III

HOW THE MASTODON HAPPENED FIRST TO BELONG TO A MAN, AS TOLD BY ARRUMPA


"In my time, everything, even the shape of the land was different. From
Two Rivers it was all marsh, marsh and swamp with squidgy islands, with
swamp and marsh again till you came to hills and hard land, beyond which
was the sea. Nothing grew then but cane and coarse grass, and the water
rotting the land until there was no knowing where it was safe treading
from year to year. Not that it mattered to my people. We kept to the
hills where there was plenty of good browse, and left the swamp to the
Grass-Eaters--bunt-headed, woolly-haired eaters of grass!"

Up came Arrumpa's trunk to trumpet his contempt, and out from the
hillslope like a picture on a screen stretched for a moment the flat
reed-bed of Two Rivers, with great herds of silly, elephant-looking
creatures feeding there, with huge incurving trunks and backs that
sloped absurdly from a high fore-hump. They rootled in the tall grass or
shouldered in long, snaky lines through the canes, their
trunks waggling.

"Mammoths they were called," said Arrumpa, "and they hid in the swamp
because their tusks curved in and they were afraid of Saber-Tooth, the
Tiger. There were a great many of them, though not so many as our
people, and also there was Man. It was the year my tusks began to grow
that I first saw him. We were coming up from the river to the
bedding-ground and there was a thin rim of the moon like a tusk over the