A Woman of the Ice Age

by L. P. Gratacap

Now, as a matter of more discreet scientific statement, the world of science has almost resolved, after some remarkable demonstrations of Dr. J. R. Wortman, to believe that the great South American family of the sloths (Tardigrades) originated in the North American continent, that they issued from the family of the Ganodonta. It seems certain that late in that epoch, which preceded the Ice Age, the huge representatives of this aberrant and forlorn stem of animal crudities and curiosities, lived in the western regions of our continent. Whether by slow and prolonged emigration from the South, painfully encountering carnivorous foes and the accidents of climate, or whether indigenous in their development from some original centre of growth here in North America, they certainly passed their semi-slumbrous life, developed upon a scale of colossal size in and west of the Rocky Mountains.

It is not altogether easy to imagine this prodigious animal, resembling the extinct marvels whose skeletons in their weird homeliness and leviathan bulk charm the wonder seeking eyes of visitors in Madrid and Buenos Ayres, as actually living somewhere near the Sierras. And yet it presents no very difficult scheme of reconstruction. There was a hot climate, luxuriant and dense forests, interspersed with bottom lands, humid and saturated, and dry altitudes. The rapacity of mere animal enemies as a contemporaneous incident would have been no more marked in California than in Brazil, not any more remarkable than the elephant and the tiger to-day in India, or the rhinoceros and the lion in Africa. The range of the great sloth may have been so adjusted to the range of the savage cats as not to render its existence too precarious, and then it had attained itself a formidable size, and its alert and muscular foe may not have found it an easy or despairing prey. A blow from its monstrous tail, a close, ripping onslaught from the terrible horny talons that resemble long recurved hooks upon its feet, eviscerating and cruel, might very quickly have established an equilibrium of advantages against its crafty antagonist. At any rate, its presence in the western borders of our country seems certain in the late pleistocene period. It is no extravagant assumption that some trailing and solitary remnant of the vanishing tribe should be seen in the glacial day.

It was before a creature of this sort, gigantic, grotesque, decadent and foreign, that Ogga stared with all his eyes, thinking to please Lhatto by bringing back to her some trophy from its body. The strange beast continued its prolonged feeding and Ogga watched. The night, darkening the valley with blue shadows, that sensibly thickened, overtaking each other and pressing like a repulsing force the fleeing lights, rising upward on the mountain, soon hid the animal, and with the night came rain and a low wind raising innumerable voices in the great woods.

Ogga stole under the cover of the darkness across the valley, and guided by that indefinite light which even in the starless nights pervades the air drew near to his prey whose occasional movements he heard, heavy, slow and irregular. Under a chance shelter beyond the ginko grove, made of heavy suffragan bushes, he waited for the morning.

The morning came with uneven accessions of light. A pearly glimmer entered the valley from the east, upon the tops of the hills, and then flitted like a hesitating bird from point to point, dwelling at last upon the copse where Ogga had retreated. It was yet faint, vague, vacillating, rising; it seemed like a startled fugitive, retreating to the widening skies and then returning with new courage. Slowly the shadows fled. The sun lifted the curtains of mist and the scarlet ribbons died out in the blazoned azure as with a wide awakening force the full day rushed into the valley.

Ogga had long arisen. The first pulsations of the dawn had met his erect, expectant gaze. No sound came from the ginko trees and the rasping sonority of the great beast’s respirations was no longer audible. Ogga concluded the creature had moved. He waited for the coming day, and before the full apparel of light descended on the place he stole forward to note the changed position of his new quarry.

The ginko grove was empty. Leaves from the denuded branches lay on the ground, and the broken, torn and stripped boughs hung in confusion from the slim and needle-shaped trunks. Ogga scowled and hastened into the midst of the disarray. The sodden ground had been trampled into mud, and the long grass was tossed and smoothed in rolls, where the prostrate animal had apparently rested. Ogga soon detected an exit for the strange occupant of the grove at an aperture between two trees. Through this opening the sloth had made its way, pressing outward the young saplings and leaving on their sides a few separated hairs scraped from its tawny sides. The prints of its huge spoor were unmistakable. There were the broad impression of its feet and the depressed concavity of the trail of its hideous tail. Ogga looked out from the trees and following in the yet unsettled dawn the bunched subsidences in the grass, tangled low holes of verdure, his eyes rested out in the valley in the tall grass, on a dull yellow mound. It was the recumbent sloth. Its attitude was the limit of clumsy repose, an appropriate expression of its own meaningless enormity. Like an elephant, in kneeling, its forelegs were thrown forward, its hind legs bent, and its great uncouth head terminating with horrid ugliness its shrunken neck, thrown upon the ground between its front mani, while its angular back pushed upward in a thatched prominence, half reclined, stuck out its inane shapelessness towards Ogga, he peering at the oddity with increased interest.

And now a rapid brush and the light swinging backward of branches startled his attention. With a quickened pulse, with blood coursing backward in a regurgitation of fright, Ogga saw a few yards before him the black bodies of two pumas (Machaerodus). They seemed indifferent or unaware of his neighborhood. They were crouched beneath the slowly balancing up and down movement of an alder, and their eyes, yellow and expanded, were fixed upon the sloth. Ogga recognized the antipodes of expression in this contrast of animal temperament and forms. The sloth, gigantic, turgid in bulk and feeling, slow, inert, grewsome and unwieldy, pushed into the foreground of zoological monsters by some vital movement started along the line of animal evolution, a huge, unadapted and decrescent whim of nature! The puma, lithe, insinuating, electric in its response to any evanescent desire, holding in its power all the resources of grace and agility and cunning and treacherous audacity, its widest range of emotion covering the purr of affection, and the infuriated snarl and attack of maddened malice, and living and to live. All this Ogga felt, and he observed with pleasure the sinuous motion outward through the grass of the cats, with their bodies pressed close to the ground, their tails swinging and jerking slowly, the elbows of their forelegs stretching the soft velvet of their skin upward behind their elongated necks.

The sloth was unconscious of this serpentine and murderous approach. It still lay motionless, like a singular, yellowish protuberance on the surface of the ground. Ogga felt unwilling to leave it unwarned. His feelings of terror at the entrance so unexpectedly of the panthers urged him to hope for their repulse and injury by the huge beast, and he made some natural calculations upon so equal a combat, inuring to his own benefit by the maiming or death of both sides in this animal duel. He took measures to arouse the sleeping victim before the eager and engrossed assailants should attack it.

He hurried to the border of the small brook and picked up a few pebbles. With these gathered in the skin cloak he carried, he ran back to the ginko trees. He clambered from a low limb to the broken base of a large branch, and steadying himself against the tree trunk, was successful in disengaging his right arm so that it was at liberty for his now very apparent, intention of rousing the sloth by the discharge of his smooth and stony missiles. His position overlooked the sleeping monster, and luckily was not in the line of the pumas, whose dusky and lean outlines he also commanded, but at a very different angle. It was far from his designs to draw their attention to himself.