A Woman of the Ice Age

by L. P. Gratacap

Running along the rim of the pond, he placed himself where the cat, slowly extricating itself from the middle tide, was with difficulty directing its way. He untied the reindeer skin from his neck, dropped the spear, and hastily surveying the ground, chose a few plummet-shaped stones from the numbers of stones encumbering the bank. Armed with these he retired a short way back from the very edge of the lake, to a low elevation. This slight prominence afforded him a clearer view and brought the range of his efforts more directly upon the upper surfaces of the bewildered animal. His object was evident.

The cat was now swimming directly toward him. Ogga raised his arm. With lightning speed, with the swiftness of a hurled bolt, the smooth missile left his hand and smashed against the skull of the smilodon. It was followed by a rain of others. They crashed upon the creature, they entered its eyes, they tore its skin, they broke its teeth, they opened its back. The water foamed with their rapid impact. The desolated beast, now reduced to suppliance, still pursued its course to the shore. During the short intervals when Ogga searched about him for those water-worn and ellipsoidal pebbles which furnished him with the most effective weapons, the creature, still strong and formidable, gained in its approach. At last its feet touched the bottom, and as if renewed in all its tenacious instincts, dripping and shrunk, its beautiful coat pressed upon its lank and muscular form, it sprang forward, its horrid mouth suffused and vomiting blood.

Ogga sprang to meet it. But he held no rounded stones. Above his head was poised a heavy boulder. As he advanced the smilodon with cowering and subtle evasion crouched; its head lay flat upon the earth, its long tail swept the ground behind it with eager oscillations. Ogga rushed on. The dazed animal did not move, the great rock fell upon its crumbling, cracking skull. The smilodon was dead.

The mastodon had reaped the reward of its nimble strategy. Relieved of its incubus it had turned again to the opposite banks, and when Ogga had despatched its foe, it stood on the plain, suffering from its wounds and wailing in whistling squeaks which sounded incongruously enough when compared with its enormous size. Its bulk was indeed unusual, and Ogga looked at the superb tusks garnishing the huge head, with envy. It was just then browsing, tearing up small herbs, seizing bushes and uprooting them, and with its trunk beating them upon its own body at the spots where its dead enemy had inflicted painful gashes.

Ogga recovered his composure. He dragged the smiloden up from the water’s edge, replaced his shawl, picked up his spear, and hurried on up the stream. About a mile beyond the lake, the river which fed it broadened out in a flat, saucer-like depression full of stones and boulders, over which it rippled and broke with musical cadences. Here Ogga readily crossed the stream, and once over hastened back, hoping to find the mastodon, which it was now his evident intention to secure. The prey was more vulnerable because of its lost eyesight, though its isolation, as Ogga well knew, would add vigor to its self-defence, and its recent experience render it less susceptible to stratagem.

When Ogga had returned on the other side to the herbage and bushes where he had left the mastodon, the animal had gone. It was not difficult to trace its steps, and indeed its frequent trumpetings heard at a distance revealed inerrantly its location. The trail led up; a continuous ascent carried the hunter from the lower valley to a wide and mountainous plain, extending indefinitely on all sides, and only interrupted in its even surfaces by islands of unassorted glacial tilt. These formed elliptical elevations. They were the unremoved relics of a great deposit of the same material, covering this whole area, which had resisted the pluvial agencies which had degraded and disturbed the morainal accumulations. Their elongated shape—one axis longer than the other, and the longer axes in all cases directed in the same direction—showed their origin. Floods of water had at some time poured over this terrace, gradually the streams on the surface had excavated for themselves deeper channels, and then wearing away their banks, had finally crossed the partitions separating them from neighboring streams, and the confluent and united inundation had denuded and degraded the whole plain. These residual hillocks were now the only witnesses of the former surface and composition of the land.

When Ogga reached the level of this plain, as he glanced across it, no trace of the mastodon was discovered. The almost naked field before him was empty. But there had been no mistaking the heavy impress of the prodigious feet of the mastodon, and without halting, Ogga followed the great foot marks out into the plain. They led him directly to one of these isolated projecting spools of gravel, and they disappeared behind it.

This projection was some thirteen or fifteen feet high, its upper surface was coated with a feeble growth of grass, and its sides incurved so that the upper rim of the mound ran outward and overhung. A few observations only were necessary to reveal to Ogga the exhausted quadruped sitting behind the mound preternaturally still, its hind legs thrown sideways, its fore legs stiffly extended, and its great head, covered with the deep furrows made by the tiger’s claws and shockingly disfigured, where its right eye had been gouged from its socket, thrown backward.

Ogga spoke: “He is mine;” but he watched him for many moments longer, forming his plans, and preparing for the skillful work which would save his words from becoming an idle boast. Again the man threw away his cloak and basket, flung from him the heavy stone maul, retaining only his spear and knife.

He clambered carefully to the top of the mound, examined its circumference, and when apparently satisfied with his observation, placed the ivory spear at one point near the edge, and on the side above the still motionless mastodon. Then Ogga slid and tumbled down, drew his nephrite knife from his neck and crept around to the mastodon. The brute had remained in the same position, but its pain forced from it deep sighs, and it trembled. Ogga’s demeanor was inspired with daring and though his movements were governed by extreme caution, there was not implied for an instant hesitancy or fear.