A Woman of the Ice Age

by L. P. Gratacap

Thus nature wore all the wardrobe of her almost exhaustless store, displayed all the properties of her acquisitions through ages of geological change, and assembled the most startling devices for awakening attention and vitalizing motion.

She seemed at this point on the earth’s surface so to arrange and direct her vast physical resources for rousing the mind, charging the heart, and stiffening the will, that the new being, arising from its cradle, and beginning the task of occupying the world, might be suddenly endowed with mind and heart and will, so vigorously organized, as to make that conquest easy.

Amidst these wide contrasts of climate and scene, of internal and external energy, of products and denizens, lived a race of prehistoric men and women thinly scattered in villages over the shoulders, the valleys and the alluvial terraces of the Sierra Nevadas in Central California, at a point where a broad ingress of the sea swept past the degraded and depressed Coast Ranges. Here, from the startling and multiplied expressions of nature, the full influence of environment encompassed at an impressionable instant the dawning powers, the pulses of its primal heat, the mental movements, the suddenly erected passions of this Glacial and Occidental Man, this strange and almost silent creature, appearing from the unknown, and moving forward on the listless feet of the centuries towards the powers and civilization of the orient.

Broadly reviewed, we have for the stage of this prehistoric drama, its pictures and stirring scenes of adventure and haphazard perils, the arctic glacial zone, the canyon country on the East, the Fair Land on the West and South, and beyond the unchanging ocean, as primal then as when it swept its fluctuating waves over Archaean ledges.

The particular place where our eyes discover, in this vast area, the movements of men, was situated in a grove of giant trees upon an upland that formed a terrace on the sides of a mountain range almost wooded to its summit, where the dwindling vegetation exposed the naked precipices of an abrupt and overhanging crest. In front of the upland the ground slipped suddenly down in slanting and again vertical faces of rock and soil to a sort of bottom land, a long elliptical depression holding at its lower end a basin of water, which, as it indicated no visible source of supply, must have been fed from the streams formed in the heavy rain-falls, or from the springs issuing over its hidden floor. The land rose in a low swell beyond this, and upon the margin of the latter elevation the possible inhabitant gazed upon the sea from the edge of an intrusive dike of rock, which, wall-like, rose along the edge of the western wave, its anterior face marked in most places by rising piles of fragmental rock.

Northward it rose to steeper heights whose unencumbered exposures made sheer precipices above the frothing billows sweeping in at their feet. The grass crept to the very verge of these dizzy elevations, the mist rolled down upon them at moments, and again they described angular apices of dark stone against the clear blue or cloud flecked zenith. From these latter pinnacles of observation the Fair Land with its mountains and rivers and valleys could be well discerned on the east, and the glittering spire of the ice mountain with its wide skirts of ice imperfectly descried northward.

At the moment of time when the retrospective and imaginative eye of this narrator fell upon the secluded upland, mentioned above, a path led down to the valley and its lake, a path somewhat precariously conducted over overhanging walls of rock. It crossed the valley almost lost to sight in tall grass, rose upon the lower swell and seemed to carry its adventuresome follower straight over the edge of the trap dike into the sea.

A little reckless exploration would have shown, however, that it led to no such useless and careless termination. It became on the face of the trap dike a very broken and disjointed path indeed, but still a path.

It became a ladder of rocky steps, which, if successfully followed, brought the traveller to a beach of water-worn and rounded pebbles, which again southward disappeared into a more extended sand plain. Behind this sand plain the dike precipice visibly dwindled, until it too disappeared beneath the folds of a sparsely wooded shore. To any human eye, perhaps unwontedly addicted to piercing the air with its long vision, there would have been discerned far out to sea a line of foaming breakers careering upon jagged backs of rock, and again even beyond this, like ghosts, white ice-bergs, tilted or erect, following each other in a spectral march.

On the upland where the path we have thus traced to the shore, began, somewhat withdrawn into the shadows of the colossal trunks of trees, were a few covered spaces made habitable by skins and boughs of trees. Their design, if design could be applicable to so undesigned a structure, consisted in a few posts lightly driven in the soil, connected at their upper ends by long sapling stems, which were again connected by crossed boughs, on which the lesser twigs were left undisturbed, and on this light webbing were piled more boughs and leaves until the accumulation assumed a mounded shape. By the fertility of nature, seeds, falling in this nidus of gradually accumulating leaf mould, had started into life, and, augmented through the years, had converted it into a sort of herbal patch, which in the season of blossoming became gay and radiant with flowers.