A Woman of the Ice Age

by L. P. Gratacap

Slowly on hand and knees he approached, from behind, the strangely inert creature; when a few paces off he bounded to his feet, tore forward, and utterly regardless of the monumental power before him, and its amazing superiority in strength, rushed upon its side nearest the dirt wall. The nephrite blade was brandished in the air, its fine edge directed forwards. With frantic energy, Ogga immediately beneath the bleeding wound on the animal’s head, drove the stone scimitar into the folds of its neck, and with such force, such urgency, that it was buried to the hilt. Quick as a flash he deserted his hold, sprang up the dirt wall, clutched its overhanging edge, where his previous observation had located a half buried boulder, and with his hand on the stone support, drew himself above. His spear was at his side. He seized it and stood erect, glowing with a splendid excitement, but voiceless; his eyes were fixed below him.

The mastodon, completely surprised, had regained its feet, convulsed with a blind rage. It stumbled backward, and as it raised its head it caught sight of the defiant figure above it. Pain and fury incited it. With a stifled bellow it plunged forward, its head bent, its tusks prominent. It had but one aim, the upheaval of the pedestal on which Ogga awaited its attack. Again Ogga smiled. He encroached upon the farthest margin of the diminutive table and held his spear before him tightly clasped with both hands.

The impetus of the mastodon was extreme. As it struck the bank against which its useless anger impelled it, the tusks buried themselves in the earth and the vanquished monster was momentarily held, its twisted head held firmly against the dirt by the chancery of its own impalement. Then Ogga jumped. He sprang to the head of the animal below him, its occipital development affording room for his support. Balanced for an instant, he raised his spear upward and then, at the exact nuchal symphysis, forced it through skin and between the vertebrae, cutting the spinal cord. With a throb that shook the colossal fabric of the beast, the mastodon rolled sidewise and fell, and its tusks ripped out of their burial in the earth. Ogga declined with the heaving mass and lit upon the ground. The mastodon also was dead.

The afternoon of the day had come, and neither food or drink had passed the mouth of the hunter. He turned back to the basket with its pemmican contents and sitting on a rock where he could see his mighty prey, where he could also see the ice pinnacles of Zit, the long furrowed glacier also, and just dimly, at this elevation, catch the blue hazes of the sea where Lhatto was fighting for her life, Ogga, the hunter and the Man, broke his fast.

The incident is one of interest to recall. In the remoteness of a day which science unsuccessfully endeavors to fix, but with lofty magnanimity in its indifference to economy of time, places any where from fifty to one hundred thousand years ago, the human species, evolved or created, catching in its face the reflection of higher things, feeling the pregnancy of its own fate in its untold yearnings, its misty spiritual instincts, its forming language, its emotional power, had begun the process of subduing the earth and all that therein is. The uses of food, the preparation of clothing, the devices of defense and attack, the ingenuity of observation and application, the coinage of tales and prayers and verses, the emergence of passion and of art, of the sense of beauty, the utilization of the hard and wearable things of the soil, of animals, its grasping after preeminence, its deification of courage and endurance, all these things come before us, in the prefigurement of them in this story, of Lhatto and of Ogga. And the chances of the race, then as now, lay in the young. Theirs was power, was ambition, was aspiration, was the indefinable lure and reward of love. On their lips words first formed, their minds were the conceiving minds, their hands the artificers, and in their organs resided the sexual promises of life. And Ogga and Lhatto were both young.

When Ogga had finished his meal, he walked away for a short distance and at a spring softly flowing beneath a rock quenched his thirst, leaning flat at its rim and sucking up the sparkle and the cold. The man returned to the immense bulk of the mastodon, and began at once to free from its skull the ivory tusks. With his stone maul he broke in the alveolar sockets and from the shattered bone drew forth these exaggerated teeth.

The night was sensibly nearer when this task was completed. Re-installing his slender outfit, wrapping more closely the reindeer coat about him, balancing the ivory bows over his shoulders and holding them as well, with his spear and knife, stuck full of blood, Ogga turned back over the plain to the river in the lower valley, on whose bank lay the bruised smilodon. But Ogga had no intention of recovering the cat’s skin. His way, as the waning day shot red streaks into the sky, and the northern lights, with phosphorescent palpitation, rose above Zit, lay across the plain more to the west, bringing him finally much below the lake, and the cedar wood which he had traversed in the morning. He was advancing to the shore.

As the stars lit the immensity of the black zenith, the Man had reached the shelter of a huge erratic of such proportions and posture that, tilted over on one side, it formed a sort of leanto. Here he rested, casting down the ivory tusks. He swept together with his hand a few dry fragments of wood and hurled upon them the uprooted trunks of small trees. He took from his basket the dry tinder, struck the “fire makers” together, holding his head close to the ground; a spark ignited the punk-like powder, his breath fanned the little flame into a blaze, the wood became ignited, and the ascending forks of the fire licked up the tree trunks while they cast grotesque shadows on the granite face behind them, and in those shadows a wavering and distorted silhouette of Ogga himself swayed to and fro as he sang the song of the mastodon.

OGGA’S SONG

The great Mover stirs in the wood