16 Singing Valleys 



of the first cornstalks stronger and taller than either of the 

 wild parents; watched the ears break out and fill; felt through 

 the husks the kernels form, waited for these to ripen. One man 

 went up and down the corn rows and gathered the first harvest. 

 One man, using the jawbone of a deer, scraped the dried 

 kernels from the cobs into a basket. 



Then, his ingenuity exhausted, he handed the basket to a 

 woman. 



Perhaps she, too, drew on some dim, racial memory. She 

 spread the grain on a sloping stone, and with a smaller stone 

 pounded and rolled it to a coarse meal. This she mixed with 

 spring water and shaped between her palms into cakes. She 

 heated stones in the fire and laid the "pones" on them, watch- 

 ing anxiously while the dough formed a crust that browned 

 and smelled surprisingly sweet. Proudly she lifted the first 

 baking from the stone and held it out to the man. 



He bit into it. From his expression the woman knew at once 

 that it was good. So did the children. With a whoop they 

 snatched greedily at the other loaves. 



Heretofore the man had been a wanderer, serving the stone 

 knife he carried, following the game wherever it led him. Now 

 the knife had a rival. It was no longer his sole source of life 

 and food. For he had corn. Urged by the memory of that sweet 

 taste on his tongue, he burned off a wider patch of forest land, 

 scratched the ground between the charred tree stumps with a 

 forked stick and scattered another, and a larger planting of the 

 seeds. While these were growing, he went into the forest for 

 game. But after every kill he hastened back to the clearing to 

 see how his new crop of bread was coming on. Then it oc- 

 curred to him to leave the woman there beside the cornfield, 

 to tend it while he was away. She was charged with the duty 

 of keeping off the deer which would have eaten all the green 

 stalks in a single night. 



It was strange how the growing of grain changed man's 

 attitude toward the animals of the jungle. Heretofore he had 

 sought the deer, and his enemy had been the jaguar which 



