A Woman of the Ice Age

by L. P. Gratacap

Slin was furious, he cowered in a passion of hate and futile vindictiveness—his glance fell on his inert but uneasy companions. If he could divert the eye of the youth to them, their discomfiture might lead to some resistance that would be more dangerous than his own, for the unconcerned horse-tamer.

“They told me to say it. They said your hump would curse you. They said you got it because Zit hated you. They said your hump has a snake in it and it bites, bites, bites all the time.” As Slin uttered this improvised and well conceived lie he pointed to his astounded friends, in whose varied expressions of confusion nothing was more clear than a fundamental dissatisfaction with the turn the affair was taking. As Slin closed his sentences, his shrill voice rose higher and higher with insertive ferocity upon the last words. He had not miscalculated the effect of the scathing taunt. Lagk, with the keen susceptibility of an injured man, his own strained sense of suffering exasperated into rage by these repeated allusions to his deformity, knelt to the earth, seized a big pebble, and leaning forward, hurled it at the bewildered group. They sprang apart and the stone rolled over the mesa, and with its last hesitating turn, plunged down the cliff side into the shadows.

The situation became at once dramatic. Flitout, least adapted for physical defense, was fleeing with asthmatic coughs across the plain, his arms flapping, producing a spectral imitation of an ambling heron. Shan, behind him, was using his stiff legs with adroit agility; Slaggar alone withdrew with sullen and menacing gestures of defiance, while Slin, thus momentarily relieved of his fears, and enjoying an oblique revenge, had recovered his equanimity, and while rubbing a somewhat injured posterior with one hand, controlled his laughter with the other by holding it over his mouth.

The hero of the fracas disdained pursuit, but contented himself with suddenly changing Slin’s illusions by kicking him in the shin and telling him to follow his brave associates.

Lagk turned and looked at the full moon flooding this place of mysteries and wonder; a thousand shadows, ten thousand surfaces of light covered the cathedral depths, and far out upon the illimitable wilderness of spire and butte, crevice, gorge, ravine, wall and canyon-slope, the silver glory stayed. Lagk was hardly sentimental, but upon him as upon all these wondering hearts the poetic power of nature wrought its indispensable and irrevocable spell.

Lagk was a strong and formidable figure, though the accident of his youth had produced a disfiguring thickening and shortening of his chest. He was one of the most successful of the horse-hunters and tamers, and his skill had won him the apt nickname of the hoofed beast’s master. Masterful he was in many ways, and his imperious scorn of the doctors who were superstitiously regarded by his contemporaries, was only one exhibition of his proud and fearless nature.

He strode across the mesa, passed through the shadow of the walls of the communal house and descended the road, which with many turns and deflections and straight level lengths, formed the avenue of exit and entrance for their lonely settlement.

The method adopted or inherited by the horse-tamers for the capture and subduing of their four-footed prisoners was effective, but it required boldness, resources and strength in its executants. The horse lived in droves or families along the edges and in the grass lands of the Fair Country. Thither the horse-hunters repaired, and equipped with strong lassos, with which even in that ancient day they were well supplied, awaited the approach of their prey. The custom was to entice or drive, or simply wait for their horses to pass near the edge of the woods in the neighborhood of some tree, and then to lasso some convenient individual and running back to the tree, hold him by winding the lasso’s end around the tree. If the hunters were in companies the lassos were thrown in numbers over the unfortunate animal and he became fastened to as many trees. His struggles were generally unavailing, and he could after some hours, be thrown and vanquished.

A more cruel but even more effective system, was to starve the horse after his capture until his strength and spirit visibly diminished, and then slowly to revive him. This peculiar practice was pursued with great refinement by the horse-hunters and its results were astonishing—pliant and obedient servants were made of the most obstreperous and apparently invincible beasts. Lagk and his people did not ride the horse, though amongst their customers there were skillful horsemen; they drove or led him back to their camp in the canyon, where at regular seasons the occupants of the southern settlements convened, and a market day—the prototype of all bargaining and commercial haggling since—was inaugurated.

Lagk was festooned with lassos, his skill enabling him to use them in succession on the same animal. In this way he quickly reduced it to submission, and he often returned to the camp from his expeditions with half a dozen captives.