A Woman of the Ice Age

by L. P. Gratacap

The smilodon, the terrific tiger of those young years, voracious and blood-thirsty, was not a natural occupant of this northern zone. It was a rare animal, though almost constantly present in the warmer seasons, in small numbers or perhaps in single pairs. It belonged to the regions of South America, but at that time the Isthmus of Panama had a much greater lateral extension, and the avenues of animal migration north or south became greatly widened. A coastal platform, torrid and moist, and the central ridges, flanks, and successional elevations of the Rocky Mountains offered a contrasted range of conditions for the movement to and fro of wild animals.

Predatory animals, like the smilodon, made their way northward with precarious and tentative advances. And the mastodon so far established itself in South America, as to become under the modifying influences of separation and environment the elephant of the Andes in Peru.

As Dr. Von Schenck has recorded, the Bengal tiger ranges northward to the latitude of 52 degrees or even 48 degrees in Asia, to which point the Polar Bear in a reversed manner descends from the north.

It is easy to conceive that contemporaneous possession of a common ground by a hunter and carnivorous beast like the Sabre-toothed Tiger, and the vegetable feeding elephants, would have acted as an inducement, of varying intensity but always present, for the former to extend its range and enter the grazing grounds, the formal metropolis of the latter.

Ogga was an ivory hunter and he had also encountered a few displaced walrus coming down from the Behring Sea region. The occasional pursuit of these visitors carried him to the shores of the ocean, and so in his zestful and industrious quest for this precious material he had become acquainted with the trails, passes, rivers, lakes and inhabitants of this whole land. It was his domain. The fierce inclemency of its winters, the terrors of its storms, the temperate luxuriance of its summers, were all known to him, and in its long and vigorous exploration by him he had passed almost into the arid canyon country on the east. Amid so much varied activity, from this dependence upon skill and strength and courage, the character of Ogga had grown upward into a structure of available and solid qualities of heart and mind, and to him, as to all these precursory denizens, an intimacy with nature, a perpetual companionship with the air and the ground, and the beasts, had woven a thread of sentiment not unreal, not unusual, in the strong fibres of his being.

It was the morning of the same day on which Lhatto hastened from the highland to the shore, driven by an instinct or some suasion, knit in with the destiny of races, that Ogga stood watching the chasing snow wreaths upon the distant Zit, equipped for a new hunt for ivory amongst the hidden mastodon in the low country before him. He was a picture of aboriginal beauty.

His stature was accentuated by the spareness of his frame, its muscular precision, and the coppery swarthiness of its hue. He wore a skin apron and at the moment when he emerged from his tent nothing else hid the sinewy and blended outlines of the figure, incorporated with suggestions of endurance, pliability and action.

His face was youthful, in an Indian type, the cheek-bones high but not relieved, the eyes set and scrutinizing, with that ineffable gaze of mystery fitting his relations to an unborn world. His hair, black and braided, hung about his head, and he had drawn into his wide mouth with its thin lips a string upon which his teeth were fixed, gleaming above a short chin carried backward into the mandibular processes of his jaw by strong quadrangular lines. His beauty would have startled, by its brusque combination of grace and poise and woodland variety, a drawing room of exquisites but it would have also soon become repellent under such artificial conditions, and would only have courted the admiration of curiosity. Where he was, in the morning light, at the side of the rough wigwam upon an upland on whose carpet of grass the sunlight lay in patches, with the sombre and wonderful majesty of primeval forests, themselves the type of an extinct time, behind him, and with that lonely landscape of steppe and lake and river before him, its farthest edges rising to the unmantled glory of the glacier, Ogga was superb and invincible, and prophetic. He waved his hand significantly to the distance and even as Lhatto had bowed and prayed to Zit, Ogga now bent forward and with arms folded across his breast, littered some incoherency of worship to the titular and tutelary genius of his world.

For a few moments Ogga disappeared and when again he stood at the doorway he was accoutred for the hunt which was to be the day’s occupation.

A long knife made of green nephritic stone hung by a twisted cord about his neck, close fitting skin trousers of fox’s or wolf’s skin, the fur cut or burnt off to the surface of the hide, covered his legs, a belt of mastodon skin girded his waist, held in place by two pins of bone. A sort of shawl or mantel tied at the cincture of his neck was thrown backward behind his shoulders. This latter element of his attire was the entire skin of a reindeer, curtailed of its tail and legs, and forming a sort of peak or hood above his head. A basket, holding the pemmican-like masses which Lhatto had taken with her to the shore, some flint-stones, or “fire makers,” and scraps of dried and powdered wood, were fastened to his belt, and in one hand he swung a formidable spear.