The Mammoth Hunters (Earth's Children 3)

He left with Brinan and Tusie when they came through. They found Rugie and Rydag, and all five children, who were near the same age, immediately began talking with words and hand signs, and giggling. They crowded onto a vacant bed platform together next to the one shared by Ayla and Jondalar.

Druwez and Danug were huddled together near the Fox Hearth. Latie was standing nearby, but either they didn’t see her or weren’t talking to her. Ayla watched her turn her back on the boys finally and, with her head down, shuffle slowly toward the younger children. The girl was not yet a young woman, Ayla guessed, but not far from it. It was a time when girls wanted other girls to talk to, but there were no girls her age at the Lion Camp, and the boys were ignoring her.

“Latie, you sit with me?” she asked. Latie brightened and sat beside Ayla.

The rest of the Aurochs Hearth came through the longhouse along the passageway. Tulie and Barzec joined Talut, who was conferring with Mamut. Deegie sat on the other side of Latie, and smiled at her.

“Where’s Druwez?” she asked. “I always knew if I wanted to find him, I just had to find you.”

“Oh, he’s talking to Danug,” Latie said. “They’re always together now. I was so glad when my brother came back, I thought all three of us would have so much to talk about. But they just want to talk to each other.”

Deegie and Ayla caught each other’s eye, and a knowing glance passed between them. The time had come when the friendships made as children needed to be looked at in a new light, and rearranged into the patterns of adult relationships when they would know each other as women and men,

but it could be a confusing, lonely time. Ayla had been excluded and alienated, one way or another, for most of her life. She understood what it meant to be lonely, even when surrounded by people who loved her. Later, in her valley, she had found a way to ease a more desperate loneliness, and she recalled the yearning and excitement in the girl’s eyes whenever she looked at the horses.

Ayla looked at Deegie, then at Latie to include her in the conversation. “This is so busy day. Many days so busy. I need help, could help me, Latie?” Ayla asked.

“Help you? Of course. What do you want me to do?”

“Before, every day I brush horses, go for ride. Now, I not have so much time, but horses need. Could help me? I show you.”

Latie’s eyes grew big and round. “You want me to help you take care of the horses?” she asked in a surprised whisper. “Oh, Ayla, could I?”

“Yes. As long as I am stay here, would be so much help,” Ayla replied.

Everyone had crowded into the Mammoth Hearth. Talut and Tulie and several others were talking about the bison hunt with Mamut. The old man had made the Search, and they were discussing whether he should Search again. Since the hunt had been so successful, they wondered if another would be possible soon. He agreed to try.

The big headman passed around more of the bouza, the fermented drink he had made from the starch of cattail roots, while Mamut was preparing himself for the Search, and filled Ayla’s cup. She drank most of the fermented brew he had given her outside, but felt a little guilty for throwing some away. This time, she smelled it, swished it around a few times, then took a deep breath and swallowed it down. Talut smiled and filled her cup again. She returned an insipid smile, and drank it, too. He filled her cup once more when he passed by and found it empty. She didn’t want it, but it was too late to refuse. She closed her eyes and gulped the strong liquid. She was getting more used to the taste, but she still couldn’t understand why everyone seemed to like it so much.

While she was waiting, a dizziness came over her, her ears buzzed, and her perceptions grew foggy. She didn’t notice when Tornec began a rhythmic tonal beating on the mammoth shoulder bone; it seemed instead to have happened inside her. She shook her head and tried to pay attention. She concentrated on Mamut and watched him swallow something, and had a vague feeling that it wasn’t safe. She wanted to stop him, but stayed where she was. He was Mamut, he must know what he was doing.

The tall, thin, old man with the white beard and the long white hair sat cross-legged behind another skull drum. He picked up an antler hammer and after a pause to listen, played along with Tornec, then began a chanting song. The chanting was picked up by others, and soon most of the people were deeply involved in a mesmerizing sequence that consisted of repetitive phrases sung in a pulsating beat with little change in tone, alternating with arrhythmic drumming that had more tonal variation than the voices. Another drum player joined them, but Ayla only noticed that Deegie was not beside her any more.

The pounding of the drums matched the pounding in Ayla’s head. Then she thought she heard more than just the chanting and the beating drums. The changing tones, the various cadences, the alterations of pitch and volume in the drumming, began to suggest voices, speaking voices, saying something she could almost, but not quite, understand. She tried to concentrate, strained to listen, but her mind wasn’t clear and the harder she tried, the further from comprehension the voices of the drums seemed to be. Finally she let go, gave in to the whirling dizziness that seemed to engulf her.

Then she heard the drums, and suddenly she was swept away.

She was traveling, fast, across the bleak and frozen plains. In the empty landscape stretched out below her, all but the most distinctive features were shrouded in a veil of wind-blown snow. Slowly, she became aware she was not alone. A fellow traveler viewed the same scene, and in some inexplicable way, exercised a degree of control over their speed and direction.

Then, faintly, like a distant aural beacon, a point of reference, she heard voices chanting and drums talking. In a moment of clarity, she heard a word, spoken in an eerie staccato throbbing that approximated, if it did not exactly reproduce, the pitch, tone, and resonance of a human voice.

“Zzzlloooow.” Then again, “Zzllooow heeerrrr.”

She felt their speed slow, and looking down, saw a few bison huddled in the lee of a high riverbank. The huge animals stood in stoic resignation in the driving blizzard, snow clinging to their shaggy coats, their heads lowered as though weighted down by the massive black horns that extended out. Only the steam blowing from the nostrils of their distinctively blunted faces gave a hint that they were living creatures and not features of the land.

Ayla felt herself drawn closer, close enough to count them and to notice individual animals. A young one moved a few steps to crowd against her mother; an old cow, whose left horn was broken off at the tip, shook her head and snorted; a bull pawed the ground, pushing snow aside, then nibbled on the exposed clump of withered grass. In the distance a howl could be heard; the wind, perhaps.

The view expanded again as they pulled back, and she caught a glimpse of silent four-legged shapes moving with stealth and purpose. The river flowed between twin outcrops below the huddled bison. Upstream, the floodplain where the bison had sought shelter, narrowed between high banks and the river rushed through a steep gorge of jagged rock, then gushed out in rapids and small waterfalls. The only outlet was a steep rocky defile, a runoff for spring floods, that led back up to the steppes.

“Hhooomme.”

The long vowel of the word resonated in Ayla’s ear with intensified vibrations, and then she was moving again, streaking over the plains.

“Ayla! Are you all right?” Jondalar said.

Ayla felt a spastic jump wrench her body, then opened her eyes to see a pair of startling blue ones looking at her with a worried frown.

“Uh … yes. I think so.”