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Roy Glashan's Library
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The Blue Book Magazine, October 1942,
with "Mammoths Make Nice Pets"
He weighed six tons and was never really
house-broken, but he came through in a big way.
MR. HOBART HONEY was not a mean man and therefore was not prone to the practice of stinginess—so that it gave him a small shock when he first realized that it had never once occurred to him. to share with any of his friends the dubious joys which he was extracting from the use of the pills so kindly presented to him by the Tibetan Lama. A pill that has the power temporarily to transport the person who swallows it back into a life which he has lived hundreds, maybe thousands, of years ago is at least a novelty, and at most a miracle. And if a person possesses some hundreds of such miracles, surely, reflected Mr. Honey, it is only bare decency to present a miracle or two to a pal.
He acted on the idea with the impulsiveness of a naturally generous man. He had very little difficulty in selecting from his numerous acquaintances three people to be recipients of his gifts. One of these was his friend the Bishop of Stretchester, a serious man who claimed to suffer from his nerves. Mr. Honey strongly recommended one of his pills and promised the Bishop another if he found that the first pill did anything for his nerves. It did something for them— it came near to wrecking them utterly, for the Bishop "dreamed" (as he described it) that he had been changed into Balaam's ass and, as such, spent a considerable time experiencing the various vicissitudes of that ill-starred quadruped. The Bishop did not ask for another pill, and Mr. Honey did not explain that if he had "dreamed" that he had been Balaam's ass, then he had evidently got on in the world.
Another pill Mr. Honey gave to a politician friend of his, but this too was far from proving a staggering success. The politician "dreamed" that he was a Trappist monk vowed to everlasting silence. To a politician, this naturally was worse than "dreaming" he had died and gone to hell.
The last of the three pills given away by Mr. Honey in his outburst of generosity he gave as a headache cure to an elderly Dowager Countess who admired, or said she admired, his literary work. The lady afterward complained that the pill had made her "dream" that she was the celebrated giant Goliath at about the time Goliath met with one of the younger generation, a lad named David, the local sling champion. David did nothing to ameliorate the Dowager's headache—rather the contrary, in fact. She said that the pills did not agree with her, and shed some of her admiration for Mr. Honey's writing.
So he abandoned the practice of giving away the pills.
"These people can't take it—or the pills, either. Queer pasts they seem to have had—unless they were really my pasts. Probably they were. In that case I may as well enjoy—bah!—my own pasts!" he said one evening as he sat looking at the pill-bottle.
"After all, I suppose it's a habit one has to get used to." He threw the end of his cigarette away and tilted out a pill. In a way he hoped that it might take him back to an incarnation in which he had been Louis the Fifteenth of France. Hope, after all, is both lawful and inexpensive—and Louis' girl-friend Madame du Barry had always exercised a curious fascination for Mr. Honey.
But as it chanced, the Du Barry did not put in an appearance that evening—Mr. Honey awoke to a somewhat sterner love-affair than that of Louis XV and Madame.
HE swallowed a glass of port, then the pill, then another port and lay back at his ease. At least, he thought he was lying back at his ease but within a space of seconds he perceived himself to be mistaken—for, as his head cleared, he discovered that he was lying back against one of the hardest rocks he had ever felt. Nor was it merely hard, it was knobby and it was veneered with ice. He noted that he was clad in an abbreviated fur shirt-far too abbreviated for comfort, for the air was cold enough to crack a thermometer.
He leaped to his feet like a man on springs, took one swift glance at a pallid sun which was low in the western sky, and at a swiftish trot headed north along a rocky track. In one hand he carried a species of ax—a sharp-edged bit of chipped flint bound with sinew into the cleft end of a haft of wood. In the other hand he carried a strip of frozen meat at which he gnawed as he went. On his back he bore a skin sack.
His eyes, as he glanced continually at the sinking sun, were anxious—for he was now a dweller in the age which we know as the Paleolithic, and that was not a good age in which to spend a midwinter night outside of a cave, even in the low altitude of the plains. And Mr. Honey was not in the altitude of the plains. Far from it. He was about nine thousand feet up on the mountainside and he had a long way to go in the very short time which remained before darkness and the first breath of a coming blizzard was already whispering in his chilled ears.
Not that he was worried—but a little anxious, yes. He had made the trip before and, just as he had done today, he had paused after crossing the Ridge for a little sleep. But he had never before slept quite so long. Had he shaved things a little too fine?
He was gaiting along at a definitely smart clip and the bulging skin bag that hung by a strap across his shoulder was weighing a lot more heavily than it seemed to weigh when he had started from home, full-fed, a couple of days before. He halted a second to readjust it, then hurried on, slapping his horny-soled bare feet down on to the rocky track in serious earnest.
He muttered something about the bag as he went, and presently halted with his hands raised as though he intended to slip it off, leave it behind and get along in a higher gear.
But he did not do so. Instead he laughed, rather a grim, sardonic laugh, shouted something insulting to a big condor-like bird that, overhead, was effortlessly following his course down the narrow, precipice-bordered track, in a companionable kind of way, and pushed on.
"I know of no man who ever visited the tribe of the Bough-swingers without presents and lived to tell the tale," he muttered. "Nor any lover who brought away a bride from among them without first paying down the ready shugar* for her!"
*Shugar was the word they used in the Paleolithic age when they meant what we mean when we say "money." Their money was not the pure milled-edge coin nor the prettily printed paper so popular with us. It was many things—in Mr. Honey's case, in this incarnation, it consisted of about three-quarters of a hundredweight of amber, of turquoise-matrix, of mother-of-pearl shell and rough gold nuggets, designed for the more ostentatious forms of decorations. —Bertram.
And he was right. The tribe of the Bough-swingers from whom he was expecting shortly to collect the lady he loved (in the Paleolithic manner) were, after their primitive fashion, pretty good business men.
They knew Hob—indeed, they were unusually well acquainted with him. But they were not in the habit of trusting a man of another tribe merely because they knew him. They were very practical people—as people had to be in those far-distant clays. "Fair words and hearty promises produce no flint axes," was one of their everyday proverbs. "Show us the shugar—don't word-paint it!" was another. Some of their descendants, thousands of years later, settled in Missouri....
Hob knew that he had to deliver his sack of goods or come away minus his bride and possibly minus a good deal of his personal anatomy as well.
So he pushed on down the track pretty cheerfully, skirting the precipices, and side-stepping the slippery spots with the sureness of a mountain goat.
It was just as the lower rim of the red sun touched the jagged horizon, and Hob slowed down crossing with great caution a ledge no more than a few inches wide which hung over a thousand feet of sheer precipice that the huge bird of prey made a pass at him and all but got him. But Hob was expecting this and was ready. He grabbed a lucky hand-hold and gave the bird the flint ax on its flat skull. These prehistoric gentlemen did not miss much that they aimed at. Dimly the Paleolithic condor regretted its impulsiveness for as long as it takes a condor with concussion to fall a thousand feet.
Hob grinned faintly and completed his crossing of the most dangerous pan of the ledge.
THE path widened quickly now and the downhill going was much easier. This was just as well, for the icy dusk was now close at hand. An occasional snowflake, not larger than a smallish sea-gull, sailed silently past Hob now, increasing slowly in numbers. These flakes were no more than slight hints but Hob knew that what they hinted at was something more like an avalanche than a snowstorm as we understand the word.
He had steamed up very nearly to his speed limit when he heard a thin sound far behind him which stopped him dead in his tracks, listening—listening, body and soul.
Wolves!.
He acted fast—he had to. He slipped off the bag, which went rolling over the precipice, and went forward groping in his pouch for a bit of skin and some sinews. As he ran he knotted the sinew round the fur into the form of a rough lumpy ball. Then, still running, he gashed his arm with his flint ax and soaked the skin with blood. In a few minutes he reached the spot he wanted—a place where the sheer precipice had yielded to a steep slope. He stopped, permitted himself to bleed a little on the edge of the track, smeared it about with the soaked ball and started the ball rolling irregularly down the slope. He swiftly bound a bit of skin over the wound. Then he took a mighty leap up to a rock on his left hand and desperately struggled along the face of the rocky wall for a few dozen yards.
Then he dropped to the track again and began to hurry in real earnest. He was accustomed to speeding—one did that from childhood upward in those days; he was going downhill; and he had a pack of wolves behind him.
He was now moving at a rate which made it difficult to see whether his feet actually touched the ground more than once in about ten yards or not. He looked as if he was on the point of "taking off" from an airdrome—as if he might soar into the air at any moment. His ears were set back like a hare's, so that he decreased the wind resistance to that extent and moreover could nicely estimate the volume of the observations of the wolf-pack behind him. These were dying down slightly —naturally enough, for in the first flush of his enthusiasm Hob could have outstripped practically anything but one of the latest models of single-seat fighters. Yet, fast as he was going, he notched up a record at the sudden clamor that outraged the air when the wolves reached the bloodstained point from which the ball of skin had started down the slope.
Then the howlings died away.... They had followed the blood scent.
HALF an hour later in pitch darkness Hob scrambled over the high stockade round the forest clearing in which the tribe of the Bough-swingers had their village, shouting his name and his pacific intentions very loudly indeed.
It was quite dark by the time Hob reached the relative safety of the stockade and most of the Bough-swingers had gone to bed—as they understood the art of going to bed. It was an extremely simple business. When bedtime arrived they stopped sitting about on the chilly ground and climbed up trees. The rich crawled into little tree huts made of sticks and dried grass and reeds; the poor sat in forks and crotches; lovers did the best they could. All seemed satisfied.
As Hob landed over the stockade two hefty shadows slid down the trunk of a big beech tree at rather dizzy speed, armed with enormous stone-headed clubs or bats and interviewed him.
"Be not alarmed, brothers. It is but Hob of the Clams come to collect his bride, the beautiful Lumpee," said Hob very swiftly, for the Bough-swingers were bat-sharps of no mean order.
Recognizing him, they grunted that he was lucky to have got there and returned to their bedrooms up the beech.
Hob thanked them for their hearty welcome, and picked himself a tree— the one which he fancied Lumpee slept up. Evidently his fancy was wrong or Lumpee had recently changed trees for Hob spent the night with a tame bear cub which the Chief of the Bough-swingers was teaching to retrieve. The bear cub was as friendly to Hob as Hob was to it and he did not trouble to select another tree. He filled himself into a fork and after reflecting for a few minutes on the unromantic beginning to his expedition, fell asleep.
Next morning, after a moderate breakfast of post-dated venison, berries, roots and a nut or two the Council of Elders, having sent the young men out to hunt game and the young women out to pick eatables off eatable-bearing bushes, sat on Hob's case.
The Chief spoke first.
"You have come hither from the seashore tribe of the Clams to pay for and to bear away your betrothed— Lumpee, the daughter of Humph?"
"Yes," admitted Hob.
"The price is already agreed with Humph?"
"Yes," said Hob, rather slowly.
"What says Humph?"
"Humph!" said Humph, a grim parent, who rarely said anything else.
"It is well!" said the Chief. "Produce the price, Hob."
Hob, his eyes anxiously on the smiling lady, began to explain.
"The price—yes, of course. I brought it—a good price, a noble price, a price worthy of Lumpee—I brought it away from my home. But alas, being chased by wolves, I deemed it prudent to ease my burden by depositing the sack containing the price in a safe place."
All smiles vanished.
"You have not the price?" rose a shrill wire-drawn voice—Lumpee's.
"Well, no—yes, I have it—but not on me—not actually with me. so to say!"
"Humph!" said Humph.
THE Chief of the Bough-swingers knotted his brows, staring. "You say that you have not—nay, let us be clear upon this matter. There was an agreed price for this beautiful daughter of the Bough-swingers for marriage purposes? Is that correct?"
"Yes, correct, O Chief, and superbly put," admitted Hob.
"You have come now to fetch away Lumpee?"
"It is even so," said Hob. "But you have not brought the shugar—saying instead that you hid it because you were chased by a pack of wolves." "Yes."
"For so trifling a thing—for are we not always being chased about by wolves? So you have the unparalleled crust to appear here demanding a wife on credit!"
Lumpee began to scream with anger, horror, disgust, humiliation, disappointment, mortification and a number of other things.
"Silence your offspring, Humph!" commanded the Chief.
Humph silenced her and replaced his club on the ground.
"This is a very grievous affront to the Bough-swingers!" stated the Chief. "Since when have outlanders believed us so low that we are willing to supply them with free wives?"
"It is an insult!" said a huge grim-looking and muscular Bough-swinger called Beetle-brow, who was leaning upon his stone-topped club, next to Lumpee with one arm round her not unwilling waist.
The Council nodded solemnly in unison.
Hob bowed and salaamed respectfully several times. When he had finished bowing he was a good deal nearer the stockade than he had been.
The Chief seemed suddenly to lose his judicial calm.
"You come here as bold as a saber-toothed tiger but empty-handed, and tell us a tale like that!" he bellowed. "Evidently you conceive us to be tools! You say you were chased here by
wolves! By the eternal rocks, if there were men present worth their salt yon would think you were being chased hence by cave-hyenas!"
The big Bough-swinger by Lumpee lurched forward—but he was slow. Hob was over the stockade and on his way like a scalded cat. He paused for a second at the top of the stockade to utter a truly bloodcurdling threat.
"I go now—yea. But I will return and destroy the whole tribe of you, root and bough!" he stated shortly— and left, touching only the high spots. He may have been short of shugar, but he had plenty of speed.
SOMETHING well over a hundred years before, Hob's great-great-great-grandfather, a famous hunter, had been trailing a huge cow-mammoth when the vast creature by some accident or misjudgment had got itself out on the frozen surface of a swamp, followed by its calf.
The frozen crust had broken, letting the mammoth through. It disappeared instantly. But the weight of the small calf made no impression on the ice and after a wait of some hours, the baby mammoth, hungry, cold, bewildered, had fallen an easy prisoner to the patient old hunter watching it. It was fortunate for the calf that the tribe chanced at that period to be overstocked, if possible, with food. A couple of enormous woolly rhinoceroses had fought each to a double finish just outside the village the day before; a dead whale had stranded on the beach a week before; and for miles the same beach was strewn with the carcasses of about half a million of cod which had thrown themselves out of the water, high above tidemark, in frantic flight from a school of vast cod-eating sharks that infested round about there at that period. The tribe of the Clams therefore was so foodful that they could only see with difficulty and they took no interest in the tiny mammoth. Ordinarily they would have barbecued him before he was well inside the village; now they agreed good-humoredly with Hob's ancestor when he stated that he was going to rear the baby mammoth and bring him up as a kind of pet—use him for riding, pulling or pushing objects and so on.
Strange to relate, the ancestor had succeeded. He named the calf Lowsie and it became greatly attached to the Hob family. For a mammoth it had a very gentle nature. In less than forty years it would follow the old man like a dog. It would fetch and carry for him, push rocks, pull down trees, make itself useful in many ways. For years it had slept at the old man's feet till one night when it was about one-third grown it had turned over in its sleep—onto the old man's feet—and sprained both his ankles badly before he could get them out from under. After this Lowsie slept outside. Time went on, the old man died and bequeathed Lowsie to his son, who enjoyed the mammoth's company and utilized its services for about thirty years. Then, in turn he passed on the now fully grown mammoth. And so it had gone on and on, generation by generation, till the mighty animal had been inherited by Hob.
Lowsie was round about a hundred and fifty years old at this period, and more than all the members of the Hob dynasty he had known and by whom he had been owned, he loved the present holder of the Hob title. He had grown into a fine mammoth, five tons or so, maybe a little more or slightly less,* and he would obey the least whisper or sign of Hob like a trained seal. He was a grand pet and he cost nothing—he fed himself in the woods. Hob would not run from a pack of wolves if he had Lowsie with him—it was the wolves who performed the running on these occasions. Even the mighty cave-bear or the huge, ferocious and haughty saber-tooth tiger-looked the other way and failed to notice Hob or Lowsie when they met. Indeed, in their haughty, absent-minded way they usually climbed a tree or ducked over a precipice. Lowsie was well over twelve feet high; his gleaming white tusks were eight or nine feet long and could have hooked an ordinary elephant of these days pretty well up to the Milky Way; his trunk was like a waterspout and he was covered with dirt-colored wool.
*Call it six tons. I am not the kind of party to grudge readers of the Blue Book a ton of mammoth —Bertram.
AND this was the pet which gamboled clumsily forth to meet his beloved owner when the still furious Hob, a few days after his interview with the Bough-swinger Council, came home again.
"Hello, Lowsie—good Lowsie!" said Hob, patting the vast beast somewhere just about the knee joint. It was like patting a pillar in a cathedral. Lowsie gently curled his trunk end around Hob and lifted him up on his back.
"They have insulted your Boss, Lowsie, and you have got the job of avenging him," said Hob viciously, as they headed for the village of the Clams.
Lowsie wagged a tail the size of a medium bolster. Although he was probably the only really docile mammoth ever known in the history of mankind, his habit of obedience, ingrained over a period of a hundred and fifty years, was greater even than his natural and acquired docility," the Boss said, "Obliterate the Bough-swingers," Lowsie was entirely willing to oblige, for he loved the Boss who, in the mammoth's low-geared mind was the kindest, most generous Boss in the world. Quite frequently Lowsie had known him say: "Go now and get your dinner, Lowsie—eat hearty, as much and as long as you like!" The mammoth's favorite food was the tender tips of the pine boughs, and there . were millions of pine trees about. Probably Lowsie labored under the delusion that these trees were Hob's personal property, and he was in a dim-witted way extremely grateful, or appreciative, of Hob's generosity. He was a fine specimen of a mammoth physically, but mentally his lights were a little low. Even the occasional lady mammoth he met in the vast pine forest when taking his daily snack of fifty bushels of turpentiny foliage meant very little to Lowsie, for, judged by modern standards, he was sexed to about the same degree as a General Grant tank. His sex rating was somewhere round about zero on any reliable thermometer. Hence, probably, his unnatural docility. He was, of course, still very young and inexperienced—for a mammoth.
IT did not take Hob very long to equip himself for the projected mopping-up of the avaricious Bough-swingers.
He remained at home only long enough to amass a pile of dried meat, to select a spare flint ax for himself, a flint jabber or goad for Lowsie's benefit, and he was off again—lingering only to inquire whether anybody had any farewell messages for the Bough-swingers.
They went a long way round to avoid the mountain tracks, so that it was a week before they were within reasonable scouting distance of the stockade in the trees. Here Hob hailed, gave Lowsie permission to eat for awhile, and, for himself, proceeded to do a spot of Paleolithic scouting.
Shuffling silently up to the stockade which the Bough-swingers had so intelligently erected between themselves and the outside world he paused to listen. It was dusk and evidently the hunters had done well that day, for judging from the volume of conversation going on within the stockade everybody was contented with the kind of relaxed contentment which usually results from a hearty supper. A few moments listening-in acquainted Hob with the fact that somebody had killed a large specimen of the Great Irish Elk that morning and that everybody had eaten him that evening. They were now gossiping as they digested.
It was not long before Hob heard his own name mentioned—by the voice of Beetle-brow, the rough who had chased him over the stockade and far beyond it.
"Yes, that was the fellow—Hob. Hob of the Clams. He came hither as bold as—as—a boulder rolling down the slope of a steep hill, demanding my girl Lumpee as his bride. 'Very good and well,' said the Chief. 'A price was agreed for the maiden?'
"'Yes,' said this Hob.
"'Produce the price!' said the Chief; and believe it or not the Clam had it not—had nothing in fact. Said so-explained he had been chased by wolves and had to throw the price into the chasm! Sounds mad—but it is true. Is it not true, Lump, old lady?"
"Absolutely," confirmed Lump, contemptuously. "He had nothing but the last year's skin he stood up in!"
"The Chief asked him if he thought the Bough-swingers were in the business of supplying free wives to foreigners, and that was hint enough for me. I got m\ club into the 'ready' position and Hob must have seen it for he went over the stockade like a Stone Age kangaroo gone frantic! And that was the last seen of him. Lumpee naturally disowned him on the spot—and I got together the necessary shugar and paid the price for her then and there. So she's mine now—that so, Lump, old lady?"
"Absolutely," confirmed Lump again.
"And now," resumed Beetle-brow, "if ever that wolf-haunted clout of a Clam comes sneaking around here again I will so deal with the front of his face that ever thereafter he shall fail to distinguish it from the back of his head!"
"For myself, I have never liked the Clams. There is something fishy about them!" said a voice.
"I ask you, what kind of a man but a Clam would expect a wife like the beautiful Lump bukshee, free gratis and for nothing!" said another voice.
"The Clams are not true men, they are a kind of salt monkey that lives in the cliff caves and eats seaweed," declared a third conversationalist.
HOB left; he felt he had heard all he required. He found his way back to Lowsie—and his Stone Age language would have startled anything but a zero-witted mammoth.
"Tomorrow at dawn, Lowsie—tomorrow at dawn!" he hissed. "Lie down, you, and keep the wind off me!"
He crept snarling into the lee of the monster, and was instantly asleep.
But he was awake at the first peep of dawn, his fury increased rather than abated by a good night's rest.
"You are today going into action for the first time, Lowsie, good mammoth, under my command. Mark that—under my command! You will destroy the village and all within it. You will pull down all trees in which Bough-swingers seek shelter and the denizens of these trees you will trample. All folk who run away you will catch and pull apart! Is that clear? Good! I will now mount!"
He mounted the huge beast like a man mounting a tank.
"Start, Lowsie!" he commanded.
It was, of course, easy.
THE peace-loving mammoth only required a fairly generous application of the flint goad to believe that Hob meant what he said.
He charged forward, going through the stockade as if it were cotton wool. He uprooted trees like a hungry man uprooting radishes. He shook Bough-swingers out of said trees and destroyed them, as ordered by the now raving Hob. He caught fleeing Bough-swingers and mowed them down. He went baresark and tried to plow up solid rock with his tusks, breaking one off and bending the other. This gave him a kind of toothache and he became all but uncontrollable, so that, having obliterated all the Bough-swingers he could see, he decided to charge a small cliff of pure rock just outside the wood. It was quite a small cliff—probably only weighed about two hundred and seventy thousand tons. Still, it was good close-grained rock—and it all but concertinaed the murderous mammoth. It stretched him flat. If Hob had not slid down over his tail just in time it would have concussed him crazy.
When presently Lowsie returned to consciousness he was much less wild. He felt ill and bilious and sulky. Nothing but a lifelong habit of obedience would have forced him so mechanically to respond to a screamed order by Hob to pursue two figures which were moving toward the horizon at a truly remarkable speed—the figures of Lumpee and Beetle-brow.
Wearily, the rock-stricken, granite-drunk tank rolled after them.
Even in his lowest gear it only took the mammoth a minute or two to catch them. They parted and ran wide of each other as the thundering monster's snaky trunk reached for them. It was the man that Lowsie grabbed, threw down and trampled.
Hob turned to shout to the staring and horrified girl.
"Ho, Lumpee! Said I not that I would return and render extinct all the tribe of Bough-swingers! Wait there for me—wait—"
He broke off as Lowsie gave a very unusual lurch and the southwest corner of him sank suddenly. Hob saw at once what had happened. Lowsie had caught the fugitives at the wrong spot and trampled Beetle-brow just a trifle too enthusiastically.
They were on a frozen quicksand and the ponderously pounding feet and great weight of the mammoth had broken the icy crust.
With a furious trumpeting, Lowsie exerted his full colossal strength and tore his leg free—only to sink another leg deeper still. Then both forelegs went through. The doomed mammoth was sinking fast.
Hob glared round him measuring the area of jagged cakes of broken ice across which he must jump to the safety of the firm ice when Lowsie sank deep enough.
A flint-headed spear went whizzing past his head. The girl Lumpee was out to avenge her people. She ran round the wreckage to recover the weapon, screaming a few of the things she intended to do to Hob if and when he leaped from the sinking Lowsie. But she was wasting her breath.
Hob saw two husky survivors from the village, their spears and axes ready, racing up. They had seen Tank No. One's disaster from their hiding-places. Then, even as he realized that he was doomed, the forefront of the mammoth sank several feet so that it was from a steeply sloping platform that Hob desperately jumped—practically straight into the curled end of the huge flailing trunk. The mammoth clung to Hob like a forlorn hope— which he was.
Then suddenly the mammoth roared and went under, taking Hob with him. At least he would have gone the whole distance with Lowsie if at that moment he had not returned to this life and these days in the apartment of Mr. Hobart Honey.
OUTSIDE, a motor-bus in need of workshop attention was roaring down the street like—like a mammoth or a tank....
Mr. H. took two large glasses of port in quick succession. Then he said "Hah!" and poured a third. He drank it slowly, eying the bottle of pills with something like disgust. But his disgust, after all, was premature. He had a glorious surprise coming to him before long—out of that same bottle.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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