A Woman of the Ice Age

by L. P. Gratacap

And Ogga asked her what it meant, and so, watching the sombering sky, even noting the falling dust of ashes sprinkling the water underneath them with a minute rain, Lhatto told him the legend of Zit.

The Legend of Zit.

“It was long ago, and Zit, the spirit of the Snow and Cold, rose on the earth. His mouth blew icy blasts, his fingers dripped with icicles, from his nose fell blinding storms of snow, his ears poured out sleet and rain, and his eyes froze everything on which they fell. He walked over the earth. He walked over the earth and the rivers stopped in their running, the hills were hidden in snow, the trees grew pale and naked, the lakes became as floors over which the wild beast roamed, and the great sea was crowded with the big drops of ice-like towers which broke off from his fingers.

“And he went on and on, the animals fled before him, for they shivered when he opened his mouth, the trees broke and fell with the load of snow that shot from his great white nose, the rivers were filled with rain from his ears, and they became stiff and quiet again when the glitter of his eyes shone upon them, and so the world was disappearing before Zit, the Spirit of Cold and Snow.

“Then the Fire-Breather, way down in the breast of the earth, asleep, felt the chill through the thick skin of the ground which he wore around him, and he woke with a cry and hurried out to try to get to the top of the earth and kill Zit, with his hot breath, with the fire from his eyes, with his warm hands. And the Fire-Breather knocked and pushed at the doors of his own house, and he could not move it, it was frozen tight, and he tried to get out at the window and it was stopped with snow, and he broke a hole in the roof and was half way out, with his head above the earth, when Zit rushed on him and with his mouth and his fingers and his nose and his ears and his eyes, pushed him back and he sank in the earth groaning and shaking.

“Then Zit took the highest mountain which stood where the Fire-Breather tried to climb out of the earth, and laid down on it and covered it with ice and snow, and he sat there and broke icicles off his fingers to sail in the sea, and blew snow from his nose till all the hills were buried, and when the sun came he looked at it and kept it cold, and the Fire-Breather was dumb and still.

“And now and then when Zit falls asleep the Fire-Breather knows it by his snoring and then he pushes up again and gets on his hands and knees and fights Zit. Some time he will escape. He is trying now, he is fighting Zit, for Zit has fallen asleep.”

So Lhatto told Ogga, and they crept down from the stump on which they stood, and as the day darkened, ran on together with backward glances.

They had entered a wide valley running south between two ridges of rather high foot hills, behind which on the east extended a mountain range up which clambered the deep woods, but leaving its higher summits bare. A muddy stream filtered through this valley which shortly spread out variously and became a sort of inland savannah of tall waving grasses that crept up to and even entered the limits of a very considerable lake or pond. It was shallow, however, and in the incipient stages of natural redemption by filling up from the deposits of the sluggish silt-laden stream that fed it on one side. This stream indeed, falling with broken descent from the mountain range, betrayed its distant water-falls by the roar that came to the ears of the wanderers through the thick woods above them. Throughout the lake were low emergent banks of mud on which plants were growing, while thick mattresses of water weed dotted its surface everywhere. The valley stretched on indefinitely beyond.

Ogga suddenly cried out and pointed to the farther edge of the lake. From the distances in the produced valley there was swarming, in rushing companies, an army of wild horses. They seemed countless. They were entering in a solid stream, merged into a single surface by compression, producing a curious semblance, in their crowded compact progression, to the serpentine undulations of some titanic snake or worm, whose skin bore flecks or monticules of hair. They were yet so far away that to Ogga and Lhatto their individual forms were indistinguishable.

As they advanced upon the savannah they visibly distended, and then the rapidity of their approach became obvious, even calculable. In a few minutes this avalanche of wild horses would surround or overwhelm the lovers. And the animals were panic stricken. The sudden violence of the seismic convulsion had communicated an indescribable terror to these nomads—the pleistocene horse of North America—and with neighs, attaining a falsetto note like piercing shrieks, they came bounding on, momentarily freed, in the broader arena of the savannah, from the restraint of mutual impingement.

Ogga realized the danger. He turned sideways and with Lhatto now clasping his arm, with a new fear, flew across the field to the nearest outlying grove of trees. Among their dense trunks there was safety. The diversion was made none too quickly. As they reached the trees, the first arrivals brushed past them, their heads erected and their eyes blazing and wild in an agony of terror. Soon the feral current, dense and expressive of some illimitable pressure, crushed upon them, and they saw horses thrown down, trampled into unrecognizable mutilation, while others, thrown against trees or rocks with ribs and legs broken, writhed in mortal torments.

The pleistocene horse of the Americas, both North and South, was a reality. Developed through the slowly piled up centuries from the Eohippus of the first tertiaries, the modern horse was practically given to the world in the Ice Age. Then he lived on this Continent and the men of that polar day knew and used him; the drawings on the rock walls of the Combarelles Cave in France show that in Europe. There can be no pretense of objection to the same claim here.

But it has been an unsolved mystery how the pleistocene horse should have so utterly vanished that when the Europeans came to North America he had no existing representation, and even the Indians had no legendary lore narrating their past knowledge of him. Sudden and extensive destruction only can account for so extraordinary a disappearance. It was under circumstances doubtless as strange and awful as that which Ogga and Lhatto now witnessed that the horse owed in some measure his rapid and complete extinction.