beyond, the feathered shaft sunk in its vitals, the whole tribe
applauding.

I was Ushu, the archer, and Igar was my woman and mate. We laughed
under the sun in the morning, when our man-child and woman-child,

yellowed like honey-bees, sprawled and rolled in the mustard, and at
night she lay close in my arms, and loved me, and urged me, because

of my skill at the seasoning of woods and the flaking of arrow-
heads, that I should stay close by the camp and let the other men

bring to me the meat from the perils of hunting. And I listened,
and grew fat and short-breathed, and in the long nights, unsleeping,

worried that the men of the stranger tribe brought me meat for my
wisdom and honour, but laughed at my fatness and undesire for the

hunting and fighting.
And in my old age, when our sons were man-grown and our daughters

were mothers, when up from the southland the dark men, flat-browed,
kinky-headed, surged like waves of the sea upon us and we fled back

before them to the hill-slopes, Igar, like my mates far before and
long after, leg-twining, arm-clasping, unseeing far visions, strove

to hold me aloof from the battle.
And I tore myself from her, fat and short-breathed, while she wept

that no longer I loved her, and I went out to the night-fighting and
dawn-fighting, where, to the singing of bowstrings and the shrilling

of arrows, feathered, sharp-pointed, we showed them, the kinky-
heads, the skill of the killing and taught them the wit and the

willing of slaughter.
And as I died them at the end of the fighting, there were death

songs and singing about me, and the songs seemed to sing as these
the words I have written when I was Ushu, the archer, and Igar, my

mate-woman, leg-twining, arm-clasping, would have held me back from
the battle.

Once, and heaven alone knows when, save that it was in the long ago
when man was young, we lived beside great swamps, where the hills

drew down close to the wide, sluggish river, and where our women
gathered berries and roots, and there were herds of deer, of wild

horses, of antelope, and of elk, that we men slew with arrows or
trapped in the pits or hill-pockets. From the river we caught fish

in nets twisted by the women of the bark of young trees.
I was a man, eager and curious as the antelope when we lured it by

waving grass clumps where we lay hidden in the thick of the grass.
The wild rice grew in the swamp, rising sheer from the water on the

edges of the channels. Each morning the blackbirds awoke us with
their chatter as they left their roosts to fly to the swamp. And

through the long twilight the air was filled with their noise as
they went back to their roosts. It was the time that the rice

ripened. And there were ducks also, and ducks and blackbirds
feasted to fatness on the ripe rice half unhusked by the sun.

Being a man, ever restless, ever questing, wondering always what lay
beyond the hills and beyond the swamps and in the mud at the river's

bottom, I watched the wild ducks and blackbirds and pondered till my
pondering gave me vision and I saw. And this is what I saw, the

reasoning of it:
Meat was good to eat. In the end, tracing it back, or at the first,

rather, all meat came from grass. The meat of the duck and of the
blackbird came from the seed of the swamp rice. To kill a duck with

an arrow scarce paid for the labour of stalking and the long hours
in hiding. The blackbirds were too small for arrow-killing save by

the boys who were learning and preparing for the taking of larger
game. And yet, in rice season, blackbirds and ducks were

succulently fat. Their fatness came from the rice. Why should I
and mine not be fat from the rice in the same way?

And I thought it out in camp, silent, morose, while the children
squabbled about me unnoticed, and while Arunga, my mate-woman,

vainly scolded me and urged me to go hunting for more meat for the
many of us.

Arunga was the woman I had stolen from the hill-tribes. She and I
had been a dozen moons in learning common speech after I captured

her. Ah, that day when I leaped upon her, down from the over-
hanging tree-branch as she padded the runway! Fairly upon her

shoulders with the weight of my body I smote her, my fingers wide-
spreading to clutch her. She squalled like a cat there in the

runway. She fought me and bit me. The nails of her hands were like
the claws of a tree-cat as they tore at me. But I held her and

mastered her, and for two days beat her and forced her to travel
with me down out of the canyons of the Hill-Men to the grass lands

where the river flowed through the rice-swamps and the ducks and the
blackbirds fed fat.

I saw my vision when the rice was ripe. I put Arunga in the bow of
the fire-hollowed log that was most rudely a canoe. I bade her

paddle. In the stern I spread a deerskin she had tanned. With two
stout sticks I bent the stalks over the deerskin and threshed out

the grain that else the blackbirds would have eaten. And when I had
worked out the way of it, I gave the two stout sticks to Arunga, and

sat in the bow paddling and directing.
In the past we had eaten the raw rice in passing and not been

pleased with it. But now we parched it over our fire so that the
grains puffed and exploded in whiteness and all the tribe came

running to taste.
After that we became known among men as the Rice-Eaters and as the

Sons of the Rice. And long, long after, when we were driven by the
Sons of the River from the swamps into the uplands, we took the seed

of the rice with us and planted it. We learned to select the
largest grains for the seed, so that all the rice we thereafter ate

was larger-grained and puffier in the parching and the boiling.
But Arunga. I have said she squalled and scratched like a cat when

I stole her. Yet I remember the time when her own kin of the Hill-
Men caught me and carried me away into the hills. They were her

father, his brother, and her two own blood-brothers. But she was
mine, who had lived with me. And at night, where I lay bound like a

wild pig for the slaying, and they slept weary by the fire, she
crept upon them and brained them with the war-club that with my

hands I had fashioned. And she wept over me, and loosed me, and
fled with me, back to the wide sluggish river where the blackbirds

and wild ducks fed in the rice swamps--for this was before the time
of the coming of the Sons of the River.

For she was Arunga, the one woman, the eternal woman. She has lived
in all times and places. She will always live. She is immortal.

Once, in a far land, her name was Ruth. Also has her name been
Iseult, and Helen, Pocahontas, and Unga. And no stranger man, from

stranger tribes, but has found her and will find her in the tribes
of all the earth.

I remember so many women who have gone into the becoming of the one
woman. There was the time that Har, my brother, and I, sleeping and

pursuing in turn, ever hounding the wild stallion through the
daytime and night, and in a wide circle that met where the sleeping

one lay, drove the stallion unresting through hunger and thirst to
the meekness of weakness, so that in the end he could but stand and

tremble while we bound him with ropes twisted of deer-hide. On our
legs alone, without hardship, aided merely by wit--the plan was

mine--my brother and I walked that fleet-footed creature into
possession.

And when all was ready for me to get on his back--for that had been
my vision from the first--Selpa, my woman, put her arms about me,

and raised her voice and persisted that Har, and not I, should ride,
for Har had neither wife nor young ones and could die without hurt.

Also, in the end she wept, so that I was raped of my vision, and it
was Har, naked and clinging, that bestrode the stallion when he

vaulted away.
It was sunset, and a time of great wailing, when they carried Har in

from the far rocks where they found him. His head was quite broken,
and like honey from a fallen bee-tree his brains dripped on the

ground. His mother strewed wood-ashes on her head and blackened her
face. His father cut off half the fingers of one hand in token of

sorrow. And all the women, especially the young and unwedded,
screamed evil names at me; and the elders shook their wise heads and

muttered and mumbled that not their fathers nor their fathers'
fathers had betrayed such a madness. Horse meat was good to eat;

young colts were tender to old teeth; and only a fool would come to
close grapples with any wild horse save when an arrow had pierced

it, or when it struggled on the stake in the midst of the pit.
And Selpa scolded me to sleep, and in the morning woke me with her

chatter, ever declaiming against my madness, ever pronouncing her
claim upon me and the claims of our children, till in the end I grew

weary, and forsook my far vision, and said never again would I dream
of bestriding the wild horse to fly swift as its feet and the wind

across the sands and the grass lands.
And through the years the tale of my madness never ceased from being

told over the camp-fire. Yet was the very telling the source of my
vengeance; for the dream did not die, and the young ones, listening

to the laugh and the sneer, redreamed it, so that in the end it was
Othar, my eldest-born, himself a sheer stripling, that walked down a

wild stallion, leapt on its back, and flew before all of us with the
speed of the wind. Thereafter, that they might keep up with him,

all men were trapping and breaking wild horses. Many horses were
broken, and some men, but I lived at the last to the day when, at

the changing of camp-sites in the pursuit of the meat in its
seasons, our very babes, in baskets of willow-withes, were slung

side and side on the backs of our horses that carried our camp-
trappage and dunnage.

I, a young man, had seen my vision, dreamed my dream; Selpa, the
woman, had held me from that far desire; but Othar, the seed of us

to live after, glimpsed my vision and won to it, so that our tribe
became wealthy in the gains of the chase.

There was a woman--on the great drift down out of Europe, a weary
drift of many generations, when we brought into India the shorthorn

cattle and the planting of barley. But this woman was long before
we reached India. We were still in the mid-most of that centuries-

long drift, and no shrewdness of geography can now place for me that
ancient valley.

The woman was Nuhila. The valley was narrow, not long, and the
swift slope of its floor and the steep walls of its rim were

terraced for the growing of rice and of millet--the first rice and
millet we Sons of the Mountain had known. They were a meek people

in that valley. They had become soft with the farming of fat land
made fatter by water. Theirs was the first irrigation we had seen,

although we had little time to mark their ditches and channels by
which all the hill waters flowed to the fields they had builded. We

had little time to mark, for we Sons of the Mountain, who were few,
were in flight before the Sons of the Snub-Nose, who were many. We

called them the Noseless, and they called themselves the Sons of the
Eagle. But they were many, and we fled before them with our

shorthorn cattle, our goats, and our barleyseed, our women and
children.

While the Snub-Noses slew our youths at the rear, we slew at our
fore the folk of the valley who opposed us and were weak. The

village was mud-built and grass-thatched; the encircling wall was of
mud, but quite tall. And when we had slain the people who had built

the wall, and sheltered within it our herds and our women and
children, we stood on the wall and shouted insult to the Snub-Noses.

For we had found the mud granaries filled with rice and millet. Our
cattle could eat the thatches. And the time of the rains was at

hand, so that we should not want for water.
It was a long siege. Near to the beginning, we gathered together

the women, and elders, and children we had not slain, and forced
them out through the wall they had builded. But the Snub-Noses slew

them to the last one, so that there was more food in the village for
us, more food in the valley for the Snub-Noses.

It was a weary long siege. Sickness smote us, and we died of the
plague that arose from our buried ones. We emptied the mud-

granaries of their rice and millet. Our goats and shorthorns ate
the thatch of the houses, and we, ere the end, ate the goats and the

shorthorns.

• feathered [´feðəd] a.有羽毛的；羽状的 (初中英语单词)
• hidden [´hid(ə)n] hide 的过去分词 (初中英语单词)
• chatter [´tʃætə] vi.&n.饶舌；闲聊 (初中英语单词)
• twilight [´twailait] n.黎明；黄昏 (初中英语单词)
• restless [´restləs] a.没有休息的 (初中英语单词)
• vision [´viʒən] n.视觉；想象力；幻影 (初中英语单词)
• scarce [skeəs, skers] a.缺乏的；稀有的 (初中英语单词)
• learning [´lə:niŋ] n.学习；学问；知识 (初中英语单词)
• stolen [´stəulən] steal 的过去分词 (初中英语单词)
• clutch [klʌtʃ] v.抓住 n.爪子；控制 (初中英语单词)
• driven [´driv(ə)n] drive 的过去分词 (初中英语单词)
• eternal [i´tə:nəl] a.永远的；永恒的 (初中英语单词)
• sleeping [´sli:piŋ] n.&a.睡着(的) (初中英语单词)
• circle [´sə:kəl] n.圆圈 v.环绕；盘旋 (初中英语单词)
• hunger [´hʌŋgə] n.饥饿；渴望 (初中英语单词)
• thirst [θə:st] n.渴，口渴；渴望 (初中英语单词)
• weakness [´wi:knis] n.虚弱；弱点，缺点 (初中英语单词)
• sunset [´sʌnset] n.日落；晚霞 (初中英语单词)
• pursuit [pə´sju:t] n.追踪；追击；事务 (初中英语单词)
• wealthy [´welθi] a.富有的；丰富的 (初中英语单词)
• valley [´væli] n.谷；河谷；流域 (初中英语单词)
• flight [flait] n.逃走；飞行；班机 (初中英语单词)
• insult [in´sʌlt, ´insʌlt] n.&vt.侮辱；损害 (初中英语单词)
• beginning [bi´giniŋ] n.开始，开端；起源 (初中英语单词)
• sickness [´siknis] n.生病；呕吐，恶心 (初中英语单词)
• archer [´ɑ:tʃə] n.射手，弓箭手 (高中英语单词)
• learned [´lə:nid] a.有学问的，博学的 (高中英语单词)
• thereafter [ðeə´rɑ:ftə] adv.此后，其后 (高中英语单词)
• hardship [´hɑ:dʃip] n.受苦，吃苦；苦难 (高中英语单词)
• madness [´mædnis] n.疯狂；狂热 (高中英语单词)
• barley [´bɑ:li] n.大麦 (高中英语单词)
• geography [dʒi´ɔgrəfi] n.地理(学) (高中英语单词)
• theirs [ðeəz] pron.他们的 (高中英语单词)
• mustard [´mʌstəd] n.芥菜；芥末(色) (英语四级单词)
• antelope [´æntiləup] n.羚羊 (英语四级单词)
• irrigation [,iri´geiʃən] n.灌溉；水利 (英语四级单词)
• thatch [θætʃ] n.茅草屋顶 (英语四级单词)
• hunting [´hʌntiŋ] n.打猎 (英语六级单词)
• sluggish [´slʌgiʃ] a.呆滞的；偷懒的 (英语六级单词)
• taking [´teikiŋ] a.迷人的 n.捕获物 (英语六级单词)
• rudely [´ru:dli] ad.粗鲁地；粗略地 (英语六级单词)
• meekness [´mi:knis] n.温顺；卑恭屈节 (英语六级单词)
• forsook [fə´suk] forsake的过去式 (英语六级单词)