She had already passed over miles of water from the glacier’s edge and her encouraged heart grew hopeful. She left the friendly berg and directed her boat eastward against the waves. She worked the sea-worthy little dug-out with temerity and skill. She sat looking forward and her keen eyes, helped now by the renewed sunlight, watched the crested waves, their slanting or direct approach, and while she resisted their tendency to carry her from the shore, she so far permitted them to neutralize her advance, as was necessary to avert the danger of upsetting.
It was a clever and strong series of efforts, and to the sympathetic spirits watching her from some asylum in the skies her success must have elicited approving nods.
Slowly as the night fell the lapsing wind faded away; the sun’s parting rays piercing the higher atmosphere, left the cold world in darkness; spectral and terrifying shadows stole over the ice fields and one by one the stars in the firmament lit their everlasting vigils, and Lhatto, still struggling with the waves, moved silently shoreward, almost despairing with fatigue, but calling, in her brave primeval heart, upon all the powers of the blue black dome above her to bring her safely home.
All that night the tireless arms worked, and the nursed boat overcame the distance with increasing ease; the tide, mutable with new affections, now helped the exhausted maiden in place of opposing her, the wind, soothed into pity by the moving spectacle, brushed her onward with alternating puffs, and the surges on the far away shore made themselves heard so as to direct her path. Birds from the shore piped above her head, and ever and anon an earthy odor swept over her bowed head, to lure her hope with reviving thoughts of life and flowers.
But Lhatto slept. Her prostrate form lay backwards in the boat, the paddle had dropped from her nerveless hand, her seal skin cap had slipped from the clustering hair, dark with moisture, that pressed down upon her narrow and arched brow, the darting eyes were closed, and as the sun again toiled upward in the east, his light, touching many things with beauty, touched none more gently than the sleeping girl, saved from the sea anemone, or the thronging fish or the myriad coral beds, to be the mother of new men.
CHAPTER IV.
Ogga—The Man.
Where the opening valleys of the Fair Land turned northward into the Dismal Country of heaped ridges, interminable peat hogs, low woods, and scanty or puissant streams, upon an upland sparingly covered with trees, and almost on its incline to the lowland beyond it, dwelt Ogga—the mastodon hunter.