Before Adam Page #19

"Before Adam" by Jack London, published in 1907, is a unique blend of science fiction, evolutionary theory, and adventure. It explores the idea of genetic memory through a narrator who experiences vivid dreams of a prehistoric past.

• Action and Adventure
• Science fiction

								

pebble had struck him between the shoulders. Then I got one and yelled.
The only thing that saved us was the exhausting of Red-Eye’s
ammunition. He dashed back to the gravel-bed for more, while Lop-Ear
and I paddled away.

Gradually we drew out of range, though Red-Eye continued making trips
for more ammunition and the pebbles continued to whiz about us. Out in
the centre of the slough there was a slight current, and in our
excitement we failed to notice that it was drifting us into the river.
We paddled, and Red-Eye kept as close as he could to us by following
along the shore. Then he discovered larger rocks. Such ammunition
increased his range. One fragment, fully five pounds in weight, crashed
on the log alongside of me, and such was its impact that it drove a
score of splinters, like fiery needles, into my leg. Had it struck me
it would have killed me.

And then the river current caught us. So wildly were we paddling that
Red-Eye was the first to notice it, and our first warning was his yell
of triumph. Where the edge of the current struck the slough-water was a
series of eddies or small whirlpools. These caught our clumsy logs and
whirled them end for end, back and forth and around. We quit paddling
and devoted our whole energy to holding the logs together alongside
each other. In the meanwhile Red-Eye continued to bombard us, the rock
fragments falling about us, splashing water on us, and menacing our
lives. At the same time he gloated over us, wildly and vociferously.

It happened that there was a sharp turn in the river at the point where
the slough entered, and the whole main current of the river was
deflected to the other bank. And toward that bank, which was the north
bank, we drifted rapidly, at the same time going down-stream. This
quickly took us out of range of Red-Eye, and the last we saw of him was
far out on a point of land, where he was jumping up and down and
chanting a paean of victory.

Beyond holding the two logs together, Lop-Ear and I did nothing. We
were resigned to our fate, and we remained resigned until we aroused to
the fact that we were drifting along the north shore not a hundred feet
away. We began to paddle for it. Here the main force of the current was
flung back toward the south shore, and the result of our paddling was
that we crossed the current where it was swiftest and narrowest. Before
we were aware, we were out of it and in a quiet eddy.

Our logs drifted slowly and at last grounded gently on the bank.
Lop-Ear and I crept ashore. The logs drifted on out of the eddy and
swept away down the stream. We looked at each other, but we did not
laugh. We were in a strange land, and it did not enter our minds that
we could return to our own land in the same manner that we had come.

We had learned how to cross a river, though we did not know it. And
this was something that no one else of the Folk had ever done. We were
the first of the Folk to set foot on the north bank of the river, and,
for that matter, I believe the last. That they would have done so in
the time to come is undoubted; but the migration of the Fire People,
and the consequent migration of the survivors of the Folk, set back our
evolution for centuries.

Indeed, there is no telling how disastrous was to be the outcome of the
Fire People’s migration. Personally, I am prone to believe that it
brought about the destruction of the Folk; that we, a branch of lower
life budding toward the human, were nipped short off and perished down
by the roaring surf where the river entered the sea. Of course, in such
an eventuality, I remain to be accounted for; but I outrun my story,
and such accounting will be made before I am done.




CHAPTER XII


I have no idea how long Lop-Ear and I wandered in the land north of the
river. We were like mariners wrecked on a desert isle, so far as
concerned the likelihood of our getting home again. We turned our backs
upon the river, and for weeks and months adventured in that wilderness
where there were no Folk. It is very difficult for me to reconstruct
our journeying, and impossible to do it from day to day. Most of it is
hazy and indistinct, though here and there I have vivid recollections
of things that happened.

Especially do I remember the hunger we endured on the mountains between
Long Lake and Far Lake, and the calf we caught sleeping in the thicket.
Also, there are the Tree People who dwelt in the forest between Long
Lake and the mountains. It was they who chased us into the mountains
and compelled us to travel on to Far Lake.

First, after we left the river, we worked toward the west till we came
to a small stream that flowed through marshlands. Here we turned away
toward the north, skirting the marshes and after several days arriving
at what I have called Long Lake. We spent some time around its upper
end, where we found food in plenty; and then, one day, in the forest,
we ran foul of the Tree People. These creatures were ferocious apes,
nothing more. And yet they were not so different from us. They were
more hairy, it is true; their legs were a trifle more twisted and
gnarly, their eyes a bit smaller, their necks a bit thicker and
shorter, and their nostrils slightly more like orifices in a sunken
surface; but they had no hair on their faces and on the palms of their
hands and the soles of their feet, and they made sounds similar to ours
with somewhat similar meanings. After all, the Tree People and the Folk
were not so unlike.

I found him first, a little withered, dried-up old fellow,
wrinkled-faced and bleary-eyed and tottery. He was legitimate prey. In
our world there was no sympathy between the kinds, and he was not our
kind. He was a Tree-Man, and he was very old. He was sitting at the
foot of a tree—evidently his tree, for we could see the tattered nest
in the branches, in which he slept at night.

I pointed him out to Lop-Ear, and we made a rush for him. He started to
climb, but was too slow. I caught him by the leg and dragged him back.
Then we had fun. We pinched him, pulled his hair, tweaked his ears, and
poked twigs into him, and all the while we laughed with streaming eyes.
His futile anger was most absurd. He was a comical sight, striving to
fan into flame the cold ashes of his youth, to resurrect his strength
dead and gone through the oozing of the years—making woeful faces in
place of the ferocious ones he intended, grinding his worn teeth
together, beating his meagre chest with feeble fists.

Also, he had a cough, and he gasped and hacked and spluttered
prodigiously. Every time he tried to climb the tree we pulled him back,
until at last he surrendered to his weakness and did no more than sit
and weep. And Lop-Ear and I sat with him, our arms around each other,
and laughed at his wretchedness.

From weeping he went to whining, and from whining to wailing, until at
last he achieved a scream. This alarmed us, but the more we tried to

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