The fifty men and women selected for the first mammoth hunt of the season had reached the disagreeable but inevitable bogs. The permanently frozen ground beneath the surface layer, softened now by spring and summer melt, allowed no drainage to percolate through. Where the accumulation of melt was greater than could be dissipated by evaporation, the result was standing water. On any extended trek in the warmer season, it was likely that tracts of accumulated ground moisture would be found, ranging from large shallow melt lakes to still ponds that reflected the moving sky to swampy mires.
It had been too late in the afternoon to decide whether to attempt to cross the bog or find a way around it. Camp was quickly set up and fires lit to deter the flying hordes. The first night on the trek, those who had not seen Ayla’s firestone used before made the usual exclamations of surprise and awe, but by now it was taken for granted that she would light the fire. The tents they used were simple shelters made of several hides that had been sewn together to make one large covering. Its shape depended upon structural materials that were found or brought with them. A mammoth skull with large tusks still intact might be used to hold up the hide cover, or the supple strength of a living dwarf willow could be bent to the task, even mammoth spears served double duty as tent poles on occasion. Sometimes it was just used as an extra ground cloth. This time the cover hide, which was shared by the hunters from Lion Camp with a few others, was draped across a slanting ridgepole with one end jammed into the ground and the other braced up by the crotch of a tree.
After they had made camp, Ayla searched around the dense vegetation near the bog and was pleased to find certain small plants with hand-shaped, dark green leaves. Digging down to the underground system of roots and rhizomes, she collected several, and boiled the greenish-yellow goldenseal root to make a healing and insect-repelling wash for the sore eyes and throats of the horses. When she used it on her own mosquito-bitten skin, several others asked to use it and she ended up treating the insect bites of the entire hunting party. She added more of the pounded root to fat to make a salve for the next day. Then she found a patch of fleabane and pulled up several plants to throw on the fire, as an additional deterrent along with ordinary smoke to help keep a small area close to the fire relatively insect free.
But in the cool damp of morning the flying scourges were quiescent. Ayla shivered and rubbed her arms, but made no move to return for a warmer covering. She stared at the dark water, hardly noticing the gradual encroachment of light from the east filling the entire vault of the sky, and bringing into sharp focus the tangled vegetation. She felt a warm fur drape over her shoulders. Gratefully she pulled it around her, and felt arms encircle her waist from behind.
“You’re cold, Ayla. You’ve been out here a long time,” Ranec said.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she replied.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. Just an uneasy feeling. I can’t explain it.”
“You’ve been troubled ever since the Calling ceremony, haven’t you?” Ranec said.
“I hadn’t thought about it. You may be right.”
“But you didn’t participate. You only watched.”
“I didn’t want to participate, but I’m not sure. Something may have happened,” Ayla said.
Immediately after breakfast, the hunters packed up and started traveling again. At first they attempted to skirt the bog, but there appeared to be no way around without making a long detour. Talut and several other hunt leaders peered into the dense, swampy thicket overhung by a cold misty fog, conferred with some of the others, and finally decided on a route that seemed to offer the easiest passage through.
The waterlogged ground near the edge soon gave way to a quivering fen. Many of the hunters removed their footwear and plunged into the cold, muddy water barefoot. Ayla and Jondalar led the nervous horses in more carefully. Cold-loving vines and long beards of greenish-gray lichen hung from dwarf birch, willow, and alder growing so closely together they formed a miniature arctic jungle. Footing was treacherous. With no solid ground to bind the roots and give stability, the trees grew at unlikely angles and sprawled along the ground, and the hunters struggled to make their way across fallen trunks, twisted brush, and partially submerged roots and branches that snared unsuspecting feet. Tufts of reeds and sedge grass looked deceitfully more substantial than they were, and mosses and ferns camouflaged stinking stagnant pools.
Progress was slow and exhausting. By midmorning, when they stopped to rest, everyone was sweating and warm, even in the shade. Starting out again, Talut ran into a particularly tenacious branch of an alder, and exploding in a rare outburst of anger, chopped at the tree furiously with his massive axe. The bright orange liquid seeping out of gashes in the offending tree resembled blood, and gave Ayla an unpleasant feeling of foreboding.
Nothing was so welcome as firm ground. Tall ferns and even taller grasses, more than the height of a man, grew on the rich clearing near the bog. They turned east to avoid wetlands that extended toward the west, then climbed a rise out of the depression in the plains filled by the bogs, and sighted the joining of a large river and a tributary. Talut, Vincavec, and the leaders of some of the other Camps stopped to consult maps marked on ivory, and scratched more marks on the ground with knives.
As they approached the river, they passed through the middle of a birch forest. Not a forest of the tall sturdy trees of warmer climates, these birches were stunted and dwarfed by the harsh periglacial conditions, yet they were not without beauty. As though pruned and shaped on purpose into endlessly fascinating individual shapes, each tree had a distinctive, pale, delicate grace. But the thin, frail, pendulent branches were misleading. When Ayla tried to break one, it was tough as sinew, and in the wind, they flailed the competing vegetation into submission.
“They’re called the ‘Old Mothers.’ ”
Ayla spun around and saw Vincavec.
“An appropriate name, I think. They remind one never to misjudge the strength of an old woman. This is a sacred grove, and they are guardians of somuti,” he said, pointing toward the ground.
The small quivering light green birch leaves did not entirely block out the sun, and dappled patterns of shade danced lightly on the forest floor thick with leaf mold. Then Ayla noticed, sprouting from the moss under certain trees, the large, white-spotted, bright red mushrooms.
“Those mushrooms, is that what you call somuti? They are poisonous. They can kill you,” Ayla said.
“Yes, of course, unless you know the secrets of preparing them. That is so they will not be used inappropriately. Only those who are chosen may explore the world of somuti.”
“Do they have medicinal qualities? I know of none,” she asked.
“I don’t know. I’m not a Healer. You’d have to ask Lomie,” Vincavec said. Then, before she knew it, he had taken both her hands, and was looking at her, or rather, looking into her, she felt. “Why did you fight me at the Calling ceremony, Ayla? I had prepared the way to the underland for you, but you resisted me.”
Ayla felt a strange sense of internal conflict, pulled two ways. Vincavec’s voice was warm and compelling, and she felt a great desire to lose herself in the black depths of his eyes, to float in the cool dark pools, to give in to anything he wished. But she also felt an overpowering need to break away, to hold herself apart and maintain her own identity. With a wrenching effort of will, she tore her eyes away, and caught a glimpse of Ranec watching them. He quickly turned aside.
“You may have prepared a way, but I wasn’t prepared,” Ayla said, avoiding Vincavec’s gaze. She looked up when he laughed. His eyes were gray, not black.
“You’re good! You’re strong, Ayla. I’ve never met anyone like you. You are so right for the Mammoth Hearth, for the Mammoth Camp. Tell me you’ll share my hearth,” Vincavec said, with every bit of persuasion and feeling he could bring to bear.
“I have Promised Ranec,” she said.
“That doesn’t matter, Ayla. Bring him along, if you wish. I would not mind sharing the Mammoth Hearth with so gifted a carver. Take us both! Or I’ll take you both.” He laughed again. “It would not be the first time. A man has a certain appeal, too!”