It was humanizing for the children, this association of such a number
together, though they ran only a little less wildly than those who had
heretofore been born in the isolated caves. There came more of an average
of intelligence among them, thus associated, though but little more
attention was paid them than the cave men had afforded offspring in the
past. There had come to Ab after Little Mok two strong sons, Reindeer and
Sure-Aim, very much like him in his youth, but of them, until they
reached the age of help and hunting, he saw little. Lightfoot regarded
them far more closely, for, despite the many duties which had come upon
her, there never disappeared the mother's tenderness and watchfulness.
And so it was with Moonface, whose brood was so great, and who was like a
noisy hen with chickens. So existed the hovering mother instinct with all
the women of the valley, though then the mothers fished and hunted and
had stirring events to distract them from domesticity and close affection
almost as much as had the men.
From this oddly formed community came a difference in certain ways of
doing certain things, which changed man's status, which made a revolution
second only to that made by the bow and for which even men of thought
have not accounted as they should have done, with the illustration before
them in our own times of what has followed so swiftly the use of steam
and, later, of electricity.
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