nlooker, while one who deliberately gave
a false alarm was the recipient of much rough usage at our hands. But
Red-Eye walked rough-shod over all our customs, and we so feared him
that we were incapable of the collective action necessary to punish him.

It was during the sixth winter in our cave that Lop-Ear and I discovered
that we were really growing up. From the first it had been a squeeze
to get in through the entrance-crevice. This had had its advantages,
however. It had prevented the larger Folk from taking our cave away
from us. And it was a most desirable cave, the highest on the bluff, the
safest, and in winter the smallest and warmest.

To show the stage of the mental development of the Folk, I may state
that it would have been a simple thing for some of them to have driven
us out and enlarged the crevice-opening. But they never thought of
it. Lop-Ear and I did not think of it either until our increasing size
compelled us to make an enlargement. This occurred when summer was well
along and we were fat with better forage. We worked at the crevice in
spells, when the fancy struck us.

At first we dug the crumbling rocks away with our fingers, until our
nails got sore, when I accidentally stumbled upon the idea of using a
piece of wood on the rock. This worked well. Also it worked woe.
One morning early, we had scratched out of the wall quite a heap of
fragments. I gave the heap a shove over the lip of the entrance. The
next moment there came up from below a howl of rage. There was no need
to look. We knew the voice only too well. The rubbish had descended upon
Red-Eye.

We crouched down in the cave in consternation. A minute later he was at
the entrance, peering in at us with his inflamed eyes and raging like a
demon. But he was too large. He could not get in to us. Suddenly he went
away. This was suspicious. By all we knew of Folk nature he should have
remained and had out his rage. I crept to the entrance and peeped down.
I could see him just beginning to mount the bluff again. In one hand he
carried a long stick. Before I could divine his plan, he was back at the
entrance and savagely jabbing the stick in at us.

His thrusts were prodigious. They could have disembowelled us. We shrank
back against the side-walls, where we were almost out of range. But by
industrious poking he got us now and again--cruel, scraping jabs with
the end of the stick that raked off the hide and hair. When we screamed
with the h