There had been a time, within living memory, when the Koor family had subsisted entirely on the hunting and snaring of animals and on casual foraging for edible roots and fruits and fungus; and the hunters were still, and likely to remain, the most powerful and privileged class. Agriculture, however, was now firmly established as something more than a fantastic experiment. The wild grasses had been coaxed and tamed; the two natural terraces at the base of the Great Ox, the nearest of five surrounding hills, had been tilled and sown and cossetted with pious and bloody observances; and the grain, during many seasons, had grown more sleek and abundant. At harvest-time even the great lords of the hunt would join their humbler brethren and for a while wield the flint sickle instead of axe and spear; but in the threshing of the grain they took no part, and its grinding served to keep the women out of mischief. Other processes followed: some of the flour would be stored away in the clay pots which the women had learned to make, and some would be at once made into paste and baked in a covered pit filled with heated stones. At this point the interest of the hunters would revive. Some liked the stuff to be soggy in the middle, with a hard outer crust; others demanded that it should be hard and dry-throughout; but all found it a comfort to the belly, and a good deal better than nothing when lean times came. It was from a woman, captured by Koor himself in his more vigorous days, that they had learned the trick of agriculture; she, coming of a people versed in such things, had been the first among them to hoard grain for sowing, and scatter it over a little patch of ground cleared and tilled by implements of her own making, flint-headed picks and spades of deerhorn. For this she had been accorded as much honour as a woman needs. She became the mother of many sons, and died in giving birth to Hawkon.
Hawkon, squatting at ease in his house, glanced at Flint and thought suddenly of Ogo. He was indulging in one of his rare moments of reflection. For as long as he could remember, the tribe of Koor had lived in this valley, though sometimes in dreams there came to him fragmentary pictures, derived from hearsay, of another squat, another valley, whence they had migrated. But he took small account of dreams, if only because for the most part he forgot them in the moment of waking. He lived not at all in the past; a very little in the future; most of all, in common with his kind, he lived in the present, which is action. Where he differed from most of his fellows was in the degree of his looking forward. They, with rare exceptions, could look no further than from the moment of waking to the moment of sleep, and in practice seldom looked so far. From the kill to the feast, from the feast to the next hunt: this was the usual measure of their fancy. But Hawkon had greatness in him: his imagination, given rein, could range over tomorrow and even into the next day; and, more than that, unknown to him, working secretly, it could carry him forward to a goal that he had never consciously aimed at. He was crafty as well as ambitious, but he was more ambitious than crafty. His ambition was a pure instinct, unhampered by intelligence. Every plan that formed in his mind he instantly translated into action. He was incapable of waiting. And because the obscure force working in him was always timely, never premature, in releasing an idea into his mind, he seldom made a mistake with consequences too big for his energy to override. Although young he was already a leader in the hunt, and he accepted his position without question, almost without noticing it. Even the dogs recognized his quality: the two best of them, swiftest and fiercest, followed him fondly wherever he went and would sleep nowhere but at his side. When his tongue was loosened he would boast indeed: but only as a child boasts, in a naive impersonal fashion, as though the deeds he celebrated were but distantly related to himself. It was so he thought of them, or so would have thought if he had thought of the matter at all. These things, though they had issued from him, were not in any intimate sense his: having happened, they belonged to the external world, the world of action. Of the internal world he was unaware: its events, for him, were of one kind with the rest, or differing only in a degree that caused but momentary doubt and perplexity.