THE SLOTH.
When Ogga left Lagk, he crossed the uplands with rapid strides. His
hunter’s keen desire and ambition had been roused by the strange
report which Lagk had made to him. Lagk had told him of a singular
and monstrous beast which he had seen, almost casually, as the three
travelers made their way up to the mountain ridge. In one of his
rambling excursions he had entered a savannah-like level, which
appeared to be a southern extension of the horse valley, where Ogga
and Lhatto had witnessed the strange devastation of the equine host.
Here he had been arrested by a squeaking grunt, and tracing the curious
interruption, had detected in a grove of ash trees, assembled near a
depressed and wet area of heavy grass, a new and formidable creature.
It had a covering of tawny hair, it was standing on its hind feet, and
was dragging down with its huge front hands the pendant branches. Lagk
had not dared to approach it closer; its novel and whimsical homeliness
had dismayed him. He had concealed his discovery until the episode of
Ogga’s and Lhatto’s love duet suggested its useful interjection as a
device for securing Ogga’s absence.
It was this anomalous and new animal wonder that Ogga was now in search
of. Suspicion of Lagk’s intentions, suspicion of his truthfulness, at
first deterred Ogga, but Lagk’s asseverations became so earnest, and
the picture he drew was so inexplicable that Ogga felt drawn to the
eccentric chase by curiosity alone.
He had crossed the open field and found its further end cut by a
landslide which had scoured a broad concavity down the side of the
mountain, heaping up at the limit of its denudation the accumulated
earth into a huge mound, promiscuously mixed with projecting boughs
and trunks and mangled roots of trees and with fragments of rock. The
erosion formed a convenient line of descent for about half a mile.
Ogga slipped down the irregular and smooth surfaces and reached the
debris at its foot. Up that he ascended a short way, as far as its
annoying entanglement of sticks and stones allowed, and there he could
see far below him an opening in the unbroken wilderness which might be
interpreted as the spot mentioned by Lagk.
He knew that their movement westward and south had brought them
now to the west wall of the Horse Valley, and that this continuous
triangle which seemed to form an avenue of indefinite extension, was
characterized by many side outlets or tributaries running for miles up
lateral ravines. Through these ravines a stream, rising at some higher
elevation usually was conducted, and they were further distinguished
by widenings or shelf-like expansions, free from trees, supporting
a luxuriant herbage, and almost invariably provided with marsh-like
bowls, where the water seemed to disappear or at best sluggishly emerge
from its inferior limits. These ravines were very warm and humid, and
by some occult reasoning, which bore no resemblance to the zoological
deductions of a naturalist, Ogga thought this shapeless and sluggish
beast, which fed on leaves and twigs, would be likely to find such
places congenial to its unusual nature.
He remained upon the view-point he had secured for a long time. He
studied the scene, noting the trees, the points of rocky exposure,
the precipices, the cataract-like fall of the forest at spots where
there was some defalcation of the ground on which they stood, and thus
completed the mental survey, whose imagery, immutably fixed in his
memory, would help him reach the glade wherein he located his unknown
guest.
When he had sufficiently stored his impressions and observations,
he climbed down the forward slope of the mound of detritus and
disappeared in the forest. We can hardly imagine that the details of
his meanderings could interest the reader, even if it were possible
to bring before the reader’s eye the features of his woodland journey.
The forests of the later Ice Age in southwestern America were probably
not essentially different in physical circumstances from the forests
of the same region to-day, except that in pleistocene time the
encroaching ice-cap had thrust southward the flora and the fauna that
had previously mantled with its color and animated with its diversity
the wide northern plains of North America, and so produced a biological
congestion, a crowding of types and forms, species and genera, like
a crush of humans, or of cattle, for that matter, striving to pass
simultaneously through a narrow entrance into some escapement, or
breadth of localities beyond; except for this, the forests in their
gloom and silence, in fallen monarchs, moss-covered and beetle-lined,
were just as they are to-day.
Ogga certainly did not recognize that around him was going on an
invisible struggle, a contest unmarked by outcry or blows or surging
pressures. Certainly, there was such a conflict impending and in
progress. The conflict for survival amongst the birds and beasts and
plants was real, though noiseless. A population of living things that
had spread itself over a continent had been forced to compress itself
in much smaller areas, and share at the same time this restriction
with that same area’s own previous population. A carnage slow and
exterminating, a crafty emergence of adaptations in plants and
in animals that fitted this or that one to take advantage of its
competitors and displace them, was evidently present, though as he
pushed his toilsome way through shredded brakes and undergrowth, or
walked in the twilight of the gigantic pines, or scaled some moderate
pinnacle of rock to reset the bearings of his course, the depths kept
their impenetrable secrets and in the development of life of which he,
Ogga, was a divine element, covered with their shadows its remorseless
consequences.
Ogga had made his way through that endless wood, the witness in the
skies and earth of many marvels. It had arisen in the dateless past,
and while with the coming and the going years its leaves had sprouted
and ripened and fallen, their shade had screened a changing animal
world. Those intangible unknown processes of alteration, which by the
subtlety of their influence upon the plants themselves evoked also
responses in the creature of the mountain and the plain, were replacing
an old fauna by a newer one. And Ogga was about to discover a relic
of a passing race. The sun had moved behind the mountain crests and
the narrow valley, faintly deepening into a verdant crease, like the
enrichment of a deeper colored border to a fabric, which passed on its
further side, was traversed by a stream. Towards this the prehistoric
turned, crossing the grass inundated field, bare of trees, in the
ashen gold of the falling day.
There was opposite to the place where Ogga had emerged from the wood a
clump of low ginko trees. These strange plants, living to-day and in
Asia, were barely surviving from the tertiaries in the glacial age,
while their antecedent rise was far off in the mesozoic, in the vast
periods of reptilian abundance. It was Lagk’s description of this spot
and the singular fan-leafed trees which made Ogga certain that he had
reached the position where the new creature Lagk had run upon was to be
found.
As Ogga came nearer to the peculiar trees, their scarcity and thinness
of foliage, united with the whorl-like arrangement of their branches,
permitted him to see distinctly the animal novelty which Lagk had urged
him to pursue.
It had evidently remained at the very place in which it was discovered,
and its strangeness, its whimsical union of grotesque deformity and
awkwardness with mere physical mass, caused the hunter to stop in
amazement, sinking slowly to the ground in the tall grass, and stalking
stealthily towards the unusual object. It was engaged in feeding. For
this purpose it had raised itself upon its hind legs and had stretched
its long forearms upward, distending their length to the utmost to
reach the high twigs. It afforded Ogga a complete display of its
strange proportions, and the young savage remained motionless, puzzled
and astonished.
The animal was covered with a coat of coarse, dun-colored hair, growing
heavily in patches about its thighs and forelegs, not unlike the skirts
of pelage about Indian sheep. Its forefeet were provided with enormous
extensive claws, which fastened themselves like little anchors upon the
swaying branches. These served the purpose of drawing to it the leafy
boughs on which it fed with its bizarre and produced jaws, behind and
above which, in deeply set sockets, burned its small, immobile eyes.
Its great, heavy quarters supported its somewhat contracted body,
though one of great size, and their assistance was supplemented by an
enormous tail. This stretched behind the creature like a round log and
seemed serviceable as a support, though moved by the animal itself with
exertion and extreme slowness.
The stray long hair of the body disappeared on the tail, which lay
inert behind it, thickly swathed in its gray investiture of flesh and
skin. A strange, gaunt and horrible appearance, part of that untempered
productivity of nature which has engaged its energies so long in
fruitless and disappointing creations! The nightmares and disjointed
reveries of some struggling mind rising to its ideals through a host
of abhorrent things, things which once animate must linger through an
inexorable law of vitality and heredity until the correction of time
can destroy them. Indeed, this monstrous waif was itself the furthest
of a receding biological wave, a stranded horror dying before the
approach of conditions more benign and judicious. It was the gigantic
sloth, the relative of the megatherium and mylodon, the excrescent
development of that group of animals which typify to the psychologist
the inertia of mind and the collapse of invention, the drugged
dyspeptic sleep of creation and creators.
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.
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.
[Illustration]