the next part of the story. Does that sound alright?’ ‘Yes!’ came the reply.
‘Good, because the next creature to arrive was man. Us.
We came with stone tools, and we knew how to make fire, and traps, and how to hunt. We discovered that stegadon the little mammoth was not very bright, and could easily
be driven into a pit with spikes set in the bottom, or over a cliff, so it could be killed. It was good eating and plenty of it. The skins made strong footwear and good clothing. Quite soon the humans helped stegadon towards extinction and the sabre toothed cat along with it. You can’t catch rabbits and squirrels too well with sabre teeth, can you? Without stegadon the sabrecats got hungrier and hungrier.’
A motorboat came puttering along noisily from astern. We waited for it to pass. The Longbow curtsied softly to its wash. ‘My Granny, who knew all about every- thing, or said she did, she reckoned there was something extra to the sabrecat. She said, of all the creatures, they must have had brains and could think, and they got together in a mass and held a great pow- wow of wailing and wrowling for days and nights, until the Great Spirit came to see whatever was the matter.’
“The two-legs with the dancing flower have stolen all the stegadon, Great Spirit,’ the cats wailed, ‘We are starving! We can catch nothing small with these teeth which You gave us! Rabbits laugh at us! We can’t even get past the dancing flower to eat two- legs when its asleep! Yowl, wowl, wail!! Please, please help us!”
“Um, yes, thank you for bringing this to My Attention,” said the Great Spirit. “I do in fact have a plan for you. It will take a little while, you will be hungry for a bit, and you will have to get smaller. But, you will recover, and I will also give you a power over the two-legs with the dancing flower, as you call them. Make good use of it !” ‘And the Great Spirit was gone,’ said the steersman.
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‘But, so it was,’ he continued, ‘a long time later, as Granny told it, on one fierce cold stormy night when the two-legs were sitting at their cave entrance with a bright crackling fire to keep warm and to keep the wild animals at bay, it was then the little girl of that family heard the strangest squeak- ing sound, very near, at the edge of the firecircle. As she watched and listened, a small wet bedraggled furry animal dragged itself towards the warmth where she was. Carefully she touched it and picked it up. It was a scrawny, tiny kitten. ‘The girl warmed and dried it in her lap and fed it a scrap of meat. It licked her finger and began to purr.’ “Oh Mum!” she said, “look what I’ve got!
Look at its little face, Mum! Can we keep it Mum? Oh go on , Mum, please Mum! Can we keep it?’
‘And that, Granny said, was how the first cat first joined a family, and came to dominate it in the way that only cats can, as anyone that’s ever had a good cat will tell you.’ He paused. ‘And it happened just around here, by the Dart.’ Then it was time to start paddling again.u
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