sun.

Being a man, ever restless, ever questing, wondering always what lay
beyond the hills and beyond the swamps and in the mud at the river's
bottom, I watched the wild ducks and blackbirds and pondered till my
pondering gave me vision and I saw. And this is what I saw, the
reasoning of it:

Meat was good to eat. In the end, tracing it back, or at the first,
rather, all meat came from grass. The meat of the duck and of the
blackbird came from the seed of the swamp rice. To kill a duck with an
arrow scarce paid for the labour of stalking and the long hours in
hiding. The blackbirds were too small for arrow-killing save by the boys
who were learning and preparing for the taking of larger game. And yet,
in rice season, blackbirds and ducks were succulently fat. Their fatness
came from the rice. Why should I and mine not be fat from the rice in
the same way?

And I thought it out in camp, silent, morose, while the children
squabbled about me unnoticed, and while Arunga, my mate-woman, vainly
scolded me and urged me to go hunting for more meat for the many of us.

Arunga was the woman I had stolen from the hill-tribes. She and I had
been a dozen moons in learning common speech after I captured her. Ah,
that day when I leaped upon her, down from the over-hanging tree-branch
as she padded the runway! Fairly upon her shoulders with the weight of
my body I smote her, my fingers wide-spreading to clutch her. She
squalled like a cat there in the runway. She fought me and bit me. The
nails of her hands were like the claws of a tree-cat as they tore at me.
But I held her and mastered her, and for two days beat her and forced her
to travel with me down out of the canyons of the Hill-Men to the grass
lands where the river flowed through the rice-swamps and the ducks and
the blackbirds fed fat.

I saw my vision when the rice was ripe. I put Arunga in the bow of the
fire-hollowed log that was most rudely a canoe. I bade her paddle. In
the stern I spread a deerskin she had tanned. With two stout sticks I
bent the stalks over the deerskin and threshed out the grain that else
the blackbirds would have eaten. And when I had worked out the way of
it, I gave the two stout sticks to Arunga, and sat in the bow paddling
and directing.

In the past we had eaten the raw rice in passing and not been pleased
with it. But now we parched it over our fire so that the grains puffed
and exploded in whiteness and all the trib