A Woman of the Ice Age

by L. P. Gratacap

When Lagk reached the end of the long slant, his pathway almost brilliantly illumined by the zenith-soaring moon, he found a pleasant heat radiating from the walls of rock, and creeping to a familiar shelter, he lay down and slept.

Long before the dawn, just as Ogga left his stony bed, Lagk had shaken off the clinging drowsiness of the night, and had resumed his walk. The trail led him through narrow defiles and over interposed table-lands, but presented at no point great difficulties, even the last ascent which extricated him from the aisles of the canyon country, not claiming any extreme test of endurance.

It was a slope or talus of splintered rock, fragments dejected by frost or heat, rain and sun, from the steep channelled palisades above, that arrested Lagk for a moment just at the beginning of this last station in his journey. He stood looking at the gray, herb-sprinkled surface, like the stone heap of chippings and refuse in a modern quarry. He took a thick dense rock from the ground and hurled it against the lower face of the cliff,—a vibration, a dislodgement of loose particles that came rattling down in diminishing numbers, and some readjustment of the flakes in the talus,—and then suddenly a buzz increasing to a rasping insistent locust cry, and there appeared over the extended incline the emergent heads of the desert rattlers. Sinister and threatening, the bodies raised for a foot or so, and thrown into recoiled loops swinging uneasily with a graceful restlessness, the snakes, except for size, acted with one impulse and one posture. Their flat heads, darting tongues, and checkered bodies swam before Lagk’s eyes like a low thicket of animated plants. He drew back and hurled a pebble amongst them. The half expiring susurra sprang again into a fierce sibilancy, and the aroused beasts started out with a simultaneous motion that made them seem like animal springs worked together, at one and the same pressure. They shot forward, bending their elated bodies, and then, in a single sweep, that spread with unanimity amongst them, raising their squamate heads and falling backward like so many hundred curved and elastic wands.

Lagk hastened on; the day was climbing fast, and a long distance intervened before his feet touched the hunting fields. At last he descended the slope of a pass that brought him to a southern portion of the same valley, in whose northern extension lay the lake that has been described, and where Lhatto and Ogga saw the cruel sepulchre of the wild horses. It was then that Lagk realized the presence of the volcanic disturbance that clouded Zit. The ashes and dirt fell around him and far away from the summit of the pass he discerned on those frozen heights he had never visited, but which to him were a sort of Olympus, and which only in the clearest days he could see, the wreaths of smoke, the rushing pillars of darkness, and the forked radiance playing on their sides or lighting them with livid lambency.

Long did Lagk watch the ominous clouds; he forgot his errand, and stood like some carven image in the open pass above a chaparral with eyes fixed on the unearthly picture. And as he looked the earth tremors came. A mocking bird flew to a tree near him, jumping with excited interest from branch to branch and uttering the “cha-cha-la-ca” of the Texan Guan. Some thrushes lingered near the mute spectator and sang. A tit-mouse whistled its sweet, clear notes in his ear, a group of woodpeckers gathered near him on a projecting bough like a little colony of colored toys. Some ground squirrels ran forward and halted like a corvee of minute cavalry in front of him, and while he remained unmoved, unnoticing, the sullen movement of terror in the air and earth brought strangely into his companionship a mountain lion, less rare then than to-day, crawling with prostrate paunch, upon a lifted cornice of rock, her outline designated in the sky in a black silhouette. Below him in the trail of the descending pass, a bear suddenly blocked the way, snuffing the air, and scratching anxiously upon the trembling earth. Above him aimlessly wheeled a company of bats.

The singular congery of associates gathered around the solitary figure, momentarily, in the still panic of the instant, forgetful of their natural antipathies and fears, resembled some adamic renewal of intercourse between man and Nature. Even while the motionless group was thus assembled, Lagk’s ears caught the sound of trampling feet, the thunder of a thousand desperate hoofs beating the valley floor. He looked hastily towards the distance and his trained eye saw the phalanx of wild horses stampeding up the valley.

And yet he remained apathetic and estranged. The terror of Zit rested on the face of all things, the security of the foot-stool was gone, the reverberations of rumbling thunder coming nearer, the still darkening sky, encompassed the whole circle of attention. Again Lagk looked to the north, and still the birds and animals, and even the crouching puma, stayed like rivetted and dead beings.

Rapidly the storm gathered and the enlarging circuit of the electric tempest spread around them and the crawling thunders deepened into bomb-like explosions. The flood gates of the sky opened, and pitchy darkness wiped out the heavens and the earth. Lagk hurried to a crevice in the rocks, a seam of dislocation deep and wide enough to shelter him. The frightened animals dissolved away and the drenched mountain side, deserted and smitten, was lit in every recess when the blinding lightning flashed. The wind, in furious gusts, tore through the oak trees, howling and moaning, its exasperation raised to a sharp shriek, as it sped through the fissured cliffs.

Lagk crept from his hiding place in the morning, stiff and depressed. He sat long in the sun, wondering, eating mechanically of the food he had brought with him in a skin bag. But the returning serenity of the world, the resumed chorus of the birds, the cleared ether, his own improved spirits restored his quailed courage, and as he again saw Zit triumphant, shining, immobile, the order of things as he knew it, seemed renewed and he bethought himself of his errand.

He did not turn down the pass to the valley where he had seen the stream of doomed horses hastening. Had his footsteps been attended by any sympathetic observer, the latter would have wondered why he climbed so toilsomely up a pinched, scarcely possible trail to a shoulder of the mountain range. The difficult way surmounted, Lagk found himself upon a projecting spur of rock set out from the mountain mass and rising to an apex from which a very broad view of the region was obtained. He continued his scramble up to this apex—a cluster of riven quartz or granite pinnacles—and here the beauties of a great quarry table-land on one side, the flanks wooded and irregular, falling into the horse valley on the other, Zit and its icy assemblage of peaks far north, and the canyon country to the east, like an etching on a copper plate, were revealed. Lagk lingered a long time watching the shifting lights, and seemingly fascinated by the wondrous picture. He even lay flat in the warming sun upon one glistening quartz cleavage, and slept. The place cherished and suited him and he seemed to have forgotten the purpose of his expedition.