A Woman of the Ice Age

by L. P. Gratacap

This latter weapon, the insignia and instrument of his trade and prowess, was an illustrious example of wild art. It was almost seven feet long—the shaft made of a dense arbor-vitae wood much rubbed and rudely ornamented with incised lines, herring bone patterns, and circles; the shaft bore at its bifurcated or socketed extremity a superb flat blade of walrus ivory, the tusk or canine of one of these phocidean creatures, but despoiled of its cylindricity, and made into an evenly tapering javelin of fatal power. Two rings of dark green stone, cemented with pitch, held it firmly to the handle, and inscribed upon it was a doubtful outline of a mastodon. One other implement completed his equipment. It was a stone hammer of fair proportions, withed tightly to a wooden handle which clasped it around its hollowed sides, and came together beyond it. This was stuck, handle down, into his belt.

The hunter stood still, and shading his eyes, as if irresolute, looked towards a remote oval of water which, suddenly illuminated by the sun, threw its rays upward with the intensity of a spectrum. His inspection of the distant spot was satisfactory. He grunted and turned down the path. It led after a few premonitory winds straight down the embankment, and after half a mile entered the seclusion of a small cedar wood. The trees were not, however, in such proximity as to preclude the sunlight. There were more or less open spaces, and here in charming profusion grew clumps of wild anemone. Inside the wood, the murmur of running water at a distance became quickly audible, its faint vibrations failing to penetrate entirely the acoustic hedge of trees.

The man hurried along with great strides and soon emerged from the wood, which a backward glance would have discovered occupied a thin slip of arable soil at the edges of the stormy, boulder-covered plain, through which our Nimrod was forcing his way with impatient haste. The scene, except for the bright sky and the copious sunlight, would have been disquieting and dreary. It was a sort of domed eskar or gravel heap formed by glacial agencies which had vanished. Crossing its low crest where the trains of boulders, fragments of rock, angular and scored erratics imparted an unmistakable glacial expression to the whole accumulation, Ogga found himself looking into a long depression holding now a swiftly flowing river. The stream was quite unequal in this respect. Broad pools expanded its course in places and here its current became sluggish or imperceptible. Releasing itself from these, temporary relaxations, it poured over low dams of clay and sand, and spilled in foam and cataracts to lower levels, on its certain way to the coast.

One of these lakes was near at hand. It was the water Ogga had seen from his tent reflecting the sun’s rays. Toward it, still following the summit of the prolonged ridge, Ogga turned his steps. The violence or power or duration of the former ice transportation was seen by the monoliths amongst which he moved. Great cubes of stone thrown against each other and surmounted by others, formed veritable observatories, while approximate alignments of huge masses brought so closely together that their opposed sides formed alleys and corridors, in which the sun never penetrated; impregnable shelters for fugitive reserves of ice, or snow still remaining from the winter’s storms.

At times Ogga quite disappeared in these hidden streets, his reappearance occurring after such an interval of time as had permitted him to make considerable progress towards the lake. Finally, climbing a long slope, over one aspect of which the escaping waters from above emptied themselves in a noisy torrent, Ogga stood on the edge of a very considerable basin. It was formed in a continuation, on a higher level, of the eskar over which he had been moving. Receding around it were terraces of gravel and sand and clay. The lake lay in this enclosed pocket, a deep hole formed perchance by some torrential power of water, or occupied at a former time by an enormous mass of ice, a fraction of a great glacier which had become imbedded in the mud and stony debris, and finally, succumbing to the increasing heat, had melted, discharging its mineral burdens about it, heaping up the walls of its own prison, until it itself vanished, its witness and transmuted form being the lake that succeeded it. The terrace, or higher ground embracing it, formed at points vertical escarpment, especially at its upper end, where the river that fed it had worn down its bed through the centre of such an embankment of wasted and foreign matter.

The lake was not unattractive. It was a sort of Arctic mere. Vegetation in low growths of willows or alders and ashes, emphasized in the most surprising way by an aberrant pine or even cypress, sticking up its tall spire, covered some of its sides. In patches of grass, the Arctic scene displayed a vigor and brilliancy that brought even from the apathetic Ogga exclamations of interest or delight.

The hunter, emerging on this deep tarn, paused. His eyes rose above the borders of the lake, crossed the empty plateau beyond it, and met again far off Zit, with its iron crown, amid the discomfited and baffled glaciers whose tardy defeat was already recorded in this vacant ground. He seemed absorbed in contemplation when a brushing sound, the sway of crushing branches, and a half suffocated sigh proceeding from a bunch of birches at the head of the lake almost immediately bordering the debouchement of the vociferous river, turned all his languor into strained expectation.

The next instant and the curving tusks of an immense mastodon sprang into view from between the parting branches, and the uplifted trunk of the proboscidean, lifted up between them, hurled outward in this arena of devastation and utter solitude the same trumpeting note which from its congeners in the tropics of India or Africa awoke the echoes of the jungle and the bush. Ogga fell flat upon his chest, watching every movement of his great quarry. The mastodon stopped at the water’s edge and then with a renewed roar plunged into the lake. He was alone. Ogga knew well the call. It was the cry of the desolation of loneliness. The great beast had in some way lost his companions; diverted from their spoor or possibly attacked, it had wandered from the herd, and with almost human desperation was struggling to regain them. The cry was not the note of anger, its shrill vibrant hoarseness marked the exacerbation of a sense of desertion and hopelessness.

The place where the huge creature had entered the water was not deep but thickly encumbered with silt and sediment brought by the stream, loaded with the dust of the attrition of the ancient rocks. Into this unconsolidated mud the unfortunate and disturbed animal sank deeply. Its fore quarters sank first and as its body entered the pond its entire bulk seemed suddenly swallowed up. Its head disappeared beneath the water. The tips of the tusks and the exsert trunk, through which it breathed, were yet above the surface. It was visibly fighting fiercely against engulfment, and the agitated water broke in small waves at the side of Ogga.

The herculean strength of the mastodon won, and essaying still deeper water, liberated from its treacherous footing, it reappeared, its head half emergent, swimming to the opposite shore. Ogga arose on his knees, his spear drawn tightly across his abdomen by both hands, and a smile lurking in his face still wove its intangible tracery of pleasure about his eyes.