A Tale of the Time of the Cave Men Author:Stanley Waterloo Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III A FAMILY DINNER Despite the hyena and baby incident, the day had been a satisfactory one for this cave family. Of course, had the woman failed ... more »to reach just when she did the hollow in which her babe was left there would have come a tragedy in the extinction of a young and promising cave child, and the two would have been mourning, as even wild beasts mourn for their lost young. But there was little reversion to past possibilities in the minds of the cave people. The couple were not worrying over what might have been. The mother had found food of one sort in abundance, and the father's fortune had been royal. He had tossed a rock from a precipice a hundred feet in height down into a passing herd of the little wild horses, and great luck had followed, for one of them had been killed, and so this was aholiday in the cave. The man and wife were at ease and had each an appetite. The nuts gathered by the woman were tossed in a heap among the ashes, and live coals were raked upon them, and the popping which followed showed how well they were being roasted. A sturdy twig, two yards in length and sharpened at the end, was utilised by the man in cooking the strips of meat cut from the haunch of the wild horse, and very savoury were the odours that filled the cave. There was the faint perfume of the crackling nuts, and there was the fragrant beneficence of the broiling meat. There are no definite records upon the subject; the chef of to-day can give you no information on the point, but there is reason to believe that a steak from the wild horse of the time was something admirable. There is a sort of maxim current in this age, in civilised rural communities, to the effect that those quadrupeds are good to eat which "chew the cud or part the hoof." The horse of to-day is a...« less