A Woman of the Ice Age

by L. P. Gratacap

His eyes sought Lhatto with increasing earnestness, with desire. She was so different from all women he had seen. Her grace, her sweet strength and aptness, the potency of her beauty, was a revelation, for in the camp of the horse-hunters and amongst the trading people of the south, he had not met such a woman. They were coarse and shrunken, age had wrinkled and distorted them, work had made them pinched and ailing; exposure, a rude life, and perhaps no heritage of shape or feature, deprived them of charm. They did not please his eye.

Ogga and Lhatto were exceptionable and yet not unique. The prehistorics were living close upon the period of emergence from something animal and unformed. Traces of a strange or a debased ancestry lingered amongst them, but it was not wonderful, not impossible, that in many instances the efforts of nature, always ascending, always ameliorating and artful, should produce types of human perfection. Nature so quickly raises her ideals and her mechanism is so perfect, her power to follow up an ideal with execution so implicit! The outlines and muscles of a wild animal are sometimes the very acme of possible physical expression, the beauty of an animal’s eye surpasses description, the grace of an animal’s movement touches the keenest criticism with despair, the adaptive structure of an animal’s frame and bones excels the widest appreciation of art and of artificers.

Have we not seen amongst savage races, whose routine of life brings them into the air, trains them to run, to lie in wait, to fight, to urge wild beasts, to watch the telltale skies for storm, to strive with the inert resistance of stone, and refractory materials; who know the plants of the forest, the bark of the trees, the trail and scent of the beasts, have we not seen those who have been formed into strict types of beauty? And thought has left upon them too, its refining stamp, poetry has lit the flame of their eyes, and emotion spread the seal of its presence and of its pressure over the whole face.

In Winthrop’s Canoe and the Saddle occurs this opulent description of Prince and Poins (by soubriquet) his Indian guides. “It was worth a shirt, nay shirts, merely to be escorted by these graceful centaurs. No saddle intervened between them and their horses, no stirrup compelled their legs, a hair rope, twisted around the mustang’s lower lip, was their only horse furniture. ‘Owhhigh tenas,’ the younger, claimed to be one of Owhhigh boys. Nowhere have I seen a more beautiful youth; he rode like an Elgin marble. A circlet of Otter fur, plumed with an eagle’s feather, crowned him. His forehead was hardly perceptibly flattened, and his expression was honest and merry, not like the sombre, suspicious visage of Loolocan, disciple of Talipus.”

And again of the chief Kamaiakan, clad in the surplus and the dregs of human hosiery and tailoring, the superb writer says: “Yet Kamaiakan was not a scare-crow. Within this garment of disjunctive conjunction he stood a chieftainly man. He had the advantage of an imposing presence and hearing and above all a good face, a well lighted Pharos, at the top of his colossal frame. We generally recognize whether there is a man looking at us from behind what he chances to use for eyes, and when we detect the man we are cheered or bullied, according to what we are. It is intrinsically more likely that the chieftainly man will be an acknowledged chief among simple savages than in any of the transitional phases of civilization preceding the educated simplicity of social life, whither we now tend. Kamaiakan, in order to be the chiefest chief of the Yakimahs, must be clever enough to master the dodges of salmon, and the will of wayward mustangs; or, like Fine-Ear, he must know where Kamas-bulbs are mining a passage for their sprouts; or he must be able to tramp farther and far better than his fellows; or by a certain tamanous that is in him, he must have power to persuade or convince, to win or overbear, he must be best as a hunter, a horseman, a warrior, an orator. These are personal attributes, not heritable; if Kamaiakan, Junior, is a Nature’s nobody, he takes no permanent benefit by his parentage.”

But nature fails to hit the mark persistently. Her efforts, always intentionally perfect through the obstruction of accident, of heredity, of use and of misuse, decline into homeliness and torpidity, and even abortions. Now amongst wild people, let it be insisted amongst these prehistorics, fortunate conjunctions of mother and father, of embryo and environment, of employment and indulgence, might naturally have been mingled with mistakes, indirection, harm, over-work, deprivation, hunger and hardships of surroundings. But where such fortunate conjunctions happened, where the efflorescence, the flowering, came to view under the smile of some creative fancy reckless of tradition or conventions, making the thing on which it worked beautiful, according to the law of the thing’s type, may not, even at the earliest moment, may not such images and glories have arisen?

In Lhatto and in Ogga such an image and glory was realized, and its power, its attractiveness, was felt by Lagk; he yielded to it as a bird yields to the call of music, as flowers yield to the summons of the sun, as rivers yield to the encompassing embrace of the ocean, as all things incomplete and yearning yield to the complementary that makes them full and complete, adequate and strong.

And the three, with the changing days, still wandered on southward in those summer hours full of unlacing heat, of fragrance and endless mystery, rich in the languid temper of air that develops sense and feeling, and germinates and brings to fruitage the bud of love. So Lagk loved Lhatto.

The days were serene and clear. Zit’s contest with the Fire-Breather had been followed by peace so unmistakable and reassuring that it was a conviction with the three nomads that the Fire-Breather had abandoned an unequal fight. The last plume of smoke had faded away, the earth had again lapsed into sleep, the glacier sky only reflected the poignant splendor of the ice-cap.

The strange animal companion of their journey still followed, and he had not been unwisely used. The instinct for human companionship is soon awakened, indeed, the currents of response spring into motion almost by anticipation with the dog and horse. Kindness fostered the natural union, and the horse attached itself with servile affection to the careful and painstaking Lagk.