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Ugh-lomi and the Cave-Bear:
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Stories of the Stone Age
2. Ugh-lomi and the Cave-Bear
by
H.G. Wells
PGA e-Book Cover
Based on an image created with Microsoft Bing software
ILLUSTRATED BY COSMO ROWE (1877-1952)
First published in The Idler, June 1897,
in the series "Stories of the Stone Age"
This e-book edition: Project Gutenberg Australia, 2024
IN the days when Eudena and Ugh-lomi fled from the
people of Uya towards the fir-clad mountains of the Weald,
across the forests of sweet chestnutand the grass-clad
chalkland, and hid themselves at last in the gorge of
the river between the chalk cliffs, men were few and
their squatting-places far between. The nearest men to
them were those of the tribe, a full day's journey down
the river, and up the mountains there were none. Man
was indeed a newcomer to this part of the world in that
ancient time, coming slowly along the rivers, generation
after generation, from one squatting-place to another,
from the south-westward. And the animals that held the the
hippopotami and rhinoceri of the river valleys, the horses
of the grass plains, the deer and swine of the woods, the
grey apes in the branches, the the uplands, feared him but
little—let alone the mammoths in the mountains and the
elephants that came through the land in the summer-time out
of the south. For why should they fear him, with but the
rough, chipped flints that he had not learnt to haft and
which he threw but ill, and the poor spear of sharpened
wood, as all his weapons against hoof and horn, tooth and
claw?
Andoo, the huge cave bear, who lived in the cave up
the gorge, had never even seen a man in all his wise and
respectable life, until midway through one night, as he
was prowling down the gorge along the cliff edge, he saw
the glare of Eudena's fire upon the ledge, and Eudena red
and shining, and Ugh-lomi, with a gigantic shadow mocking
him upon the white cliff, going to and fro, shaking his
mane of hair, and waving the axe of stone—the first axe
of stone—while he chanted of the killing of Uya. The
cave bear was far up the gorge, and he saw the thing
slanting-ways and far off. He was so surprised he stood
quite still upon the edge, sniffing the novel odour of
burning bracken, and wondering whether the dawn was coming
up in the wrong place.
Waving the axe of stone while he chanted of the killing of Uya.
He was the lord of the rocks and caves, was the cave
bear, as his slighter brother, the grizzly, was lord of
the thick woods below, and as the dappled lion—the lion
of those days was dappled—was lord of the thorn-thickets,
reed-beds, and open plains. He was the greatest of all
meat-eaters; he knew no fear, none preyed on him, and
none gave him battle; only the rhinoceros was beyond his
strength. Even the mammoth shunned his country. This
invasion perplexed him. He noticed these new beasts were
shaped like monkeys, and sparsely hairy like young pigs.
"Monkey and young pig," said the cave bear. "It might not
be so bad. But that red thing that jumps, and the black
thing jumping with it yonder! Never in my life have I seen
such things before."
He came slowly along the brow of the cliff towards them,
stopping thrice to sniff and peer, and the reek of the fire
grew stronger. A couple of hyænas also were so intent
upon the thing below that Andoo, coming soft and easy, was
close upon them before they knew of him or he of them. They
started guiltily and went lurching off. Coming round in a
wheel, a hundred yards off, they began yelling and calling
him names for the start they had had. "Ya-ha!" they cried.
"Who can't grub his own burrow? Who eats roots like a
pig? . . . Ya-ha!" For even in those days the hyæna's
manners were just as offensive as they are now.
"Who answers the hyæna?" growled Andoo, peering
through the midnight dimness at them, and then going to
look at the cliff edge.
There was Ugh-lomi still telling his story, and the
fire getting low, and the scent of the burning hot and
strong.
Andoo stood on the edge of the chalk cliff for some
time, shifting his vast weight from foot to foot, and
swaying his head to and fro, with his mouth open, his ears
erect and twitching, and the nostrils of his big, black
muzzle sniffing. He was very curious, was the cave bear,
more curious than any of the bears that live now, and the
flickering fire and the incomprehensible movements of
the man, let alone the intrusion into his indisputable
province, stirred him with a sense of strange new
happenings. He had been after red deer fawn that night, for
the cave bear was a miscellaneous hunter, but this quite
turned him from that enterprise.
"Ya-ha!" yelled the hyænas behind. "Ya-ha-ha!"
Peering through the starlight, Andoo saw there were now
three or four going to and fro against the grey hillside.
"They will hang about me now all the night until I kill,"
said Andoo. "Filth of the world!" And mainly to annoy them,
he resolved to watch the red flicker in the gorge until the
dawn came to drive the hyæna scum home. And after a
time they vanished, and he heard their voices, like a party
of Cockney beanfeasters, away in the beech-woods. Then they
came slinking near again. Andoo yawned and went on along
the cliff, and they followed. Then he stopped and went
back.
It was a splendid night, beset with shining
constellations, the same stars, but not the same
constellations we know, for since those days all the stars
have had time to move into new places. Far away across the
open space beyond where the heavy-shouldered, lean-bodied
hyænas blundered and howled, was a beech-wood, and
the mountain slopes rose beyond, a dim mystery, until their
snow-capped summits came out white and cold and clear,
touched by the first rays of the yet unseen moon. It was a
vast silence, save when the yell of the hyænas flung
a vanishing discordance across its peace, or when from
down the hills the trumpeting of the new-come elephants
came faintly on the faint breeze. And below now, the red
flicker had dwindled and was steady, and shone a deeper
red, and Ugh-lomi had finished his story and was preparing
to sleep, and Eudena sat and listened to the strange voices
of unknown beasts, and watched the dark eastern sky growing
deeply luminous at the advent of the moon. Down below,
the river talked to itself, and things unseen went to and
fro.
After a time the bear went away, but in an hour he was
back again. Then, as if struck by a thought, he turned, and
went up the gorge. . . .
The night passed, and Ugh-lomi slept on. The waning moon
rose and lit the gaunt white cliff overhead with a light
that was pale and vague. The gorge remained in a deeper
shadow, and seemed all the darker. Then by imperceptible
degrees the day came stealing in the wake of the moonlight.
Eudena's eyes wandered to the cliff brow overhead once, and
then again. Each time the line was sharp and clear against
the sky, and yet she had a dim perception of something
lurking there. The red of the fire grew deeper and deeper,
grey scales spread upon it, its vertical column of smoke
became more and more visible, and up and down the gorge
things that had been unseen grew clear in a colourless
illumination. She may have dozed.
Suddenly she started up from her squatting position,
erect and alert, scrutinising the cliff up and down.
She made the faintest sound, and Ugh-lomi too, light
sleeping like an animal, was instantly awake. He caught up
his axe and came noiselessly to her side.
The light was still dim, the world now all in black and
dark grey, and one sickly star still lingered overhead.
The ledge they were on was a little grassy space, six feet
wide, perhaps, and twenty feet long, sloping outwardly, and
with a handful of St. John's wort growing near the edge.
Below it the soft, white rock fell away in a steep slope of
nearly fifty feet to the thick bush of hazel that fringed
the river. Down the river this slope increased, until
some way off a thin grass held its own right up to the
crest of the cliff. Overhead, forty or fifty feet of rock
bulged into the great masses characteristic of chalk, but
at the end of the ledge a gully, a precipitous groove of
discoloured chalk, slashed the face of the cliff, and gave
a footing to a scrubby growth, by which Eudena and Ugh-lomi
went up and down.
They stood as noiseless as startled deer, with every
sense expectant. For a minute they heard nothing, and then
came a faint rattling of dust down the gully, and the
creaking of twigs.
Ugh-lomi gripped his axe, and went to the edge of the
ledge, for the bulge of the chalk overhead had hidden the
upper part of the gully. And forthwith, with a sudden
contraction of the heart, he saw the cave bear half-way
down from the brow, and making a gingerly backward step
with his flat hind-foot. His hind-quarters were towards
Ugh-lomi, and he clawed at the rocks and bushes so that he
seemed flattened against the cliff. He looked none the less
for that. From his shining snout to his stumpy tail he was
a lion and a half, the length of two tall men. He looked
over his shoulder, and his huge mouth was open with the
exertion of holding up his great carcase, and his tongue
lay out. . . .
He got his footing, and came down slowly, a yard
nearer.
"Bear," said Ugh-lomi, looking round with his face
white.
But Eudena, with terror in her eyes, was pointing down
the cliff.
Ugh-lomi's mouth fell open. For down below, with her big
fore-feet against the rock, stood another big brown-grey
bulk—the she-bear. She was not so big as Andoo, but she
was big enough for all that.
Then suddenly Ugh-lomi gave a cry, and catching up
a handful of the litter of ferns that lay scattered on
the ledge, he thrust it into the pallid ash of the fire.
"Brother Fire!" he cried, "Brother Fire!" And Eudena,
starting into activity, did likewise. "Brother Fire! Help,
help! Brother Fire!"
Brother Fire was still red in his heart, but he turned
to grey as they scattered him. "Brother Fire!" they
screamed. But he whispered and passed, and there was
nothing but ashes. Then Ugh-lomi danced with anger and
struck the ashes with his fist. But Eudena began to hammer
the firestone against a flint. And the eyes of each were
turning ever and again towards the gully by which Andoo
was climbing down. Brother Fire! Suddenly the huge furry
hind-quarters of the bear came into view, beneath the bulge
of the chalk that had hidden him. He was still clambering
gingerly down the nearly vertical surface. His head was yet
out of sight, but they could hear him talking to himself.
"Pig and monkey," said the cave bear. "It ought to be
good."
Eudena struck a spark and blew at it; it twinkled
brighter and then—went out. At that she cast down flint
and firestone and began wringing her hands. Her face was
wet with tears. Then she sprang to her feet and scrambled
a dozen feet up the cliff above the ledge. How she hung on
even for a moment I do not know, for the chalk was vertical
and without grip for a monkey. In a couple of seconds she
had slid back to the ledge again with bleeding hands.
Ugh-lomi was making frantic rushes about the ledge-now
he would go to the edge, now to the gully. He did not know
what to do, he could not think. The she-bear looked smaller
than her mate—much. If they rushed down on her together,
one might live. "Eigh?" said the cave bear, and Ugh-lomi
turned again and saw his little eyes peering under the
bulge of the chalk. "Stand away!" said the bear; "I'm going
to jump down."
Eudena, cowering at the end of the ledge, began to
scream like a gripped rabbit.
At that a sort of madness came upon Ugh-lomi. With a
mighty cry, he caught up his axe and began to clamber up
the gully to the bear. He uttered neither word nor cry.
The monster gave a grunt of surprise. In a moment Ugh-lomi
was clinging to a bush right underneath the bear, and in
another he was hanging to its back half buried in fur, with
one fist clutched in the hair under its jaw. The bear was
too astonished at this fantastic attack to do more than
cling passive. And then the axe, the first of all axes,
rang in its skull.
He was hanging to its back half buried in fur.
The bear's head twisted from side to side, and he began
a petulant scolding growl. The axe bit within an inch of
the left eye, and the hot blood blinded that side. At that
the brute roared with surprise and anger, and his teeth
gnashed six inches from Ugh-lomi's face. Then the axe,
clubbed close, came down heavily on the corner of the
jaw.
The next blow blinded the right side and called forth
a roar, this time of pain. Eudena saw the huge, flat
feet slipping and sliding, and suddenly the bear gave a
clumsy leap sideways, as if for the ledge. Then everything
vanished, and the hazels smashed, and a roar of pain and a
tumult of shouts and growls came up from far below.
Eudena screamed and ran to the edge and peered over.
For a moment, man and bears were a heap together, Ugh-lomi
uppermost; and then he had sprung clear and was scaling the
gully again, with the bears rolling and striking at one
another among the hazels. But he had left his axe below,
and three knob-ended streaks of carmine were shooting down
his thigh. "Up!" he cried, and in a moment Eudena was
preceding him to the top of the cliff.
In half a minute they were at the crest, their hearts
pumping noisily, with Andoo and his wife far and safe
below them. Andoo was sitting on his haunches, both paws
at work, trying with quick exasperated movements to wipe
the blindness out of his eyes, and the she-bear stood on
all-fours a little way off, ruffled in appearance and
growling angrily. Ugh-lomi flung himself flat on the grass,
and lay panting and bleeding with his face on his arms.
For a second Eudena regarded the bears, then she came
and sat beside him, looking at him. . . .
Presently she put forth her hand timidly and touched
him, and made the guttural sound that was his name. He
turned over and raised himself on his arm. His face was
pale, like the face of one who is afraid. He looked at her
steadfastly for a moment, and then suddenly he laughed.
"Waugh!" he said exultantly.
"Waugh!" said she—a simple but expressive
conversation.
Then Ugh-lomi came and knelt beside her, and on hands
and knees peered over the brow and examined the gorge.
His breath was steady now, and the blood on his leg had
ceased to flow, though the scratches the she-bear had made
were open and wide. He squatted up and sat staring at the
footmarks of the great bear as they came to the gully—they
were as wide as his head and twice as long. Then he jumped
up and went along the cliff face until the ledge was
visible. Here he sat down for some time thinking, while
Eudena watched him.
Presently Ugh-lomi rose, as one whose mind is made up.
He returned towards the gully, Eudena keeping close by him,
and together they clambered to the ledge. They took the
firestone and a flint, and then Ugh-lomi went down to the
foot of the cliff very cautiously, and found his axe. They
returned to the cliff now as quietly as they could, and
turning their faces resolutely up-stream set off at a brisk
walk. The ledge was a home no longer, with such callers in
the neighbourhood. Ugh-lomi carried the axe and Eudena the
fire-stone. So simple was a Palæolithic removal.
They went up-stream, although it might lead to the very
lair of the cave bear, because there was no other way to
go. Down the stream was the tribe, and had not Ugh-lomi
killed Uya and Wau? By the stream they had to keep—because
of drinking.
So they marched, through beech trees, with the gorge
deepening until the river flowed, a frothing rapid, five
hundred feet below them. And of all the changeful things
in this world of change, the courses of rivers, in deep
valleys change least. It was the river Wey, the river we
know to-day, and they marched over the very spots where
nowadays stand little Guildford and Godalming—the first
human beings to come into the land. Once a grey ape
chattered and vanished, and all along the cliff edge, vast
and even, ran the spoor of the great cave bear.
And then the spoor of the bear fell away from the cliff,
showing, Ugh-lomi thought, that he came from some place to
the left, and keeping to the cliff's edge, they presently
came to an end. They found themselves looking down on a
great semi-circular space caused by the collapse of the
cliff. It had smashed right across the gorge, banking the
up-stream water back in a pool which overflowed in a rapid.
The slip had happened long ago. It was grassed over, but
the face of the cliffs that stood about the semicircle was
still almost fresh-looking and white as on the day when
the rock must have broken and slid down. Starkly exposed
and black under the foot of these cliffs were the mouths
of several caves. And as they stood there, looking at the
space, and disinclined to skirt it, because they thought
the bears' lair lay somewhere on the left in the direction
they must needs take, they saw suddenly first one bear and
then two coming up the grass slope to the right and going
across the amphitheatre towards the caves. Andoo was first,
and he dropped a little on his fore-foot, and his mien was
despondent, and the she-bear came shuffling behind.
Eudena and Ugh-lomi stepped quite noiselessly back from
the cliff until they could just see the bears over the
verge. Then Ugh-lomi stopped. Eudena pulled his arm, but
he turned with a forbidding gesture, and her hand dropped.
Ugh-lomi stood watching the bears, with his axe in his
hand, until they had vanished into the cave. He growled
softly, and shook the axe at the she-bear's receding
quarters. Then to Euderia's terror, instead of creeping
off with her, he lay flat down and crawled forward into
such a position that he could just see the cave. It was
bears—and he did it as calmly as if it had been rabbits he
was watching!
He lay still, like a barked log, sun-dappled, in the
shadow of the trees. He was thinking. And Eudena had
learnt, even when a little girl, that when Ugh-lomi became
still like that, jawbone on fist, novel things presently
began to happen.
It was an hour before the thinking was over; it was noon
when the two little savages had found their way to the
cliff brow that overhung the bears' cave. And all the long
afternoon they fought desperately with a great boulder of
chalk; trundling it, with nothing but their unaided sturdy
muscles, from the gully where it had hung like a loose
tooth, towards the cliff top. It was full two yards about,
it stood as high as Eudena's waist, it was obtuse-angled
and toothed with flints. And when the sun set it was
poised, three inches from the edge, above the cave of the
great cave bear.
In the cave, conversation languished during the
afternoon. The she-bear snoozed sulkily in her corner—for
she was fond of pig and monkey—and Andoo was busy licking
the side of his paw and smearing his face to cool the smart
and inflammation of his wounds. Afterwards he went and sat
just within the mouth of the cave, blinking out at the
afternoon sun with his uninjured eye, and thinking.
"I never was so startled in my life," he said at last.
"They are the most extraordinary beasts. Attacking me!"
"I don't like them," said the she-bear, out of the
darkness behind.
"A feebler sort of beast I never saw. I can't think what
the world is coming to. Scraggy, weedy legs . . . . Wonder
how they keep warm in winter?"
"Very likely they don't," said the she—bear.
"I suppose it's a sort of monkey gone wrong."
"It's a change," said the she-bear.
A pause.
"The advantage he had was merely accidental," said
Andoo. "These things will happen at times."
"I can't understand why you let go," said the
she-bear.
That matter had been discussed before, and settled. So
Andoo, being a bear of experience, remained silent for
a space. Then he resumed upon a different aspect of the
matter. "He has a sort of claw—a long claw that he seemed
to have first on one paw and then on the other. Just one
claw. They're very odd things. The bright thing, too, they
seemed to have—like that glare that comes in the sky in
daytime—only it jumps about—it's really worth seeing.
It's a thing with a root, too—like grass when it is
windy."
"Does it bite?" asked the she-bear. "If it bites it
can't be a plant."
"No——I don't know," said Andoo. "But it's curious,
anyhow."
"I wonder if they are good eating?" said the
she-bear.
"They look it," said Andoo, with appetite—for the cave
bear, like the polar bear, was an incurable carnivore—no
roots or honey for him.
The two bears fell into a meditation for a space.
Then Andoo resumed his simple attentions to his eye. The
sunlight up the green slope before the cave mouth grew
warmer in tone and warmer, until it was a ruddy amber.
"Curious sort of thing—day," said the cave bear. "Lot
too much of it, I think. Quite unsuitable for hunting.
Dazzles me always. I can't smell nearly so well by day."
The she-bear did not answer, but there came a measured
crunching sound out of the darkness. She had turned up a
bone. Andoo yawned. "Well," he said. He strolled to the
cave mouth and stood with his head projecting, surveying
the amphitheatre. He found he had to turn his head
completely round to see objects on his right-hand side. No
doubt that eye would be all right to-morrow.
He yawned again. There was a tap overhead, and a big
mass of chalk flew out from the cliff face, dropped a yard
in front of his nose, and starred into a dozen unequal
fragments. It startled him extremely. When he had recovered
a little from his shock, he went and sniffed curiously at
the representative pieces of the fallen projectile. They
had a distinctive flavour, oddly reminiscent of the two
drab animals of the ledge. He sat up and pawed the larger
lump, and walked round it several times trying to find a
man about it somewhere. . . .
When night had come he went off down the river gorge to
see if he could cut off either of the ledge's occupants.
The ledge was empty, there were no signs of the red thing,
but as he was rather hungry he did not loiter long that
night, but pushed on to pick up a red deer fawn. He forgot
about the drab animals. He found a fawn, but the doe was
close by and made an ugly fight for her young. Andoo had
to leave the fawn, but as her blood was up she stuck to
the attack, and at last he got in a blow of his paw at
her nose, and so got hold of her. More meat but less
delicacy, and the she-bear, following, had her share. The
next afternoon, curiously enough, the very fellow of the
first white rock fell, and smashed precisely according to
precedent.
The aim of the third, that fell the night after,
however, was better. It hit Andoo's unspeculative skull
with a crack that echoed up the cliff, and the white
fragments went dancing to all the points of the compass.
The she-bear coming after him and sniffing curiously at
him, found him lying in an odd sort of attitude, with his
head wet and all out of shape. She was a young she-bear,
and inexperienced, and having sniffed about him for some
time and licked him a little, and so forth, she decided to
leave him until the odd mood had passed, and went on her
hunting alone.
She looked up the fawn of the red doe they had killed
two nights ago, and found it. But it was lonely hunting
without Andoo, and she returned caveward before dawn. The
sky was grey and overcast, the trees up the gorge were
black and unfamiliar, and into her ursine mind came a dim
sense of strange and dreary happenings. She lifted up her
voice and called Andoo by name. The sides of the gorge
re-echoed her.
As she approached the caves she saw in the half light,
and heard, a couple of jackals scuttle off, and immediately
after a hyæna howled and a dozen clumsy bulks went
lumbering up the slope, and stopped and yelled derision.
"Lord of the rocks and caves—ya-ha!" came down the wind.
The dismal feeling in the she-bear's mind became suddenly
acute. She shuffled across the amphitheatre.
"Ya-ha!" said the hyænas, retreating.
"Ya-ha!"
The cave bear was not lying quite in the same attitude,
because the hyænas had been busy, and in one place
his ribs showed white. Dotted over the turf about him lay
the smashed fragments of the three great lumps of chalk.
And the air was full of the scent of death.
The she-bear stopped dead. Even now, that the great and
wonderful Andoo was killed was beyond her believing. Then
she heard far overhead a sound, a queer sound, a little
like the shout of a hyæna but fuller and lower in
pitch. She looked up, with her little dawn-blinded eyes,
seeing little, her nostrils quivering. And there, on the
cliff edge, far above her against the bright pink of dawn,
were two little shaggy round dark things, the heads of
Eudena and Ugh-lomi, as they shouted derision at her. But
though she could not see them very distinctly she could
hear, and dimly she began to apprehend. A novel feeling as
of imminent strange evils came into her heart.
She began to examine the smashed fragments of chalk that
lay about Andoo. For a space she stood still, looking about
her and making a low continuous sound that was almost a
moan. Then she went back incredulously to Andoo to make one
last effort to rouse him.
Thus it was in the dawn of time that the Great Bears,
who were the Lords of the Rocks and Caves, began their
acquaintance with Man.
THE END
Project Gutenberg Australia