United States or Bhutan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The man came, uneasy, but full of interest. "Take this, and hold it for me," said Bawr, and tossed him the red brand. With shrinking hands Ne-boo caught it, to drop it instantly with a yell of pain and terror. It fell, scraping his leg, and his foot, and in his fright he threw himself down beside it, begging it not to smite him again.
Once more, therefore, he held himself in check; while Bawr, his eyes easily reading the trail, crept on with the soundless step of a wild cat. But Grôm was not the only hunter lying in ambush in the sun-drenched ravine. Out from a bed of giant, red-blooming canna arose the diabolical, grinning head and monstrous shoulders of a saber-tooth, and stared after Bawr.
During all this excitement the main body of the tribe came straggling back along the beach from their hunting of whelks and mussels. At the foot of the bluff below the cave they found the body of the second bear, and gathered anxiously about it, clamoring over its spear-wounds and the arrows sticking in it, till Bawr and Grôm, who were in the rear, came up.
Bawr the Chief, meanwhile, was revolving many things in his sagacious brain, as he alternately lighted and extinguished the little, eating flames which fixed themselves upon the dry wood when he held it in the blaze. His mind was of a very different order from that of Grôm, though, perhaps, not less capacious and capable.
Then Bawr, ever subtle in the reading of his people's hearts, suggested to him that even such a feat as the rescue of the girl A-ya might not be impossible to the subjugator of the fire and the slayer of a whole people. And from that moment Grôm began climbing steadily back to life. The clay-colored, ape-like, bow-legged men squatted in council.
"Before they come," said Bawr, dropping his great craggy chin upon his breast, "the People of the Caves will be trodden out. Whither can we escape from such foes? We will build great fires before the caves, and we will go down fighting, as befits men." He lifted his maned and massive head, and shook his great spear defiantly at the unknown doom that was coming up from the south.
Before each cave-mouth, tended night and day, burned the sacred flame, its tongues licked upwards in gold and scarlet with a radiance from which all the tribe, with the sole exceptions of Bawr, the Chief, and Grôm, his right hand and councilor, were wont to avert their eyes in awe whenever they passed it in their comings and goings.
Grôm was the discoverer, the initiator, while Bawr was essentially the ruler, concerned to apply all he learned to the extension and securing of his power. It was his realization of Grôm's transparent honesty and indifference to power which made him so free from jealousy of Grôm's prestige.
The arrow in the throat had done its work. With fine self-restraint Bawr refrained from striking, that he might seem to usurp no share in Grôm's amazing achievement. He stood leaning upon his spear, calmly watching the last feeble paroxysm, till Grôm came scrambling down from the ledge and stood beside him. He took the bow and arrows, and examined them in silence.
The ominous roar and that obscure confusion rolled swiftly nearer, and Bawr, with a swing of his huge club, sprang down from his post of observation and strode to the front. Grôm shouted an order, and light was set to all the crescent of fires.
Word Of The Day