A Woman of the Ice Age

by L. P. Gratacap

When near the projection she caught it with one hand, let go of the rope and flung her other hand upon it and then drew herself quickly upward, flinging her legs upon the crust around her. She had gained an ample space extending outward from the spire of the iceberg on all sides. She could walk around the central mass and her eye traversed the whole visible area of the shores.

Instinctively she looked upward to Zit. Its granite obelisk still gleamed amid the ice, and a rare splendor of unbroken sunshine flooded the marvellous picture. A second time the Woman sank to her knees and from her untrained lips, from the speechless impulse of her heart, there rose a prayer for safety, and she stretched out her imploring hands to the distant mountain.

As she thus bowed to the sensible Deity before her, great wraiths and swirling towers of snow seemed developed upon one edge of the vast scene. They rose as colossal and advancing clouds, and closed with immense strides the whole picture of the mountain. Cold winds descended from their flanks, bearing a tornado of ice particles, whirring snow-flakes and poignant sleet. Poor Lhatto! She trembled in the gale and cold; the iceberg, pushed by the storm’s harsh hands, reeled outward, and the descending blizzard rapidly hid the outlines of the coast. The woman had caught the slightest glance eastward, but it was enough to show her that the glaciated areas faded away somewhere south into a barren region which seemed again succeeded by the Fair Country.

There was no time to lose. Other bergs loosened from their moorings, or started in more rapid motion, were crowding now upon the massif on which Lhatto stood, the water spaces about her were filled with cakes and hummocks, the waters themselves, violently disturbed, were forming into waves, the blinding snow crowded the air, and the dismal frightening moment seemed to seal her fate.

She turned anxiously and looked over the platform’s edge to see if her one little hope, the small dug-out, was yet upon the lower shelf. To her alarm, the greater part of this ledge had disappeared; a triangular section still held the canoe, but the leaping waves were falling upon it and it rocked upon the slippery floor, with every intimation of quickly following the broken portions of the berg. Lhatto, stricken with terror at the thought of her separation from the one link connecting her with home and the sweet memories of the southern land, looked hastily about her for some quick escape from the dilemma. She had inadvertently approached the curling edge of the upper platform and stood peering over it upon a bank of drifted snow. The plate of ice beneath her broke with a sharp rattle, and Lhatto, buried in the snow bank, was flung headlong upon the ice beneath. She emerged unhurt from the protecting blankets of wet snow and leaped to the dug-out. Another instant and she had coiled up the pendent strand from the ice bough by which she had ascended, thrown it and the harpoon into the boat, now slipping away with every new oscillation, and following both, launched herself amid the wilderness of ice, in the bitter breath from the frosty deserts of the glacier, in that desolate black moment when the light of day seemed extinguished, and the power of night held her prisoner in this sepulchre of death, with the shrill blasts whistling about her, a thousand missiles of hail pelting her remorselessly, and the inky waters, beaten into froth, curling their smitten crests about her.

Then the natal heroism emerged; her spirit met the unexpected and monstrous demand, her muscles stiffened into sinews of iron, and the prescience of her mind, educated by numberless adventures, directed her.

The very proximity of the stalking bergs, somewhat aligned in rows, protected Lhatto against the fiercer assaults of the wind, and permitted her to secure shelter from the rising waters. She adroitly directed her way between these stealthy and splendid argonauts, shooting across open lanes of water between them, skirting cautiously their quiet margins, even clinging to them, waiting for a propitious moment to move safely onward in her course.

The instinct of direction in wild men and women is acute and infallible. The obstreperous confusion of warring details in natural features becomes with them a completely composed picture with all the details properly distributed, and the relations of parts all accurately designed. Lhatto had seen but little from the iceberg, and distance had veiled it, but some compass of direction set instantly in her bright mind, and she knew, even in this labyrinth, the avenue of escape. It lay to the south-east.

The sudden tempest almost as suddenly abated, but all the startled movements it had inaugurated continued its physical effects long after its activity had ceased. The ice continued to pour outward from the glacier, the water remained froward and dangerous. Lhatto, still aiming to shield herself from the waves, had clung to the larger floats of ice in such wise as to secure immunity from their attack, but she could not much longer afford to drift with them too far to sea. She would have again met that tide perchance which first brought her northward, and besides she realized that, nearer in shore, a back setting tide might help her on her difficult return.

The moment had come for her to venture out upon the broken waves, and auspiciously as she shot her canoe from behind a barrier of ice to which she had tenaciously held, the sun again opened the canopy of the sky, and a light shaft flung athwart her boat seemed propitious to her animated fancy.