Meat was good to eat.  In the end, tracing it back, or at the first, rather, all meat came from grass.  The meat of the duck and of the blackbird came from the seed of the swamp rice.  To kill a duck with an arrow scarce paid for the labour of stalking and the long hours in hiding.  The blackbirds were too small for arrow-killing save by the boys who were learning and preparing for the taking of larger game.  And yet, in rice season, blackbirds and ducks were succulently fat.  Their fatness came from the rice.  Why should I and mine not be fat from the rice in the same way?

And I thought it out in camp, silent, morose, while the children squabbled about me unnoticed, and while Arunga, my mate-woman, vainly scolded me and urged me to go hunting for more meat for the many of us.

Arunga was the woman I had stolen from the hill-tribes.  She and I had been a dozen moons in learning common speech after I captured her.  Ah, that day when I leaped upon her, down from the over-hanging tree-branch as she padded the runway!  Fairly upon her shoulders with the weight of my body I smote her, my fingers wide-spreading to clutch her.  She squalled like a cat there in the runway.  She fought me and bit me.  The nails of her hands were like the claws of a tree-cat as they tore at me.  But I held her and mastered her, and for two days beat her and forced her to travel with me down out of the canyons of the Hill-Men to the grass lands where the river flowed through the rice-swamps and the ducks and the blackbirds fed fat.

I saw my vision when the rice was ripe.  I put Arunga in the bow of the fire-hollowed log that was most rudely a canoe.  I bade her paddle.  In the stern I spread a deerskin she had tanned.  With two stout sticks I bent the stalks over the deerskin and threshed out the grain that else the blackbirds would have eaten.  And when I had worked out the way of it, I gave the two stout sticks to Arunga, and sat in the bow paddling and directing.

In the past we had eaten the raw rice in passing and not been pleased with it.  But now we parched it over our fire so that the grains puffed and exploded in whiteness and all the tribe came running to taste.

After that we became known among men as the Rice-Eaters and as the Sons of the Rice.  And long, long after, when we were driven by the Sons of the River from the swamps into the uplands, we took the seed of the rice with us and planted it.  We learned to select the largest grains for the seed, so that all the rice we thereafter ate was larger-grained and puffier in the parching and the boiling.

But Arunga.  I have said she squalled and scratched like a cat when I stole her.  Yet I remember the time when her own kin of the Hill-Men caught me and carried me away into the hills.  They were her father, his brother, and her two own blood-brothers.  But she was mine, who had lived with me.  And at night, where I lay bound like a wild pig for the slaying, and they slept weary by the fire, she crept upon them and brained them with the war-club that with my hands I had fashioned.  And she wept over me, and loosed me, and fled with me, back to the wide sluggish river where the blackbirds and wild ducks fed in the rice swamps—­for this was before the time of the coming of the Sons of the River.