A Woman of the Ice Age

by L. P. Gratacap

The strange unbidden thought of self-destruction, perhaps thus first entering the heart of man, vanished, and following it, leaping like a flame that has lain stifled in smoke, or moved unheeded, along hidden tracts of heat towards the surface and the air, came the devastating fire of jealousy and hatred and the thirst for vengeance.

The prehistoric man then discovered his endowment of emotions, and under the sudden summons of his offended passions, became as modern as Leontes or Agamemnon. Ogga’s face certainly assumed no extreme distortion of rage, and the air was not imperatively needed to repeat his imprecations to the surrounding rocks. He simply walked, with perhaps the sparkle of a peculiar light newly awakened in his eyes, and a slightly noticeable tension of the muscles of his arm as his hands grasped the long used ivory spear, and there was, were our eyes near enough to discern it, a sinister pallor in his cheeks; he walked to the edge of the ledge and listened.

He turned his face to the directions below, above, around him, and, motionless, like some lost animal expectant to regain his companions by some wandering bleat or call, listened. Then, when that conjecture proved fruitless, he fell upon his knees and studied the imprints that were freshly made in the soil. The path Lagk and Lhatto had taken was soon determined, and Ogga, with a sudden quivering ejaculation—the first word he had spoken—followed the descending trail.

Lagk had hurried Lhatto away, and yet his movements were not neglectful of her comfort. The horse sought its path with trepidation, down the steeper defiles of the descent to the valley, and not infrequently Lagk’s strength and presence of mind alone prevented a serious accident to beast and burden. His progress, greatly as he wished to hasten it, was slow, nor was his own knowledge of the aisles and passages of the woods quite sufficient. He intended to gain a prolongation of the valley where the sloth had been seen, and pass beyond the ranges east of it by some clove or depression, or, if that was impossible, by some shoulder of the cordillera from which he might more successfully plot his return to the canyon.

The country was not altogether difficult to traverse. The forests were continuous but not densely interrupted with undergrowth, and when the valleys between the ranges were reached they formed quite open highways for miles. Treeless areas extended on the mountain sides in places, and here upon a plateau country the igneous agencies had developed a landscape, weird and chaotic, where black shadows and glaring patches of light marked the violent contrasts of cliff and plain.

Lagk had been solicitous and tender with Lhatto. He loved her, and his passion, by the corrective influence of his mind, superior to brutal concupiscence, had maintained a certain aboriginal gallantry. He brought her water and food. He plucked tender berries and offered them to her. Except for the acceptance of water Lhatto remained stolid and stubbornly unresponsive. Lagk would have unloosed the irksome bonds and taken her with him under less constraint, but the sense of capture was delightful to him, the physical possession thus assured seemed to enervate and entrance him. He often paused in their descent, and stood near Lhatto, his hand upon her body and his keen eyes, brilliant, with a seam of light crossing them, in a frenzy of anticipation, resting upon her.

Such unwise surrenders to his fancy lost him time, the stumbling and uncertain horse and his own hesitation as to the way added increased delays, which were unfavorable for his escape from a resentful foe whose feet were winged with anger, whose muscles sprang forward under the whip of scorn, and in whose veins the blood bounded with a thirst for murder.

Yes! in the prehistoric, in Ogga, the gaunt horror of the desire to kill had arisen. The pallid beast of hatred, ridden by the clutching hags of envy and jealousy and spite and terror, ran before Ogga in his path. He—Ogga—stared wildly at the image of a man, stifled and gasping, held at the throat by Ogga’s hand—his own—until the eyes started from their sockets, turning their lifeless whitenesses downward and upward in the wanton agony of death. Ogga’s hands, thrust before him, caught, in his dreaming mind, the body of Lagk, and they raised it, struggling, kicking, voluble with cries and tears and prayers, above the earth, above the splintered rocks, harsh and ragged with edges and translucent tips, and these same hands smashed the pitiful and shrinking body upon the hard edges, the lacerating, piercing tips, and it lay there before Ogga, palpitating like a slain animal, gushing red tides of blood.

Ogga’s feet, whose impetuous haste, now sent him bounding like a ball over an obstructing rock, now with slippery treachery sent him sprawling from the damp mossiness of a fallen tree, those flying feet, suddenly in Ogga’s inner sight, became immobile, stamped upon the cracked and pensile neck of the deceiver, of the girl he loved, before whom, before this happened, the wide earth and all the firmament of stars were pale, inconsequent, and foolish things. With such surprising madness did Ogga hunt the felons of his joy, the vague misery of his desolation cutting his heart, in the sudden blackness which touched him on every side.

Lagk had hurried up the valley where Ogga had found the sloth, and the pale topped mountains rose, as he advanced, into flinty pinnacles, gray and spectral, in the summer sun. They rose as the valley widened, their bared heads destitute of covering, sending into the broad zenith the half-visible rays of the reflected heat and light. They thrust out wide shoulders, the shadows resting in the cold remoteness of their elevations, revealing cliffs and recesses, ragged gorges and wandering seams of dislocation. Lagk paused again and again, wondering and dismayed. His path forward became more strange, and though he had roamed for years through this country of the wild horses, this southern marge frightened him with its sublimity. Its insistent immensity oppressed him and the silent solitudes by some power of evocation, that rests in all things majestic, summoned to his lips some confession of disgrace and shame.