A Woman of the Ice Age

by L. P. Gratacap

Ogga was strong, strong in his youth and strong through the exercise of his toils in hunting. It was not difficult for him to send the water-rolled pebbles as far as the sloth, nor less easy to hit its broad sides. The first stone fell upon the shoulder of the creature, and scarcely had its impact been felt, and the stone itself had rolled to the ground, than another, and more effectively directed, struck its back. A third, larger, and more swiftly driven through the air, landed on one of its outstretched paws, crushing its horny hoofs. The sloth was awakened. It rose to its feet and turning with a half indolent movement of surprise, its eyes encountered the crouching, motionless figures of the cats, their lips quivering in their retraction from gleaming and sabre-like teeth.

Its behaviour was curious, and Ogga, still enlaced among the ginko boughs, remained motionless; perhaps at the uncouth and shambling cowardice of the beast, a smile crossed his dark face. The sloth, when it discovered its assailants, turned heavily around, and raised itself as a quivering pile of flesh upon its broad and massive legs; its prolonged head thrown forward, uneasily swinging up and down, and its forelegs with their powerful claws aimlessly beating and pawing the air. The next instant the larger of the cats shot like a long bolt from the ground, its outspread paws descried by Ogga in its lightning passage, and fell plump upon the breast of the sloth, below its neck. As the huge monster felt the laceration of the cat’s talons, followed by a savage, burrowing thrust of its armed jaws at the neck, where the sloth was less heavily coated with hair, it emitted a half musical, whimpering scream, so out of reason with its great size that Ogga laughed. The next instant the second cat sprang on the creature’s flanks, burying its head in the softer flesh of its abdomen. But the first attack had already expiated with death its hardihood. The sloth, frantic and smarting, had, as if impulsively, closed its powerful front limbs over the arched back of its enemy, and with an effort that gained a momentum from the desperation of its own fear, crushed it to a lifeless pulp. And as it did so, with a swooning sob it dropped forward, the blood flowing in rivulets from its own severed cervical arteries. Its fall enveloped beneath it the second cat, yet mining with voracious eagerness into the intestines of its wretched prey. A second later this cat emerged, fighting to escape its own sepulchre from beneath the mountainous mass overhanging it.

Ogga had already dropped from the trees and had ventured out into the valley. He was not far distant from the waning contest. When he saw the panther’s head beneath the sloth, wriggling with violence to extricate itself, he ran forward and his descending spear of ivory pierced its eye. Another rending snarl, and the raging creature, blinded in the copious gushes of blood and humous, and struck again and again by Ogga, expired, while with a last somnolent groan, the megatherium lapsed sideways and hid the puma under its own shaggy sides.

Ogga knew the fight was finished, and with grim satisfaction he reviewed the opportunities for his own trophies. But it was soon evident his mind had changed. A few of the great claws only of the sloth were broken or cut away by Ogga, and he turned hastily backward to the forest and the mountain. He had concluded to bring both Lhatto and Lagk to the strange sight, and only show, as some surety for his incredible story, the great claws of the unknown animal.

So Ogga reentered the twilight of the forest and passed through those solitudes, yet undisturbed by man, man, that inevitable summation of those forces which had made them, and of whom Ogga, strong, radiant and simple, was the forerunner and type.

His return, hastened by the expectation of the wonder of his friends over the recital of his experience, and by his own better acquaintance with the way which he had partially marked on his descent, was almost accomplished at nightfall. The moon placed a sheen of silver on the mountain peaks, and the far distant darkness below him screened the dead creatures, whose impotent encounter he had seen in the morning. He stood wonderingly on the edge of the little upland at the further end of which was the simple camp where Lhatto and Lagk awaited his return. He could afford to linger, and surely his mind could afford to think.

A child’s mind and the mind of the infancy of the race may not, in some respects, be inaptly compared. But it would be plainly silly to bring them closely together in any claims of exact resemblance. At least in the infancy of the race we are dealing with adults in whom passions of mature life have become developed, and upon whom the practical experiences of life, in winning food and shelter and clothing, have made lasting marks. How foolish to place a child’s faculties or apprehensions in such a category! In one thing, perchance, they are strikingly alike, the futility, weakness or absence of language. But behind the silence of the prehistoric is a web of emotional life, the maze of natural impressions, and the formed habits of making and doing things. Behind the silence of the child is an embryo mind, and only that.

But feeling and thought which, as they are refined, issue so naturally in speech in our cultivated life, may, in the prehistoric, as in many examples of living men and women, have moved over the nerve tissue with no response at the portals of the lips. It is a trite suggestion that the poets speak our unuttered thoughts, and their exquisite phrase makes clearer to us our own yearnings and inquietudes and doubts.

The prehistoric man in Ogga, the prehistoric woman in Lhatto, was not some dishevelled emergence from simian ugliness, turpitude and filth. In their minds the lamp of intelligence, in their hearts the fire of love had both been lit, and they burned fairly, and gave light, though no written page, no entwined sentences displayed them. They were there. Back of them the twilight of growth from immense and carnal and animal beginnings may have brooded over men or women. And along side of them inchoate or drivelling beings, less well conditioned in their descent and habitat, may have walked on legs and slung stone hatchets. But in Ogga and Lhatto, while the Ice Age dwindled in the North, while the resumptive vigor of vegetable and animal life was capturing again the deserted northland, while the mastodon moved on the face of the earth, and the great sloth yet stayed, and the cave tiger stole along the fretted edges of the cliffs, in them Life had begun the intonation of its great unceasing symphony of ideals, and hopes! and dreads, and sorrows, joys and tears, and they both heard and knew it.

So Ogga lingered in the upland gazing at the full moon, his heart strangely stirred. Religion in Ogga and Lhatto had reached only the indefinite stage of awe and wonder. It hardly yet expressed itself in signs or stories. But with it was poetic recognition, which, perhaps, as duly hound in with the impressions of the senses, with what we see and hear and smell and feel, rises early, indeed earliest. And to Ogga, a somnambulous sense of the beauty of the world, of the wonderment of his own passion for Lhatto, of the mystery of things, of the flux and fall of the life of trees, and birds, and beasts, came then, and he lingered, and as he stretched upward his hands to the white Orb, there came to him also, as there comes in water at our feet, the mirrored image of a distant cloud, a mild surprise of a sense of mercy and of goodness, and Ogga took up the spear which had dropped to his feet, yet encrusted with the blood and brains of the slain puma, and went forward to the camp.