Always, in the beginning, before his conscious life dawned, he had
crawled toward the mouth of the cave. And in this his brothers and
sisters were one with him. Never, in that period, did any of them crawl
toward the dark corners of the back-wall. The light drew them as if
they were plants; the chemistry of the life that composed them demanded
the light as a necessity of being; and their little puppet-bodies
crawled blindly and chemically, like the tendrils of a vine. Later on,
when each developed individuality and became personally conscious of
impulsions and desires, the attraction of the light increased. They
were always crawling and sprawling toward it, and being driven back
from it by their mother.
It was in this way that the grey cub learned other attributes of his
mother than the soft, soothing, tongue. In his insistent crawling
toward the light, he discovered in her a nose that with a sharp nudge
administered rebuke, and later, a paw, that crushed him down and rolled
him over and over with swift, calculating stroke. Thus he learned hurt;
and on top of it he learned to avoid hurt, first, by not incurring the
risk of it; and second, when he had incurred the risk, by dodging and
by retreating. These were conscious actions, and were the results of
his first generalisations upon the world. Before that he had recoiled
automatically from hurt, as he had crawled automatically toward the
light. After that he recoiled from hurt because he _knew_ that it was
hurt.
He was a fierce little cub. So were his brothers and sisters. It was to
be expected. He was a carnivorous animal. He came of a breed of
meat-killers and meat-eaters. His father and mother lived wholly upon
meat. The milk he had sucked with his first flickering life, was milk
transformed directly from meat, and now, at a month old, when his eyes
had been open for but a week, he was beginning himself to eat meat—meat
half-digested by the she-wolf and disgorged for the five growing cubs
that already made too great demand upon her breast.
But he was, further, the fiercest of the litter. He could make a louder
rasping growl than any of them. His tiny rages were much more terrible
than theirs. It was he that first learned the trick of rolling a
fellow-cub over with a cunning paw-stroke. And it was he that first
gripped another cub by the ear and pulled and tugged and growled
through jaws tight-clenched. And certainly it was he that caused the
mother the most trouble in keeping her litter from the mouth of the
cave.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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