A Woman of the Ice Age

by L. P. Gratacap

Both Lagk and Ogga were skillful in woodcraft. They shaped bows and arrows, they wrought in stone, they knit the braided boughs above the fire. Lagk was ingenious and conniving in various skills. He shaped artful traps for bird and beast, he called the wild things to him by mimic whistles, notes and cries, he knew the flowers of the wood and plain, he devised keen hooks and caught gleaming fish from the rivers, he burrowed in the banks of the streams for the pearl unios, and he found wonderful spiral shells on the land, he chased the radiant insects, and sometimes returned from his excursions with tesselated snakes wound about his arms. And all these wonders and many more he diligently sought for, to bring them to Lhatto, and he would tell her what he knew, and Lhatto learned to care for him, to feel an interest in his knowledge, even in his attentions.

And it was then, even in that old, old time as it has ever been since: The persuasion of kindness and indulgent interest was mistaken by the forlorn heart which essayed to find in them its peace and satisfaction, for a woman’s love. The cruel misconception worked quickly upon the nervous and excitable temperament of Lagk, and his darkening scowls, when Ogga drew Lhatto to himself, grew deeper in their dread and hatred. They betrayed a plotting soul, dark in its sense of injury, apt to provocation and retaliation, and driven by physical inferiority to schemes of cunning and deceit, to impish freaks of sin and shame.

The love of Ogga and Lhatto was primal and strong, and carried in itself and made affirmative in them, the simple principles of the moral law. Without doubt the moral law may have been ignored in savage communities, in the irregular gatherings of primal populations, in those first avulsions from the life of beasts, of ethnic cultures. And yet, who knows? The sudden step from tree climbing and nest building monkeys to the attitude and attention of men may have brought with it some equally sudden illumination, some transcendent push that raises men at that first instant above the levels they sank to later, even as the first dawn of day is brighter than the succeeding hours. But, however imagined, the love of Ogga and Lhatto lifted their union above accidental intercourse and fitted it to things supreme and eternal.

The singular migration of these three with the ancillary horse, may awaken ridicule in the reader accustomed to some anxious calculations about the weather, the size and appointments of his room, his nearness to a market and the conveniences of transportation for his wife and family. The domesticities of Arcadia scarcely conform to the intricacies of the West End Avenue, nor are the virgin instincts of men cramped or deteriorated by the stiffening varnish of self-indulgence.

Their casual camps embraced a wide loveliness and variety. The open forest, the glades, the timbered uplands, the valley levels, defile and peak, lakes set like sapphires within beryl rims of trees, rushing torrents carrying in their waters the tint of the washed woods, and holding in their mirrowy pools the cold and painted trout, the cliff side from whose prominence the world seemed suddenly displayed, or the climbing pinnacle whence even the blue ocean like a dream swam upon their vision, still tireless in its endless task of renewing and destroying continents, and still, with the witchery of its deathless charm, calling men to its pale lips.

And to them were gathered the most rare of incidents, the appurtenances of nature swelled their resources in sport and pleasant episodes, the arsenal of the skies beset their path with thrilling dangers, and all living things accompanied them in a procession of beauty and wonderment and terror. They saw the black snake snare the fledged firstlings of the nest, they met the shrike impaling its furred captive on the thorn, the herons were startled from their hidden homes, rising cloudlike in discordant streams to the overhanging trees; the hawk, before their eyes, set its talons in the squealing chipmunk, and the water moccasin glided within their reach after the leaping frog along the slimy edges of pond and pool; the lizards basked in the sunshine, their eyes glimmering like gold-encircled stones, undisturbed at their approach, and anon, the silence of some valley changed in a moment to the mocked minstrelsy of an orchestra, when the migrant birds invaded it.

Deer with timid outlook awaited them within the sheltering shadows of the forest, their missiles lamed the shuddering partridge in the fields, and Ogga fought the wild bear, where the edges of the pines laid their pencilled shadows on the lichened rocks; Lagk trapped the beaver at its clumsy dam, inundating the woods, and changing a forest glade to a luxuriant dilapidation of moss covered logs, he chased the keen whistling bat to its last covert.

The cougar slunk to its lairs with menace and distrust before them, and, in their adventuresome invasion, they essayed to trace the grizzly to the verge of its retreat in the mountain caves.

The scenic and theatrical diversity of storms filling the air with colliding vapors, and the earth’s broad floor with deluge, and seaming the spent spaces of the heavens with fire, surrounded them.

They saw the stiff oaks snap before the cyclone’s blow, and through the snapping boughs of the pines caught the lightning in its race to earth.