A Woman of the Ice Age

by L. P. Gratacap

His strength already severely tested by his pursuit, by his long fast, was unequal to this new emergency. Sometimes, in his overthrows, his head struck the unyielding floor. He was succumbing, he grew dizzy, he fought wildly with the implacable cord. His best efforts only saved him from being choked, and his imprisoned hands, occupied in saving his neck from the tightening rope, were useless. He reeled, the blood flowed down his face. His eyes seemed rolling in his head, and then sounds of confusion burst on his ears. As to all men, approaching exhaustion and unconsciousness, pictures floated before his eyes, the smilodon and mastodon, the steppe country, Zit and the ice blanket, the ocean, the boat with Lhatto, the stampede of the wild horses and then, again, and again, and again, Lhatto. How then he resisted his cogent foe! How her face summoned up new desperate energies, but how pitiably inadequate! He tossed to and fro on the rock, falling, rising, pitching headlong, a toy, a waif, in the iron hands of the relentless Lagk. And Lhatto, stealing outward too from the wall, following with even pace Ogga’s circling and vain motions, held her hands before her face, in great pain and sorrow.

Lagk knew his advantage, saw Ogga’s downfall and helplessness, but by a cool precision of judgment, of prudence, risked nothing by coming too near his prey, nor did he relax an instant the sharp pressure of the cord. His plans slowly fixed, as the fight, now unequal and in his own hands, drew certainly to a close. The fixation of his plan came with the recollection of his own injury in youth at Ogga’s hands. Ogga had pushed him from the cliff—he would push Ogga from the cliff, but into the depthless waters; into the cold embrace of death; he would leave him dead on the mountain top, in the blue hidden recess of the mountain lake. And then Lhatto!

The quick comprehension of his life-long thirst for vengeance and the possession of the woman who now claimed his heart with unspeakable power, suffocated him with its delirium of satisfaction. He cried aloud, he reviled Ogga; the ribald, the obscene, the torturing cruelty of the savage, ran loose in his vulgar, wicked jubilation. Strength came to his arms. He hurled the smarting, almost senseless Ogga this way and that; each fall of the staggering victim elicited new shouts of triumph. He waved his arms, his lips spat upon the prostrate hunter, whom at length he drew to himself, to the cliff’s edge, and he watched the bleeding body, the matted hair, the rolling eyes, the mouth discolored and thick with gore. Ogga was vanquished. Lagk possessed the earth and Lhatto! The Woman of the Ice Age was his! It was enough.

Lagk stood at the brink of the cliff, and Ogga, motionless, lay at his feet. Below him the lake waters, yet disturbed by the wind which had become stronger, colder with the sinking sun, splashed against the broken face of the cliff. Their waves ran in upon half revealed points of rock, and their spray was flung upward over higher edges and irregular prominences. The cliff’s edge was undercut, and as Lagk looked down, he stood upon a cornice of rock immediately above the broken masses of granite, partially submerged, partially exposed. The waters of the lake were at this point deep. Lagk noted that with interest. He leaned over the splintered abyss.

A dark spot crossed the rocks. It was the shadow of the eagle flying on broad pinions to the forests he had left. Lagk watched it obliviously. The faint impact of running feet came to his ears. With a start he turned; the thong about Ogga dropped from his hand, but he had not turned too quickly—Lhatto’s hands were beating with a sudden shock upon his unbalanced body. It needed but a touch to throw him over, and she had come with the impetus which the swiftness of the wind gave her.

He slipped, the extreme lip of the granite crumbled as he fell, writhing in a horror that smote his face with many grimaces, and stood in his eyes like a spectre in a doorway and even ran through his thick hair and bade it rise. Lagk fell. His hands clutched backward at the woman, but they closed only on inviolable air. His head pitched down and struck the splintered, rough faces of the stone. His body lingered for an instant on the verge of the cold waiting waters and as it turned in the last hideous convulsion, its eyes met Lhatto still bending and gazing at his last chance.

The waters broke in crisping ripples and the white spray rose in the red light of the sun, hid now in a sultry haze. Lagk lost consciousness, the harsh bruise of his fall had crushed his ribs; he sank into the green filminess of the lake like a heavy dark mass, not altogether without resistance. The water was churned with the involuntary muscular revolt; the currents rising upward from his twisting body, his flail-like extended arms, seamed the surface with interlacing currents. Lhatto still watched until all was gone, until even the perturbed water, save for the brushing of the wind, had come to rest.

Then Lhatto turned to Ogga. He was leaning on one arm with a wavering effort at steadiness, the other mechanically engaged in freeing his neck from the fatal noose, and his face, smeared and disfigured, was lifted towards her. The young savage woman, the Prehistoric, knelt beside him. She wiped his face with her hands, and put her cheeks to his. She hurried to the lake and brought water in her scooped palms and poured it on his head. She gathered skins from where they had been thrown down by Lagk. These she brought to Ogga and so placed them under and about him that he might rest more easily. She knelt beside him and, as instinctively as might a nurse to-day, soothed and caressed him. Ogga’s head lay in her lap, his eyes, now filled with tenderness and shining with joy, were fixed on hers. She brought him food. The horse was recovered. Finally, as Ogga was able to walk, though only feebly yet, the harsh concussion on his head yet lingering in dumb aches and dizzy and whirling shadows dancing before his eyes, she led him to the slim shelter of the rocks. The nightfall hastened. The intense stars shown in the inky vault above them, and the creeping cold followed the dazzling sunshine and the intemperate heat.

They gathered the warm furs about them, they shrank together in the night, they talked softly about Lagk, only a little way from them in the bottom of the lake, and their yet wondering minds, timid before the strange catastrophe of death, changed the shadows they saw about them into his image. He seemed to lurk in the crevice behind them, he rose suddenly at the end of the cairn, he stooped over them from the air, he crept between them, motionless and unfelt. They clasped each other in fright, and their eyes wild with a suffocating dread of interruption, of dispersal, of some nocturnal vengeance sweeping with the bat’s wing, from the air upon them, grew weary at length, and the shuddering horror succumbed to sleep. The morning sun smote their faces, pressed together by the pressure of love and fear. Their arms unlocked, their eyelids wet with dew parted, their lips opened with smiles; love rested upon them like a consecration, and with the sense of warmth, in the sunlight of the full day, the bright haloes and beckoning joys of life came back tumultuously, gay and sweet.

Ogga soon revived. The recuperative power in the wild man is part of the recuperative power of the wild life about him, of the animals, the plants, of the riven soil settling back into peace and cohesion and new fruitfulness, after shock and storm and fire. So again they prepared to move southward. Lhatto longed for the sea, and in both were growing the hidden instincts of home seeking, of rest; and dreams of a fair spot sheltered from storms, where there was good fishing, and trees and the surf beaten beaches, and the long endless plain of the ocean stretching into the scarlet blankets of the sunset, formed in their eyes, and drew them onward with irrevocable power.