Before Adam | Page 9

meet her, and on the instant she leaped straight up
into the air, catching an overhanging branch with her hands. The next
instant, with clashing tusks, the boar drove past underneath. He had
recovered from his surprise and sprung forward, emitting a squeal that
was almost a trumpeting. At any rate it was a call, for it was followed
by the rushing of bodies through the ferns and brush from all
directions.

From every side wild hogs dashed into the open space--a score of them.
But my mother swung over the top of a thick limb, a dozen feet from
the ground, and, still holding on to her, we perched there in safety. She
was very excited. She chattered and screamed, and scolded down at the
bristling, tooth-gnashing circle that had gathered beneath. I, too,
trembling, peered down at the angry beasts and did my best to imitate
my mother's cries.
From the distance came similar cries, only pitched deeper, into a sort of
roaring bass. These grew momentarily louder, and soon I saw him
approaching, my father--at least, by all the evidence of the times, I am
driven to conclude that he was my father.
He was not an extremely prepossessing father, as fathers go. He seemed
half man, and half ape, and yet not ape, and not yet man. I fail to
describe him. There is nothing like him to-day on the earth, under the
earth, nor in the earth. He was a large man in his day, and he must have
weighed all of a hundred and thirty pounds. His face was broad and flat,
and the eyebrows over-hung the eyes. The eyes themselves were small,
deep-set, and close together. He had practically no nose at all. It was
squat and broad, apparently with-out any bridge, while the nostrils were
like two holes in the face, opening outward instead of down.
The forehead slanted back from the eyes, and the hair began right at the
eyes and ran up over the head. The head itself was preposterously small
and was supported on an equally preposterous, thick, short neck.
There was an elemental economy about his body--as was there about all
our bodies. The chest was deep, it is true, cavernously deep; but there
were no full-swelling muscles, no wide-spreading shoulders, no
clean-limbed straightness, no generous symmetry of outline. It
represented strength, that body of my father's, strength without beauty;
ferocious, primordial strength, made to clutch and gripe and rend and
destroy.
His hips were thin; and the legs, lean and hairy, were crooked and
stringy-muscled. In fact, my father's legs were more like arms. They
were twisted and gnarly, and with scarcely the semblance of the full

meaty calf such as graces your leg and mine. I remember he could not
walk on the flat of his foot. This was because it was a prehensile foot,
more like a hand than a foot. The great toe, instead of being in line with
the other toes, opposed them, like a thumb, and its opposition to the
other toes was what enabled him to get a grip with his foot. This was
why he could not walk on the flat of his foot.
But his appearance was no more unusual than the manner of his coming,
there to my mother and me as we perched above the angry wild pigs.
He came through the trees, leaping from limb to limb and from tree to
tree; and he came swiftly. I can see him now, in my wake-a-day life, as
I write this, swinging along through the trees, a four-handed, hairy
creature, howling with rage, pausing now and again to beat his chest
with his clenched fist, leaping ten-and-fifteen-foot gaps, catching a
branch with one hand and swinging on across another gap to catch with
his other hand and go on, never hesitating, never at a loss as to how to
proceed on his arboreal way.
And as I watched him I felt in my own being, in my very muscles
themselves, the surge and thrill of desire to go leaping from bough to
bough; and I felt also the guarantee of the latent power in that being
and in those muscles of mine. And why not? Little boys watch their
fathers swing axes and fell trees, and feel in themselves that some day
they, too, will swing axes and fell trees. And so with me. The life that
was in me was constituted to do what my father did, and it whispered to
me secretly and ambitiously of aerial paths and forest flights.
At last my father joined us. He was extremely angry. I remember the
out-thrust of his protruding underlip as he glared down at the wild pigs.
He snarled something like a dog, and I remember that his eye-teeth