A Woman of the Ice Age

by L. P. Gratacap

And the primal woman leaned over the dead seal, and before the mystery of death began the long interrogation which man has ever put to this same wonder, running on past false prophets, ethnic faiths, revelation and modern science.

Lhatto disengaged the harpoon point which, as in the same instrument of the Esquimaux to-day, was attached by a thong to the wooden shaft that carried it, and washed it clean and replaced it in a socket in a handle. She laid it in the boat and stood lingering over the spot where the seal had been slain, perhaps with some propitiary thought, for the life she had taken from the world.

She turned to the boat that now with the receding tide had become half elevated from the water on the widening surfaces of the bared rocks. A light push, a leap and the rocking dug-out shot outward in a maze of ripples, with its agile occupant still standing upright, a curious gaze of interest rising in her face as she looked northward to the blanched and drifting ice bergs, intermittently visible and absent on the far horizon.

The girl slowly resumed her paddling, and began, after some hesitation, to row still further outward from the shore, that now seemed a long way off, its details softened into confused blotches of color, and its irregularities of outline merged into bold and simple shapes. The strangeness of her position, the weird isolation of her voyage on the Pacific, a human waif in the great void of expectancy of nature, certainly carried no intimation of its poetic or dramatic interest to her primitive experience, and feeling. She, the naive precursor of a continent’s population!

A fascination only drew her outward, the compelling curiosity of her nature, that delicate and insistent inquisitiveness of woman, which in more conventional forms is reduced and dissipated into the idle and transitory whims of modern life.

In Lhatto, this minimized attitude of interest in trifles, innuendos and intrigues, was foreshadowed by a great yearning; the stalwart, uninjured, bare response of her strong passionate heart to her own questioning of nature, to the myriad strains of sympathy between her and this chrysalis of mysteries into which she had been born. How shall we justly realize the proportions or properties of the first full formed human soul in a woman, standing somewhere near the marvellous incident which evolved or made her; yet possessing an indescribable heritage of half-animal instincts, transmuted let us hope, by the benison of the Great Intention, into a labyrinth of longings, and dreams, and hopes, and queries.

She moved constantly outward on the waste of waters, and her face was turned to the land looming up behind its first declivities in purple mountain tops, here and there accentuated in sharp and sparkling pinnacles. Still outward. And now so recklessly had she advanced that the thronging fingers of a great oceanic current, sweeping northward, like myriads of tiny tentacles, each the lapping summit of a drop of water, had seized her boat and slowly swerved it from its path, carrying it on the broad river of its eddying tides.

Lhatto seemed to notice nothing at first, but suddenly she rose to her feet. The receding land seemed miles away, the sun shone from the zenith, the little groups of rocks on which she had landed were lost to sight, a low creeping ripple made itself heard and the boat rose upon the successive swelling convexities of larger and larger waves. The realization of her position was acute. She worked vigorously to draw her little vessel out of the hastening and now vociferous tide, but for once her strong arm, nerved into desperation by a sense of impending danger, was impotent.

The struggle between the woman and the now exulting water, leaping and splashing upon her terror-stricken face, was an unequal combat. The insidious gliding wavelets, as if instinct with a hidden purpose, had disguised their force until their softly augmented power had reached the full measure of an irresistible purpose. Nothing now in that woman—become frail before the strength of natural agencies—could save her.

She stood up, and dropping the useless paddle, between her scooped hands shouted to the shore. The wild sad cry drifted lonely, shivering unanswered, over the hopeless plain of water, and if it reached the shore, died forgotten against the flinty barriers, or lost itself in cranny, crevice, and defile.