together, pinning the seams with twigs, and carried home a
bigger quantity of berries than could have been contained in the largest
gourd.

So far we got, and no farther, in the transportation of supplies during
the years I lived with the Folk. It never entered anybody's head to
weave a basket out of willow-withes. Sometimes the men and women tied
tough vines about the bundles of ferns and branches that they carried to
the caves to sleep upon. Possibly in ten or twenty generations we might
have worked up to the weaving of baskets. And of this, one thing is
sure: if once we wove withes into baskets, the next and inevitable step
would have been the weaving of cloth. Clothes would have followed, and
with covering our nakedness would have come modesty.

Thus was momentum gained in the Younger World. But we were without this
momentum. We were just getting started, and we could not go far in a
single generation. We were without weapons, without fire, and in the
raw beginnings of speech. The device of writing lay so far in the future
that I am appalled when I think of it.

Even I was once on the verge of a great discovery. To show you how
fortuitous was development in those days let me state that had it
not been for the gluttony of Lop-Ear I might have brought about the
domestication of the dog. And this was something that the Fire People
who lived to the northeast had not yet achieved. They were without dogs;
this I knew from observation. But let me tell you how Lop-Ear's gluttony
possibly set back our social development many generations.

Well to the west of our caves was a great swamp, but to the south lay
a stretch of low, rocky hills. These were little frequented for two
reasons. First of all, there was no food there of the kind we ate;
and next, those rocky hills were filled with the lairs of carnivorous
beasts.

But Lop-Ear and I strayed over to the hills one day. We would not have
strayed had we not been teasing a tiger. Please do not laugh. It was old
Saber-Tooth himself. We were perfectly safe. We chanced upon him in
the forest, early in the morning, and from the safety of the branches
overhead we chattered down at him our dislike and hatred. And from
branch to branch, and from tree to tree, we followed overhead, making
an infernal row and warning all the forest-dwellers that old Saber-Tooth
was coming.

We spoiled his hunting for him, anyway. And we made him good and angry.
He snarled at us and lashed his tai