Every day Thorn worked for a little while at the chipping of stone axes, but he had plenty of time for play. One morning he ran to the river and jumped on his raft.
"Ha!" he said, "my other self jumped the stream with me. And now it leans over a shadow raft and reaches for a shadow pole."
He looked about him. On the grass lay the long shadows of the trees. In the clear water were the pictured banks.
"Everything has another self," he thought.
As he grew busy with his bow, he heard loud talking, and looked up and saw strange men and children coming along the other bank.
"The men are coming to buy axes," he thought. "The children have come along with them."
The men jumped into the river and swam across and went to the stone yard. But the children came swimming up around the raft like wild ducks. Some of them had long hair that floated about on the water.
"Are you Thorn, the cave boy?" one of them asked him.
"Yes, who are you?"
"I am Clam, a shell mound boy."
Then the children came up around the raft and shook it so that Thorn almost fell off.
"Stop, or I will shoot you!" he cried, laughing.
"Oh, he will shoot us!" cried the children, and they hid behind one another, playing they were afraid.
"Is that your bow?" Clam now asked. "We heard about it. Shoot for us."
"Yes," said Thorn.
He began to paddle to the bank, but the children crowded around the raft and quickly pushed it to shore. Thorn jumped off and began to shoot at the trees. The children went along with him and watched with big eyes. One of the arrows struck a tree and stuck in the bark. The children laughed and ran and pulled it out.
"Do that again!" they cried.
Thorn did it again to shouts and the clapping of hands. Then a boy named Periwinkle threw up a piece of bark and cried, "Hit that!"
Thorn tried over and over again, but he could not. At last he grew tired of shooting. Then the children crowded round him, and Clam said, "Come home with us. Show your bow to the other children."
"How can I get there?" Thorn asked.
"Swim across the river, then walk."
"I cannot swim."
The children laughed and thought that very strange, but Periwinkle said, "Well, we will push you on the raft."
"Yes, yes!" cried the other children.
So Thorn told his grandfather that he was going home with the shell mound people. And when the men had bought their axes, the children all ran down to the river together.
Some of the boys quickly tied a wild grape vine to the raft. Then they cried, "Here we go!" and dived into the river and swam away, pulling the raft. Laughing and shouting and splashing, the others jumped in and followed. They came up alongside the raft and pushed it with one hand and swam with the other.
Before long, all the children on one side of the raft shouted and waved their arms and dived. They came up on the other side of the raft. Then the rest of the children dived and came up far ahead of the raft. Thorn looked on in wonder. As they came near the other bank, the girls pulled up the yellow water lilies and tied them in their wet hair.
The children walked along beside the river for a while. Hippopotamuses lay floating in the water, asleep in the sun. The children gave a great shout and woke up the river horses, as they called them. The animals opened their big mouths;—and the snorts, grunts, yawns! Thorn had never heard anything like it.
"What big teeth they have," he said.
"Yes, and just to eat grass," said another boy.
And soon some of the great rough things dived and came up with their mouths full of reeds.
A little farther along, Thorn saw beavers at work on the bank. They were carrying birch branches down to their homes beneath the little round mounds. And once in a while a water rat or snake swam across the river. Farther on, a flock of white swans floated. Their wings were raised a little, and their shadows floated with them.
The children stopped to watch them.
"Pretty!" they said. "Swans and shadow swans!"
So laughing and playing and seeing strange and beautiful things, Thorn walked a long way with the children. At last, far off, he saw a long purple line.
"That is the sea," Periwinkle told him.
When they came to it, there was a big blue water with no shore on the other side. It was beautiful, and Thorn shouted as he saw the foam-capped waves roll in and break on the white sand.
Pointing to a place along the shore, the children said, "There is our home."
Dogs barked and ran up and down the shore among the people. The children ran along to their home. They were not afraid of the dogs, but petted them. And the dogs jumped about the children and played with them and were glad to see them.
The people of the shell mounds did not look just like the cave people. They were shorter and had rounder heads. But their eyebrows hung over their eyes, as the cave people's did. And they dressed in skins.
Their houses were made of branches of trees and stones and dirt. They were set high up on shore where the waves could not reach them.
Thorn walked about with the children and saw a great pile of shells. It lay far along the shore, and was higher than a man, and very wide.
"What are you going to do with all these shells?" he asked Periwinkle.
"Do with them?" laughed Periwinkle. "Why, nothing. We threw them away. They show what good things we have had to eat, do they not, Foam?"
Foam was a girl with white teeth.
"Yes," said Foam, laughing. "They are shells of oysters and clams and periwinkles that we have eaten."
"Um-m! what lots of them you have eaten!" said Thorn, looking over the big pile.
"Yes," said Periwinkle, with a laugh, "we live on them."
"But you see," Foam went on, "our people have lived here for a long time—longer than my grandfather can remember. And the shell mounds have been growing all that time. There are many other shell heaps all along this shore, where more of our people live."
Thorn looked down to the water's edge and saw men pulling hollow logs down to the shore.
"They are going fishing in the dug-outs," said Periwinkle. "Come on, we will go with them."
The boys ran down to the shore and jumped into a boat that the men had pushed out into the water. Then the men also jumped in, and paddled out with sticks.
"Why do you call these dug-outs?" asked Thorn, rubbing his hand along the side of the boat.
"Because they are dug-outs," laughed Periwinkle. "You will see them made some day."
"Well, why do they not turn over?" Thorn asked next.
"Because they are flat on the bottom."
The dug-outs kept together and went a little way out to sea. One man had a bone spear. He saw a fish lying on the bottom and speared it.
"Oh, it is a flounder," said Periwinkle. "See, it is white on one side. It lies on that side. It is gray on the top side, and both the eyes are there."
Other men had long strings and bone hooks. They caught cod and herring.
When the boats were well filled with fish, the men began to paddle home. But before they reached the shore, the sky turned gray, and the sea grew rough, for the wind blew hard.
"This is nothing," said Periwinkle, laughing, as he saw the whites of Thorn's eyes. "You should see it sometimes. The waves are as high as a hill! Then we do not go fishing, and we live on foxes or rabbits or bears or ducks, or anything that we can kill. When we get nothing by hunting, we kill the dogs."
"Do the big waves ever turn the dug-outs over?" Thorn asked, with white lips.
"Yes, but we all swim."
When the boats reached shore, the women stood waiting. They were glad when they saw the fish, and quickly took them out. Then they began to cook them.
One woman laid her fish on hot coals to cook. Another put big leaves around hers and buried them in the ashes. One cooked hers in still another way. She went to a hole in the ground and lined it with a skin. She poured water into the hole and then put in hot stones until the water grew hot. Then she put in her fish.
When the fish were cooked, the women cut big pieces and gave them to their families. The people took the fish in their hands and sat down on the sand and ate.
"Maybe you would like salt on your fish," said Foam to Thorn.
She took a little in her fingers and put it on his fish.
"That makes it taste better. Where do you get salt?"
"We burn sea-weed and get it."
When all the fish had been eaten, Periwinkle called, "They are going to hack down a tree. Come on, if you want to see it."
As the boys ran through the woods, Thorn saw nothing but fir trees.
"Have you no trees but firs?" he asked.
"No, only firs—firs, little and big, as far as you can see."
The boys followed the sounds that rang through the woods. Soon they saw men busy about a tree. One man was hacking a ring around it near the ground. When that was done, he hacked another ring above the first. His stone ax did not cut deep. And the wood between the two rings stayed there; it did not fly off in chips. So both men began to beat the wood between the rings with the flat side of their axes. Around and around the tree they went, and beat the chips to get them loose. Then, with a piece of antler, they worked under the chips until they came off. After that they hacked again in the rings, and again beat the wood between, and worked off the chips.
"Oh, come and play in the sand," at last cried Periwinkle. "They will be days hacking down that tree."
The boys ran back to the shore and lay down in the warm sand. They saw the purple sea, and the sea birds flying, and heard the waves breaking on the beach.
After a little the boys jumped up and ran into the water to play with the other children.
A big green wave came rolling in, and the children quickly took hold of hands. They jumped up as the wave broke over them. It knocked some of them down and stood Clam on his head. Somebody caught his feet, and the others all laughed. He came up angry and choking, when another wave caught him and rolled him over again. After that the boys came crowding around Thorn, waving their arms.
"You must learn to swim," they cried. "It is easy. Make your arms go this way and your feet this way"; and they showed him how.
Thorn tried it and went straight to the bottom. The boys shouted.
"Here is a log," they said. "Put your arms over that. It will keep you up till you learn."
Thorn kept on trying, and in a few days he could swim a little.
"You do very well," said Foam.
The next day, when the tide was out, the boys waded in and picked up periwinkles and oysters and clams, and threw them up on the beach.
When Periwinkle began to open his oysters, he took a brown bowl to put them in. Once, in breaking a shell, his stone knife struck the bowl and broke it.
"Too bad," he said. "Mother liked that bowl. She made it herself, of clay, and dried it by the fire."
"Of clay!" Thorn said, looking at pieces wonderingly. "I never saw a bowl like that."
Periwinkle threw the oyster shells and pieces of broken bowl up on the shell heap. "We throw all such things in a heap," he said. "Then they are out of the way and will not cut our feet."
After working for days and days, the men got the tree for the dug-out hacked down. Then they hacked off a log and dragged it down to the shore. Here they began to make the dug-out.
They built a fire all along the top of the log. It burned down slowly. The men watched the fire and kept putting on more sticks. If it burned too near the edge, they put on water or clay or wet moss to stop it.
"You see, they burn out only the middle of the log and leave good strong thick sides to the boat," said Periwinkle.
After the fire had burned down into the log a way, the men raked off the hot coals. The wood beneath was burned to charcoal. The men scraped it off with stone scrapers. Then they put on more fire and again burned the log.
"The fire will burn down faster, now that the charcoal is scraped off," said Periwinkle.
The men worked for a long time, burning and scraping away, burning and scraping, until they had dug a little hollow all along the middle of the log.
Then one man said, "We have worked enough."
And the men dropped their scrapers and went off.
The next day Thorn walked along the beach and picked up pretty shells.
"These are for the folks at home," he said to Periwinkle. "They will put them on the strings around their necks."
"Here is my bow," he went on, handing it to Periwinkle. "You may keep it. I can make another. I am going back to my grandfather's now."
Periwinkle and Clam and some of the men went part way with Thorn. They walked for a long time through fir forests and then came to the forests of oak and beech and ash and chestnut. Here Thorn left his friends, and waved his arm to them as he ran on to his grandfather's. The shell people went back to their home by the sea.
One morning after Thorn had come back to his grandfather's cave, he woke up with tears on his face.
"Last night when I was asleep," he said to himself, "my shadow self went away to the home cave. And there it saw my mother and Pineknot and the baby sitting about the fire, just as they used to sit. And they were talking about me, saying that they wanted to see me. And I want to go home to see them."
The homesick boy went into the woods for comfort; he loved to watch the wild things going about. Not far off, he saw a herd of mammoths feeding. He never tired of looking at the big hairy elephants with their turned-up tusks and long snaky trunks. They were reaching up for the tender leaves of the birch, or needles of the hemlock, and would carry the green stuff to their mouths with their trunks. Young ones with shaggy coats of woolly hair, were playing about their mothers or eating grass. Sometimes one of the big mothers would give her young one a bunch of leaves. Then she would rub it gently with her trunk, petting it.
The herd ate on toward the edge of the woods. Then, following a big mammoth, it left the forest and went toward a swamp.
Thorn slipped down from his tree and ran to another one on the edge of the woods, where he could get a better view. From here he saw the mammoths out in the swamp. Some were drinking, others were wallowing, and still others were throwing water over themselves with their trunks. After getting a thick coat of mud on their shaggy skins, the herd began to leave the swamp.
But one big mammoth did not leave with the others. He could not; he had gone far out in the swamp. His feet sank in the soft mud; and when he tried to pull them out, he found them stuck fast. Then he began to trumpet. At this the whole herd grew uneasy and turned back and walked round him, waving their trunks and trumpeting and throwing mud and water.
Thorn well knew that a mammoth stuck in the mud meant meat for the cave folks for many a day. So he lightly slid down the tree and ran to the stone yard with the news. The men there ran to the nearest caves with the word, and it was sent on from cave to cave.
The herd stayed with the mired mammoth all day. But when night fell, the other mammoths slowly left him, often turning back to touch him with their trunks and to trumpet.
A crowd of cave men had already gathered, and were waiting in the woods until the herd should leave. They now made fires around the mammoth to keep off the wolves and hyenas that had already begun to skulk about. And then they killed the mammoth with their spears.
As the sun rose next morning, Thorn and his grandfather and grandmother went over to the swamp. The cave people soon began to come in from all the caves round about in the hill country. They came in little crowds, laughing and talking very loud. They were happy, for there was plenty to eat and somebody to eat with. As they came up, they stood for a long time looking at the mammoth and talking about how big he was. And some told of other mammoths that had got stuck in swamps and of how they had found them.
Thorn sat down on the side of a hill and watched the people coming. The arms and faces of the men and women were painted in stripes of red or yellow. All the cave men that Thorn knew were there, and many that he did not know. Before long his own family came.
Soon after that the men began to cut great pieces of meat from the mammoth. They gave them to the women to roast. The women made fires and put stones in them to get hot. They dug holes in the ground and rolled into them some of the hot stones. Next they threw meat upon the hot stones and rolled more hot stones upon it. Then they covered the holes with dirt and built fires upon them. While the meat was roasting, the women went over to watch the men playing.
The men were talking together in a crowd. A man named Crowfoot stood out and shouted, "I can climb a tree faster than any man here!"
"No, no!" shouted five or six men who jumped up and ran to trees.
"Go!" called a man.
They all jumped as high as they could and then climbed very fast, hand over hand, feet and legs pushing as if a wounded bear were after them. Crowfoot reached the top first.
Everybody shouted, "Crowfoot! Crowfoot!"
Then a man with big arms stood out and said, "I am best man in throwing the spear!"
A dozen men snatched spears and ran out. Everybody stood where he could see. The men with spears stood far back from a tree. One threw. His spear struck the tree, but fell. Everybody laughed. The next man threw.
His spear missed the tree. Everybody yelled and roared. Strongarm threw. His spear struck and stood in the tree shaking.
"Strongarm!" shouted the people.
Other men threw, whose spears stood in the tree. Then those men ran and pulled out their spears and stood farther back and threw again. Each man threw many times. Strongarm's spear stood oftenest in the tree from the longest distance.
"Strongarm's eye is best!" the others shouted. "His arm is strongest!"
After that a young man cried, "I have flying feet! Who will run with me?"
"I will!"
"I will!"
And young men ran out and stood beside him, and all the people watched.
The race started. The young men ran lightly, like deer. They skimmed the ground like swallows. Some of them ran all the way side by side, and came in together sweating and panting.
The people clapped their hands and said laughing, "They are good cave men; they can both fight and run away."
By this time the meat was roasted. The women pulled it from the holes with long sticks, and the people took great pieces in their hands and ate them, and then took more.
"Mammoth meat is good and juicy," one man said.
"Yes," said another, "but not so tender as horse or reindeer meat."
After eating all they wanted, Thorn and Pineknot and old Hickory's children and some of the other children went off to play. They played being grown up; and Thorn fought with the other little hunters and caught and carried off a wife, and played living with her and their children in a cave.
The men ate for a long time, but at last they had enough. Then they began to break up the tusks of the mammoth, and they gave a piece to each man who had helped to kill the animal.
"To wear on your necklace," they said.
And they gave a piece to Thorn because he had found the mired mammoth. Strongarm looked at him proudly then, and the boy stood straight and tall and held his head high.
A man standing near him snatched for the piece of tusk, but Strongarm shouted, "Get off!" and scowled and shook his fist.
The man grew angry and raised his stone ax. Strongarm snatched his, and in a minute there was a clash of stone axes. The other men stood around and watched. They loved a good fight. Before long Strongarm's ax crashed down on the man's head, and he fell over and lay still. The others looked at him, and then went on breaking up the tusks.
After that every man grew busy, and began to cut as much meat from the big bones of the mammoth as he could carry. One bone was all cut bare. Three men standing near it whispered together. Then they lifted the bone and carried it toward a man who could not make axes and was too lazy to hunt. They set it down before him.
"This is your prize," they said, without a smile.
Everybody was looking.
The man turned red and snatched a spear. But the other men ran away and laughed. And everybody laughed.
Then the people started homeward, carrying the mammoth meat. Thorn said good-bye to his grandfather for a while and went home with his mother. Old Hickory and his family went along with Strongarm and his family, and the children ran through the bushes and scared up the wild rabbits and porcupines.
When they reached the cave, Thorn told Pineknot all over again about the mammoth. And he scratched a picture on the piece of tusk to show him. Holding up the picture he said, "This is the way the angry mammoth looked. His mouth was open, and his trunk was up. When still a long way off, the men heard him trumpeting."
Then Thorn made another picture of the mammoth. In it he showed the big body with the long hair, and the turned-up tusks, the long trunk, the small eyes, and the shaggy ears.
Thorn was very happy that evening, as he sat in his old place by the fire. Pineknot sat beside him, and Wow wow lay at his feet.
Last summer a little boy went to visit his grandfather who lived near one of the beautiful lakes in the northern part of our own land. The family doctor was very kind to the boy and often took him on long walks into the country.
One day, as they were going through the woods together, the boy said to his friend, "Grandpa says that when he first came here, red men lived all about him, and that they made their houses of skins and called them wigwams. Afterwards the red men were all moved to the west and given land there. But grandpa says that for years after they went away, he used to find their arrow heads and stone axes as he turned up the ground in plowing. I wish that I could find an arrow head!"
As the doctor walked on he pointed to a pebble half buried in the sand beside the path. The boy stooped; there was a beautiful arrow head! He was very glad. Seeing that he was pleased, the doctor took him to his office and showed him hundreds of arrow heads. Some of them were small and finely chipped.
"These are bird arrows," the doctor said.
Then he showed large arrows.
"These are for killing buffalo and other big game."
And there were stone axes and hammers. Lastly, the doctor showed him something that looked like a little, very old hatchet. The boy turned it over and over and looked at it. It was all weather stained, and reddish-brown and green.
"This is not stone," the boy said at last.
"No," said the doctor, "that is a copper hatchet. I was very glad to get that because there are not many of them found now. You know that when Columbus came to our country, red men lived all over the land. They were in what we call the Stone Age; that is, they made their tools and weapons of stone. But there are great lumps of copper beside one of our lakes here. Now copper, you know, is a rather soft metal, and the red men about here learned to pound it into shape for weapons. They called both their stone hatchets and copper hatchets 'tomahawks.'
"Red men never learned to melt iron and make tools of it as we do, though there was plenty of iron in the mountains among which many tribes lived. The red men never got beyond the Stone Age and into the Iron Age as white men did."
"Where did you get all these beautiful stone things?" the boy asked after a while, looking at them with longing eyes.
"I have been years in getting them together," the doctor said. "Many of them I found myself, on my walks through the country. Others I bought from the people who found them."
"You must love them very much," said the boy.
"I do," said his friend, "and some day I shall give them all to a museum where they will be kept for people to see."
If you should cross the broad ocean that lies toward the rising sun, you would come to a beautiful country called France. Here grow the olive, the orange, and the grape; and the mulberry, on which the silk worm feeds. But it is not with these that we have to do to-day, but with some strange old things that once lay buried far below the soil in which they grow.
About seventy years ago, a man in that country who sold sand and gravel found that his own gravel pits were worked out. He went to the banks of a river—the river Somme—near by and found a good gravel bed, which he began to cut down and cart off to sell. He dug away at the hill for months and got far below the top of the ground. Then one day his spade struck something hard; he dug it out and saw that it was a very large bone.
"That is a queer bone," he said to himself. "I wonder what animal it belonged to. It is too big to have been the bone of a horse or a cow. It is big enough to have belonged to an elephant. Well, no matter what it came from," he said, throwing it aside, "it is neither sand nor gravel, so it is nothing to me."
As he dug on, he threw out some rudely shaped stones.
"These are queer, too," he said, "but they will not sell for gravel." And away went the stones from his shovel.
That evening a learned man from Paris, the most beautiful city of France, was walking beside the river and looking at the sunset clouds in sky and water.
There in the pit lay the big bones. He saw them. Forgotten were clouds and sky! He knew that he was looking at the bones of some animal long since gone from the earth! For years after that, he watched the work in the gravel pits and carried away any bones and shaped stones that were dug out. He studied them and found that some of the bones were those of the mammoth, and that there were bones of the rhinoceros too.
At last he showed the bones and the stones to the learned men in Paris, and said, "These stones are very old; they are as old as the ground in which they lay. They were shaped by men who knew very little and had very little, and who used them for weapons. Near the stone weapons were these bones of the mammoth and the rhinoceros. So those animals lived at the time the men did, and in this country."
The learned men listened, but did not believe what he said.
A few years after that, however,—about twenty years,—other shaped stones were found on the banks of the river that flows by the great city of London, in England, across the narrow water from France. And in Denmark, another country near France, still more shaped stones were found, and, with them, bones of the reindeer.
Then the learned men had to believe that men who shaped stones once lived in England and France and Denmark; and that at the same time lived the mammoth, the rhinoceros, and the reindeer; and that the men had very little and knew very little, and made the shaped stones for weapons.
Soon after this, chipped stones were found all the world over. More than that, there were people living who still were chipping them. The Eskimo, who live in the frozen north of our own country, make their weapons of stone.
So you see that by the Age of Stone is meant a time when the metals—tin and copper and iron—were not known; and when stone, horn, bone, shell, and wood were used for tools and weapons. The cave men were in the Stone Age long ago. The Eskimo are in the Stone Age now. And the American red men, though they were still in the Stone Age, were beginning to learn the use of one metal—copper.
And the people of the shell mounds—how do we know about them? In Denmark to-day you may see shell mounds. They are the old hunting and fishing villages. They are of different sizes; some are a quarter of a mile long and half as wide. They are built up of things that the hunters and fishermen threw away: oyster and mussel and periwinkle shells; bones of the wolf, the hyena, the dog; of wild duck, swan, and grouse; of cod, herring, flounder, and other deep-sea fish. Many of the bones had been split open for the purpose of extracting the marrow. Besides bones, there are also pieces of burnt wood; and there is sea plant, which may have given salt.
The stone tools and weapons found in the heaps are axes, knives, hammers, awls, lance heads, and sling stones—all of rude make. There are also bits of rude pottery, which show that these men knew a little more than the cave men; they knew how to bake clay. They were ahead of the cave men also in having one tamed animal—the dog. No bones were found of any tamed animal except the dog, and this seems to show that it was the earliest animal tamed by man.
Mounds like those in Denmark are found in many other countries: in our own land where the red men lived; in Africa, the land of the black man; and in Asia, where the brown man lives. Wherever man has led a wandering life, eating fish and leaving their bones behind him, these heaps are found; and they are always by the sea or by a river.
At the time when the cave men and the shell men lived, the earth looked much as it looks now, as far as hills and rivers and trees and grass could make it. The earth had its seasons—its spring and summer, its autumn and winter. Then, as now, the forests dropped their leaves in autumn. Many leaves of oak, maple, poplar, and hickory fell upon clayey soil and left their imprints; and the clay afterwards turned to stone, and the imprints show us that the forests of the cave men were like our own.
The insects, too, were the same as those of our own fields. We know this because the gum flowed down the pine trees then as now; and ants, crickets, butterflies, grasshoppers, and spiders visiting the tree were held and covered. The gum turned to stone and made the amber of a later time and kept the insects within it unchanged, and there within the amber we see the insects that the cave men knew.
The animals, also, were much the same as those of our own time. It seems strange to us that at that time the reindeer and the mammoth should have lived in the same country; because the reindeer of our time lives in a cold country, and the elephant, which is like the mammoth, lives in a hot country. But before the time of the cave men, it was warm in England and France, and the mammoth went to live there then. Afterwards, it became colder; but the mammoth liked it there, so he grew himself a coat of thick woolly hair to keep out the cold and stayed, while the reindeer lived there only in winter and went northward in summer.
We know that the mammoth had this heavy coat of wool because, in the cold country of Siberia, some time since, there was a mammoth thawed out of the ice; and also because the cave men have left a drawing that pictures the long hair. It was about a hundred years ago, when a fisherman on the frozen Lena River saw an iceberg of odd shape. Two years later, he saw the tusks of a mammoth standing out from it. And five years after that, all the ice had melted from around it, and the big body of the mammoth lay upon the sand. There was a flowing mane on the neck, and the body was covered with reddish wool and long black hair. The people about the country there cut up the flesh as food for their dogs, and the bones and tusks were sent to the museum in St. Petersburg.
Thousands of teeth and tusks of mammoths have been brought up by the nets of fishermen in the North Sea, that washes England. And whole islands along that coast are made up of nothing but ice and sand and the teeth and tusks of mammoths. During every storm, pieces of this old ivory are washed loose and cast ashore; and the fishermen sell them.
It is thought that what is now the North Sea was, at the time the elephants lived there, a swamp in which the animals went to drink and bathe, and in which, at times, they became mired; and that this is why so many of their bones are found along that coast.
Mammoths were very like big elephants, with tusks that turned up. There are none on earth now. Neither are there any cave tigers. And the two-horned rhinoceros has gone, and the great snowy owl.
Caverns and rock shelters in which men of the Stone Age lived have been found in many places in our own country and in other lands. But caves are few, even in limestone countries; and these early, stone-chipping men lived the world over. So, in the open places and in forests among wild beasts, they must have dug pits for safety or made rude huts of earth or branches.
In caverns there have been more bones of horse and reindeer found than of any other animals; and this shows that the early hunters did best in killing these animals. There have been few bones of mammoths found; but that is because those bones were mostly too heavy for the cave people to carry away. It is likely that the flesh was eaten on the spot where the animal was killed.