The dog is the oldest friend man has among the animals - very much the oldest. Compared with him the cat and the horse are new acquaintances. Probably we shall never know when the friendship began, but the bones of dogs lying side by side with the bones of primitive men tend to show that it was in very, very remote times.

And perhaps in the beginning of their acquaintanceship they were not friends; probably not. Probably primitive man had to fight the wild dogs as he doubtless had to fight all the other wild animals he came in contact with.

"Quarters fit for a dog rather than a human being" once was an opprobrious description; but many an infantryman in the world war would have felt as "comfy as a king" if his rest billet had been as clean, as dry, and as sanitary as these kennels, where messenger dogs were tended with the greatest care in order that they might be in perfect physical condition when called upon to carry a message, upon the delivery of which might depend the success of an offensive (see pages 17, 55, and 73).

And no mean foes would these wild dogs prove themselves. Their speed, strength, courage, and ferocity, coupled with their probable habit of fighting in packs, must have made them very formidable enemies to unarmed men, no matter how strong the latter may have been. Doubtless in those early days the encounters would often end in favor of the dogs, and the man would go down and be torn to pieces by the overwhelming pack.

But the man had two arms and prehensile fingers and toes, and so could climb trees which the dogs could not, and probably he often escaped his canine enemies in this way. We can imagine him, out of breath and badly bitten, perhaps, sitting up in a tree gazing fearfully at the leaping dogs below, and wondering when he would lie able to descend to get some food.

Perhaps it was while sitting thus that some great prehistoric genius conceived the idea that by means of a branch broken from the tree he sat in he could strike the dogs without descending to the ground. And perhaps he carried out this idea, drove the dogs away yelping, and the next day leaped into fame as the inventor of the club, the original "big stick".