A Woman of the Ice Age

by L. P. Gratacap

He had not been harsh with Lhatto. He curbed his own impatience and fear by resting from hour to hour, for he was not insensible of the restraint and discomfort which Lhatto suffered. He had even lifted her from the horse, like some fragile burden, and laid her on soft couches of grass or moss. But he did not change the thongs that held her rigid, swathed in a panoply of imprisoning cords. He was afraid to loosen her, fearful perhaps of her agility, her sylvan velocity that, as the bird flies, or the wild cat leaps, or the squirrel runs, would evade, confuse and escape him. He could not be sure. Her silence, yet unbroken, though now and then her lips twitched with suffocating rage, or perhaps with sharp aches and dull misery, made him bitter and distrustful.

But now, before the awful splendor of the external world, before the unvoiced appeal of those mountains up whose sides he was pressing and whose altitudes, with their stony retinue of forms and faces gazing unchanged, and yet with every moment a renewed persistency of inquiry, made him tremble with alarm; before these things a kind of contrition arose in him, and because it came from his own burning love—as in all love there is something holy and self-condemning—he came slowly to the side of Lhatto on the horse and spoke:

“Lhatto, I do not mean harm or hurt. You shall be with me in my land and with my people. I will be so good to you. I love you. The spirit men shall be good to you. You will have so much to eat, to wear, and you shall do nothing. I took you because I cannot live anyway, besides. I will bring you birds and little animals, and furs and flowers. You shall be beautiful. And my people will do as you say, all of them, or I will kill them. Let it be so. Forget Ogga. Love me.”

And yet as he spoke, Ogga, growing hotter, warier, keener, surer, deadlier, followed his trail, even as the meteoric spark that crosses the black night follows its inerrant path to earth.

But Lhatto did not answer. In that woman’s heart, primeval with the centuries, the rapture of devotion had its birth. Her ears were deaf, her eyes were filled with the image of the man who woke her sleeping on the rocking waves, and her heart was still with the great hope and prayer that he would find her. Such a spirit dwelt in this woman of the Ice Age, the prehistoric, in whom grew, by some mystery of design, the consecration of fidelity.

They hurried on. Lagk incensed, beat the lagging horse, and desperate by an increasing apprehension of Ogga’s pursuit, breathlessly pushed upward, expecting from a high and desert tableland, which he had descried, to see more clearly his way eastward to the canyon land.

At last they reached, by toilsome struggles in which Lhatto suffered, the edge of a wide plain. On its farthest margin still rose the baffling mountain peaks. It was a bowl-shaped expanse, of sand and pebbles, that sloped by the most imperceptible subsidence to a small lake. Sage bushes, groups of cedars, presenting angular and dwarfed and prostrate forms, offered in spots some relief to the unmasked stare of the palpitating scent. The day was well advanced. By some peculiarity of position, or by some vagary of weather, the air was motionless, and the unclouded sun shone mercilessly, until the heated stones emitted a radiant warmth and the parched herbage seemed melted and shrunken.

Over the singular field of stones and sand the little and exhausted company forced their way, Lagk by turns pulling the reluctant beast, or else from behind pelting it with pebbles. By means of such exertions he reached the sides of the lake which revealed a border of mimic beaches and low precipitous cliffs. Turning up a defile where a temporary shade was secured from some fantastic trees, whose roots, by all the available ingenuity of a subterranean quest for moisture, had fastened themselves in riven rocks and over included boulders, they finally emerged upon a flat exposure that rose from the lake in a vertical wall, and like some miniature stage, commanded the desolate and monotonous surroundings.

It was a granite ledge hollowed over its surface with small depressions, which were now pools of water from some recent rain, and upon it lay scattered blocks, a few crowded together in a low wall, full of apertures and chance shelters, beyond which again the arid deposit stretched to the last needles of the range. Beyond these peaks Lagk felt certain he should find an avenue of escape. To the wall of drifted or weathered boulders he made his way, the shadows of the horse with its recumbent load and the short muscular body of Lagk, moving over the granite floor of the pedestal, like phantom silhouettes, the sun burning the crystalline edges of the roughened asperities of the rocks into dust.

In the shadow of this wall they rested and Lagk looked long at Lhatto, still silent. Slowly he passed his hand over her body, slowly his fingers sought the knotted cords, slowly they unfastened the entwined and embracing thongs, and slowly one by one the cords dropped from Lhatto, and slowly the freed woman, with gestures of distress and stiffness, rose on the back of the horse. It was not altogether painful for her. She had been indeed cruelly confined, and on her legs and arms and breast the strictures of the skin were visible. An enfeeblement had overcome her, and as Lagk seized her in his arms and carried her resistless to the rocks, his love seemed kindled to a more poignant fury by the pressure of her warm and helpless body. She sat beside him, her eyes with a wandering glance searching the strange spot. The color had faded in her cheeks, its hue, that had been like the sheen of a delicate bronze, was replaced by a pasty pallor, and a ring of shadow lay beneath each eye. But to Lagk she was the same, but more precious, more desirable, more his own. An eagle flying with convulsive leaps from rock to rock approached them. Its whistling cackle seemed to mock the loneliness and weakness of the girl.