A Woman of the Ice Age

by L. P. Gratacap

Her thoughts, now again wakeful and swarming upward with fresh hopes of escape, as the tide had stopped, and land far south showed its varying outlines, were suddenly interrupted. Although apparently arrested, her boat had been drawing imperceptibly closer to an enormous berg which lay, tilted sideways, from some dislocation of its centre of gravity, its bottom immovable in the mud. A beetling wedge of ice formed its apex. Beneath this impending block and straight against a shelf of ice at its base, the exile had drifted. The dug-out struck the ice-cake sharply and Lhatto was thrown forward upon the prow of the small boat. Her fall was fortunate. The next instant, long enough for the slight concussion to be communicated to the toppling summit, the great mass fell, splintering like some colossal Rupert’s bubble into myriads of fragments, indenting the water with a deep concavity upon whose depression the refluent waves rolled in deafening disorder. Lhatto lay just beyond—by the narrowest margin—the extreme verge of its showering cleavages. The stern of the boat was hit by a big cake and sank beneath the water. Lhatto leaped to her feet, sped forward upon the ice shelf of the berg and falling flat, grasped the retreating dug-out, which, sucked outward, almost pulled her after it. The strong muscles and the roughened edges of the berg holding her back by their asperities, catching in her loose and wrinkled dress, saved all.

Another moment the stress of peril was past, and Lhatto drew over the rim of the ice shelf the boat still containing the captured seal. A stranger and larger craft was now the vehicle of her further adventures.

Adventure was indeed certain, for relieved of its cumbrous and dislodged pinnacle, the huge iceberg reeled slowly over and with a pulsating boom that shook the gathered snows from its shoulders, in storms of irridescent dust, it rose from its muddy fastenings and floated; to follow perchance the spectral procession which in the morning of the previous day Lhatto had seen far south, proceeding outward on the trackless deep.

But apprehensions were for the instant forgotten. The woman drew from the pocket of her trousers a long thin blade, that shining from its concave facets revealed the substance of obsidian, or volcanic glass. She squeezed the plush-like skin of the seal, draining away the absorbed water, and then cut deeply into its back, and dexterously working the stone knife, dislodged the fat in lumps. And these she ate.

The reassuring comfort of satiety, the new warmth bringing with it courage, made Lhatto keen and anxious again. She reviewed the chances of her escape. The berg was moving. That she could detect by watching the sharp edges of its arête pass the features of the glacier beyond it, and that it was likely to follow in the wake of the endless train of emigrants whose majestic beauty was destined to vanish before the tropic suns, dropping like despoiled queens their ornaments of sparkling jewels in the hot waters of the south, was equally certain. What means did she possess to effect her escape? The boat was intact, food was there, the harpoon and paddle still remained, and her own good heart and buoyant muscles, the quick concurrence of ardor and of strength, were also hers.

The berg moved steadily out to sea. No time was to be lost; the sea was as yet undisturbed, save by its own unquiet breathing, and even this perturbation, near the shore, and shielded as her position was by fences of icy peninsulas and drifting ice, was now scarcely noticeable. If she left the berg and trusted herself upon the water, could she shun the tides which had brought her there? To answer this question it was essential for Lhatto to find out exactly where she was. The body and mass of the berg, in steps and colonnaded loveliness, was between her and the distance, only the shelf on which she stood offered any room for foothold or support.

She looked intently upward. Above her she could see a shoulder of ice projecting outward, and it seemed so disposed to the central trunk of ice as to suggest that it surrounded it with a sort of lower platform. If she could surmount this the wider circuit of vision would enable her to form her plans. The task was not easy. The wall of ice at her very face was steep and actually inclined outwards, and the nearest margin of its pendent edges was thirty feet away.

Lhatto studied the problem, but it was an impossible physical feat to ascend the glassy slope. The iceberg, with occasional shuddering thrills which broke the snow loose from its higher parts, sending down white showers upon the startled woman, was slowly veering seaward. The circling eddies around its edges betrayed its motion. It even seemed that the shelf on which she stood was being invaded by the sea water. Her boat, a few minutes ago dry on the ice, was now partially surrounded by water. Her dismay increased. Running almost hopelessly to and fro, a waif of humanity in the great arctic world, straining her eyes from the extremities of the tipping shelf where she stood, to see if possible what surmounted the platform above her, which she desired to reach, her eye noted a horn-like projection of cylindrical ice, suddenly revealed by one of the discharges of the powdery snow above.

It was a stalactitic formation of ice extending outward like the round limb of a tree. Lhatto’s eye detected here an opportunity. Wound around the long harpoon she had brought, were many feet of strongly woven cord, a provision made by her people in their hunting excursions, when their prey dove or swam from them. It was attached to the harpoon blade, and the device contemplated a separation of the blade from the stock or handle which floated to the surface, though still united by this long thong to the wounded animal, seeking escape below the water.

Lhatto quickly unwound this cord, severed it from the stock and blade and threw one end over the uprising and ringent projection. In another instant she had looped the other end about her thighs, pulled the noose tightly around her limbs, and then, seizing the disengaged end, drew herself upward as a trapeze performer does to-day in a circus ring.