A Woman of the Ice Age

by L. P. Gratacap

CHAPTER VI.
The Intruder.

The little village of the horse-hunters, if village it could be called when it was a sort of communal dwelling house, was built upon a very flat and scantily herbaged plain, forming an elevated mesa, rather sharply defined by cliff-sides. These cliffs were not continuously precipitate or high, on all sides; and at one point access to the summit was readily gained by broken inclines which actually permitted the inhabitants of this isolated spot to form a rude road, so skillfully constructed that by adaptation and selection, a pathway had been built or smoothed to the bottom of the citadel of rock on which the village stood. The butte rose with receding walls, disposed in ascending steps or terraces from a canyon-like valley, from which again escape to the country beyond was gained by less easy means.

The butte of the horse-hunters formed indeed a depressed elliptical elevation, planular at the top, which stood at the intersection of two canyons, whose walls actually rose above it on all sides. Its position was very picturesque. Running southwestward a deep gorge opened, which extended back around the insular terrace, and divided on its north eastern exposures into two tributary canyons of extreme depth and narrowness. These two smaller arroyos united in the larger gorge, and in both of them a stream, with intermittent flow, gave a temporary animation to the dismal loveliness, the confluence of the rivers making a more considerable body of water in the larger canyon. From the plain of the butte’s crest, encircling walls were seen on all sides; southward the descending vista, along the broken and bold declivities of the large canyon with the river it contained reduced to a white ribbon; northward the ascending vistas, in the two narrower canyons with vertical walls, the streams running through their deep defiles, reduced to a white thread.

The butte only, amongst the eminences about it, was at all easily approached, and then its ascent on one side alone offered any attractive invitations. The rocks of the canyon were variously colored, and the myriad fancy which had carved and trenched and cut them into innumerable profiles, had indulged in a still wider complexity of invention in its panoramic marvels of color. Bands of blood red lay across the exposed strata, fading with inconstant undulations into brown and yellow ochres—purple shades filled up the diversified pallet, and white strips of quartz or unctuous edges of clay streaked the cliffs with weird and sudden contrasts.

In the mornings the extraordinary picture was dim with mists, the tricks of optical interference, reflection and diffraction raising strange phantoms in the silent gorges, and at night the shadows stealing upward and quenching the radiant illumination imparted an almost theatrical effectiveness, as if an artful scene shifter had manipulated the setting sun, and pulled into place the changing and relevant flies and screens.

It was in the latter time that shadows settled like a flood upon the home of the horse-hunters—when the sunlight still fell on the heights about them, and they were submerged in a twilight night long before the sun had deserted the uplands.

It was the evening of the day when Ogga killed the mastodon that the four medicine men of the little village—Shan, Flitout, Slin and Slaggar—squatted on the edge of the mesa, gazing with half shut, squinting eyes, into the vacancy before them. They had attained a sufficient distinction in ugliness, querulousness, abiding and carefully nurtured vindictiveness to hold without question in that aboriginal community, the preeminence their position implied. Their mutual distrust of one another had rendered more acute their craftiness of demeanor. They incessantly quarreled, and the religious exhibitions of their thaumaturgic powers were made none the less ridiculous by their evident desire to excell their rivals in impossible antics. Nature had furnished them with contrasted physical features, but a common calling, and a very uniform tendency to intrigue produced a noticeable resemblance amongst them. They were seldom separate from each other, although their companionship led them into the most discordant wrangles which usually ended in an encounter which excelled in acerbity of language, rather than in bodily violence.

Perhaps expressions in that early age were more restricted than in a later age, but as Renan has pointed out, primal language gained in compression what it lacked in capriciousness, and the squabbles and fights of the four doctors, consisting generally of hair-pulling and flesh scratching, like modern duels amongst cats, were punctuated by sharp and shrieking exclamations which had sufficient poignancy of meaning to make the melee more prolonged and vigorous.