other Cave boy or girl in the whole valley ever took the trouble to
think about anything that was not connected with dinner, or the latest
style of wearing burrs in their hair; and when Umpl thought so long
about it that he feared it must be a spirit, and laid his best
arrowhead on it as an offering, while Sptz for the same reason brought
a queer bit of bone with a feather in one end and a scrap of rabbit
fur around it, the thoughts were good for them. It did for their small
brains just what a boy does for his arm when he swings a club or a
dumb-bell. It made them stronger, so that they could use them for
other things and use them better.

Umpl, for one thing, looked upward among the trees oftener. He saw
more birds, he learned their actions better and so knew better how to
have roast bird for supper. So perhaps they were right about the good
luck. Besides, both of them were growing up. Sptz had learned to make
acorn bread and found a hollow on the top of the Iron Star which was
just the thing to grind up nuts in. Umpl was two feet taller than when
the star fell, and could draw a bow and send an arrow right through a
stag. And one great day he met a Cave Bear and sent his flint-headed
shaft whistling with such force that it broke through the hard skull
of the savage beast and dropped him in his tracks.

All his life long Umpl wore on his arm an ornament made out of the
longest teeth and sharpest claws of that bear; and boys and girls
looked at it and wondered if they would ever have the right to be so
honored. Umpl had become a man. But he was a very young one still.

This luck did not follow every one in that long valley. There came a
time when it did not rain for nearly a year. The springs stopped
running. The birds flew away. The hares went, no one knew where. The