Umpl could take a great bone, and with a sharp flint and a copper
knife which had been hammered until it was almost as hard as flint, he
could carve on that white bone a picture of a fierce wild bull, so
naturally that you would want to run away if he had not also carved a
young warrior rushing down all ready to do battle with the beast.
Every animal that Umpl had ever killed in the forest he had pictured
out on the hardest and whitest bones he could find. They were his
picture books, and he could take one in hand, perhaps a sketch of the
great hairy elephant which we call the mammoth, and show it around the
circle and then tell the story of that hunt. And they would look at
the picture a moment and shut their eyes and seem to see it all just
as it happened. Some of those carved pictures have lasted until this
day, for I myself have seen them!

But after a time things became altogether too peaceful. They began to
want something exciting--they could not go to the theatre, for there
never had been such a thing. Just ordinary, plain hunting was not
enough--it was too tame. There wasn't enough danger in it, and any boy
will understand at once what I mean by that.

More than half of the good things of life owe their goodness to the
very fact that danger attends them in some form,--danger of being
"caught," of being "it," of being "put out" by some one on the other
side; and the fun all comes from the being able, by your own quick
foot, or eye, or thought, to win the game. The more you play that game
the better you can play it, and when it gets too easy then you feel
that it is tame, and you want something harder to win than the prize
of such baby-play. We all feel this in one way or another. We always
have, since long before the days of Umpl. And it is just because of
this that we now know more and can do more than Umpl did or could.