The Mammoth Hunters (Earth's Children 3)

Everyone was standing back, with held breaths, watching the woman who seemed to know what she was doing, in a life-and-death struggle to clear the blockage in the little girl’s throat. The child had stopped breathing, though her heart was still beating. Ayla lay the child down and kneeled beside her. She saw a piece of clothing, the child’s parka, and stuffed it under her neck to hold her head back and her mouth open. Then holding the small nose closed, the woman placed her mouth over the girl’s, and pulled in her breath as hard as she could, creating a strong suction. She held the pressure until she was almost without breath herself.

Then suddenly, with a muffled pop, she felt an object fly into her mouth, and almost lodge in her own throat. Ayla lifted her mouth and spat out a piece of gristly bone with meat clinging to it. She took a deep gulp of air, flipped her hair back out of her way, and, covering the mouth of the still child with her mouth again, breathed her own life-giving breath into the quiet lungs. The small chest raised. She did it several more times.

Suddenly the child was coughing and sputtering again, and then she took a long, rasping breath of her own.

Ayla helped Nuvie to sit up as she started to breathe again, only then aware of Tronie sobbi

ng her relief to see her daughter still alive.

Ayla pulled her parka on over her head, threw the hood back, and looked down the row of hearths. At the last one, the hearth of the Aurochs, she saw Deegie standing near the fireplace brushing her rich chestnut hair back and wrapping it into a bun while she talked to someone on a bed platform. Ayla and Deegie had become good friends in the past few days and usually went outside together in the morning. Poking an ivory hairpin—a long thin shaft carved from the tusk of a mammoth and polished smooth—into her hair, Deegie waved at Ayla and signaled, “Wait for me, I’ll go with you.”

Tronie was sitting on a bed at the hearth next to the Mammoth Hearth, nursing Hartal. She smiled at Ayla and motioned her over. Ayla walked into the area defined as the Reindeer Hearth, sat down beside her, then bent over to coo and tickle the baby. He let go for a moment, giggled and kicked his feet, then reached for his mother to suckle again.

“He knows you already, Ayla,” Tronie said.

“Hartal is happy, healthy baby. Grows fast. Where is Nuvie?”

“Manuv took her outside earlier. He’s such a help with her, I’m glad he came to live with us. Tornec has a sister he could have stayed with. The old and the young always seem to get along, but Manuv spends almost all his time with that little one, and he can’t refuse her anything. Especially now, after we came so close to losing her.” The young mother put the baby over her shoulder to pat his back, then turned to Ayla again. “I haven’t really had a chance to talk to you alone. I’d like to thank you again. We are all so grateful … I was so afraid she was … I still have bad dreams. I didn’t know what to do. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t been there.” She choked up as tears came to her eyes.

“Tronie, do not speak. Is not necessary to thank. Is my … I don’t know word. I have knowledge … is necessary … for me.”

Ayla saw Deegie coming through the Hearth of the Crane and noticed that Fralie was watching her. There were deep shadows around her eyes, and she seemed more tired than she should be. Ayla had been observing her and thought she was far enough along in her pregnancy that she should not be suffering morning sickness any more, but Fralie was still vomiting regularly and not just in the morning. Ayla wished she could make a closer examination, but Frebec had created a big furor when she mentioned it. He claimed that because she stopped someone from choking didn’t prove she knew anything about healing. He wasn’t convinced, just because she said so, and he didn’t want some strange woman giving Fralie bad advice. That gave Crozie something else to argue with him about. Finally, to stop their squabbling, Fralie declared she felt fine and didn’t need to see Ayla.

Ayla smiled encouragingly at the besieged woman, then picking up an empty waterskin on the way, walked with Deegie toward the entrance. As they passed through the Mammoth Hearth, and stepped into the Hearth of the Fox, Ranec looked up and watched them pass by. Ayla had the distinct feeling that he watched her all the way through the Lion Hearth and the cooking area until she reached the inner arch, and she had to restrain an urge to look back.

When they pushed back the outer drape, Ayla blinked her eyes at the unexpected brightness of an intense sun in a bold blue sky. It was one of those warm, gentle days of fall that came as a rare gift, to be held in memory against the season when vicious winds, raging storms, and biting cold would be the daily fare. Ayla smiled in appreciation and suddenly remembered, though she hadn’t thought of it in years, that Uba had been born on a day like this, that first fall after Brun’s clan found her.

The earthlodge and the leveled area in front of it were carved out of a west-facing slope, about midway down. The view was expansive from the entrance, and she stood for a moment, looking out. The racing river glinted and sparkled as it murmured a liquid undertone to the interplay of sunlight and water, and across, in a distant haze, Ayla saw a similar escarpment. The broad swift river, gouging a channel through the vast open steppes, was flanked by ramparts of eroded earth.

From the rounded shoulder of the plateau above to the wide floodplain below, the fine loess soil was sculpted by deep gullies; the handiwork of rain, melting snow, and the outflow of the great glaciers to the north during the spring runoff. A few green larch and pine stood straight and stiff in their isolation, scattered sparsely among the recumbent tangle of leafless shrubs on the lower ground. Downstream, along the river’s edge, the spikes of cattails mingled with reeds and sedges. Her view upstream was blocked by the bend in the river, but Whinney and Racer grazed within sight on the dry standing hay that covered the balance of the stark, spare landscape.

A spattering of dirt landed at Ayla’s feet. She looked up, startled, into Jondalar’s vivid blue eyes. Talut was beside him with a big grin on his face. She was surprised to see several more people on top of the dwelling.

“Come up, Ayla. I’ll give you a hand,” Jondalar said.

“Not now. Later. I just come out. Why you up there?”

“We’re putting the bowl boats over the smoke holes,” Talut explained.

“What?”

“Come on. I’ll explain,” Deegie said. “I’m ready to overflow.”

The two young women walked together toward a nearby gully. Steps had been roughly cut into the steep side leading to several large, flat mammoth shoulder blades with holes cut in them braced over a deeper part of the dry gully. Ayla stepped out on one of the shoulder blades, untied the waist thong of her legged garment, lowered it, then bent down and squatted over the hole, beside Deegie, wondering again why she hadn’t thought of the posture herself when she was having so much trouble with her clothes. It seemed so simple and obvious after she watched Deegie once. The contents of the night baskets were also thrown into the gully, as well as other refuse, all of which was washed away in the spring.

They climbed out and walked down to the river beside a broad gulch. A rivulet, whose source farther north was already frozen, trickled down the middle. When the season turned again, the trench would carry a raging torrent. The top sections of a few mammoth skulls were inverted and stacked near the bank along with some crude long-handled dippers, roughed out of leg bones.

The two women filled the mammoth skull basins with water dipped from the river, and from a pouch Ayla brought with her, she sprinkled withered petals—once the pale blue sprays of saponin-rich ceanothus flowers—into both their hands. Rubbing with wet hands created a foamy, slightly gritty washing substance which left a gentle perfume on clean hands and faces. Ayla snapped off a twig, chewed the broken end, and used it on her teeth, a habit she had picked up from Jondalar.

“What is bowl boat?” Ayla asked as they walked back carrying the waterproof stomach of a bison, bulging with fresh water, between them.

“We use them to cross the river, when it’s not too rough. You start with a frame of bone and wood shaped like a bowl that will hold two or maybe three people, and cover it with a hide, usually aurochs, hair side out and well oiled. Megaceros antlers, with some trimming, make good paddles … for pushing it through the water,” Deegie explained.

“Why bowl boats on top of lodge?”

“That’s where we always put them when we aren’t using them, but in winter we cover the smoke holes with them so rain and snow won’t come in. They were tying them down through the holes so they won’t blow away. But you have to leave a space for the smoke to get out, and be able to move it over, and shake it loose from inside if snow piles up.”

As they walked together, Ayla was thinking how happy she was to know Deegie. Uba had been a sister and she loved her, but Uba was younger, and Iza’s true daughter; there had always been the difference. Ayla had never known anyone her own age who seemed to understand everything she said, and with whom she had so much in common. They put the heavy waterskin down and stopped to rest for a while.