The Shelters of Stone (Earth's Children 5)

“That deer was young,” Jondalar said. “You could still see his spots. I wonder if his dam died early and left him alone a little too young. He found the male herd, but it didn’t matter. Young animals are always vulnerable.”

“When I was a little girl, I once tried to kill a lynx with my sling,” Ayla said, urging Whinney to a walk.

“With a sling? How old were you?” Jondalar asked.

She thought for a moment, trying to remember. “I think I could count eight or nine years,” she said.

“You could have been killed as easily as that deer,” Jondalar said.

“I know. He moved and the stone just bounced off. It just irritated him and he sprang at me. I managed to roll aside and found a piece of wood and hit him with it, and he went away,” she said.

“Great Mother! That was a close call, Ayla,” he said, leaning back on his horse, which caused Racer to slow down.

“I was afraid to go out alone for a while afterward, but that was when I got the idea to throw two stones. I thought if I had had another one ready, I could have hit him a second time before he came for me. I wasn’t sure if it could be done, but I practiced and worked it out. Still, it wasn’t until I killed a hyena that I felt confident to go hunting again,” she said.

Jondalar just shook his head. When he thought about it, it was amazing that she was still alive. On the way back to their current camp, they saw a herd of animals that made Whinney and Racer pay attention: a horselike animal called an onager, which appeared to be a cross between a horse and donkey, but were a viable species of their own. Whinney stopped to smell their droppings, and Racer nickered at them. The whole herd stopped grazing and looked at the horses. The sound they returned was closer to a bray, but both animals seemed to be aware of their similarity.

They also saw a female saiga antelope with two young. Saiga were goatlike animals with Overhanging noses who preferred plains or steppes, no matter how barren, to hills or mountains. Ayla remembered that the saiga antelope was Iza’s totem. The following day they saw another herd of animals that bothered Ayla more than she wanted to admit: horses. Both Whinney and Racer were drawn to them.

Ayla and Jondalar studied them and noticed some differences between the wild herd and the animals they had brought with them from the east. Rather than Whinney’s dun-yellow color, which was most common all over, or even the rare dark brown of Racer’s coat, most of the horses in this herd were a bluish-gray color with a white belly. They all, their two included, had similar stand-up brushlike black manes and black tails, black stripes down their backbones, and black lower legs, with some suggestion of striping on their lower haunches. They were generally small horses, broad backed with rounded bellies, but the herd animals seemed to stand a fraction higher and had slightly shorter muzzles.

The herd was watching Whinney and Racer with as much intensity as the two were watching the herd, but this time Racer’s nicker brought a ringing neigh of challenge in return. She and Jondalar looked at each other when they heard the call and saw a large stallion coming toward them from the back of the herd. By tacit agreement, Ayla and Jondalar rode their horses in another direction as fast as they could. Jondalar did not want Racer to be drawn into a fight with the herd stallion, and with Wolf being gone so much of the time, Ayla was afraid the horses, too, might be tempted to leave her and decide to live with their own land.

In the next few days, Wolf spent some time with them, which made Ayla feel as though her family were back together. They made a point of staying away from a big wild boar digging for truffles, laughed at a pair of otters playing in a pond that was formed by a dam built by a reclusive beaver that had quickly dived into the water when he saw them. They saw the wallow of a bear and some of his hair caught in the bark of a tree, but not the animal itself, and smelled the distinctive musk of a wolverine. They watched a spotted leopard gracefully leap down from a high ledge, and some ibex, wild mountain goats, nimbly vault up the face of an almost perpendicular cliff.

Several female ibex and their young, their tight wool making them seem round and shapeless, with sticks for legs, had come down from the highlands to fatten up on the rich lowland growth. They had long horns that curved over their backs, very wide-set eyes, a hump behind their heads, and hooves that were hard and strong around the edges, with soft, spongy, flexible soles that gripped the hard stone.

Jondalar saw Ayla close her eyes as though concentrating, turning her head back and forth to better hear something. “I think mammoths are coming this way,” she said.

“How do you know? I can’t see anything.”

“I can hear them,” she said, “especially the big male.”

“I can’t hear anything,” Jondalar said.

“It’s a deep, deep rumbling sound,” she said, straining to listen again. “Look, Jondalar! Over there!” she called out, full of excitement, when she saw a herd of mammoths in the distance coming in their direction. Ayla was detecting the long-distance bellow of a male mammoth in musth, which was below the auditory range normally heard by humans, but could be heard by a female mammoth in heat for up to Ave miles because such low-level sounds did not attenuate as easily over distance. Though Ayla couldn’t exactly hear it, she could sense the deep call.

The herd was essentially female and their young, but since one of the young females was in heat, several males were crowding around the edges, always hopeful, though the dominant bull of the region was already in consort with her. She had refused the persistent advances of the lesser males until he arrived. Now he kept the others away, since none of them dared to challenge him, which allowed her to eat and nurse her first young calf in between mating sessions.

The thick coat of the woolly mammoth covered the huge animal completely, from the toes to the end of its long nose, including the small ears. As they came closer, the various shades of their fur became more apparent. The little ones had the lightest-colored hair, the females shaded from bright chestnut in the younger ones to the dark brown of the old matriarch. The males became almost black as they aged. The coat had a very dense underfur out of which grew fairly long, straight hairs that kept them very warm even in the coldest of the winters, especially after consuming the sometimes icy water or eating snow or ice. That’s when their bodies tended to become chilled.

“It’s early in the season for mammoths,” he said. “We never used to see them until fall, late fall. Mammoths, rhinos, musk oxen, and reindeer, those are the winter animals.”

On the last day of their isolation, Ayla and Jondalar rose early. They had spent the previous few days exploring the region to the west of The River near a second river that ran nearly parallel to it. They packed all their belongings but wanted to make one more long ride before they went back to the Summer Meeting with all its people and social interactions, which put demands on their time and attention, but brought rewards, satisfaction, and pleasure as well. They had enjoyed the respite, but they were ready to return and looking forward to seeing the people they cared about. They had spent nearly a year with only each other and the animals for company and were familiar with both the joys and the sorrows of solitude.

They took food and water with them, but they were in no hurry and had no particular destination in mind. Wolf had left them two days before, which saddened Ayla. He had been eager to stay with them on their Journey, but he was little more than a puppy then. He was still young. Although it seemed much longer, they could count only one year and about two seasons since the winter they lived with the Mamutoi, when Ayla brought back a fuzzy little wolf who had been born no more than a moon before. For all of Wolf’s great size, he was still a juvenile.

Ayla didn’t know how long wolves lived, but she suspected that the length of their lives was far less than that of most humans, and she thought of Wolf as an adolescent—considered by most mothers and their mates as the most troubling years. Those were the years of exuberant energy and little experience when youngsters, full of life and convinced it would last forever, took chances that endangered their lives. If they lived, they usually gained some background and knowledge that would help them to survive longer. She thought it was probably not much different for wolves, and she couldn’t help worrying.

It had been a cool summer, and drier than Jondalar recalled. On the open plains mini-whirlwinds of dust blew up, spun around for a while, then died, and they were happy to see a small lake ahead. They stopped beside it and shared Pleasures in the shade of a weeping willow, extravagantly full of small lanceolate leaves on boughs that bent to the water’s surface, then rested and talked before going for a swim.

After splashing into the water, Ayla shouted, “I’ll race you across,” and immediately reached out with long, sure strokes. Jondalar followed quickly, slowly gaining on her with his longer arms and powerful muscles, but it was an effort. She looked back, saw him drawing near, and renewed her efforts in a fresh burst of speed. They reached the other side in a dead heat.

“You had a head start, so I won,” Jondalar said as they reached the opposite shore of the small lake and flopped to the ground, breathing hard.

“You should have challenged me first,” Ayla answered, laughing. “We both won.”

They swam at a more leisurely pace back to the other side as the sun passed its zenith and was starting its descent, signaling the last half of the day. They were a little sad as they repacked their things, knowing their idyllic respite was nearly over. They mounted the horses and headed in the direction of the Summer Meeting camp, but Ayla missed Wolf and wished he was with them.