climbing over the rocks at the upper end of the valley, searching for the nests of wild birds he sometimes found there. Then she called Cold to her.
"Blow your hardest for a few moments, Cold," she said.
Cold puffed out his cheeks and blew a freezing blast down the valley, and all the falling drops of Rain turned to bits of ice, like hail, which cut Adh's shoulders and arms and back, and hurt him, in spite of his thick coat of hair. To escape from the storm, he ran beneath some overhanging rocks, and suddenly found himself in a little cave, its floor covered with soft dry moss. Here he was quite safe from the hail and rain, and he was very much pleased.
While he was standing in the cave, Adh suddenly had another thought. He wished that his wife and child were with him. And no sooner had he thought of them than he dashed out of the cave, and forgetting all about the hail and rain, he ran to the nest in the grass where they lay trying to keep warm, and brought them as fast as he could back to the nice dry cave. And this cave was Man's very first home.
"You see," said Mother Nature to the Sun, "whenever I want my new Man to think, I send him some kind of trouble. If I hadn't made him hungry, he would never have got the idea of pulling the bunch of fruit out of the tree with his stick, and now, because I made him cold and wet, he has found himself a home."
"What are you going to make him do next?" asked the Sun.
"Wait and see," said Mother Nature. "But don't forget that I have given him a wife and child to think about, now, and he will do more, on their account, than he would ever do, alone, for in his simple way, he loves them."
"What is Love?" asked the Sun.
"It is one of the great laws of the Universe, that God has made, a feeling, or instinct, that causes all His creatures to want a mate to live with, and thus have children. If it were not for this law, there would never be any children, and all the living creatures on the Earth would disappear in a very little while."
"This Love must be a very queer thing," said the Sun. "I do not understand it."
"And yet, Sun, you will see, some day, that it is the most wonderful law that God has made. Without it, Man would never amount to anything at all. From now on my creature Adh is going to think of doing a great many things, because of his wife and child, that he would not think of doing without them."
When Adh got his wife and child into the cave, they were no longer cold and wet, but they were still very hungry, and all day long the Ape-Man wandered through the valley, looking for something to eat. Sometimes, when all he could find was a few dried berries, or a handful of little grains from the tall grasses that grew here and there, he would carry them back to his wife, instead of eating them himself. In the past, before he had any wife, he would never have thought of such a thing as going hungry for the sake of some one else, but now it was different; he thought of his wife and child.
At last there came a day when from morning to night he could not find a single scrap of food. Everything was gone, and he was weak from hunger. He went down to the shore of the little lake that lay in the bottom of the valley, and throwing himself on the ground, drank as much water as he could, to fill his empty stomach. Then he sat up and stared at the cold, grey sky, not knowing what to do. Presently he saw a great bird, like a fish-hawk, swoop down to the surface of the lake, and rise a moment later with a shining fish in its claws. Then, as Adh watched, another hawk flew up and tried to take the fish away from the first one. The two birds screamed and tore at each other, and as they fought, the fish the first one had been carrying fell to the ground close to where Adh was sitting.
He walked over to where it lay, and picked it up, more from curiosity than anything else, for he had never thought of such a thing as eating a fish. For thousands of years his parents before him had eaten nothing but fruit, and roots, and nuts, with occasionally an egg or a young bird, and he had always done just as they had done. He did not know that the flesh of fish, or animals, was good to eat.
As he held the fish in his hands, he smelt the fresh blood from the wound made by the claws of the fish-hawk and it made him hungrier than ever. Half starved as he was, he could have eaten anything, and without thinking any more about it, he tore the fish apart and put a piece of it in his mouth. It tasted strange to him, and he did not like it, but his stomach was very empty, and almost before he knew what he was about, he had eaten the whole fish.
After that, he felt better, and sat on the edge of the lake for a long time, watching the fish swimming about in the shallow water. Then he thought of his wife. She would want something to eat, too. How could he get another fish? He tried for a long time to catch one in his hands, but they were too quick for him.
Then he thought of his club, and taking it in his hands, he did his best to hit one of the fish with it, but every time he failed. Once he struck so hard that the club was splintered against a rock, and the heavy end of it broken off. Adh looked at the piece left in his hands and felt sad, for he loved his club, and always carried it about with him. Pretty soon he noticed, as he felt the broken and splintered end of the stick, that it was very sharp, and he thought to himself, why could he not drive the sharp end into the back of one of the fish, as it lay in the mud. It took him a long time to do this, but by lying among the rushes, and keeping very quiet, he finally succeeded. Reaching down, he seized the fish he had speared in his hands.
"Look!" said Mother Nature to the Sun. "My new Man has made himself a spear."
When Adh gave the fish to his wife, she did not understand what he wanted her to do with it, but finally, by chattering, and making signs, he got her to eat a little of it. The new kind of food made her rather sick, at first, but after a while, as there was nothing else to eat, she made a meal of it, and from then on Adh went to the lake every day and speared a fish or two for their dinner. By the time the cold rainy season was over, and the warm weather had come again, he and his wife had grown quite used to eating fish, and had even got to like it.
Mother Nature watched all this and smiled to herself.
"See how quickly my Ape-Man is learning to think," she said to the Sun. "Already he has found a home, and taught himself to get food from the rivers and lakes, instead of from the trees and bushes, and he has made himself a spear. I knew he was not going to let himself starve."
"What is he going to do next?" asked the Sun, who was getting very much interested in the funny little Ape-Man.
"I think I shall teach him to fight," Mother Nature said.
"To fight? What for?"
"So that he can protect himself against his enemies. When I took away his tail, you said he would either starve, or be eaten up. Well, he hasn't starved, and I can't let him be eaten up. He will have plenty of enemies, before he gets through, and if he doesn't know how to fight, they will destroy him."
"Will this thing you call Love help him to fight?" asked the Sun.
"Yes. He will fight twice as hard, because of his love for his wife and child. If you don't believe it, just wait and see."
CHAPTER VI
ADH'S FIRST FIGHT
Wherever he went, Adh carried about with him a club. He had found himself a new one, now that his first was broken, and this new club was short and heavy, with a great hard knob on the end of it, as big as his two fists. He had broken it from the limb of a tree, and rubbed and polished it on the rocky floor of the cave until it was hard and smooth. Besides the club, he had made himself a long straight spear, with the end of it rubbed to a point against the rocks. He used the spear for getting fish, and had become so skilful that he hardly ever missed them.
One
