When a thing was funny we were convulsed with appreciation of it, and the simplest, crudest things were funny to us.

Oh, we were great laughers, I can tell you.
The way we had treated Saber-Tooth was the way we treated all animals that invaded the village.

We kept our run-ways and drinking-places to ourselves by making life miserable for the animals that trespassed or strayed upon our immediate territory.

Even the fiercest hunting animals we so bedevilled that they learned to leave our places alone.

We were not fighters like them; we were cunning and cowardly, and it was because of our cunning and cowardice, and our inordinate capacity for fear, that we survived in that frightfully hostile environment of the Younger World.
Lop-Ear, I figure, was a year older than I.What his past history was he had no way of telling me, but as I never saw anything of his mother I believed him to be an orphan.