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brown fronds of Royal Fern, through which the crosiers of this year's
growth were unrolling to the light and warmth. The fire was a
smouldering heap of char, light grey and black, replenished by the old
women from time to time with brown leaves. Most of the men were
asleep--they slept sitting with their foreheads on their knees. They had
killed that morning a good quarry, enough for all, a deer that had been
wounded by hunting dogs; so that there had been no quarrelling among
them, and some of the women were still gnawing the bones that lay
scattered about. Others were making a heap of leaves and sticks to feed
Brother Fire when the darkness came again, that he might grow strong and
tall therewith, and guard them against the beasts. And two were piling
flints that they brought, an armful at a time, from the bend of the
river where the children were at play.
None of these buff-skinned savages were clothed, but some wore about
their hips rude girdles of adder-skin or crackling undressed hide, from
which depended little bags, not made, but torn from the paws of beasts,
and carrying the rudely-dressed flints that were men's chief weapons and
tools. And one woman, the mate of Uya the Cunning Man, wore a wonderful
necklace of perforated fossils--that others had worn before her. Beside
some of the sleeping men lay the big antlers of the elk, with the tines
chipped to sharp edges, and long sticks, hacked at the ends with flints
into sharp points. There was little else save these things and the
smouldering fire to mark these human beings off from the wild animals
that ranged the country. But Uya the Cunning did not sleep, but sat with
a bone in his hand and scraped busily thereon with a flint, a thing no
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