A Woman of the Ice Age

by L. P. Gratacap

He knew that their movement westward and south had brought them now to the west wall of the Horse Valley, and that this continuous triangle which seemed to form an avenue of indefinite extension, was characterized by many side outlets or tributaries running for miles up lateral ravines. Through these ravines a stream, rising at some higher elevation usually was conducted, and they were further distinguished by widenings or shelf-like expansions, free from trees, supporting a luxuriant herbage, and almost invariably provided with marsh-like bowls, where the water seemed to disappear or at best sluggishly emerge from its inferior limits. These ravines were very warm and humid, and by some occult reasoning, which bore no resemblance to the zoological deductions of a naturalist, Ogga thought this shapeless and sluggish beast, which fed on leaves and twigs, would be likely to find such places congenial to its unusual nature.

He remained upon the view-point he had secured for a long time. He studied the scene, noting the trees, the points of rocky exposure, the precipices, the cataract-like fall of the forest at spots where there was some defalcation of the ground on which they stood, and thus completed the mental survey, whose imagery, immutably fixed in his memory, would help him reach the glade wherein he located his unknown guest.

When he had sufficiently stored his impressions and observations, he climbed down the forward slope of the mound of detritus and disappeared in the forest. We can hardly imagine that the details of his meanderings could interest the reader, even if it were possible to bring before the reader’s eye the features of his woodland journey. The forests of the later Ice Age in southwestern America were probably not essentially different in physical circumstances from the forests of the same region to-day, except that in pleistocene time the encroaching ice-cap had thrust southward the flora and the fauna that had previously mantled with its color and animated with its diversity the wide northern plains of North America, and so produced a biological congestion, a crowding of types and forms, species and genera, like a crush of humans, or of cattle, for that matter, striving to pass simultaneously through a narrow entrance into some escapement, or breadth of localities beyond; except for this, the forests in their gloom and silence, in fallen monarchs, moss-covered and beetle-lined, were just as they are to-day.

Ogga certainly did not recognize that around him was going on an invisible struggle, a contest unmarked by outcry or blows or surging pressures. Certainly, there was such a conflict impending and in progress. The conflict for survival amongst the birds and beasts and plants was real, though noiseless. A population of living things that had spread itself over a continent had been forced to compress itself in much smaller areas, and share at the same time this restriction with that same area’s own previous population. A carnage slow and exterminating, a crafty emergence of adaptations in plants and in animals that fitted this or that one to take advantage of its competitors and displace them, was evidently present, though as he pushed his toilsome way through shredded brakes and undergrowth, or walked in the twilight of the gigantic pines, or scaled some moderate pinnacle of rock to reset the bearings of his course, the depths kept their impenetrable secrets and in the development of life of which he, Ogga, was a divine element, covered with their shadows its remorseless consequences.

Ogga had made his way through that endless wood, the witness in the skies and earth of many marvels. It had arisen in the dateless past, and while with the coming and the going years its leaves had sprouted and ripened and fallen, their shade had screened a changing animal world. Those intangible unknown processes of alteration, which by the subtlety of their influence upon the plants themselves evoked also responses in the creature of the mountain and the plain, were replacing an old fauna by a newer one. And Ogga was about to discover a relic of a passing race. The sun had moved behind the mountain crests and the narrow valley, faintly deepening into a verdant crease, like the enrichment of a deeper colored border to a fabric, which passed on its further side, was traversed by a stream. Towards this the prehistoric turned, crossing the grass inundated field, bare of trees, in the ashen gold of the falling day.

There was opposite to the place where Ogga had emerged from the wood a clump of low ginko trees. These strange plants, living to-day and in Asia, were barely surviving from the tertiaries in the glacial age, while their antecedent rise was far off in the mesozoic, in the vast periods of reptilian abundance. It was Lagk’s description of this spot and the singular fan-leafed trees which made Ogga certain that he had reached the position where the new creature Lagk had run upon was to be found.

As Ogga came nearer to the peculiar trees, their scarcity and thinness of foliage, united with the whorl-like arrangement of their branches, permitted him to see distinctly the animal novelty which Lagk had urged him to pursue.

It had evidently remained at the very place in which it was discovered, and its strangeness, its whimsical union of grotesque deformity and awkwardness with mere physical mass, caused the hunter to stop in amazement, sinking slowly to the ground in the tall grass, and stalking stealthily towards the unusual object. It was engaged in feeding. For this purpose it had raised itself upon its hind legs and had stretched its long forearms upward, distending their length to the utmost to reach the high twigs. It afforded Ogga a complete display of its strange proportions, and the young savage remained motionless, puzzled and astonished.

The animal was covered with a coat of coarse, dun-colored hair, growing heavily in patches about its thighs and forelegs, not unlike the skirts of pelage about Indian sheep. Its forefeet were provided with enormous extensive claws, which fastened themselves like little anchors upon the swaying branches. These served the purpose of drawing to it the leafy boughs on which it fed with its bizarre and produced jaws, behind and above which, in deeply set sockets, burned its small, immobile eyes. Its great, heavy quarters supported its somewhat contracted body, though one of great size, and their assistance was supplemented by an enormous tail. This stretched behind the creature like a round log and seemed serviceable as a support, though moved by the animal itself with exertion and extreme slowness.

The stray long hair of the body disappeared on the tail, which lay inert behind it, thickly swathed in its gray investiture of flesh and skin. A strange, gaunt and horrible appearance, part of that untempered productivity of nature which has engaged its energies so long in fruitless and disappointing creations! The nightmares and disjointed reveries of some struggling mind rising to its ideals through a host of abhorrent things, things which once animate must linger through an inexorable law of vitality and heredity until the correction of time can destroy them. Indeed, this monstrous waif was itself the furthest of a receding biological wave, a stranded horror dying before the approach of conditions more benign and judicious. It was the gigantic sloth, the relative of the megatherium and mylodon, the excrescent development of that group of animals which typify to the psychologist the inertia of mind and the collapse of invention, the drugged dyspeptic sleep of creation and creators.