Chapter XII. The Primitive Man

by Joseph A. Altsheler

　　When Henry came back to this world he was lying upon the ground,with his head against a log, and about him was a circle of brownfaces, cold, hard, expressionless and apparently devoid of humanfeeling; pity and mercy seemed to be unknown qualities there.But the boy met them with a gaze as steady as their own, and thenhe glanced quickly around the circle. There was no otherprisoner and he saw no ghastly trophy; then his comrades hadescaped, and, deep satisfaction in his heart, he let his headfall back upon the log. They could do now as they chose withhim, and whatever it might be he felt that he had no cause tofear it.

　　Three other warriors came in presently, and Henry judged that allthe party were now gathered there. He was still lying near theriver on whose banks he had been struck down, and the shiftingclouds let the moonlight fall upon him. He put his hand to hishead where it ached, and when he took it away, there was blood onhis fingers. He inferred that a heavy blow had been dealt to himwith the flat of a tomahawk, but with the stained fingers he madea scornful gesture. One of the warriors, apparently a chief,noticed the movement, and he muttered a word or two which seemedto have the note of approval. Henry rose to his feet and thechief still regarded him, noting the fearless look, and the hintof surpassing physical powers soon to come. He put his hand uponthe boy's shoulder and pointed toward the north and west. Henryunderstood him. His life was to be spared for the present, atleast, and he was to go with them into the northwest, but to whatfate he knew not.

　　One of the warriors bathed his head, and put upon it a lotion ofleaves which quickly drove away the pain. Henry suffered hisministrations with primitive stoicism, making no comment andshowing no interest.

　　At a word from the leader they took up their silent march,skirting the river for a while until they came to a shallowplace, where they forded it, and buried themselves again in thedark forest. They passed among its shades swiftly, silently andin single file, Henry near the middle of the column, his figurein the dusk blending into the brown of theirs. He had completelyrecovered his strength, and, save for the separation from hisfriends and their consequent wonder and sorrow, he would not havegrieved over the mischance. Instinct told him-perhaps it was hisyouth, perhaps his ready adaptability that appealed to hiscaptors-that his life was safe, and now he felt a keen curiosityto know the outcome. It seemed to him too that without any willof his own he was about to begin the vast wanderings that he hadcoveted.

　　Hour after hour the silent file trod swiftly on into thenorthwest, no one speaking, their footfalls making no sound onthe soft earth. The moonlight deepened again, and veiled thetrunks and branches in ghostly silver or gray. By and by it grewdarker and then out of the blackness came the first shoot ofdawn. A shaft of pale light appeared in the east, then broadenedand deepened, bringing in its trail, in terrace after terrace,the red and gold of the rising sun. Then the light swept acrossthe heavens and it was full day.

　　They were yet in the forest and the dawn was cold. Here andthere in the open spaces and on the edges of the brown leavesappeared the white gleam of frost. The rustle of the woodsbefore the western wind was chilly in the ear. But Henry waswithout sign of fatigue or cold. He walked with a step as easyand as tireless as that of the strongest warrior in the band, andat all times he held himself, as if he were one of them, nottheir prisoner.

　　About an hour after dawn the party which numbered fifteen menhalted at a signal from the chief and began to eat the dried meatof the buffalo, taken from their pouches. They gave him a goodsupply of the food, and he found it tough but savory. Hungerwould have given a sufficient sauce to anything and as he ate ina sort of luxurious content he studied his captors with theadvantage of the daylight. The full sunshine disclosed no moreof softness and mercy than the night had shown. The featureswere immobile, the eyes fixed and hard, but when the gaze of anyone of them, even the chief, met the boy's it was quickly turned.There was about them something furtive, something of the lowerkingdom of the animals. That inherited primitive instinct,recently flaming up with such strength in him, did not tell himthat they were his full brethren. But he did not hate them,instead they interested him.

　　After eating they rested an hour or more in the covert of athicket and Henry saw the beautiful day unfold. The sunshine wasdazzling in its glory, the crisp wind made one's blood sparklelike a tonic, and it was good merely to live. A vast horizoninclosed only the peace of the wilderness.

　　The chief said some words to Henry, but the boy could understandnone of them, and he shook his head. Then the chief took therifle that had belonged to the captive, tapped it on the barreland pointed toward the southeast. Henry nodded to indicate thathe had come from that point, and then smiling swept the circle ofthe northwestern horizon with his hands. He meant to say that hewould go with them without resistance, for the present, at least,and the chief seemed to understand, as his face relaxed into alook of comprehension and even of good nature.

　　Their march was resumed presently and as before it was straightinto the northwest. They passed out of the forest crossed theOhio in hidden canoes and entered a region of small but beautifulprairies, cut by shallow streams, which they waded withundiminished speed. Henry began to suspect that the band camefrom some very distant country, and was hastening so much inorder not to be caught on the hunting grounds of rival tribes.The northwesterly direction that they were following confirmedhim in this belief.

　　All that day passed on the march but shortly after the night cameon and they had eaten a little more of the jerked meat, they laydown in a thicket, and Henry, unmindful of his captivity, fell ina few minutes into a sleep that was deep, sweet and dreamless.

　　He did not know then that before he was asleep long the chieftook a robe of tanned deerskin and threw it over him, shieldinghis body from the chill autumn night. In the morning shortlybefore he awoke the chief took away the robe.

　　That day they came to a mighty river and Henry knew that theyellow stream was that of the Mississippi. The Indians draggedfrom the sheltering undergrowth two canoes, in which the wholeparty paddled up stream until nightfall, when they bid the canoesagain in the foliage on the western shore, and then encamped onthe crest. They seemed to feel that they were out of danger nowas they built a fine fire and the captive basked in its warmth.

　　Henry had not made the slightest effort to escape, nor had heindicated any wish to do so, finding his reward in the increasedfreedom which the warriors gave to him. He had never been boundand now he could walk as he chose in a limited area about thecamp. But he did not avail himself of the privilege, for thepresent, preferring to sit by the fire, where he saw pictures ofWareville and those whom he loved. Then he bad a swift twinge ofconscience. When they heard they would grieve deep and long forhim and one, his mother, would never forget. He should havesought more eagerly to escape, and he glanced quickly about him,but there was no chance. However careless the warriors mightseem there was always one between him and the forest. Heresigned himself with a sigh but had he thought how quickly thepain passed his conscience would have hurt him again. Now hefelt much comfort where he sat; the night was really cold,bitingly cold, and it was a glorious fire. As he sat before itand basked in its radiance he felt the glorious physical joy thatmust have thrilled some far-away primeval ancestor, as he huggedthe coals in his cave after coming in from the winter storm.

　　Henry had the best place by the fire and a warrior who wassitting where his back was exposed to the wind moved over andshoved him away. Henry without a word smote him in the face withsuch force that the man fell flat and Henry thrust him aside,resuming his original position. The warrior rose to his feet andrubbed his bruised face, looking doubtfully at the boy who sat insuch stolid silence, staring into the coals and paying no furtherattention to his opponent. The Indian never uses his fists, andhis hand strayed to the handle of his tomahawk; then, as itstrayed away again he sat down on the far side of the fire, andhe too began to stare stolidly into the red coals. The chief,Black Cloud, bestowed on both a look of approval, but uttered nocomment.

　　Presently Black Cloud gave some orders to his men and they laydown to sleep, but the chief took the deerskin robe and handed itto Henry. His manner was that of one making a gift, and agesture confirmed the impression. Henry took the robe which hewould need and thanked the chief in words whose meaning the donormight gather from the tone. Then he lay down and slept as beforea dreamless sleep all through the night.

　　Their journey lasted many days and every hour of it was full ofinterest to Henry, appealing alike to his curiosity and itsgratification. He was launched upon the great wandering and hefound in it both the glamour and the reality that he wished, thereality in the rivers and the forests and the prairies that hesaw, and the glamour in the hope of other and greater rivers andforests and prairies to come.

　　Indian summer was at hand. All the woods were dyed in vividcolors, reds and yellows and browns, and glowed with dazzlinghues in the intense sunlight. Often the haze of Indian summerhung afar and softened every outline. Henry's feeling that hewas one of the band grew stronger, and they, too, began to regardhim as their own. His freedom was extended more and more andwith astonishing quickness he soon picked up enough words oftheir dialect to make himself intelligible. They took him withthem, when they turned aside for hunting expeditions, and he waspermitted now and then to use his own rifle. Only six men in theband had guns, and two of these guns were rifles the other fourbeing muskets. Henry soon showed that he was the best marksmanamong them and respect for him grew. The Indian whom he knockeddown was slightly gored by a stag when only Henry was near, butHenry slew the stag, bound up the man's wound and stayed by himuntil the others came. The warrior, Gray Fox, speedily becameone of his best friends.

　　Henry's enjoyment became more intense; all the trammels ofcivilization were now thrown aside, he never thought of themorrow because the day with its interests was sufficient, andfrom his new friends he learned fresh lore of the forest withmarvelous rapidity; they taught him how to trail, to takeadvantage of every shred of cover and to make signals byimitating the cry of bird or beast. Once they were caught in ahailstorm, when it turned bitterly cold, but he endured it aswell as the best of them, and made not a single complaint.They came at last to their village, a great distance west of theMississippi, a hundred lodges perhaps, pitched in a warm andsheltered valley and the boy, under the fostering care of BlackCloud, was formally adopted into the tribe, taking up at once thethread of his new life, and finding in it the same keen interestthat had marked all the stages of the great journey.

　　The climate here was colder than that from which he had come, andwinter, with fierce winds from the Great Plains was soon uponthem. But the camp which was to remain there until spring waswell chosen and the steep hills about them fended off the worstof the blast. Yet the snow came soon in great, whirling flakesand fell all one night. The next morning the boy saw the worldin white and he found it singularly beautiful. The snow he didnot mind as clothing of dressed skins had been given to him andhe had a warm buffalo robe for a blanket. Now, young as he was,he became one of the best hunters for the village and with theothers he roamed far over the snowy hills in search of game.Many were the prizes that fell to his steady aim and eye, chiefamong them the deer, the bear and the buffalo.

　　His fame in the village grew fast, and it would be hiding thefact to deny that he enjoyed it. The wild rough life with itslimitless range over time and space appealed to every instinct inhim, and his new fame as a tireless and skillful hunter was verysweet to him. He thought of his people and Wareville, it istrue, but he consoled himself again with the belief that theywere well and he would return to them when the chance came, andthen he plunged all the deeper and with all the more zest intohis new life which had so many fascinations. At Wareville therewere certain bounds which he must respect, certain weights whichhe must carry, but here he was free from both.

　　Meanwhile his body thrived at a prodigious rate. One couldalmost see him grow. There was not a warrior in the village whowas as strong as he, and already he surpassed them all inendurance; none was so fleet of foot nor so tireless. His faceand hair darkened in the wind and sun, his last vestige ofcivilized garb had disappeared long ago, and he was clothedwholly in deerskin. His features grew stronger and keener andthe eyes were incessantly watchful, roving hither and thither,covering every point within range. It would have taken more thana casual glance now to discover that he was white.

　　The winter deepened. The snow was continuous, fierce blasts blewin from the distant western plains and even searched out theirsheltered valley. The old men and the women shivered in thelodges, but sparkling young blood and tireless action kept theboy warm and flourishing through it all. Game grew scarce aboutthem and the hunters went far westward in search of the buffalo.Henry was with the party that traveled farthest toward thesetting sun, and it was long before they returned. Winter was atits height and when they came out of the forest into the wavingopen stretches which are the Great Plains all things were hiddenby the snow.

　　Henry from the summit of a little hill saw before him an expanseas mighty as the sea, and like it in many of its aspects. Theytold him that it rolled away to the westward, no man knew howfar, as none of them had ever come to the end of it. In summerit was covered with life. Here grew thick grass and wild flowersand the buffalo passed in millions.

　　It inspired in Henry a certain awe and yet by its very vaguenessand immensity it attracted just as he had wished to explore thesecrets of the forest he would like now to tread the Great Plainsand find what they held.

　　They turned toward the southwest in search of buffalo and werecaught in a great storm of wind and hail. The cold was bitterand the wind cut to the bone. They were saved from freezing todeath only by digging a rude shelter through the snow into theside of a hill, and there they crouched for two days with solittle food left in their knapsacks, that without game, theywould perish, in a week, of hunger, if the cold did not get thefirst chance. The most experienced hunters went forth, butreturned with nothing, thankful for so little a mercy as theability to get back to their half-shelter.

　　Henry at last took his rifle and ventured out alone-the otherswere too listless to stop him-and before the noon hour he found abuffalo bull, some outcast from the herd which had gonesouthward, struggling in the snow. The bull was old and lean,and it took two bullets to bring him down, but his death meanttheir life and Henry hurried to the camp with the joyful news.It was clearly recognized that he had saved them, but no one saidanything and Henry was glad of their silence.

　　When the storm ceased they renewed their journey toward the southwith a plentiful supply of food and not long afterwards the snowbegan to melt. Under the influence of a warm wind out of thesouthwest it disappeared with marvelous quickness; one day theearth was all white, and the next it was all brown. The warmwind continued to blow, and then faint touches of green began toappear in the dead grass; there were delicate odors, the breathof the great warm south, and they knew that spring was not faraway.

　　In a week they ran into the buffalo herd, a mighty black mass ofmoving millions. The earth rumbled hollowly under the tread of amyriad feet, and the plain was black with bodies to the horizonand beyond.

　　They killed as many of the buffalo as they wished and after thefashion of the more northerly Indians reduced the meat topemmican. Then, each man bearing as much as he couldconveniently carry, they began their swift journey homeward, notknowing whether they would arrive in time for the needs of thevillage.

　　Henry felt a deep concern for these new friends of his who wereleft behind in the valley. He shared the anxiety of the otherswho feared lest they would be too late and that fact reconciledhim to the retreat from the Great Plains, whose mysteries helonged to unravel.

　　As they went swiftly eastward the spring unfolded so fast that itseemed to Henry to come with one great jump. They were now inthe forests and everywhere the trees were laden with fresh buds,in all the open spaces the young grass was springing up, and thebrooks, as if rejoicing in their new freedom from the ice-boundwinter, ran in sparkling little streams between green banks.

　　The physical world was full of beauty to him, more so than everbecause his power of feeling it had grown. During the winter andby the triumphant endurance of so many hardships his form hadexpanded and the tide of sparkling blood had risen higher.Although a captive he was regarded in a sense as the leader ofthe hunting party; it was obvious, in the deference that theothers, though much older, showed to him and he knew that onlyhis resource, courage and endurance had saved them all fromdeath. A song of triumph was singing in his veins.

　　They found the village at the edge of starvation despite theapproach of spring; two or three of the older people had diedalready of weakness, and their supplies arrived just in time torelieve the crisis. There were willing tongues to tell of hisexploits, and Henry soon perceived that he was a hero to them alland he enjoyed it, because it was natural to him to be a leader,and he loved to breathe the air of approbation. Yet as theyvalued him more they grew more jealous of him, and they watchedhim incessantly, lest he should take it into his head to flee tothe people who were once his own. Henry saw the difficulty andagain it soothed his conscience by showing to him that he couldnot do what he yet had a lingering feeling that he ought to do.

　　Good luck seemed to come in a shower to the village with thereturn of the hunting party. Spring leaped suddenly into fullbloom, and the woods began to swarm with game. It was the mostplentiful season that the oldest man could recall, there was nohunter so lazy and so dull that he could not find the buffalo andthe deer.

　　Then the band, with the spirit of irresponsible wandering uponit, took down its lodges and traveled slowly into the northfarther and farther from the little settlement away down inKentucky. There was peace among the tribes and they could go asthey chose. They came at last to the shores of a mighty lake,Superior, and here when Henry looked out upon an expanse ofwater, as limitless to the eyes as the sea, he felt the samethrill of awe that had passed through his veins when the GreatPlains lay outspread before him. As it was now midsummer and theforests crackled in the heat, they lingered long by the deep coolwaters of the lake. Here white traders, Frenchmen speaking atongue unknown to Henry, came to them with rifles, ammunition andbright-colored blankets to trade for furs. More than one of themsaw and admired the tall powerful young warrior with thesingularly watchful eyes but not one of them knew that under hispaint and tan he was whiter than themselves; instead they tookhim to be the wildest of the wild.

　　Henry's heart had throbbed a little at the first sight of them,but it was only for a moment, then it beat as steadily as ever;white like himself they might be, but they were of an alien race;their speech was not his speech, their ways not his ways and heturned from them. He was glad when they were gone.

　　Toward the end of summer they went south again and wandered idlythrough pleasant places. It was still a full season with wildfruits hanging from the trees and game everywhere. There hadbeen no sickness in the little tribe and they basked in physicalcontent. It was now a careless easy life with the stimulus ofwandering and hunting and all the old primeval instincts inHenry, made stronger by habit, were gratified. He fell easilyinto the ways of his friends; when there was nothing to do hecould sit for hours looking at the forests and the streams andthe sunshine, letting his soul steep in the glory of it all. Tohis other qualities he now added that of illimitable patience.He could wait for what he wished as the Eskimo sits for days atthe air hole until the seal appears.

　　In their devious wanderings they kept a general course toward thevalley in which they had passed the first winter, intending torenew their camp there during the cold weather, but autumn, asthey intended, was at hand before they reached it. They were yeta long distance north and west of their valley when they werethreatened by a danger with which they had not reckoned. A localtribe claimed that the band was infringing upon their huntinggrounds and began war with a treacherous attack upon a huntingparty.

　　The war was not long but the few hundreds who took part in itshared all the passions and fierce emotions of two great nationsin conflict. Henry was in the thick of it, first alike in attackand defense, superior to the Indians themselves in wiles andcunning. Several of the hostile tribe fell at his hand, althoughhe could not take a scalp, the remnants of his early trainingforbidding it. But once or twice he was ashamed of the weakness.The hostile party was triumphantly beaten off with great loss toitself and Henry and his friends pursued their journey leisurelyand triumphantly. Now besides being a great hunter he was agreat warrior too.