A Woman of the Ice Age

by L. P. Gratacap

It may be objected that the assumption of Medicine Men amongst these prehistoric and glacial people is audacious and impossible. But in this current of pictures given in this absolutely veracious reconstruction of that vanished time, it must be remembered that the author is dealing with ethnic conditions that had reached some degree of complexity. The instincts and rudimentary or moral or psychic motions in men had begun their sway long before the time given in this story. Men had been long upon the earth, and their distribution which involved means and ways more primitive and considerably slower than the railroad or the steamship, had been accomplished through a process of migration which not only brought them under influences in Nature contrasted and various, and developed self-initiative and constructive faculties, but by every possible avenue of appeal stirred their fear and reverence, and very quickly inaugurated morality and intensity of religious practices. And such practices would have developed quite rapidly as the imagination was powerfully excited by their environment.

It has been from the first assumed that in this Ice Age, as depicted in this story, the arctic severity of the north did, at least in the western portion of this continent, come close at hand with far milder conditions, and that the severity of self-preservation in this zone was not at all so urgent as to repress or degrade or eliminate religious customs. This is in itself, however, a concession to unnecessary censoriousness, as the Esquimaux who to-day live in the ice, have well advanced religious customs of humane and symbolic interest.

That medicine men or something like, them should have reached an almost instantaneous importance is most likely. The credulity of an aboriginal mind increased by the wonders of natural phenomena and the hardships of life, the mystery of death and the growth of many natural feelings of love and terror, would have quite quickly started the pretensions of crazy or inflamed, senile or adroit, individuals who could have easily insisted upon their special privileges and powers of divination, and by reason of ingenuity and fortuitous circumstance, given their pretensions a very deceiving appearance of reality.

At any rate, the four worthies to whom the attention of the reader is now invited—Shan, Flitout, Slin and Slaggar—were veritable facts at the very time when the mountain of Zit was incased in the broad skirts of a semi-continental ice-sheet, when Ogga the hunter killed the mastodon in the steppe country south of the glacier, and when Lhatto left the upland of the Sierras in the Fair Land to kill seal in the coast waters of the Pacific. And they were also, be it insisted with no less emphasis, the medicine men of the horse-hunters who lived in the Canyon Country east of the Fair Land, and who had begun to assume some premonitional resemblances to the Pueblo Indians of today.

The Horse-Hunters were an outlying settlement of kindred peoples to the south and their present location was found useful as bringing them near the grazing grounds of the wild horses in the river bottoms of the Fair Land. The exchanges amongst aboriginal peoples,—their commerce,—was more general than might be at first supposed and the Horse-Hunters found ample opportunities for making useful bargains with the horses they secured. Their origin, like that of all these disassociated and stray inhabitants, was even then lost in antiquity. Their habits and the business which helped to sustain them, were hereditary. They occupied a peculiar and inaccessible retreat, not contiguous even to their hunting fields. These latter were, however, reached by a trail which presented few difficulties for the conduct of their captives, though the way was long and circuitous. The aspect of their whole life was unique and unintelligible, though they seldom were inclined to improve or explain it. How they came to the lonely table-land, and why, in so remote a position they should have found it convenient to pursue their peculiar calling, were unanswered, unanswerable questions. The hunters amongst them were not many, generally the young and artful, and though they captured and subdued horses, they found no use for them. The wild people further south who became their customers came to the mesa with food supplies, clothing and implements, and took away the animals, and thus the Horse-Hunters, in an impoverished and sad way, maintained their strange and lofty seclusion.

The four worthies who pretended to direct the spiritual destinies of the colony, had arisen, and their varying statures and girths, as they turned to the waning light in the sky above them, became apparent, as well as the less easily defined peculiarities of their physiognomies. Shan was a strong and high man, braced with broad thighs which, from the execution of many trying and prolonged dances, displayed their muscles in rigid relief, but his narrow chest and pinched neck imparted insignificance to the rest of his figure. His appearance was completed by a large head, heavily covered with tangled locks, from which a face of mingled cruelty and deceit gazed at you from lancet shaped eyes, one of which had been disabled by disease, and the second, compelled to do duty for two, opened wide with a sinister glare beneath a low straight hairy eyebrow. His nose was thin and beaked, his mouth distorted and sunken, which, in the infrequent occasions when he became amused, opened with a cackling laugh and revealed a single incisor.

Flitout, who stood next to him, was a thin and shrunken man, stooping and angular, with a peculiar flapping of his arms, symptomatic of some nervous irritability or weakness, which gave him a not unfanciful resemblance to a wounded bird trying to fly. His face was even more concealed than that of Shan’s by the coarse and unkempt hair which framed it, and as he lifted his head, his bright and restless eyes moving incessantly, betokened some mental excitement or disorder which much of his conduct showed was not far removed from insanity. His face was really pallid, but the grease, paint and dirt which seamed or smeared it, concealed the evidences of his anaemic and dissipated condition. His voice was cracked and piping, a cough racked his weary chest with intermittent spasms, and he spat with malevolent zeal at almost everything moving near him.

Slin alone in this extraordinary company was fat, or of such proportions as made, in contrast with his associates, that epithet appropriate. But this greater bulk carried with it no compensatory advantages. His bulging eyes, thick cheeks and puffed lips, were disfigured with pimples and pustules. His distended abdomen was suspended above short and thick set legs. His arms, lengthened by some freak of satirical cunning, reached to his knees, an adjustment of parts which, taken in conjunction with protruding and heavy ears, and a skull, alone, amongst the four, largely deprived of its natural covering, gave him a very real likeness to an orang-outang. His disposition was, perhaps, as simian as his looks, and while he owed to that fact some sense of humour, it was also responsible for his wickedness, his jealousy and his uncontrollable fits of temper.

Slaggar was the youngest of them all and not without pretense to natural proportions. He was of medium size and apparently muscular. It was his peculiar pigmentation that attracted comment. He was in a state of partial decoloration. Irregular patches of pinkish white skin, like geographic markings, were distributed over his face, and two, extending from the angles of his mouth to the corners of his eyes, made his grimace or scowls equally hideous and shocking.

The four men were covered quite imperfectly with skins, and around the neck of each hung a perforated stone, while ivory beads decorated the knuckles of their hands, and ribbons of red and yellow ochre striped their naked legs.