(1907)
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MAP
What to you the friendship of Lop-Ear, the warm lure of
the Swift One, the lust and the atavism of Red-Eye? A screaming
incoherence and no more. And a screaming incoherence, likewise,
the doings of the Fire People and the Tree People, and the
gibbering councils of the horde. For you know not the peace of
the cool caves in the cliffs, the circus of the drinking-places
at the end of the day. You have never felt the bite of the
morning wind in the tree-tops, nor is the taste of young bark
sweet in your mouth.
It would be better, I dare say, for you to make your
approach, as I made mine, through my childhood. As a boy I was
very like other boys--in my waking hours. It was in my sleep
that I was different. From my earliest recollection my sleep
was a period of terror. Rarely were my dreams tinctured with
happiness. As a rule, they were stuffed with fear--and with a
fear so strange and alien that it had no ponderable quality. No
fear that I experienced in my waking life resembled the fear
that possessed me in my sleep. It was of a quality and kind
that transcended all my experiences.
For instance, I was a city boy, a city child, rather, to
whom the country was an unexplored domain. Yet I never dreamed
of cities; nor did a house ever occur in any of my dreams. Nor,
for that matter, did any of my human kind ever break through
the wall of my sleep. I, who had seen trees only in parks and
illustrated books, wandered in my sleep through interminable
forests. And further, these dream trees were not a mere blur on
my vision. They were sharp and distinct. I was on terms of
practised intimacy with them. I saw every branch and twig; I
saw and knew every different leaf.
Well do I remember the first time in my waking life that I
saw an oak tree. As I looked at the leaves and branches and
gnarls, it came to me with distressing vividness that I had
seen that same kind of tree many and countless times n my
sleep. So I was not surprised, still later on in my life, to
recognize instantly, the first time I saw them, trees such as
the spruce, the yew, the birch, and the laurel. I had seen them
all before, and was seeing them even then, every night, in my
sleep.
This, as you have already discerned, violates the first
law of dreaming, namely, that in one's dreams one sees only
what he has seen in his waking life, or combinations of the
things he has seen in his waking life. But all my dreams
violated this law. In my dreams I never saw ANYTHING of which I
had knowledge in my waking life. My dream life and my waking
life were lives apart, with not one thing in common save
myself. I was the connecting link that somehow lived both
lives.
Early in my childhood I learned that nuts came from the
grocer, berries from the fruit man; but before ever that
knowledge was mine, in my dreams I picked nuts from trees, or
gathered them and ate them from the ground underneath trees,
and in the same way I ate berries from vines and bushes. This
was beyond any experience of mine.
I shall never forget the first time I saw blueberries
served on the table. I had never seen blueberries before, and
yet, at the sight of them, there leaped up in my mind memories
of dreams wherein I had wandered through swampy land eating my
fill of them. My mother set before me a dish of the berries. I
filled my spoon, but before I raised it to my mouth I knew just
how they would taste. Nor was I disappointed. It was the same
tang that I had tasted a thousand times in my sleep.
Snakes? Long before I had heard of the existence of
snakes, I was tormented by them in my sleep. They lurked for me
in the forest glades; leaped up, striking, under my feet;
squirmed off through the dry grass or across naked patches of
rock; or pursued me into the tree-tops, encircling the trunks
with their great shining bodies, driving me higher and higher
or farther and farther out on swaying and crackling branches,
the ground a dizzy distance beneath me. Snakes!--with their
forked tongues, their beady eyes and glittering scales, their
hissing and their rattling--did I not already know them far too
well on that day of my first circus when I saw the
snake-charmer lift them up? They were old friends of mine,
enemies rather, that peopled my nights with fear.
Ah, those endless forests, and their horror-haunted gloom!
For what eternities have I wandered through them, a timid,
hunted creature, starting at the least sound, frightened of my
own shadow, keyed-up, ever alert and vigilant, ready on the
instant to dash away in mad flight for my life. For I was the
prey of all manner of fierce life that dwelt in the forest, and
it was in ecstasies of fear that I fled before the hunting
monsters.
When I was five years old I went to my first circus. I
came home from it sick--but not from peanuts and pink lemonade.
Let me tell you. As we entered the animal tent, a hoarse
roaring shook the air. I tore my hand loose from my father's
and dashed wildly back through the entrance. I collided with
people, fell down; and all the time I was screaming with
terror. My father caught me and soothed me. He pointed to the
crowd of people, all careless of the roaring, and cheered me
with assurances of safety.
Nevertheless, it was in fear and trembling, and with much
encouragement on his part, that I at last approached the lion's
cage. Ah, I knew him on the instant. The beast! The terrible
one! And on my inner vision flashed the memories of my
dreams,--the midday sun shining on tall grass, the wild bull
grazing quietly, the sudden parting of the grass before the
swift rush of the tawny one, his leap to the bull's back, the
crashing and the bellowing, and the crunch crunch of bones; or
again, the cool quiet of the water-hole, the wild horse up to
his knees and drinking softly, and then the tawny one--always
the tawny one!-- the leap, the screaming and the splashing of
the horse, and the crunch crunch of bones; and yet again, the
sombre twilight and the sad silence of the end of day, and then
the great full-throated roar, sudden, like a trump of doom, and
swift upon it the insane shrieking and chattering among the
trees, and I, too, am trembling with fear and am one of the
many shrieking and chattering among the trees.
At the sight of him, helpless, within the bars of his
cage, I became enraged. I gritted my teeth at him, danced up
and down, screaming an incoherent mockery and making antic
faces. He responded, rushing against the bars and roaring back
at me his impotent wrath. Ah, he knew me, too, and the sounds I
made were the sounds of old time and intelligible to him.
My parents were frightened. "The child is ill," said my
mother. "He is hysterical," said my father. I never told them,
and they never knew. Already had I developed reticence
concerning this quality of mine, this semi-disassociation of
personality as I think I am justified in calling it.
I saw the snake-charmer, and no more of the circus did I
see that night. I was taken home, nervous and overwrought, sick
with the invasion of my real life by that other life of my
dreams.
I have mentioned my reticence. Only once did I confide the
strangeness of it all to another. He was a boy--my chum; and we
were eight years old. From my dreams I reconstructed for him
pictures of that vanished world in which I do believe I once
lived. I told him of the terrors of that early time, of Lop-Ear
and the pranks we played, of the gibbering councils, and of the
Fire People and their squatting places.
He laughed at me, and jeered, and told me tales of ghosts
and of the dead that walk at night. But mostly did he laugh at
my feeble fancy. I told him more, and he laughed the harder. I
swore in all earnestness that these things were so, and he
began to look upon me queerly. Also, he gave amazing garblings
of my tales to our playmates, until all began to look upon me
queerly.
It was a bitter experience, but I learned my lesson. I was
different from my kind. I was abnormal with something they
could not understand, and the telling of which would cause only
misunderstanding. When the stories of ghosts and goblins went
around, I kept quiet. I smiled grimly to myself. I thought of
my nights of fear, and knew that mine were the real
things--real as life itself, not attenuated vapors and surmised
shadows.
For me no terrors resided in the thought of bugaboos and
wicked ogres. The fall through leafy branches and the dizzy
heights; the snakes that struck at me as I dodged and leaped
away in chattering flight; the wild dogs that hunted me across
the open spaces to the timber--these were terrors concrete and
actual, happenings and not imaginings, things of the living
flesh and of sweat and blood. Ogres and bugaboos and I had been
happy bed-fellows, compared with these terrors that made their
bed with me throughout my childhood, and that still bed with
me, now, as I write this, full of years.
The commonest dream of my early childhood was something
like this: It seemed that I was very small and that I lay
curled up in a sort of nest of twigs and boughs. Sometimes I
was lying on my back. In this position it seemed that I spent
many hours, watching the play of sunlight on the foliage and
the stirring of the leaves by the wind. Often the nest itself
moved back and forth when the wind was strong.
But always, while so lying in the nest, I was mastered as
of tremendous space beneath me. I never saw it, I never peered
over the edge of the nest to see; but I KNEW and feared that
space that lurked just beneath me and that ever threatened me
like a maw of some all-devouring monster.
This dream, in which I was quiescent and which was more
like a condition than an experience of action, I dreamed very
often in my early childhood. But suddenly, there would rush
into the very midst of it strange forms and ferocious
happenings, the thunder and crashing of storm, or unfamiliar
landscapes such as in my wake-a-day life I had never seen. The
result was confusion and nightmare. I could comprehend nothing
of it. There was no logic of sequence.
You see, I did not dream consecutively. One moment I was a
wee babe of the Younger World lying in my tree nest; the next
moment I was a grown man of the Younger World locked in combat
with the hideous Red-Eye; and the next moment I was creeping
carefully down to the water-hole in the heat of the day.
Events, years apart in their occurrence in the Younger World,
occurred with me within the space of several minutes, or
seconds.
It was all a jumble, but this jumble I shall not inflict
upon you. It was not until I was a young man and had dreamed
many thousand times, that everything straightened out and
became clear and plain. Then it was that I got the clew of
time, and was able to piece together events and actions in
their proper order. Thus was I able to reconstruct the vanished
Younger World as it was at the time I lived in it--or at the
time my other-self lived in it. The distinction does not
matter; for I, too, the modern man, have gone back and lived
that early life in the company of my other-self.
For your convenience, since this is to be no sociological
screed, I shall frame together the different events into a
comprehensive story. For there is a certain thread of
continuity and happening that runs through all the dreams.
There is my friendship with Lop-Ear, for instance. Also, there
is the enmity of Red-Eye, and the love of the Swift One. Taking
it all in all, a fairly coherent and interesting story I am
sure you will agree.
I do not remember much of my mother. Possibly the earliest
recollection I have of her--and certainly the sharpest--is the
following: It seemed I was lying on the ground. I was somewhat
older than during the nest days, but still helpless. I rolled
about in the dry leaves, playing with them and making crooning,
rasping noises in my throat. The sun shone warmly and I was
happy, and comfortable. I was in a little open space. Around
me, on all sides, were bushes and fern-like growths, and
overhead and all about were the trunks and branches of forest
trees.
Suddenly I heard a sound. I sat upright and listened. I
made no movement. The little noises died down in my throat, and
I sat as one petrified. The sound drew closer. It was like the
grunt of a pig. Then I began to hear the sounds caused by the
moving of a body through the brush. Next I saw the ferns
agitated by the passage of the body. Then the ferns parted, and
I saw gleaming eyes, a long snout, and white tusks.
It was a wild boar. He peered at me curiously. He grunted
once or twice and shifted his weight from one foreleg to the
other, at the same time moving his head from side to side and
swaying the ferns. Still I sat as one petrified, my eyes
unblinking as I stared at him, fear eating at my heart.
It seemed that this movelessness and silence on my part
was what was expected of me. I was not to cry out in the face
of fear. It was a dictate of instinct. And so I sat there and
waited for I knew not what. The boar thrust the ferns aside and
stepped into the open. The curiosity went out of his eyes, and
they gleamed cruelly. He tossed his head at me threateningly
and advanced a step. This he did again, and yet again.
Then I screamed...or shrieked--I cannot describe it, but
it was a shrill and terrible cry. And it seems that it, too, at
this stage of the proceedings, was the thing expected of me.
From not far away came an answering cry. My sounds seemed
momentarily to disconcert the boar, and while he halted and
shifted his weight with indecision, an apparition burst upon
us.
She was like a large orangutan, my mother, or like a
chimpanzee, and yet, in sharp and definite ways, quite
different. She was heavier of build than they, and had less
hair. Her arms were not so long, and her legs were stouter. She
wore no clothes--only her natural hair. And I can tell you she
was a fury when she was excited.
And like a fury she dashed upon the scene. She was
gritting her teeth, making frightful grimaces, snarling,
uttering sharp and continuous cries that sounded like "kh-ah!
kh-ah!" So sudden and formidable was her appearance that the
boar involuntarily bunched himself together on the defensive
and bristled as she swerved toward him. Then she swerved toward
me. She had quite taken the breath out of him. I knew just what
to do in that moment of time she had gained. I leaped to meet
her, catching her about the waist and holding on hand and
foot--yes, by my feet; I could hold on by them as readily as by
my hands. I could feel in my tense grip the pull of the hair as
her skin and her muscles moved beneath with her efforts.
As I say, I leaped to meet her, and on the instant she
leaped straight up into the air, catching an overhanging branch
with her hands. The next instant, with clashing tusks, the boar
drove past underneath. He had recovered from his surprise and
sprung forward, emitting a squeal that was almost a trumpeting.
At any rate it was a call, for it was followed by the rushing
of bodies through the ferns and brush from all directions.
From every side wild hogs dashed into the open space--a
score of them. But my mother swung over the top of a thick
limb, a dozen feet from the ground, and, still holding on to
her, we perched there in safety. She was very excited. She
chattered and screamed, and scolded down at the bristling,
tooth-gnashing circle that had gathered beneath. I, too,
trembling, peered down at the angry beasts and did my best to
imitate my mother's cries.
From the distance came similar cries, only pitched deeper,
into a sort of roaring bass. These grew momentarily louder, and
soon I saw him approaching, my father--at least, by all the
evidence of the times, I am driven to conclude that he was my
father.
He was not an extremely prepossessing father, as fathers
go. He seemed half man, and half ape, and yet not ape, and not
yet man. I fail to describe him. There is nothing like him
to-day on the earth, under the earth, nor in the earth. He was
a large man in his day, and he must have weighed all of a
hundred and thirty pounds. His face was broad and flat, and the
eyebrows over-hung the eyes. The eyes themselves were small,
deep-set, and close together. He had practically no nose at
all. It was squat and broad, apparently with-out any bridge,
while the nostrils were like two holes in the face, opening
outward instead of down.
The forehead slanted back from the eyes, and the hair
began right at the eyes and ran up over the head. The head
itself was preposterously small and was supported on an equally
preposterous, thick, short neck.
There was an elemental economy about his body--as was
there about all our bodies. The chest was deep, it is true,
cavernously deep; but there were no full-swelling muscles, no
wide-spreading shoulders, no clean-limbed straightness, no
generous symmetry of outline. It represented strength, that
body of my father's, strength without beauty; ferocious,
primordial strength, made to clutch and gripe and rend and
destroy.
His hips were thin; and the legs, lean and hairy, were
crooked and stringy-muscled. In fact, my father's legs were
more like arms. They were twisted and gnarly, and with scarcely
the semblance of the full meaty calf such as graces your leg
and mine. I remember he could not walk on the flat of his foot.
This was because it was a prehensile foot, more like a hand
than a foot. The great toe, instead of being in line with the
other toes, opposed them, like a thumb, and its opposition to
the other toes was what enabled him to get a grip with his
foot. This was why he could not walk on the flat of his foot.
But his appearance was no more unusual than the manner of
his coming, there to my mother and me as we perched above the
angry wild pigs. He came through the trees, leaping from limb
to limb and from tree to tree; and he came swiftly. I can see
him now, in my wake-a-day life, as I write this, swinging along
through the trees, a four-handed, hairy creature, howling with
rage, pausing now and again to beat his chest with his clenched
fist, leaping ten-and-fifteen-foot gaps, catching a branch with
one hand and swinging on across another gap to catch with his
other hand and go on, never hesitating, never at a loss as to
how to proceed on his arboreal way.
And as I watched him I felt in my own being, in my very
muscles themselves, the surge and thrill of desire to go
leaping from bough to bough; and I felt also the guarantee of
the latent power in that being and in those muscles of mine.
And why not? Little boys watch their fathers swing axes and
fell trees, and feel in themselves that some day they, too,
will swing axes and fell trees. And so with me. The life that
was in me was constituted to do what my father did, and it
whispered to me secretly and ambitiously of aerial paths and
forest flights.
At last my father joined us. He was extremely angry. I
remember the out-thrust of his protruding underlip as he glared
down at the wild pigs. He snarled something like a dog, and I
remember that his eye-teeth were large, like fangs, and that
they impressed me tremendously.
His conduct served only the more to infuriate the pigs. He
broke off twigs and small branches and flung them down upon our
enemies. He even hung by one hand, tantalizingly just beyond
reach, and mocked them as they gnashed their tusks with
impotent rage. Not content with this, he broke off a stout
branch, and, holding on with one hand and foot, jabbed the
infuriated beasts in the sides and whacked them across their
noses. Needless to state, my mother and I enjoyed the sport.
But one tires of all good things, and in the end, my
father, chuckling maliciously the while, led the way across the
trees. Now it was that my ambitions ebbed away, and I became
timid, holding tightly to my mother as she climbed and swung
through space. I remember when the branch broke with her
weight. She had made a wide leap, and with the snap of the wood
I was overwhelmed with the sickening consciousness of falling
through space, the pair of us. The forest and the sunshine on
the rustling leaves vanished from my eyes. I had a fading
glimpse of my father abruptly arresting his progress to look,
and then all was blackness.
The next moment I was awake, in my sheeted bed, sweating,
trembling, nauseated. The window was up, and a cool air was
blowing through the room. The night-lamp was burning calmly.
And because of this I take it that the wild pigs did not get
us, that we never fetched bottom; else I should not be here
now, a thousand centuries after, to remember the event.
And now put yourself in my place for a moment. Walk with
me a bit in my tender childhood, bed with me a night and
imagine yourself dreaming such incomprehensible horrors.
Remember I was an inexperienced child. I had never seen a wild
boar in my life. For that matter I had never seen a
domesticated pig. The nearest approach to one that I had seen
was breakfast bacon sizzling in its fat. And yet here, real as
life, wild boars dashed through my dreams, and I, with
fantastic parents, swung through the lofty tree-spaces.
Do you wonder that I was frightened and oppressed by my
nightmare-ridden nights? I was accursed. And, worst of all, I
was afraid to tell. I do not know why, except that I had a
feeling of guilt, though I knew no better of what I was guilty.
So it was, through long years, that I suffered in silence,
until I came to man's estate and learned the why and wherefore
of my dreams.
I have no memory of my father than the one I have given.
Never, in the years that followed, did he reappear. And from my
knowledge of the times, the only explanation possible lies in
that he perished shortly after the adventure with the wild
pigs. That it must have been an untimely end, there is no
discussion. He was in full vigor, and only sudden and violent
death could have taken him off. But I know not the manner of
his going--whether he was drowned in the river, or was
swallowed by a snake, or went into the stomach of old
Saber-Tooth, the tiger, is beyond my knowledge.
For know that I remember only the things I saw myself,
with my own eyes, in those prehistoric days. If my mother knew
my father's end, she never told me. For that matter I doubt if
she had a vocabulary adequate to convey such information.
Perhaps, all told, the Folk in that day had a vocabulary of
thirty or forty sounds.
I call them SOUNDS, rather than WORDS, because sounds they
were primarily. They had no fixed values, to be altered by
adjectives and adverbs. These latter were tools of speech not
yet invented. Instead of qualifying nouns or verbs by the use
of adjectives and adverbs, we qualified sounds by intonation,
by changes in quantity and pitch, by retarding and by
accelerating. The length of time employed in the utterance of a
particular sound shaded its meaning.
We had no conjugation. One judged the tense by the
context. We talked only concrete things because we thought only
concrete things. Also, we depended largely on pantomime. The
simplest abstraction was practically beyond our thinking; and
when one did happen to think one, he was hard put to
communicate it to his fellows. There were no sounds for it. He
was pressing beyond the limits of his vocabulary. If he
invented sounds for it, his fellows did not understand the
sounds. Then it was that he fell back on pantomime,
illustrating the thought wherever possible and at the same time
repeating the new sound over and over again.
Thus language grew. By the few sounds we possessed we were
enabled to think a short distance beyond those sounds; then
came the need for new sounds wherewith to express the new
thought. Sometimes, however, we thought too long a distance in
advance of our sounds, managed to achieve abstractions (dim
ones I grant), which we failed utterly to make known to other
folk. After all, language did not grow fast in that day.
Oh, believe me, we were amazingly simple. But we did know
a lot that is not known to-day. We could twitch our ears, prick
them up and flatten them down at will. And we could scratch
between our shoulders with ease. We could throw stones with our
feet. I have done it many a time. And for that matter, I could
keep my knees straight, bend forward from the hips, and touch,
not the tips of my fingers, but the points of my elbows, to the
ground. And as for bird-nesting--well, I only wish the
twentieth-century boy could see us. But we made no collections
of eggs. We ate them.
I remember--but I out-run my story. First let me tell of
Lop-Ear and our friendship. Very early in my life, I separated
from my mother. Possibly this was because, after the death of
my father, she took to herself a second husband. I have few
recollections of him, and they are not of the best. He was a
light fellow. There was no solidity to him. He was too voluble.
His infernal chattering worries me even now as I think of it.
His mind was too inconsequential to permit him to possess
purpose. Monkeys in their cages always remind me of him. He was
monkeyish. That is the best description I can give of him.
He hated me from the first. And I quickly learned to be
afraid of him and his malicious pranks. Whenever he came in
sight I crept close to my mother and clung to her. But I was
growing older all the time, and it was inevitable that I should
from time to time stray from her, and stray farther and
farther. And these were the opportunities that the Chatterer
waited for. (I may as well explain that we bore no names in
those days; were not known by any name. For the sake of
convenience I have myself given names to the various Folk I was
more closely in contact with, and the "Chatterer" is the most
fitting description I can find for that precious stepfather of
mine. As for me, I have named myself "Big-Tooth." My eye-teeth
were pronouncedly large.)
But to return to the Chatterer. He persistently terrorized
me. He was always pinching me and cuffing me, and on occasion
he was not above biting me. Often my mother interfered, and the
way she made his fur fly was a joy to see. But the result of
all this was a beautiful and unending family quarrel, in which
I was the bone of contention.
No, my home-life was not happy. I smile to myself as I
write the phrase. Home-life! Home! I had no home in the modern
sense of the term. My home was an association, not a
habitation. I lived in my mother's care, not in a house. And my
mother lived anywhere, so long as when night came she was above
the ground.
My mother was old-fashioned. She still clung to her trees.
It is true, the more progressive members of our horde lived in
the caves above the river. But my mother was suspicious and
unprogressive. The trees were good enough for her. Of course,
we had one particular tree in which we usually roosted, though
we often roosted in other trees when nightfall caught us. In a
convenient fork was a sort of rude platform of twigs and
branches and creeping things. It was more like a huge bird-nest
than anything else, though it was a thousand times cruder in
the weaving than any bird-nest. But it had one feature that I
have never seen attached to any bird-nest, namely, a roof.
Oh, not a roof such as modern man makes! Nor a roof such
as is made by the lowest aborigines of to-day. It was
infinitely more clumsy than the clumsiest handiwork of man--of
man as we know him. It was put together in a casual,
helter-skelter sort of way. Above the fork of the tree whereon
we rested was a pile of dead branches and brush. Four or five
adjacent forks held what I may term the various ridge-poles.
These were merely stout sticks an inch or so in diameter. On
them rested the brush and branches. These seemed to have been
tossed on almost aimlessly. There was no attempt at
thatching. And I must confess that the roof leaked
miserably in a heavy rain.
But the Chatterer. He made home-life a burden for both my
mother and me--and by home-life I mean, not the leaky nest in
the tree, but the group-life of the three of us. He was most
malicious in his persecution of me. That was the one purpose to
which he held steadfastly for longer than five minutes. Also,
as time went by, my mother was less eager in her defence of me.
I think, what of the continuous rows raised by the Chatterer,
that I must have become a nuisance to her. At any rate, the
situation went from bad to worse so rapidly that I should soon,
of my own volition, have left home. But the satisfaction of
performing so independent an act was denied me. Before I was
ready to go, I was thrown out. And I mean this literally.
The opportunity came to the Chatterer one day when I was
alone in the nest. My mother and the Chatterer had gone away
together toward the blueberry swamp. He must have planned the
whole thing, for I heard him returning alone through the
forest, roaring with self-induced rage as he came. Like all the
men of our horde, when they were angry or were trying to make
themselves angry, he stopped now and again to hammer on his
chest with his fist.
I realized the helplessness of my situation, and crouched
trembling in the nest. The Chatterer came directly to the
tree--I remember it was an oak tree--and began to climb up. And
he never ceased for a moment from his infernal row. As I have
said, our language was extremely meagre, and he must have
strained it by the variety of ways in which he informed me of
his undying hatred of me and of his intention there and then to
have it out with me.
As he climbed to the fork, I fled out the great horizontal
limb. He followed me, and out I went, farther and farther. At
last I was out amongst the small twigs and leaves. The
Chatterer was ever a coward, and greater always than any anger
he ever worked up was his caution. He was afraid to follow me
out amongst the leaves and twigs. For that matter, his greater
weight would have crashed him through the foliage before he
could have got to me.
But it was not necessary for him to reach me, and well he
knew it, the scoundrel! With a malevolent expression on his
face, his beady eyes gleaming with cruel intelligence, he began
teetering. Teetering!--and with me out on the very edge of the
bough, clutching at the twigs that broke continually with my
weight. Twenty feet beneath me was the earth.
Wildly and more--wildly he teetered, grinning at me his
gloating hatred. Then came the end. All four holds broke at the
same time, and I fell, back-downward, looking up at him, my
hands and feet still clutching the broken twigs. Luckily, there
were no wild pigs under me, and my fall was broken by the tough
and springy bushes.
Usually, my falls destroy my dreams, the nervous shock
being sufficient to bridge the thousand centuries in an instant
and hurl me wide awake into my little bed, where, perchance, I
lie sweating and trembling and hear the cuckoo clock calling
the hour in the hall. But this dream of my leaving home I have
had many times, and never yet have I been awakened by it.
Always do I crash, shrieking, down through the brush and fetch
up with a bump on the ground.
Scratched and bruised and whimpering, I lay where I had
fallen. Peering up through the bushes, I could see the
Chatterer. He had set up a demoniacal chant of joy and was
keeping time to it with his teetering. I quickly hushed my
whimpering. I was no longer in the safety of the trees, and I
knew the danger I ran of bringing upon myself the hunting
animals by too audible an expression of my grief.
I remember, as my sobs died down, that I became interested
in watching the strange light-effects produced by partially
opening and closing my tear-wet eyelids. Then I began to
investigate, and found that I was not so very badly damaged by
my fall. I had lost some hair and hide, here and there; the
sharp and jagged end of a broken branch had thrust fully an
inch into my forearm; and my right hip, which had borne the
brunt of my contact with the ground, was aching intolerably.
But these, after all, were only petty hurts. No bones were
broken, and in those days the flesh of man had finer healing
qualities than it has to-day. Yet it was a severe fall, for I
limped with my injured hip for fully a week afterward.
Next, as I lay in the bushes, there came upon me a feeling
of desolation, a consciousness that I was homeless. I made up
my mind never to return to my mother and the Chatterer. I would
go far away through the terrible forest, and find some tree for
myself in which to roost. As for food, I knew where to find it.
For the last year at least I had not been beholden to my mother
for food. All she had furnished me was protection and guidance.
I crawled softly out through the bushes. Once I looked
back and saw the Chatterer still chanting and teetering. It was
not a pleasant sight. I knew pretty well how to be cautious,
and I was exceedingly careful on this my first journey in the
world.
I gave no thought as to where I was going. I had but one
purpose, and that was to go away beyond the reach of the
Chatterer. I clim