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.