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Updated: May 17, 2025
The Star was given a special welcome and a hut all to itself. Nothing in all their lives had seemed more curious to Umpl and Sptz than those huts. They were made of twigs and reeds wattled into basketwork, and then clay plastered over all until they were water tight, and they were perched on logs driven into the bottom of the lake like piles.
And I might tell how Umpl learned at last to take one sharp stone and, by pressing on it with another, break off little chips until what was left became a beautiful arrowhead, and how he made so many, and so many chips around the cave, and so many other chipmakers were doing likewise, that to-day men call the time when Umpl lived the Stone Age, for all their axes, knives, and tools seemed made of stone.
The spear bit deep into the vast shaggy chest and the air was filled with such a shuddering roar that several more pieces of stone fell from the roof; and after all it was not the spear, but the sand and sharp bits of stone which Umpl flung in his eyes that made the animal back out, growling and brushing his head in a rage.
Umpl could take a great bone, and with a sharp flint and a copper knife which had been hammered until it was almost as hard as flint, he could carve on that white bone a picture of a fierce wild bull, so naturally that you would want to run away if he had not also carved a young warrior rushing down all ready to do battle with the beast.
The fact that he had it proved that the white-toothed bracelet told the truth in regard to his bravery. While the wolves fought over their prey below Umpl looked at them and thought. The others looked without thinking. Presently the noise grew less, and Umpl looked about him and began to talk to the other young men. He pointed out to them that one wolf, or two, would not have dared to attack them.
Umpl was astonished to find that the sharp edge of this would cut like flint, yet would not bend like copper; and he began to make regular knives and spearheads of such material, finding out a way of making clay moulds and pouring the melted metal into them to harden into the right shapes.
Umpl had become a man. But he was a very young one still. This luck did not follow every one in that long valley. There came a time when it did not rain for nearly a year. The springs stopped running. The birds flew away. The hares went, no one knew where. The stags disappeared. Food was hard to earn, and every meat-eater in the valley found it so, and many of them lived only by eating each other.
No other Cave boy or girl in the whole valley ever took the trouble to think about anything that was not connected with dinner, or the latest style of wearing burrs in their hair; and when Umpl thought so long about it that he feared it must be a spirit, and laid his best arrowhead on it as an offering, while Sptz for the same reason brought a queer bit of bone with a feather in one end and a scrap of rabbit fur around it, the thoughts were good for 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!
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.
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