A Woman of the Ice Age

by L. P. Gratacap

Then Ogga became frightened, for this boy was the son of the head man. When this happened it was about night fall and Ogga knew the path down the rocks to the river, for he had carried up water that way, and he snatched up the deer and hurried down the rocks and reached the river and forded it and went up on the other side, and so wandered on and on. The deer died and Ogga made food of it, drying its flesh in the sun, still angry and wondering and frightened; he went on and on and on. And he came to the Fair Land; its berries, fish and animals supported him. He made stone knives for himself, he framed spears, he clothed himself with skins, sewed with thread of plant fibres and with needles of bone. Ogga was skillful in fashioning, and his skill grew, and as he lived so, he came northward toward the steppe country and saw the mastodon. Then he felt a desire to possess its great white tusks, and one day he found a dead mastodon, and from its tusks he made many things, patiently working in the woods for many years. He met men who bought these things, exchanging baskets and green stone knives and even gold. And so he became a hunter and lived alone in a bark tent watching the Mastodon and becoming fearless and strong and knowing. Such was Ogga’s story. And, though these two were wild denizens of nature, yet so palpable is this human soul of ours, so fraught with kindred sense in all its aspects, that as Lhatto listened she became as Desdemona did before the Moor, “She loved him for the dangers he had passed.”

Scarcely had Ogga told his story, with halting phrase perchance, and yet with words then loaded with the poesy of infancy, when a low roar increasing in loudness was heard by the two, and with it the ground about them trembled, a dislodged bird’s nest fell at their feet, the water shrank suddenly from the shore, uncovering the glistening rocks like worn teeth in a colossal jaw, and then returned with bristling vigor rushing backward up the land in pell mell surges.

Ogga and Lhatto sprang to their feet. A weird and purplish light invaded the sky, another rumble, louder, with irregular reverberations like the lateral explosions of sound in a summer thunder storm, followed the first; and the ground shook constantly, a tree slipped with a patch of earth above them, the ocean tumbled headlong on the land, and, raising their eyes, they saw with a new terror smoke forming on Zit.

It was indeed far below Zit that the gush of ashes and volcanic dust were emitted. A small cone had become the conduit of an igneous outburst, its heated summit had already bared it of snows, and its riven top opening with successive shocks had become a chimney for the evolved lapilli, the erupted gases, and the slowly exuded lava flow.

The ashen cloud rose up, densely straight at first, and encountering some upper current, was spread out in dark layers, which, expanded by rapid propulsion, descending and ascending, blurred and enveloped the ice region, and whirled outward began to rain an impalpable dirt about Ogga and Lhatto. As if, with repeated strokes upon its prison doors, the enclosed fires of the earth struggled outwards, the shocks continued, the waves rolled far up on the land. Spray flung from the billows covered the two terrified spectators. They had retreated inland. Suddenly a blast of flame seemed to mount upward in the wreathing column of smoke, and then a wind pouring down upon them, blinded them with dust and suffocating gases. Ogga, still mindful of the uses of his spear, had snatched it from the ground upon the first alarm, and now turning with bewildered eyes to Lhatto, he stretched it before him to the woodlands southward, and they ran on, her hand upon his shoulder, over the rugged land. They entered the forest, and threading an open way, reached the banks of one of those rivers which were indicated as reaching to the shore, in wide mouths, and bordered by almost unimpeded meadow land. It was as if at some former time the meadow land had formed part of the river bottom, and now formed its banks, and the woodland had not as yet succeeded in establishing itself upon this virgin soil.

The refuge was welcome. The incredible horror they had seen, unknown before, the thought of some superhuman conflict in which their minds linked the powers and destiny of Zit, had baffled and stunned them.

To the strange vagrant bodies of men who in little groups occupied this diversified land, and of whom both Lhatto and Ogga were somewhat contrasted types, Zit, the unchanging apex in the same sky that bent over all, was a sort of religious fixity, a God, the open and clear manifestation of the supernatural.

And it had happened by reason of this mountain’s structural prominence, its very great physical grandeur, its appealing beauty, that the simple tendencies in aboriginal worship had been greatly elevated. Fetichism was not as prevalent, the absurd and pernicious frivolities of a childish idolatry had no such absorbing play, and under the absorption of interest in the great mountain, fable and legend had woven about Zit a curious mythology, and to it the worship of these races had been lifted. The mid-day sun half flooded the solitude which Ogga and Lhatto had reached, for even here a murky veil latticed the sunlight with skeins of shadow.

The two fugitives had stopped just where a solitary tree, stricken by some accidents of storm, had been thrown down across the stream. Its spreading top still green and full of leaves lay on one bank, its enormous trunk crossed the river like a bridge, and the upturned roots, shooting out, like distracted arms, from the huge flake of ground enclosing them, marked its opposite extremity. Ogga and Lhatto scrambled through the branches, and quickly reached the other side, and when they came to the disk of earth they leaned against it and looked upward. Broken palls of black clouds were thickening above them, and tremors still quivering in the rocks shook their support.

Lhatto took Ogga’s arm and drawing him to her said: “The Fire-Breather fights with Zit.”