In the Beginning Read Free

it as once they had been masters of the grasslands.
    Dom shouted with the rest, proud of the tribe and of his father who had done all these things.
    They feasted in the clearing which had a stream running beside it. The women cut up the dead beasts but took only the tenderest parts of their flesh: there was far more meat here than they could eat in several days. They stripped off the hides but left the bloody carcasses in the grass. Vultures circled overhead, but dared not come down while the tribe was there.
    It was late afternoon and they dozed, full-­bellied, in the sun. Dom had a dream of hunting,and his body twitched as in the dream he yelled at onrushing antelope. But the yell became real, echoing in his ears though not from his own throat. Bewildered he leaped to his feet and saw the enemy bursting out of the bushes on the far side of the clearing. His club of bone lay at his feet; quickly he picked it up and ran forward with the other hunters to take up the challenge.
    The strangers outnumbered the hunters, though they were smaller and slimmer men. They carried pointed stones which they tried to use as daggers; but the great clubs of the hunters struck them down before they could come to grips. One of the men rushed at Dom while he was off guard from striking at another, but Dom saw him in time and fended the blow off with his arm. The man was fully grown and bigger than Dom, but he did not press the attack and fell back weakly.
    The fight was quickly over, with the rest of the enemy fleeing as the first two had done. The hunters pursued them a little way into the bushes, but they ran well and the hunters were gorged with meat. They went back to the clearing where the remainder of the tribe waited.
    Now their joy, and their pride in themselves and their chief, were greater than ever. By overcoming this enemy they had avenged the defeat on the rocky hillside. They had said the tribe were the masters of this good new land: their victory proved it true.

2
    T HAT NIGHT A LION, COUGHING in the ­distance, wakened Dom from sleep. Automatically his hand went to the club that lay beside him, to the dagger in his belt. Having checked that his weapons were within reach, he was content.
    But the sound, in the stillness of the night, made him remember another such occasion. That had been in a different land, hundreds of miles to the north, and although only a few months since, in a different age. It had been the last night of his boyhood.
    He remembered his fear at the lion’s roar. It hadhappened once that a lion had leaped the outer guarding line of hunters and snatched a child and got away with it before the hunters were properly alert. That had been an accident, all the hunters said, because in truth the lions feared the tribe. A week later the hunters killed a lion and said it was the lion which had stolen the child: the tribe, not the lions, were masters of the grassland.
    But nevertheless Dom had shivered, and pulled his covering of antelope hide tighter around him. At that moment he heard his mother’s voice whisper:
    â€œDom. . . .”
    â€œI am cold,” he whispered back.
    â€œCome to me.”
    He hesitated. He was no longer a child, to be nursed. In the hunt he went out with the men, as one of the beaters who drove the antelope to where the hunters waited. In a year’s time he might be a hunter himself and wield a club.
    His mother said again: “Come, Dom.”
    Her voice was low. Dom listened and heard only the soft sounds of sleep from the others. The lion spoke again, a double cough and nearer. Slowly, cautiously, he crept toward her, and her arms foundhim and pulled him close. Her body was warm. Gradually his shivering ceased and he slept.
    â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢
    Dom remembered the following day also. In the morning the sun woke them, rising hot above the level plain. The people of the tribe got up from the nests of grass in which they had slept and moved down the