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Updated: May 5, 2025
Not for an instant do we feel the customary respectable and sanctioned desire to kiss the sheets yet an hour or so. The traipsing, trolloping humor of spring is in our veins; we feel that we must be about felling an aurochs or a narwhal for breakfast. We leap into our clothes and hurry downstairs and out of the front door and skirmish round the house to see and smell and feel. It is spring.
Nevertheless, they found him about half way between sunrise and noon, at the waiting place. He told them that he had not seen any living soul, only one large aurochs, but was not scared and did not run away, because the animal got out of his way.
Near him grazed an aurochs bull with a cow and a calf, close beside a lone rhinoceros asleep in a dust-hole. Deer, antelope, bison, horses, sheep, and goats were all in sight at the same time, and at a little distance a great megatherium reared up on its huge tail and massive hind feet to tear the leaves from a tall tree.
The frightened sambur closed up, instead of scattering, and the impetus of the buffalo presently spent itself upon the unresisting mass. They edged their way through to the left leaving swathes of gored and trodden sambur in their wake, and went thundering off on another line of retreat, caroming into a herd of aurochs, which fought them off and punished them murderously.
At this time, too, Ab took lessons in making all the varied articles of elk or reindeer horn and the drinking cups from the horns of urus and aurochs. Old Mok even went so far as to attempt teaching the youth something of carving figures upon tusks and shoulder blades, but in this art Ab never greatly excelled. He was too much a creature of action.
During the daytime they had to get out of the way of herds of bison and aurochs; where the terrible wild-boar sharpens his crooked tusks against the roots of the pine-trees, and very often it happened that those who made no use of the crossbow, or did not strike with the pike into the sides of a deer or young boar, such passed whole days without food.
In another cave, that of Massat, in the department of Ariege, which M. Lartet ascribes to the period of the aurochs, a quadruped which survived the reindeer in the south of France, there are bone instruments of a still more advanced state of the arts, as, for example, barbed arrows with a small canal in each, believed to have served for the insertion of poison; also a needle of bird's bone, finely shaped, with an eye or perforation at one end, and a stag's horn, on which is carved a representation of a bear's head, and a hole at one end as if for suspending it.
One of the best portraits is that discovered in the old cave at Laugerie Basse by M. Elie Massénat, where a very early pre-Glacial man is represented in the act of hunting an aurochs, at which he is casting a flint-tipped javelin. In this, as in all other pictures of the same epoch, I regret to say that the ancient hunter is represented in the costume of Adam before the fall.
The aurochs, once the companion of mammoths, still survives, but owes his present and precarious existence to man's care. Now, nothing that we know of forbids the hypothesis that some new species have been independently and supernaturally created within the period which other species have survived.
Some may even believe that man was created in the days of the mammoth, became extinct, and was recreated at a later date. But why not say the same of the aurochs, contemporary both of the old man and of the new?
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