s, had not appreciated the real extent of his powers.
There was a fury and a might in his blows that was hard to associate
with the world of human beings,--such ferociousness and wolf-like
savagery, welling strength and prowess of battle that mostly men have
forgotten in their centuries of civilization, but which still mark the
death-fight between beasts.

Ben had always recalled the earlier types of man--his great-thewed
ancestors, wild hunters in the forests of ancient Germany--but never so
much as to-night. He was in his natural surroundings--at the mouth of
his cave in which the Woman watched and exulted in his blows, enclosed
by the primeval forest and beside the ashes of his fire. There could be
nothing strange or unreal about this scene to Beatrice. It was more true
than any soft vista of a far-away city could possibly be. It was life
itself,--man battling for his home and his woman against the raw forces
of the wild.

All superficialities and superfluities were gone, and only the basic
stuff of life remained,--the cave, the fire, the man who fought the
beast in the light of the ancient moon. At that moment Ben was no more
of the twentieth century than he was of the first, or of the first more
than of some dark, unnumbered century of the world's young days. He was
simply the male of his species, the man-child of all time, forgetting
for the moment all the little lessons civilization had taught, and
fighting his fight in the basic way for the basic things.

This was no new war which Ben and the grizzly fought in the pale light
of the moon. It had begun when the race began, and it would continue,
in varied fields, until men perished from the earth. Ben fought for
_life_--not only his own but the girl's--that old, beloved privilege to
breathe the air and see and know and be. He represented, by a strange
symbolism, the whole race that has always fought in merciless and
never-ending battle with the cruel and oppressive powers of nature. In
the grizzly were typified all those ancient enemies that have always
opposed, with claw and fang, this stalwart, self-knowing breed that has
risen among the primates: he symbolized not only the Beast of the
forest, but the merciless elements, storm and flood and cold and all the
legions of death. And had they but known their ultimate fate if this
intruder survived the battle and brought his fellows into this, their
last stronghold, the watching forest creatures would have prayed t