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Updated: May 23, 2025
His name was Ulf, the son of Urgan, who was the son of Umpleton, who, as you will remember, was the grandson of Umpl. It was thus a very long time after Umpl's day; and yet, here is a very curious thing: Umpl had blue eyes and black eyebrows and hair; so had Ulf! Umpl had a nose with a little rise in the bridge of it, like a curve; so had Ulf!
Straight through the glade came the rush of galloping feet, and an antlered stag swept by like a stone from a sling. So swiftly did he pass that no arrow was ready save Umpl's. His went hurtling after, straight at the back of the tossing head, and the great deer fell in a heap, stone-dead. But what had scared him? Ah! They did not need to ask. Gaunt, grey forms were rushing toward them.
That was the way in which people were taught history before the days of books. This is not so strange. But is it not a most wonderful thing that just because Umpl, from the falling of the Star was led to think, and make his brain stronger and wiser than his mates, the result of it should last so long that it made a leader of a boy more than a hundred years after Umpl's day? Just think of it!
It was a part of Umpl's good fortune that he had of late been carrying with him the Star-club that his father had made. On his arm gleamed the Cave Bear's teeth, grim and white; and when the others saw that they stopped to think a moment. They feared the bear. Who dared, then, to meet the Cave Bear's slayer? And then something happened which gave them other thoughts still more unpleasant.
Lastly but in Umpl's eyes the most important of all they carried, as of old, in a sling, the Iron Star. Surely this was not the time to leave that good-luck-bringer at home, so Umpl reasoned. Thus the Star once more set out upon its travels. Now, the errand which one goes on sometimes has a great deal to do with what he finds at the end of it.
But the son of Umpl's son knew all about it, as far as any one person knew; for in the long nights when the water rippled lazily up against the mossy logs beneath the huts, and the evening smoke curled upward from the after-supper fires, then was the time for stories of great marvels in the days of old; and Umpleton, as the boy was called, knew well that far in the northwest was the Star that once had made the fortune of his family.
Umpl got out of it safely enough, with an arrow hole or two here and there where they did not count. But he did not have so many to lead back home again; and the Iron Star, alas! was lost, captured by the enemy. Umpl never laid eyes on it again. Neither did Umpl's son.
Umpl's eyes were brighter, and he was thinner than in better days; yet he still managed to find some things eatable; and he laid it all to the Star. And one day he found himself a long way from the cave and among a dozen young men as hungry as himself, and each one ready to kill the other. It was very much as though they had all met there for a picnic.
Umpl's ears had been of a longer, narrower pattern than those of his mates; Ulf had the same style of narrow ear on each side of his head; and just as Umpl thought, and dreamed a little, and planned, and looked far ahead to what he might do as the leader of a band of warriors if he could bring them to reason, instead of shooting them all with his bow and arrows when the wolves had them treed, so now in their games Ulf was the one who did the planning.
But in Umpl's day there was only one thing more dangerous than the hunt for the Cave Bear. There was but one game which made a young man think, and plan, and contrive as never before to come out ahead.
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