e 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
clingin