y 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