Actually, save for a mere two thousand years, it had been.
At the end of a month the tribe had a permanent encampment. There were caves at a suitable distance from the slope up which most wanderers from the lowlands came. Cori's oldest child found the chrysalis of a giant butterfly, whose caterpillar form had so offensive an odor that the dogs had not attacked it. But when it emerged from the chrysalis, men and dogs together assailed it before it could take flight. They ended the enterprise with warm mutual approval. The humans had acquired great wings with which to make warm cloaks,—very useful against the evening chill. Dogs and men, alike, had feasted.
Then, one dawning, the dogs made a vast outcry which awoke the tribesmen. Burl led the rush to the spot. They did battle with a monster nocturnal beetle, less chilled than most such invaders. In the gray dawnlight Burl realized that the darting, yapping dogs kept the creature's full attention. He crippled, and then killed it with his spear. The feat appeared to earn him warm admiration from the dogs. Burl wore a moth's feathery antenna again, bound to his forehead like a knight's plumes. He looked very splendid.
The entire pattern of human life changed swiftly, as if an entire revelation had been granted to men. The ground was often thorny. One man pierced his foot. Old Tama, scolding him for his carelessness, bound a strip of wing–fabric about it so he could walk. The injured foot was more comfortable than the one still unhurt. Within a week the women were busily contriving diverse forms of footgear to achieve greater comfort for everybody. One day Saya admired glistening red berries and tried to pluck one, and they stained her fingers. She licked her fingers to clean them,—and berries were added to the tribe's menu. A veritable orgy of experiment began, which is a state of things which is extremely rare in human affairs. A race with an established culture and tradition does not abandon old ways of doing things without profound reason. But men who have abandoned their old ways can discover astonishingly useful new ones.
Already the dogs were established as sentries and watchmen, and as friends to every member of the tribe. By now mothers did not feel alarmed if a child wandered out of sight. There would be dogs along. No danger could approach a child without vociferous warning from the dogs. Men went hunting, now, with zestful tail–wagging dogs as companions in the chase. Dor killed a torpid minotaur–beetle alone, save for assisting dogs, and Burl felt a twinge of jealousy. But then Burl, himself, battled a black male spider in a lone duel,—with dogs to help. By the time a stray monster from the lowlands reached this area, it was dazed and half–numbed by one night of continuous chill. Even the black spider could not find the energy to leap. It fought like a fiend, yet sluggishly. Burl killed this one while the dogs kept it busy,—and the dogs were reproachful because he carried it back to the tribal headquarters before dividing it among his assistants. Afterward, he realized that though he could have avoided the fight he would have been ashamed to do so, while the dogs barked and snapped at its furry legs.
It was while things were in this state that the way of life for human beings on the forgotten planet was settled for all time. Burl and Saya went out early one morning with the dogs, to hunt for meat for the village. Hunting was easiest in the early hours, while creatures that strayed up the night before were still sluggish with cold. Often, hunting was merely butchery of an enfeebled monster to whom any effort at all was terribly difficult.
This morning they strode away briskly. The dogs roved exuberantly through the brush before them. They were some five miles from the village when the dogs bayed game. And Burl and Saya ran to the spot with ready spears,—which was something of a change from their former actions on notice of a carnivore abroad. They found the dogs dancing and barking around one of the most ferocious of the meat–eating beetles. It was not unduly large, to be sure. Its body might have been four feet long, or thereabouts. But its horrible gaping mandibles added a good three feet more.
Those scythelike weapons gaped wide—opening sidewise as insects' jaws do—as the beetle snapped hideously at its attackers, swinging about as the dogs dashed at it. Its legs were spurred and spiked and armed with dagger–like spines. Burl plunged into the fight.
The great mandibles clicked and clashed. They were capable of disemboweling a man or snapping a dog's body in half without effort. There were whistling noises as the beetle breathed through its abdominal spiracles. It fought furiously, making ferocious charges at the dogs who tormented and bewildered it. But they created the most zestfully excited of tumults.
Burl and Saya were, of course, at least as absorbed and excited as the dogs, or they would have noticed the thing that was to make so much difference to every human being, not only on the plateau but still down in the lowlands. This unnoticed thing was beyond their imagining. There had been nothing else like it on this world in many hundreds of years. It was half a dozen miles away and perhaps a thousand feet high when Burl and Saya prepared to intervene professionally on behalf of the dogs. It was a silvery needle, floating unsupported in the air. As they entered the battle, it swerved and moved swiftly in their direction.
It was silent, and they did not notice. They knew of no reason to scan the sky in daytime. And there was business on hand, anyhow.
Burl leaped in toward the beetle with a lance–thrust at the tough integument where an armored leg joined the creature's body. He missed, and the beetle whirled. Saya flashed her cloak before the monster so that it seemed a larger and a nearer antagonist. As the creature whirled again, Burl stabbed and a hind–leg crumpled.
Instantly the thing was limping. A beetle does not use its legs like four–legged creatures. A beetle moving shifts the two end legs on one side and the central leg on the other, so that it always stands on an adjustable tripod of limbs. It cannot adjust readily to crippling. A dog snatched at a spiny lower leg and crunched,—and darted away. The machine–like monster uttered a formless, deep–bass cry and was spurred to unbelievable fierceness. The fight became a thing of furious movement and joyous uproar, with Burl striking once at a multiple eye so the pain would deflect it from a charge at Saya, and Saya again deflecting it with her cloak and once breathlessly trying to strike it with her shorter spear.
They struck it again, and a third time, and it sank horribly to the ground, all three legs on one side crippled. The remaining three thrust and thrust and struggled senselessly,—and suddenly it was on its back, still striking its gigantic jaws frantically in the hope of murder. But then Burl struck home between two armor–plates where a ganglion was almost exposed. The blow killed it instantly.
Burl and Saya were smiling at each other when there was a monstrous sound of crashing trees. They whirled. The dogs pricked up their ears. One of them barked defiantly.
Something huge—truly huge!—had settled to the ground a bare two hundred yards away. It was metal, and there were ports in its sides, and it was quite beyond imagining. Because, of course, no space–ship had landed on this planet in forty–odd human generations.