hours a day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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