Earth Abides

Here they shoot with the bow, skillfully, and their hunting-dogs are trained to give tongue. They love assembly and debate. Their womenfolk walk proudly. The symbol of their god is a hammer, but they pay him no great reverence….

Many others there are too, each differing. In the distant years after these first years, the tribes will grow more numerous and come together, and cross-fertilize in body and in mind. Then, doubtless, blindly and of no one’s planning, will come new civilizations and the new wars.

After a while they grew hungry and very thirsty. Since the fire had now died down in places, one of the young men sallied out. When he came back, he was carrying an old aluminum tea-kettle. Ish recognized it as the one which had been kept at the near-by spring. The young man offered it first to Ish, and he took a long drink of the cool water. Then the others drank.

Afterwards the same young man pulled a flat tin can out of the hip-pocket of his blue jeans. The label had long since fallen away from the can, and the metal was well rusted. The three discussed vigorously among themselves whether they should eat whatever might be in the can. Some people had died, one of them argued, from eating out of cans. They argued vigorously, but did not ask Ish’s advice. If there was a picture of a fish or some fruit on the outside of the can, then you knew that that kind of food was inside. But even, one of them declared, a rusty can might be dangerous when you knew what was in it, for in some way, if the rust went clear through the can, then what was inside might be spoiled.

As Ish, who was not in the argument, could have told them, the obvious thing to do was to open the can and see in what condition the food inside might be. But being a very old man and having gained some wisdom with life, he realized that they were arguing merely for the fun of it, and that eventually they would get around to a decision.

After a while, indeed, they hacked the can open with one of the knives, and inside was some reddish brown material. To Ish it was obviously a can of salmon. They smelled at it inquisitively, and decided that it was not spoiled. Also they inspected the inside of the can, and found that no rust had penetrated through it. They divided the salmon, and gave a share to Ish.

Ish had not seen or eaten any canned salmon for a long time. The meat looked much darker to him than it should look and it was lacking in flavor. But its taste—or lack of taste—he decided, might be partly the result of his own dullness of palate at his age. If it had not been so much trouble to talk, he would have liked to deliver a lecture to the young men about all the miracles that lay behind their eating this little snack of salmon. The fish must have been caught many years before, probably off the coast of Alaska, a thousand miles and more from the place where they were now eating it. But even if it had not been so much trouble to talk, still he recollected he could not even have made the young men understand what he was talking about. They had seen the ocean, perhaps, because it was not very far from where they lived, but they would have no conception of a great ship sailing the ocean, and they would have not known what he meant when he talked of a thousand miles.

So he ate quietly, and let his eyes rove from one of the young men to another. More and more often, however, his eyes came to rest upon that particular one who was called Jack. Life could not have been altogether easy for Jack. He had a scar on his right arm, and, unless Ish’s eyes deceived him, the left hand had suffered some kind of accident and was a little twisted. Yes, Jack must have suffered, and yet his face, like those of the others, was clear of lines and free in all its movements.