e through the trees, leaping from limb to limb and from tree to tree;
and he came swiftly. I can see him now, in my wake-a-day life, as I
write this, swinging along through the trees, a four-handed, hairy
creature, howling with rage, pausing now and again to beat his chest
with his clenched fist, leaping ten-and-fifteen-foot gaps, catching a
branch with one hand and swinging on across another gap to catch with
his other hand and go on, never hesitating, never at a loss as to how to
proceed on his arboreal way.

And as I watched him I felt in my own being, in my very muscles
themselves, the surge and thrill of desire to go leaping from bough to
bough; and I felt also the guarantee of the latent power in that being
and in those muscles of mine. And why not? Little boys watch their
fathers swing axes and fell trees, and feel in themselves that some day
they, too, will swing axes and fell trees. And so with me. The life that
was in me was constituted to do what my father did, and it whispered to
me secretly and ambitiously of aerial paths and forest flights.

At last my father joined us. He was extremely angry. I remember the
out-thrust of his protruding underlip as he glared down at the wild
pigs. He snarled something like a dog, and I remember that his eye-teeth
were large, like fangs, and that they impressed me tremendously.

His conduct served only the more to infuriate the pigs. He broke off
twigs and small branches and flung them down upon our enemies. He even
hung by one hand, tantalizingly just beyond reach, and mocked them as
they gnashed their tusks with impotent rage. Not content with this, he
broke off a stout branch, and, holding on with one hand and foot, jabbed
the infuriated beasts in the sides and whacked them across their noses.
Needless to state, my mother and I enjoyed the sport.

But one tires of all good things, and in the end, my father, chuckling
maliciously the while, led the way across the trees. Now it was that my
ambitions ebbed away, and I became timid, holding tightly to my mother
as she climbed and swung through space. I remember when the branch broke
with her weight. She had made a wide leap, and with the snap of the wood
I was overwhelmed with the sickening consciousness of falling through
space, the pair of us. The forest and the sunshine on the rustling
leaves vanished from my eyes. I had a fading glimpse of my father
abruptly arresting his progress to look, and then all was blackness.