a child, used to frighten me. I always ran when I saw
the old man tottering along on his two canes. Old Marrow-Bone even had
a bit of sparse and straggly white beard that seemed identical with the
whiskers of the old man.

As I have said, Marrow-Bone was the only old member of the horde. He
was an exception. The Folk never lived to old age. Middle age was fairly
rare. Death by violence was the common way of death. They died as my
father had died, as Broken-Tooth had died, as my sister and the Hairless
One had just died--abruptly and brutally, in the full possession of
their faculties, in the full swing and rush of life. Natural death? To
die violently was the natural way of dying in those days.

No one died of old age among the Folk. I never knew of a case. Even
Marrow-Bone did not die that way, and he was the only one in my
generation who had the chance. A bad rippling, any serious accidental
or temporary impairment of the faculties, meant swift death. As a rule,
these deaths were not witnessed.

Members of the horde simply dropped out of sight. They left the caves
in the morning, and they never came back. They disappeared--into the
ravenous maws of the hunting creatures.

This inroad of the Fire People on the carrot-patch was the beginning of
the end, though we did not know it. The hunters of the Fire People began
to appear more frequently as the time went by. They came in twos and
threes, creeping silently through the forest, with their flying arrows
able to annihilate distance and bring down prey from the top of the
loftiest tree without themselves climbing into it. The bow and arrow
was like an enormous extension of their leaping and striking muscles,
so that, virtually, they could leap and kill at a hundred feet and more.
This made them far more terrible than Saber-Tooth himself. And then they
were very wise. They had speech that enabled them more effectively to
reason, and in addition they understood cooperation.

We Folk came to be very circumspect when we were in the forest. We were
more alert and vigilant and timid. No longer were the trees a protection
to be relied upon. No longer could we perch on a branch and laugh
down at our carnivorous enemies on the ground. The Fire People were
carnivorous, with claws and fangs a hundred feet long, the most terrible
of all the hunting animals that ranged the primeval world.

One morning, before the Folk had dispersed to the forest, there was a
panic among the wate