The First Days of Man

CHAPTER XV

THE SEA PEOPLE

As Ka-Ma's children grew up, he taught them all the things he knew, how to make weapons and tools of stone, how to dry and season wood, for spear handles, and bows and arrows, how to make cord of fish guts, or the twisted stems of marsh grasses, how to spear fish, use the sling, and shoot with the bow. But he could not teach them how to make pottery, for he could find no clay, and worst of all, there was no fire with which to burn it, even if he had found the clay.

The young people, who had never seen fire, and did not know what it was, were quite content to eat their food raw, for they had never tasted it any other way, but Ka-Ma thought every day of the Sacred Fire, and wished that in some way he could get it again.

Sometimes, when he was drilling a hole in a bit of shell, or in a stick of wood, with a sharp-pointed piece of flint, it seemed to him that the drill grew very hot, but no fire came.

One day Ka-Ma took the dried shell of a nut which he had found in the forest, and after cutting off one end, began to drill a hole in each side of it. Through these holes he meant to run a cord. Not having any bowls or jars of pottery in which to carry water, he thought he could make a sort of water bottle out of the large nut. Then, when he went hunting, or fishing, he could carry the bottle about his shoulders by means of the cord, and so have fresh water to drink during the long, hot day. He had never done this in the valley, because there was plenty of water all about, sweet and fresh, but here all the water was salt, except in the little pool near his hut, and so he either had to carry some with him or go thirsty.

He used a thin sharp piece of flint with a wooden handle to bore the hole, twirling it rapidly between the palms of his hands, and at the same time pressing down upon it as hard as he could. It was a very hot day. The soft, moss-like fibres which covered the outside of the nut were dry as tinder. As the drill cut slowly into the hard shell, Ka-Ma saw, to his surprise, a tiny wisp of smoke curl up from the hole. Its smell told him it was the same smoke he had smelt so often in the Fire Cave at home. Harder and harder he pressed the drill down, faster and faster he twirled it, and then, suddenly, the smoke burst into a tiny flame, which licked up the dry fibres about the edge of the hole and was gone.

Filled with wonder, he tried again and again, and each time the little flame appeared, and went out. At last, after he had thought for a long while, he picked a bunch of the dry moss-like fibres from the shell, and giving it to one of his sons, told him to hold the fibres in the flame the next time it appeared. He also gathered beside him a heap of dry leaves and grass.

When the boy put the fibres into the flame, they blazed up at once, and burnt his hand so that he dropped them with a cry of pain, but Ka-Ma took the blazing bit and placed it among the dry leaves and grass, and in a moment he had a fire. Tula, who had been watching him, quickly brought reeds, and bits of wood, and soon a hot fire was roaring in front of the hut. The children gathered about, astonished and a little afraid, but Ka-Ma and his wife were filled with joy. He did not know why the fire had come, for he did not understand that friction, caused by rubbing two objects together, makes heat, but he was very grateful, for he had now found a way to make fire whenever he wanted it. For this reason, it was not necessary for him or his family to keep the fire going night and day, and thus the new tribe no longer thought of the fire as sacred. They did not worship it, the way the valley people did. Being able to make it whenever they wanted to, it no longer seemed to them so wonderful, nor were they afraid of losing it. Instead of worshipping fire, they began to worship the Sun, and the Sea.

That night, Ka-Ma cooked some fish over the hot coals, and he and all his family had a feast. Later on he showed his children how to preserve fish by smoking them, the way his people had done in the valley. Then he began to search through the back country for clay.

At last he found some, and it was not long before the new tribe was using pottery bowls and jars, just as they were used by the tribe in the valley.

One of Ka-Ma's sons, named Ran, was a great fisherman. No one could spear fish so well as he. In the ocean, of course, he could not reach them, for the water was far too deep, and the surf too strong, but he waded in the shallow spots along the river banks, and when he saw a fish lying in the mud, he would bring his spear down as quick as a flash, and rarely ever missed.

It was not long, however, before the fish became frightened, and when they saw anything moving about in the water they would swim away. This made it harder and harder to get them, and Ran sometimes spent a whole day, without bringing home more than one or two.

One day, while resting on the river bank, he saw a large fish snap up a little one and devour it. Ran thought that this might be a good way to bring the fish within reach of his spear, so he managed to catch several of the little fish by driving them into a shallow pool. Then he took the cord from his bow, and after tying one of the little fish to the end of it with a bit of grass, he lowered it into the water. Quick as a flash a large fish darted up, snapped away the little one, and was gone before Ran could raise his spear.

When Ran saw that the strings of grass would not hold the little fish tight enough to his bow-cord, he tried to think of some better way to fasten them. One of his arrows had a head made of a sharp-pointed piece of bone about as long as his finger. Taking this piece of bone from the arrow, he sharpened the other end of it also, by rubbing it on a rough stone. Then he tied the bow-cord tightly about the middle of the piece of bone, and stuck the two sharp ends both ways into the body of one of the little fish. The large fish, he knew, would be unable to bite through the piece of bone, and while trying to tear the small fish loose, Ran believed he would have time to spear him. Once more he lowered the bow-cord into the water.

Soon a big fish darted up, but instead of trying to tear the smaller one loose, he swallowed it whole, and started away. Ran had no time to use his spear, but neither was the big fish able to get away, for as soon as he jerked against the strong bow-cord, the piece of bone turned crosswise and its sharp points stuck firmly in his throat. Ran, not expecting this, was almost pulled off his feet, but he could not let go of the bow-cord because the loop at the end of it was about his wrist. In a moment he had recovered his balance and hauled the big fish ashore.

Although he did not know it at the time, Ran had made a great discovery. His hook and line were very poor and clumsy, but he had caught a fish with bait, and this was something no man had ever done before. He tried again and again, and while he was not always successful, and often pulled the little fish right out of the big one's throat because the piece of bone did not turn and stick fast, he still had caught seven or eight by the time the day was over.

Ran's clumsy tackle was only a beginning. Later on, the sea people made fish-hooks in many ways. One was to tie a sharp thorn, at an angle, to the end of a bit of stick, fastening it firmly with wrappings of sinew, or gut. Another was to make the same sort of a hook out of bone. Still another was to carve a hook from stone, with a barb on it, like the barbs they made on their stone arrow heads, so that the hook would not pull loose. Long cords of gut, or twisted grass served them as lines. Soon the sea people were fishing from rafts, in the river, or from the rocks along the sea coast, and as they caught more, and bigger fish, they found it easier to get food in this way, than by hunting in the back country for wild animals. Thus they had fewer and fewer skins and furs to keep them warm, and this fact caused them to discover a way of plaiting and weaving cloth out of the tough marsh grasses, to use as a covering for their bodies in winter time.

Isn't it curious to think that learning how to make fish-hooks should also have taught them weaving? and yet it did, as you can see. All during the cold weather in the valley Ka-Ma and his wife had been used to wearing cloaks of fur, had been in the habit of sleeping in warm, cosy caves, in which, in the coldest weather, a fire was kept burning. The hair on their bodies, like that of all the cave people, had grown thin, and no longer served to keep them warm. Their children by the sea were born the same way, with very little hair; they could not stand the bitter cold of winter without some covering for their bodies. At first, when the sea tribe was small, it was an easy matter to go into the back country, far up the river, and kill bears and other wild animals for their furs. As the years passed, and the tribe grew larger and larger, this was no longer easy, for the young men of the tribe, while brave swimmers and fishermen, had forgotten, or never learned, how to attack and kill the wild beasts which lived inland. So the sea people had to look about them, to find some other material out of which they could make clothes.

From the time they built their first brush huts, they had learned how to plait together the long reeds, in making roofs. Later, the art of fishing taught them how to twist the finer grasses, long and tough, into thin strong cords. By tying a row of these cords between two poles, and then weaving other cords in and out across them, the sea people found they could make a thick, tough, durable sort of cloth, like grass matting. It was not warm, like fur, but it would keep off the cold rains, and was much better than no covering at all.

Leather, too, they learned how to make from the skins of some of the animals they found in the sea; great creatures, like walrus, or seals, that they fought and killed on the rocks along the coast. Living as they did more in the open air than the valley people, sleeping in huts instead of caves, wearing few furs, they grew tougher and stronger than the people in the valley, and were very brave and hardy and daring.

With their cords of grass, they learned before long to make nets, with which they caught fish in the river, wading in the water and pulling the nets between them. They lived on fish and wild fowl; they knew little of the fruits, nuts or roots which the valley tribes ate. Sometimes hunting parties went up the river, and brought back fresh fruits, but not often. It was toward the sea that they turned for new adventures.

CHAPTER XVI

MA-YA BUILDS A CANOE

For a long time after Ka-Ma and his wife came to live beside the sea, his children and his children's children continued to use rafts, made of logs tied together, for floating on the waters of the river. They never ventured on the ocean with these rafts, because of the heavy waves, and surf. Once or twice a raft was swept from the river into the sea, but the waves dashed over it, washing the men upon it into the water, and finally tossed it like a cork through the foaming surf and left it, battered and broken, on the beach. Some of the sea people were drowned in this way, and this made them very careful when they used their rafts upon the river.

There was a young man in the tribe named Ma-Ya, who used to sit for hours on the beach, looking out across the ocean, and wondering what was on the other side. He thought the ocean was a very wide river, too wide for him to see across, but he believed that if he could find some way of reaching the other side, he might find a new country, filled with strange adventures. The early men who lived by the sea always felt this call to cross its wide surface, and find new lands. It was the spirit which drove the early Norsemen, the Vikings, to Iceland, and later on, all the way across the Atlantic to the shores of North America, many centuries before Columbus made his first voyage. It sent these same Norsemen southward, around the shores of Spain to the coast of Africa, and into the Mediterranean Sea until they came to Italy, and even to the shores of Asia. But all this was thousands of years later, when man had learned how to build stout ships out of wooden planks, driven by long rows of oars, and sails.

Ma-Ya, sitting on the beach, made up his mind that some day he would cross the Great Water, and see what was on the other side. He believed there was land there, because he often saw flocks of birds winging their way inland from the sea, and he felt sure that in the place from which they came there must be food for them to eat, and trees for them to nest in, just as there were in his own country. But he knew he could never venture to make such a voyage on a clumsy raft.

One day, while fishing along the banks of the river, he saw, floating in the water, a dry leaf. A caterpillar had spun his cocoon in it, and with his web had drawn together the ends and sides of the leaf in such a way that it took the form of a perfect little canoe. When Ma-Ya saw it, it was gliding rapidly down the stream, dancing over the little waves like a bit of thistledown. In the centre of it lay the single passenger, the caterpillar in his cocoon.

Ma-Ya thought how nice it would be if he had such a boat to ride in. He thought about this a great deal, and finally an idea came into his head. Why could he not make himself a boat shaped like that, large enough to carry him and one of his companions upon the surface of the water? But it was a long time before he found a way to do it.

The sea people had learned a great deal from twisting and weaving rushes and reeds together to form the roofs and framework of their huts. Ma-Ya thought that in this way he might use reeds to make the framework of a boat.

So he got a great pile of reeds and wove them into a large round basket, shaped something like a bowl, and big enough to hold him. Then he covered the basket with the skin of a sea animal he had killed, tying the edges of the skin to the rim or edge of the wicker bowl. When he put his new boat in the water, it floated very nicely, but it had a bad habit of turning round and round, no matter which way he paddled. Still, it was much lighter than a raft, and could be used to cross the river in, or to fish from in quiet pools. But Ma-Ya was not satisfied with it; he wanted a boat which would be longer and narrower, with pointed ends, so that it could be more easily driven through the water. So he kept on thinking and thinking.

These round basket-work boats were called coracles, and sometimes, instead of being covered with skins, they were made by plastering all over the basket-work surface a kind of pitch that the early people found oozing from the ground. They were not very useful boats, however, and that was why Ma-Ya made up his mind to build a better one.

At last, after thinking about the matter for a long time, he found a way. First he took two long, stout poles of seasoned wood, such as the tribe used for making the handles of their spears. These two wooden poles he laid side by side on the ground, and then bound their ends tightly together with leather thongs. When this was done, he pulled the two poles apart in the middle, bending them like two bows until they were about three feet apart. A stick of this length, placed between the two poles in the middle, kept them apart. He now had a strong framework, very much the shape of a long, narrow leaf, pointed at each end, and widest in the middle.

When this was done, Ma-Ya got another pole about three feet longer than the framework, and bent the two ends of it upward at right angles to the main part of the pole. These bent ends, which were about eighteen inches long each, did not bend upward sharply, like the upright leg of the letter "L," but sloped upward on a curve, like the sides of the letter "U." Then he fastened the two uprights to the ends of his framework, with the straight part of the pole eighteen inches below it. This gave him the main framework of his boat. Then he took many strong slender reeds and bent them U-shaped, fastening the middle or bottom of the "U" to the bottom pole, and the two ends to the two upper or side poles. Because these side poles were widest apart in the middle, the U-shaped reeds were wide and flat there, but toward the two ends of the boat, the "U" shapes became narrower and narrower until at the ends they were shaped like a narrow "V." These bent reeds formed the ribs of the boat, and were held in place by wrappings of strong cord.

When they were all in place, Ma-Ya took more reeds and wove them in and out lengthwise of the boat, between the ribs, making a coarse basket-work, just as he had done in making his coracle. The framework of the boat, when done, looked like a coarse wicker basket made in the shape of a canoe.

For a covering, Ma-Ya used the back part of the hide of a great walrus he and some of his companions had killed upon the rocks. This hide, while still moist and soft, was placed upon the wicker framework and drawn over the upper edges, or gunwales, of the boat and fastened with thongs. At either end the hide was stretched tightly upward, and bound to the tops of the two posts or uprights at stem and stern. There were no openings or seams in the hide whatever, so that there could be no leaks. When the hide had become dry, it stretched tightly over the frame, and became very hard and tough, yet the canoe was so light that Ma-Ya could lift it in his two hands.

He placed it in the water, and with a paddle such as the sea people used for their rafts, climbed aboard.

It did not take him long to find out that his canoe was very easily upset. If he leaned too much to one side or the other, it would turn over, and leave him to drag it ashore and empty the water out of it before trying again. After a while, however, he got used to the new boat, and found that with a few strokes of his paddle he could send it through the water at great speed. His companions, who had laughed at it, at first, soon saw that Ma-Ya had made something that would be very useful in fishing, and in getting about on the water, and they too began to build boats of wicker-work, covered with skins. Up to now, the sea people had found it very hard to paddle their heavy rafts up the river, owing to the strong current, but in the swift, light canoes they could go wherever they pleased.

Ma-Ya's idea, however, was not to go up the river, so much as it was to sail on the ocean. As soon as he had learned how to manage his new craft, he allowed the current to sweep him through the river mouth and out on the broad surface of the sea. It was a quiet day, with no wind blowing, and Ma-Ya found that his little craft rode the long ocean swells as lightly as a cork. He paddled about for several hours, delighted with his success, and then drove his new boat back into the river mouth and pulled it up on the shore.

The next day he told one of his brothers of his plan to try to cross the Great Water and see what was on the other side, and the two adventurers placed provisions, and some jars of water, in the canoe, and started out.

This time, however, there was a strong wind blowing from the ocean, making its surface very rough. What had seemed to be only tiny waves, from the shore, turned out to be dangerous white-caps, which swept over the frail craft ready to fill it with water. The wind, too, became stronger, so that Ma-Ya and his companion could hardly paddle against it. Stronger and stronger grew the gale, and more and more weary grew the arms of the two paddlers. Soon they saw that instead of making any headway, they were being slowly driven back toward the shore. Their water jars had been upset by the plunging of the boat as it tossed in the waves, and more and more spray came aboard with every gust of wind. Ma-Ya became afraid, and told his companion they must try to paddle back to the mouth of the river.

This, however, they soon found they could not do. The gale had driven them a mile or more down the beach, and they could not force the boat back against it. Light as it was, and floating on the surface of the water like a leaf, it was at the mercy of the wind. In a few moments the two voyagers saw that they were being driven right toward the surf which thundered on the sandy beach. They paddled furiously, trying to keep the bow of the canoe pointed toward the shore, and waited to see what would happen. The great breakers lifted the tiny craft in their arms as though it had been a speck of foam, and hurled it round and round toward the beach. In the twinkling of an eye it was filled with water, upset, and Ma-Ya and his companion were left struggling in the waves. Luckily they were strong and fearless swimmers, and after a long fight, managed to make their way through the surf, almost battered to pieces. The sea folk, who were gathered on the shore watching them, ran down into the water and pulled them up on the beach. The little canoe was washed in and out again for many minutes, rolling over and over in the boiling surf like a huge fish, but at last it too came tumbling upon the sands, crushed and broken. The sea people pulled it up out of reach of the waves, and Ma-Ya gazed at it sadly. He knew now that while his frail craft was good enough for sailing on the river, it would never do for crossing the Great Water. So he made up his mind to think of something else.

It was many years before Ma-Ya made his next boat, and this time it was of wood.

He knew that the shape of his little canoe had been right, but that to stand the waves of the Great Water it would have to be made of something much stronger and more solid than wicker, covered with skin. The only thing he knew of was wood, yet his brain, which was only just beginning to think, told him no way in which he could make a boat out of wood.

One day, while far up the river in a canoe, he came across a huge log, the trunk of a tree, which had been blown down by the wind. It had drifted along the river from the forests above, and finally stuck on a mud-bank, where it was held by its dead branches.

Ma-Ya climbed up on this log and looked it over carefully. Something about it made him think of a boat. This was because the tree was partly hollow; a long stretch along one side of it had rotted away. Ma-Ya cut at the rotten wood with his stone axe, and found it soft and crumbly. He thought that if he and some of his companions were to dig out the centre of the log with their axes, and roughly chop the two ends to a point, they would have a large and strong boat, which even the waves of the ocean could not harm. It would take a long time, he knew, but he had nothing to do, and some of his friends, to whom he had told his plan to cross the Great Water and see what was on the other side, offered to help him. The next day, with axes and chisels of sharp flint, a little party went up the river to the mud-bank where the log lay, and began work on it.

The pointing of the ends was a long, hard task, but little by little they cut away the dry wood, and after many weeks the outside of the log began to take the shape of a boat. The task of digging out the inside was easy at first, where the wood was soft and rotten, but after a time the rotten wood was all cut away, and then the work became very hard. Knowing that fire would burn away the wood, Ma-Ya told his companions to start little fires all along the surface on which they were working, and when the fires had charred the inside of the log a little, they put them out and chipped away the burned wood. Over and over again they did this, for many weeks, and at last the inside of the log had been cut away until there was room in the new boat for fifteen or twenty men. Its sides were very thick and strong; they did not dare to burn away too much of the wood, for fear they would make a hole right through it. When it came time to push the new craft off the mud into the water, they found it so heavy that they were obliged to call for help. Finally, with thirty or forty men pushing and pulling, the great boat was slid into the water, where it floated almost as well as the lighter canoes. With paddles in their hands, Ma-Ya and a dozen of his friends scrambled aboard, and sent the new craft flying down the river.