PRIMEVAL MAN 193 



just such a wild life. In those days these far- 

 back ancestors of ours led the same lives of 

 suspicion and vigilant cunning among the beasts 

 of the forest and plain that are now led by the 

 wildest African savages. In that immemorial 

 past the beasts conditioned the lives of men, 

 as they conditioned the lives of one another; for 

 the chief factors in man's existence were then 

 the living things upon which he preyed and 

 the fearsome creatures which sometimes made 

 prey of him. Ages were to pass before his mas- 

 tery grew to such a point that the fanged things 

 he once had feared, and the hoofed things suc- 

 cess in the chase of which had once meant to 

 him life or death, became negligible factors in 

 his existence. 



Some of the naked or half skin-clad savages 

 whom I met and with whom I hunted were still 

 leading precisely the life of these ages-dead fore- 

 bears of ours. More than once I spent days in 

 heavy forests at the foot of equatorial moun- 

 tains in company with small parties of 'Ndorobo 

 hunters. They were men of the deep woods, 

 as stealthy and wary as any of the woodland 

 creatures. In each case they knew and trusted 

 my companion — who was in one instance a 

 settler, a famous lion hunter, and in the other 

 a noted professional elephant hunter. Yet 



