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I have bearded and bitten the frozen seas, and, aforetime of that, ere ever the ice-ages came to be, I have dripped my shoulders in reindeer gore, slain the mastodon and the sabre-tooth, scratched the record of my prowess on the walls of deep- buried caves ay, and suckled she-wolves side by side with my brother- cubs, the scars of whose fangs are now upon me."
And I taught them the making of bows from the red and sweet-smelling wood like unto cedar. And I taught them to keep both eyes open, and to aim with the left eye, and to make blunt shafts for small game, and pronged shafts of bone for the fish in the clear water, and to flake arrow-heads from obsidian for the deer and the wild horse, the elk and old Sabre-Tooth.
Ground sloth and glyptodon, sabre-tooth, horse and mastodon, and all the associated animals of large size, vanished, and South America, though still retaining its connection with North America, once again became a land with a mammalian life small and weak compared to that of North America and the Old World.
But little it mattered to all surrounding nature that the strong man in the Fire Valley had resolved upon the death of the cave tiger. The tiger was yet alive! There was a difference in the pulse of all the woodland. There was a hush throughout the forest. The word, somehow, went to every nerve of all the world of beasts, "Sabre-Tooth is here!"
The mammoth, the huge, thick-coated rhinoceros, sabre-tooth, the monstrous tiger, or the bear, or the hyena, or the loping wolf, or short-bodied and vicious wolverine were to him, even then, but lower creatures. Man felt himself the master of the world, and his children inherited the perception.
Sabre-Tooth, long-fanged and long-haired, was the chiefest peril to us of the squatting place, who crouched through the nights over our fires and by day increased the growing shell-bank beneath us by the clams we dug and devoured from the salt mud-flats beside us.
There were vigorous and well-armed hunters at hand by scores, and under such escort women and children might travel after dusk with a degree of safety, unless, indeed, the great cave tiger, Sabre-Tooth, chanced to be abroad, but he was more rarely to be met than others of the wild beasts of the time. When he came it was as a thunderbolt and there were death and mourning in his trail.
She was part-clad, for warmth only, in skins of animals, mangy and fire-burnt, that I had slain; she was swart and dirty with camp smoke, unwashed since the spring rains, with nails gnarled and broken, and hands that were calloused like footpads and were more like claws than like hands; but her eyes were blue as the summer sky is, as the deep sea is, and there was that in her eyes, and in her clasped arms about me, and in her heart beating against mine, that withheld me . . . though through the dark until dawn, while Sabre-Tooth squalled his wrath and his agony, I could hear my comrades snickering and sniggling to their women in that I had not the faith in my emprise and invention to venture through the night to the pit and the stake I had devised for the undoing of Sabre- Tooth.
And ever I see the woman, the many women, who have made me and undone me, who have loved me and whom I have loved. I remember, oh, long ago when human kind was very young, that I made me a snare and a pit with a pointed stake upthrust in the middle thereof, for the taking of Sabre-Tooth.
The dread was all about. The forest became seemingly nearly lifeless. There was less barking and yelping, less reckless playfulness of wild creatures, less rustling of the leaves and pattering along the forest paths. There was fear and quiet, for Sabre-Tooth had come!
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