and laughed.
It was a strange, disconcerting sound, that laughter, and the nearest Dinoceras, disturbed by it, edged away and crowded against his neighbor’s flank in an inexplicable apprehension.
The next moment the stupendous opposing forces met with a shock that, to the man’s overstrung senses, seemed to make the very daylight reel. There was no space for evasion or manœuver. The two ponderous bulks went straight through the ranks of the black bulls, ripping them with beak and horn from shoulder to rump, treading them down like corn, and trampling them under foot as they rolled on. The bulls on either side charged on their flanks, rearing, grunting, squealing insanely and ripping with the massive daggers of their tusks. But as this terrific assault came from both sides at once, the two monsters were in reality supported by it, so that they were not swept off their feet. Almost without a check, as it seemed, they ploughed straight on, lashing with their mighty tails, and leaving a trail of disabled victims behind them, and so wore their way right up to the line of the cows.
But here they were stopped. The calves were behind that line.
The black mothers simply heaped themselves upon those impaling horns and armored fronts, bearing them down, smothering, engulfing them in an avalanche of screaming and monstrous bulks. The bulls, meanwhile, were rending, tearing, stabbing, on flank and rear. The two Dinosaurs disappeared from view. The dreadful mountain of writhing, gigantic shapes heaved convulsively for some minutes. Then the great columns that were the Dinosaurs’ legs seemed to crumble beneath the weight. The awful, battling heap sagged, fell apart, and let in the glare of the sunlight upon what had been the two colossal monarchs of the early world. The dreadful, unrecognizable things still moved, still heaved and twisted ponderously among the bodies of their slain, but it was mere aimless paroxysm, the blind life struggling to resist its final expulsion and dissipation. The wounded Dinoceras drew away, to die or recover as curious Nature might decree. The surviving cows returned to assure themselves that their young had come to no hurt. And the great black bulls who had escaped serious injury in the struggle stood about in a ring, thrusting and ripping at the unresponsive mountains of flesh. As they satisfied themselves, one after another, that the victory was complete, and that there was nothing more to battle against, they fell to devouring their prey. Ordinarily feeders on herbage and roots, they were like pigs and rats and men, more or less without prejudice in their diet, and they seemed to think that dinosaur went very well with grass.
At a distance of not more than fifty paces from these destroying hosts, the man-creature stood carelessly, and stared and considered. He had no fear of them. He knew he could avoid them with ease. So insignificant that in their excitement they hardly noticed him, so small that in bulk he was no greater than the least of their calves, he nevertheless despised the gigantic beasts and felt himself their lord. He had played with the two monarchs of all the early world, led them into his trap, and taken such dreadful vengeance upon them that his grief was almost assuaged by the fullness of it. The black herds of the Dinoceras he had used as the tools of his vengeance. No doubt, if necessary, he could use them again in some such fashion.
He turned his back upon them, knowing that his fine ear would inform him at once if any should take it into their heads to pursue him, and stalked away with deliberation towards the wooded ground. But he avoided his tree. He would never more go near that empty home. He would return to the regions beyond the head of the lagoon, where he would find scattered members of his kindred. He would find another mate; and in a dim, groping way he harbored a desire for new offspring, for sons, in particular, who should be inquiring and full of resource, like himself. At the edge of the wood he turned, and gave one more long, musing look at the invincible black herds whom he had used. The idea of sons came back upon him insistently. A faint sense of the immeasurable vastness of what was to be done swept over his soul. But he was not daunted. He would at least do something. And he would teach his children, till they should learn, perhaps, by taking thought, even to overcome the ferocity of the saber-tooth and foil the malice of the great red bear.
CHAPTER III
THE FINDING OF FIRE
The people of the Little Hills were in extremity. Trouble after trouble had come upon them, blow after blow had stricken them, till now there were but three score fighting-men, with perhaps twice that number of women able to bear children, left to the tribe. It looked as if but one more stroke such as that which had just befallen them must wipe them out of existence. And that, had ruthless Nature suffered it, would have been a damage she might have taken some thousands of years to repair. For the People of the Little Hills had climbed higher from the pregnant ooze than any other of the man or half-man tribes at that time struggling into being on the youthful Earth.
First and not least formidable to the tribe had been an incursion from the east of beings who were plainly men, in a way, but still more plainly beasts. Had the tribe of the Little Hills but known it, these Ape-men were much like their own ancestors except for the blackness of their skins beneath the coarse fur, the narrow angle of their skulls and the heavy forward thrust of their lower jaws.
Soon afterwards, appearing from no man could say just where, came a scattered incursion of mammoth cave-bears, saber-toothed tigers and a few gigantic cave-lions. These ravenous monsters not only slaughtered wholesale the game on which the Hillmen most depended, but strove–each for himself, fortunately–to seize the caves. As they raged against each other no less desperately than against their human adversaries, the issue of the war was never in doubt. The Hillmen stood together solidly, fought with all their cunning of pitfall and ambuscade, and overwhelmed the mightiest by sheer weight of numbers. But again the victory was dearly bought. When the last of the monsters, sullen and amazed, withdrew to seek less difficult encounters, he left mourning and lamentation in the caves.
This war had been a matter of some seasons. Then had followed a summer of peace and good hunting, which had given wounds time to heal. But with winter had swept down another dreadful invasion again from the unfriendly east–wolves, wolves of gigantic stature, and hunting in such huge packs that many outlying sections of the tribe were cut off and devoured before the Hillmen could combine to withstand them. Fortunately, the different packs had no combined action, so after the first shock the sagacious warrior who ruled the men of the Little Hills was able to get his diminished followers together, along with most of their stored supplies, and mass them in the amphitheater of the central caves.
So dragged by half the desperate winter. Then suddenly the wolves, having exterminated or driven off all the game among the Little Hills, once more took the trail, though with diminished ranks, and swept off ravaging to the south-westward. The People of the Little Hills were free once more to come out into the sun. But there was no more game to hunt, neither in the forest, nor on the upland slopes, nor in the reeking marshes by the estuary. The tribe was driven to fumbling in the pools at low tide for scallops and clams and mussels, a diet which their souls despised and their bodies resented.
The fact that the invasion of the wolves had forced the tribe to concentrate, however, presently proved to have been a painfully disguised blessing. Had they remained as before, scattered all over their domain for the convenience of the chase, their next and hardest trial would surely have annihilated them.
It was once more out of the east that it came upon them, by the trail of the vanished Ape-men and the ravaging wolves. About sunrise of a summer’s day a woman of the tribe was grubbing for roots with a pointed stick by the banks of a brook when she was pounced upon by a pair of squat, yellow-brown, filthy men with enormous shoulders, short bow-legs and flat faces with gaping, upturned nostrils. Young and vigorous, she fought like a tigress till stunned by a blow on the head, which was not before both her assailants were streaming with blood from the jabs of her sharp digging-stick. Her cries had aroused the tribe, however, and her captors, appreciating in her a shapeliness and fairness beyond anything they had ever seen in their own females, hastened to make sure of their prize by dragging her off into the woods. Three of the Hillmen, raging in pursuit, were intercepted by a horde of the squat strangers suddenly
