Night Is Before the Dawn 7 



Slowly the other canoes approach him and their occupants tumble 

 out also. Only one is left and he now drifts back towards the churn- 

 ing patch of water and the mass of bobbing floats. Then he stands up 

 in his canoe and begins spearing repeatedly into the waters. Again 

 and again his great lance jabs down and is withdrawn, for this is not 

 a barbed harpoon but a heavy shaft terminating in a long cruel 

 spearhead of polished bone with a point sharpened to the fineness of 

 a needle. Bloody foam spatters the man's naked chest and drips from 

 his hair, black as tar in the half-light. Then all at once it is over and 

 the waters are still. The spearman gives a shout and the others run 

 through the shallows, the lines over their shoulders, surf splashing 

 from their flailing legs. The leader reaches down among the floats 

 and, after feeling about for a few moments, heaves some black and 

 shiny thing to the surface. This he half carries, half floats to the 

 shore. It is dragged out of the surf and thrown up upon the sand. A 

 man runs up the beach and, cupping his hands, gives out a long- 

 drawn wailing cry and it is answered from afar by a man and from 

 on high by a gull. Then a number of figures are seen bounding over 

 the short tufts of grass and leaping the tidal ditches. They come from 

 a distant group of huts and are soon pouring down on to the sandy 

 beach. They form a circle around the wet, spindle-shaped corpse on 

 the sand and a little boy squats down and pokes the creature in its 

 tiny eye. The same scene is being enacted at half a dozen other 

 points along the shore and on both sides of the channel. 



This is a scene that, with minor variations in background, actors, 

 and costumes, has taken place somewhere in the world almost every 

 day, year in and year out, since long before the dawn of history. The 

 particular incident we have been witnessing reconstructs a morning 

 ten thousand years ago by the chill waters of a sound in the southern 

 part of the Outer Hebrides Islands on the fringe of the Atlantic 

 Ocean off the west coast of Scotland. It was happening simultane- 

 ously at a number of points all around that cold, shallow body of 

 water known to us as the North Sea, and it has been repeated upon 

 those coasts almost countless times since. It was a porpoise hunt, the 

 Tnost primitive form of whaling and perhaps man's first major ven- 

 ture upon the sea. 



