The Plains of Passage (Earth's Children 4)

"Why don't you call Whinney. We have time before it gets dark to find another place."

After spending the night in their tent out in the open, they started out early in the morning, wanting to put still more distance between themselves and the cave bear. Jondalar didn't want to take the time to dry the meat, and he convinced Ayla that the temperature was cold enough for it to keep. He was in a hurry to get out of the region altogether. Where there was one bear, there were usually more.

But when they reached the top of a ridge, they stopped. In the sharp, clear, cold air, they could see in all directions, and the view was spectacular. Directly east, a snow-covered mountain of somewhat lower elevation rose in the foreground, drawing attention to the eastern range, closer now and curving around them. Though not exceptionally tall, the glaciered mountains reached their highest point to the north, rising to form a line of jagged white peaks, shadowed with hints of glacier blue against the deep azure sky.

The icy northern mountains were in the broad outer belt of the curving arc; the travelers were in the innermost arc, in the foothills of the range that encompassed them, standing on a ridge that stretched across the northern end of the ancient basin that formed the central plain. The great glacier, the densely packed cake of solid ice that had spread down from the north until it covered nearly a quarter of the land, ended in a mountainous wall that was hidden just beyond the far peaks. Toward the northwest, highlands that were lower but closer dominated the horizon. Shimmering in the distance the northern glacial ice could be glimpsed hovering like a pale horizon above the nearer heights. The huge range of much higher mountains to the west was lost in clouds.

The distant mountains that surrounded them were magnificent, but the most heart-stopping sight was closer at hand. Down below, in the deep gorge, the course of the Great Mother River had changed direction. It was now coming from the west. As Ayla and Jondalar stared down from the ridge and looked upstream at the wavering course of the river, they, too, felt as though they had reached a turning point.

"The glacier we have to cross is due west of here," Jondalar sai

d, his voice taking on a faraway tone that matched his thoughts, "but we'll follow the Mother and she'll veer a little to the northwest after a while, then southwest again until we reach it. It's not a huge glacier and, except for a higher region in the northeast, nearly flat once we get up to it, like a big high plain made out of ice. After we get across it, we'll head slightly southwest again, but essentially, from here on, we'll be traveling west all the way home."

In breaking through the ridge of limestone and crystalline rock, the river, as though hesitating, unable to make up her mind, jogged north, then dipped south, and then north again, forming a lobe that the river traced, before finally heading south through the plain.

"Is that the Mother?" Ayla asked. "All of her, I mean, not just a channel?"

"That's all of her. She's still a good-size river, but nothing like she was," Jondalar conceded.

"We've been beside her for quite a while, then. I didn't know that. I'm used to seeing the Great Mother River so much more full, when she isn't all spread out. I thought we were following a channel. We've crossed feeders that were greater," Ayla said, feeling a little disappointed that the enormous swollen Mother of rivers had become just another large waterway.

"We're up high. She looks different from here. There is more to her than you think," he said. "We have some large tributaries to cross, yet, and there will be stretches where she breaks into channels again, but she will keep getting smaller." Jondalar stared toward the west in silence for a time; then he added, "This is just the beginning of winter. We should make it to the glacier in plenty of time ... if nothing happens to delay us."

The Journeyers turned west along the high ridge, following the outside bend of the river. The elevation continued to increase on the north side of the river until they were looking down from a high point above the little southward lobe. The drop-off toward the west was quite steep, and they headed north down a slightly more gradual slope through scattered brush. At the bottom, a tributary that curled around the base of the lofty prominence from the northeast cut a deep gorge. They traced it upstream until they found a crossing. It was only hilly on the other side, and they rode beside the feeder until they reached the Great Mother again, then continued west.

In the broad central plain there had been only a few tributaries, but they were now in an area where many rivers and streams fed the Mother from the north. They came upon another large tributary later in the day and their legs got wet in the crossing. It was not like crossing rivers in the warm summertime, when it didn't matter if they got a little wet. The temperature was dipping down to freezing at night. They were chilled by the icy cold water, and they decided to camp on the far bank to get warm and dry.

They continued due west. After passing through the hilly terrain, they reached the lowland again, a marshy grassland, but not like the wetlands downstream. These were on acid soils, and more swampy than marshy, with moors of sphagnum mosses that in places were compacting into peat. They discovered the peat would burn when they made camp one day and inadvertently built a fire on top of a dry patch of it. The following day they collected some on purpose for their next fires.

When they came to a large, fast tributary that fanned into a broad delta at its confluence with the Mother, they decided to follow it upstream a short distance to see if they could find an easier place to cross. They reached a fork where two rivers converged, followed the right branch, and came to another fork where yet another river joined. The horses easily waded across the smaller river, and the middle fork, though larger, wasn't too difficult. The land between the middle and the left fork was a boggy lowland with sphagnum moors, and it was difficult going.

The last fork was deep, and there was no way to cross it without getting wet, but on the other side they disturbed a megaceros with an enormous rack of palmate antlers and decided to go after him. The giant deer, with his long legs, easily outdistanced the stocky horses, although Racer and Wolf gave him a good run. Whinney, hauling the pole drag, couldn't keep up, but the exercise had put them all in a good mood.

Jondalar, red-faced and windblown, his fur hood thrown back, was smiling when he came back. Ayla felt an unexplainable pang of love and longing as he rode up. He had let his pale yellow beard grow, as he usually did in winter, to help keep his face warm, and she always did like him with a beard. He liked to call her beautiful, but in her mind, he was beautiful.

"That animal can sure run!" he said. "And did you see that magnificent rack? One of his antlers must be twice as big as I am!"

Ayla was smiling, too. "He was magnificent, and beautiful, but I'm glad we didn't get him. He was too big for us, anyway. We couldn't take all that meat, and it would have been a shame to kill him when we didn't need it."

They rode back to the Mother, and even though their clothes had dried on them somewhat, they were glad to make camp and change. They made a point of hanging their damp clothing near the fire so it could dry further.

The next day they started out heading west; then the river veered toward the northwest. Some distance beyond, they could see another high ridge. The high prominence that reached all the way to the Great Mother River was the farthest northwest finger, the last they would see, of the great chain of mountains that had been with them almost from the beginning. The range had been west of them then, and they had traveled around its broad southern end following the lower course of the Great Mother River. The whitened mountain peaks had marched along to the east of them in a great curving arc, as they rode up the central plain beside the river's winding middle course. Going west along the Mother's upper course, the ridge ahead was the last outlier.

No tributaries joined the long river until they were almost up to the ridge, and Ayla and Jondalar realized they must have been between channels again. The river that joined from the east at the foot of the rocky promontory was the other end of the northern channel of the Mother. From there the river flowed between the ridge and a high hill across the water, but there was enough lowland riverbank to ride around the base of the high rocky point.

They crossed another large tributary just on the other side of the ridge, a river whose great valley marked the separation between the two groups of mountain ranges. The high hills to the west were the farthest eastern foreland of the enormous western chain. As the ridge fell behind them, the Great Mother River separated again into three channels. They followed the outer bank of the northernmost stream through the steppes of a smaller northern basin that was a continuation of the central plain.

In the times when the central basin had been a great sea, this wide river valley of grassy steppes, along with the swampy bogs and moors of the riverside wetlands and the grasslands to the north of them, were all inlets to that ancient inland body of water. The inner curve of the eastern mountain chain contained lines of weakness in the hard crust of the earth that became the vents for great outpourings of volcanic material. That material, combined with the ancient sea deposits and the windblown loess, created a rich and fertile soil. But only the skeletal wood of winter gave evidence of it.

The bony fingers and leafless limbs of a few birch trees near the river rattled in the rapacious wind from the north. Dry brushwood, reeds, and dead ferns lined the banks, where crusts of ice were forming that would thicken and build up jagged levees; the beginning of spring ice floes. On the northern faces and higher ground of the rolling hills in the valley divide, the wind combed billowing fields of gray standing hay with rhythmic strokes, while dark evergreen boughs of spruce and pine swayed and shivered in erratic gusts that found their way around to the protected south-facing sides. Powdery snow churned around, then settled lightly on the ground.

The weather had definitely turned cold, but snow flurries were not a problem. The horses, the wolf, and even the people were accustomed to the northern loess steppes with its dry cold and light winter snows. Only in heavy snow, that could bog down and tire the horses, and make feed harder to find, would Ayla begin to worry. She had another worry at the moment. She had

seen horses in the distance, and Whinney and Racer had noticed them, too.

When he happened to look back, Jondalar thought he saw smoke coming from the high hill across the river from the last ridge they had edged around earlier. He wondered if there were people nearby, but he did not see smoke again though he turned around to check several times.

Toward evening, they followed a small feeder upstream through an open woodland of bare-branched willows and birch, to a stand of stone pines. Frosty nights had given a still pond nearby a transparent layer of ice on top, and had frozen the edges of the little creek, but it still ran freely in the center, and they set up camp beside it. A dry snow blew down and dusted the north-facing slopes with white.