The Plains of Passage (Earth's Children 4)

The next morning they loaded a slightly lighter pack on the horses; they had burned some of the brown coal, and the heavy mammoth hide was now on their feet. Ayla unloaded them when they stopped for a rest, and she took on a little more of the load herself. But she couldn't begin to carry what the sturdy horses could. In spite of traveling, their hooves and feet seemed much improved by that night. Wolf's seemed perfectly normal, which was a great relief for both Ayla and Jondalar. The boots provided an unexpected benefit: they acted as a kind of snowshoe when there was deep snow, and the large, heavy animals didn't sink in as far.

The pattern of the first day held, with some variation. They made their best time in the morning; the afternoons brought snow and wind of varying intensity. Sometimes they were able to travel a little farther after the storm, other times they had to stay where they stopped in the afternoon through the night, and on one occasion for two days, but none of the blizzards were as fierce as the one they had encountered the first day.

The surface of the glacier wasn't quite as flat and smooth as it had appeared on that first glistening day in the sun. They floundered through deep drifts of soft powdered snow piled high from localized snowstorms. Other times, where driving winds cleared the surface, they crunched over sharp projections and slid into shallow ditches, their feet catching in narrow spaces and their ankles twisting under them on the uneven surface. Instant squalls blew down without warning, the fierce winds almost never let up, and they felt constant anxiety about unseen crevasses covered over with flimsy bridges or overhanging cornices of snow.

They detoured around open cracks, especially near the center, where the dry air held so little moisture that the snows were not heavy enough to fill the crevasses. And the cold, the deep, bitter, bone-chilling cold, never let up. Their breath froze on the fur of their hoods around their mouths; a drop of water spilling from a cup was frozen before it touched the ground. Their faces, exposed to raw winds and bright sun, cracked, peeled, and blackened. Frostbite was a constant threat.

The strain was beginning to tell. Their responses were beginning to deteriorate, and so was their judgment. A furious afternoon storm had held on into the night. In the morning, Jondalar was anxious to get under way. They had lost much more time than he had planned. In the bitter cold, it took longer for the water to heat, and their supply of burning stones was dwindling.

Ayla was going through her backpack; then she began searching around her sleeping fur. She couldn't remember how many days they had been on the ice, but as far as she was concerned, it was too many, she thought as she searched.

"Hurry up, Ayla! What's taking you so long?" Jondalar snapped.

"I can't find my eye protectors," she said.

"I told you not to lose them. Do you want to go blind?" he exploded.

"No, I don't want to go blind. Why do you think I'm looking for them?" Ayla retorted. Jondalar snatched her fur up and shook it vigorously. The wooden goggles fell to the ground.

"Be careful where you put them next time," he said. "Now let's get moving."

They quickly packed up their camp, but Ayla sulked and refused to talk to Jondalar. He came over and double-checked her lashings, as he usually did. Ayla grabbed Whinney's rope and started out taking the lead, moving the horse away before Jondalar could examine her pack.

"Don't you think I know how to pack a horse myself? You said you wanted to get moving. Why are you wasting time?" she flung back over her shoulder.

He had just been trying to be careful, Jondalar thought angrily. She doesn't even know the way. Wait until she wanders around in circles for a while. Then she will come asking me to lead, he thought, falling in behind her.

Ayla was cold and fatigued from the grueling march. She plunged ahead, careless of her surroundings. If he wants to hurry so much, then we'll hurry, she thought. If we ever get to the end of this ice, I hope I never see a glacier again.

Wolf was nervously racing between Ayla in the lead and Jondalar following behind. He didn't like the sudden change in their positions. The tall man had always started out ahead before. The wolf struck out ahead of the woman, who was trudging blindly on, oblivious to everything except the miserable cold and her injured feelings. Suddenly he stopped directly in front of her, blocking her way.

Ayla, leading the mare, went around him. He ran back around and stopped in front of her again. She ignored him. He nudged at her legs; she shoved him aside. He ran ahead a short distance, then sat down whining to get her attention. She plodded past him. He raced back toward Jondalar, pranced and whined in front of him, then bounded a few steps toward Ayla, whining, then advanced toward the man once more.

"Is something wrong, Wolf?" Jondalar said, finally noticing the animal's agitation.

Suddenly he heard a terrifying sound, a muffled boom. His head shot up as fountains of light snow filled the air ahead.

"No! Oh no!" Jondalar cried out in anguish, running forward. When the snow settled, a lone animal stood on the brink of a yawning crack. Wolf pointed his nose straight up and wailed a long, desolate howl.

Jondalar threw himself flat on the ice at the edge of the crevasse and looked over the edge. "Ayla!" he cried in desperation. "Ayla!" His stomach was a hard knot. He knew it was useless. She would never hear him. She was dead, at the bottom of the deep crack in the ice.

"Jondalar?"

He heard a small frightened voice coming from far away.

"Ayla?" He felt a rush of hope and looked down. Far below him, standing on a narrow ice ledge that hugged the wall of the deep trench, was the terrified woman. "Ayla, don't move!" he commanded. "Stand perfectly still. That ledge could go, too."

She's alive, he thought. I can't believe it. It's a miracle. But how am I going to get her out?

Inside the icy chasm, Ayla leaned in toward the wall, clinging desperately to a crack and a projecting piece, petrified with fear. She had been plodding through snow halfway to her knees, lost in her own thoughts. She was tired, so tired of it all: tired of the cold, tired of fighting her way through deep snow, tired of the glacier. The trek across the ice had drained her energy, and she was bone-weary with exhaustion. Though she struggled on, her only thought was to reach the end of the massive glacier.

Then she was startled out of her brooding thoughts by a loud crack. She felt the sickening sensation of the solid ice giving way beneath her feet, and she was suddenly reminded of an earthquake many years before. Instinctively she tried to reach for something to hold on to, but the falling ice and snow offered nothing. She felt herself dropping, nearly suffocating in the midst of the avalanching snow bridge that had collapsed beneath her feet, an

d she had no idea how she had ended up on the narrow ledge.

She looked up, afraid to move even that much, for fear the slightest shift in weight would jar her precarious support loose. Above, the sky looked almost black, and she thought she saw the faint glimmerings of stars. An occasional sliver of ice or puff of snow dropped belatedly from the edge, finally letting go of its precarious hold and showering the woman with fragments on the way down.

Her ledge was a narrow jutting extension of an older surface long buried by new snows. It rested on a large jagged boulder that had been torn from solid rock as the ice slowly filled a valley and overflowed down the sides of an adjacent one. The majestically flowing river of ice accumulated great quantities of dust, sand, gravel, and boulders that it gouged out of hard rock, which were slowly carried toward the faster-moving current at the center. These moraines formed long ribbons of rubble on the surface as they moved along the current. When the temperature eventually rose enough to melt the massive glaciers, they would leave evidence of their passage in ridges and hills of unsorted rock.