A Woman of the Ice Age

by L. P. Gratacap

Nature is her antitype, and in Nature as in a mirror she sees the multiplied reflections of her own beneficence and her own fertility. She rules in the vestiture of Man’s Empress, and the flood of time yet bears upon its tides the meanings of her presence and her powers.

Immortal Woman! in whose dowry Intention has placed all things beautiful and tender, around whose neck hang the prayers of men, and from whose eyes shine the rewards of men; she who by a welcome paradox makes her weakness the unmastered ruler of men, and whose promises are the last incentives to their ambition.

In the metaphors of Revelation she stands revealed as the victim of her own surrender to enjoyment, and through a miraculous genesis of life she is enthroned upon the seat of Mercy, as the vehicle of Man’s restoration.

And this Primal Woman? Shall such panegyric belong to her? She stands upon the threshold. Behind her the depths and mists of Oblivion—before her Man’s Empire over Life. Let us see.

As we watch her thus beaming and looking upward, she springs forward into a patch of light made by the sun’s descending rays through some aperture in the boughs of the high trees. Her beauty is revealed. She is not tall, but the tense vigor of her muscles, all uncovered and shining in the sun like a golden bronze, gives her superb frame, modelled with a charm of outline born of exercise, an imposing expression. She is not voluptuous, but the graded and blending surfaces of her body—softly tinted with that indescribable color that becomes an embrowned bronze, alive in the shadows, and a lustrous metallic sheen in the high lights—form a picture of enticement. The swollen excrescences of breast and hips, repulsive to all adroit and delicate desire, are replaced by refined outlines, sexual in meaning, but restrained to the limits of sculptural modesty. Her neck sweeps deliciously upward from the bare shoulders, imprinted with the kisses of the sun, bearing a head, perhaps small but exquisitely adjusted, and displaying features puzzling in their type, and suggestive of the subtle union of the American, the Negroid and the Malayan.

The nose aquiline, but thinly ridged and faintly expanding into nervous and sensitive nostrils, the lips full and pouting, yet short, the eyes half limpid and dark, but carrying flashes of defiance, the forehead low, the cheeks oval and delicately hollowed, the ears small and just obviously inverted, and the chin abrupt and firmly built; the whole composition lending itself to a range of expressions from languor to anger and repudiation. Nor was it deprived of less extreme shades of meaning. As she stood in the light, her eyebrows arched in attention, the smooth skin between them disturbed by a few lines of indecision and her lips parted in expectation, she leaned forward, and a look of infinite interest, a strange pained thoughtfulness arose in her face. She raised her hands as if in oblation to the light above her, her tumultuous black hair streamed down her naked back, and she sighed.

The poise was perfect, the aesthetic unity complete. Gold bands held her ankles, gold links were upon her wrists and ears, a white shell comb was inserted in her hair, and an apron of fox skin hung before her. Such was Lhatto, the girl of the Sierras, before human history began, the Woman of the Ice Age, living in the warm Fair Land in North America.

We are not concerned in proving the reasonableness of this fair vision. Eve has been made beautiful by Art. Why not Lhatto by Fiction? And why not beautiful indeed? Child of Nature, nurtured amidst its beauties, trained in the many ways of earning life from its free gifts, dispensing with all artifices of living, gathering strength, and color, form, feeling and passion from the splendor of Nature’s panorama and action. The wonderfulness of such panorama and action was in this temperate and tropic and frigid zone unsurpassed. Why not find in these first Earthlings some impassioned instance—accident it might be—of Creation’s early effort to reflect,—as if in sportive prophecy of all Woman should be thereafter,—the approaching terrors and glories of her reign in history and story, in play and legend, poetry and music.

Lhatto stood an instant longer in the sun. Then, as if regulating her movements by some carefully conceived purpose, she turned back to the sylvan camp and drew from a rude receptacle, fashioned from the trunk of a tree, a more complete covering, seized a harpoon-like weapon from the ground, crowded a pemmican mass of cooked grain and smoked meat into a woven basket, rudely ornamented with figures, and turning backward spoke to the moving figures of men and women far off in the perspective of the forest.

Her voice belonged to and fitted all her natural charm. It was musical and jubilant with woody sweetness, and a lingering ring, like the melting and penetrating calls of birds. It made her more beautiful.