The Plains of Passage (Earth's Children 4)

"You're looking satisfied with yourself," she said, roughing up his neck fur, so thick and full it was almost a mane. When she stopped, he jumped up on her, putting his muddy paws on her chest, nearly at the level of her shoulders. He caught her by surprise, almost knocking her down, but she recovered her balance.

"Wolf! Look at all this mud," she said, as he reached to lick her throat and face, and then, with a low rumbling growl, he opened his mouth and took her jaw in his teeth. But for all his impressive canine armaments, his action was as restrained and gentle as if he'd been handling a new puppy. No tooth broke skin; they hardly made an impression on it. She buried both her hands in his ruff again, pushed his head back, and looked at the devotion in his wolfish eyes with as much affection as he showed her. Then she grabbed his jaw with her teeth, and gave him the same kind of growling, gentle love-bite back.

"Now, get down, Wolf. Look at the mess you've made of me! I'm going to have to wash this, too." She brushed off the loose, sleeveless leather tunic she wore over the short leggings that had been used as undergarments.

"If I didn't know better, Ayla, I could almost be frightened for you when he does that," Jondalar said. "He's gotten so big, and he is a hunter. He could kill someone."

"You don't have to worry about Wolf when he does that. That's the way wolves greet each other and show their love. I think he's glad we woke up in time to get out of the valley, too."

"Have you looked down there?"

"Not yet ... Wolf, get away from there," she said, pushing him away when he began to sniff between her legs. "It's my moon time." She looked aside and flushed slightly. "I came to get my wool, and I haven't had the chance to look."

While Ayla attended to her personal needs, washing herself and her clothes in the little stream, tying on the straps that held the wool in place, and getting something else to wear, Jondalar walked toward the edge of the valley to pass his water and looked down. There was no sign of a campsite, or of any place there could be one. The natural basin of the valley was partially filled with water, and the logs and trees and other floating debris were bobbing and dipping as the agitated water continued to rise. The small river that fed it was still blocked at the outlet, and still creating backwash, though it was not sloshing with the sweeping back-and-forth movement of the night before.

Ayla quietly moved beside Jondalar, who had been staring intently at the valley and thinking. He looked up when he felt her presence.

"This valley must get narrow downstream, and something must be blocking the river," he said, "probably rocks or a mudslide. It's holding the water in. Maybe that's why it was so green down there, it may have done it before."

"The flash flood alone would have washed us away if it had caught us," Ayla said. "My valley used to flood every spring, and that was bad enough, but this..." She could find no words to express her thought, and she unconsciously finished her sentence with the motions of Clan sign language that to her conveyed more strongly and precisely her feelings of dismay and relief.

Jondalar understood. He, too, was at a loss for words and shared her feelings. They both stood silently watching the movement below; then Ayla noticed his forehead knotting with concentration and concern. Finally he spoke.

"If the mudslide, or whatever it is, gives away too quickly, that water washing downstream will be very dangerous. I hope there are no people that way," he said.

"It won't be any more dangerous than it was last night," Ayla said. "Will it?"

"Last night it was raining, so people might expect something like a flood, but if this breaks through, without the warning of a rainstorm, it would catch people by surprise, and that would be devastating," he explained.

Ayla nodded, then said, "But if people are using this river, wouldn't they notice that it had stopped flowing and try to find out why?"

He turned to face her. "But what about us, Ayla? We're traveling, and we wouldn't have any way of knowing that a river had stopped running. We could be downstream of something like this sometime, and we wouldn't have any warning."

Ayla turned back to look at the water in the valley and didn't answer immediately. "You're right, Jondalar," she said then. "We could get caught in another flash flood without warning. Or the lightning could have hit us instead of that tree. Or an earthquake could open up a crack in the ground and take everyone except a little girl, leaving her alone in the world. Or someone could get sick, or be born with a weakness or a deformity. The Mamut said no one can know when the Mother will decide to call one of Her children back to Her. There's nothing to be gained by worrying about things like that. We can't do anything about them. That's for Her to decide."

Jondalar listened, still frowning with worry; then he relaxed and put his arms around her. "I worry too much. Thonolan used to tell me that. I just started thinking about what would happen if we were downstream of that valley, and remembered last night. And then I thought about losing you, and . . ." He tightened his arms around her. "Ayla, I don't know what I would do if I ever lost you," he said, with sudden fervor, holding her to him. "I'm not sure I'd want to go on living."

She felt a tinge of worry at his strong reaction. "I hope you would go on living, Jondalar, and find someone else to love. If anything ever happened to you, a piece of me, of my spirit, would be gone with you, because I love you, but I would go on living, and a piece of your spirit would always be living with me."

"It wouldn't be easy to find someone else to love. I didn't think I'd ever find you. I don't know if I'd even want to look," Jondalar said.

They started back, walking together. Ayla was quiet for a while, thinking, then said, "I wonder if that's what happens when you love someone, and that person loves you back? I wonder if you exchange pieces of each other's spirit. Maybe that's why it hurts so much to lose someone you love." She paused, then continued. "It's like the men of the Clan. They are hunting brothers, and they exchange a piece of each other's spirit, particularly when one saves the other's life. It's not easy to go on living when a piece of your spirit is missing, and each hunter knows a piece of himself will go to the next world if the other goes, so he will watch and protect his brother, do almost anything to save his life." She stopped and looked up at him. "Do you think we have exchanged pieces of our spirits, Jondalar? We are hunting partners, aren't we?"

"And you once saved my life, but you are much more than a hunting brother," he said, smiling at the idea. "I love you. I understand now why Thonolan didn't want to go on living when Jetamio died. Sometimes I think he was searching for a way into the next world, so he could find them, Jetamio and the baby who was never born."

"But if anything ever happened to me, I wouldn't want you to follow me to any spirit world. I'd want you to stay right here, and find someone else," Ayla said, with conviction. She didn't like all his talk about next worlds. She wasn't sure what some other world after this one would be like, or even, deep in her heart, if one really existed. What she did know was that to get to any next world, you had to die in this one, and she didn't want to hear about Jondalar dying, either before or after she did.

Thinking about worlds of the spirit led to other random thoughts. "Maybe that's what happens when you get old," she said. "If you exchange pieces of your spirit with people you love, after you've lost a lot of them, so many pieces of your spirit have gone with them to the next world that there's not enough left to keep you alive in this world. It's like a hole inside of you that keeps getting bigger, so you want to go to the next world where most of your spirit and your loved ones are."

"How do you know so much?" Jondalar asked with a little smile. For all her lack of knowledge of the world of the spirits, her ingenuous and spontaneous observations made sense to him in a way, and displayed a genuine and thoughtful intelligence, though he had no way of knowing if there was any merit in the ideas. If Zelandoni were there, he could ask her, he thought. Then suddenly he realized they were going home and he would be able to ask her, some day soon.

"I lost pieces of my spirit when I was a little girl and the people I was born to were taken by the earthquake. Then Iza took a piece when she died, and Creb, and so did Rydag. Even though he isn't dead, even Durc has a piece of me, of my spirit, that I will never see. Your brother took a piece of you with him, didn't he?"

"Yes," Jondalar said, "he did. I will always miss him, and always hurt about it. Sometimes I still think it was my fault, and I would have done anything to save him."

"I don't think there is anything you could have done, Jondalar. The Mother wanted him, and it is for Her to decide, not for someone to search for a way to the next world."

When they got back to the tall sallow brush where they had spent the night, they began going through their belongings. Almost everything was at least damp, and many things were still very wet. They untied the swollen knots that still tied the ground cover to the upper shaped part of the tent and, each taking an end and twisting in opposite directions, tried to wring the pieces out. But too much twisting put a strain on the stitching. When they decided to erect the tent to begin letting it dry out, they discovered they had lost some of the tent poles.