Jack London. Before Adam -
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reach, and mocked them as they gnashed their tusks with
impotent rage. Not content with this, he broke off a stout
branch, and, holding on with one hand and foot, jabbed the
infuriated beasts in the sides and whacked them across their
noses. Needless to state, my mother and I enjoyed the sport.
But one tires of all good things, and in the end, my
father, chuckling maliciously the while, led the way across the
trees. Now it was that my ambitions ebbed away, and I became
timid, holding tightly to my mother as she climbed and swung
through space. I remember when the branch broke with her
weight. She had made a wide leap, and with the snap of the wood
I was overwhelmed with the sickening consciousness of falling
through space, the pair of us. The forest and the sunshine on
the rustling leaves vanished from my eyes. I had a fading
glimpse of my father abruptly arresting his progress to look,
and then all was blackness.
The next moment I was awake, in my sheeted bed, sweating,
trembling, nauseated. The window was up, and a cool air was
blowing through the room. The night-lamp was burning calmly.
And because of this I take it that the wild pigs did not get
us, that we never fetched bottom; else I should not be here
now, a thousand centuries after, to remember the event.
And now put yourself in my place for a moment. Walk with
me a bit in my tender childhood, bed with me a night and
imagine yourself dreaming such incomprehensible horrors.
Remember I was an inexperienced child. I had never seen a wild
boar in my life. For that matter I had never seen a
domesticated pig. The nearest approach to one that I had seen
was breakfast bacon sizzling in its fat. And yet here, real as