The Mammoth Hunters (Earth's Children 3)

“I … I don’t know,” she said, then looked up at the muffled pounding of hooves.

“Ayla, I’m going to take Racer into the river and brush down his legs. Mud is caked up and drying on them. Do you want me to take Whinney, too?” Jondalar said.

“I’ll take her myself,” Ayla said, glad for the excuse to get away. Vincavec was fascinating, but a little frightening.

“She’s over there, near Ranec,” Jondalar said, turning toward the river.

Vincavec’s eves followed after the tall blond man. I wonder what-part he plays in all this, the Mamut-headman thought. They arrived together, and he understands her animals, perhaps as well as she does, but they don’t seem to be lovers, and it’s not because he has trouble with women. Avarie tells me they love him, but he never touches Ayla, never sleeps with her. It’s said he turned down the Womanhood ritual because his feelings were too brotherly. Is that how he feels toward Ayla? Brotherly? Is that why he interrupted us and directed her back to the carver? Vincavec frowned, then carefully pulled up several of the large mushrooms and, with a cord, tied them upside down to the branches of the “Old Mothers” to dry. He planned to get them on the way back.

After they crossed the tributary, they reached a dryer area, with open treeless bogs, farther apart. The honking, clacking, and squealing of waterfowl warned them of the large melt lake ahead. They set up camp not far from it and several people headed for the water to bring back supper. No fish were to be found in the temporary bodies of water, unless they happened to become part of a year-round river or stream, but amid the roots of tall phragmite reeds, bulrushes, sedges, and cattails swam the tadpoles of edible frogs and fire-bellied toads.

By some mysterious seasonal signal a vast array of birds, mostly waterfowl, came north to join the ptarmigan, the golden eagle, and the snowy owl. The spring thaw, that brought renewed plant growth and the great reedy marshes, invited the uncountable numbers of migrating fowl to stop, build nests, and proliferate. Many birds fed on the immature amphibians, and some on the adults, as well as newts and snakes, se

eds and bulbs, on the inevitable insects, even on small mammals.

“Wolf would love this place,” Ayla said to Brecie as she watched a couple of circling birds, with sling in hand, hoping they would come in closer to the edge so she wouldn’t have to wade out too far to retrieve them. “He’s getting very good at going in after them for me.”

Brecie had promised to show Ayla her throwing stick, and wanted to see the young woman’s much-touted expertise with the sling. Both had been mutually impressed. Brecie’s weapon was an elongated, roughly diamond-shaped, crosswise section of leg bone, with the knobby epiphysis at the end removed and the edge sharpened. Its flight was circular, and thrown into a flock, several birds could be killed at one time. Ayla thought the throwing stick was much better for hunting birds than her sling, but the sling had more general application. She could also hunt animals with it.

“You brought the horses, why did you leave the wolf behind?” Brecie asked.

“Wolf is still so young I wasn’t sure how he’d behave on a mammoth hunt, and I didn’t want to take the chance that anything would go wrong on this one. The horses, though, can help bring meat back. Besides, I think Rydag would have been lonely without Wolf,” Ayla said. “I miss them both.”

Brecie was tempted to ask Ayla if she really did have a son like Rydag, then changed her mind. The subject was just too sensitive.

As they continued to head north over the next few days, a distinctive change came over the landscape. The bogs disappeared and, once they left the noisy birds behind, the sound of wind filled the treeless open plains with an eerie, wailing silence and a sense of desolation. The skies became overcast with a dull gray, featureless cloud cover that obscured the sun and hid the stars at night, but it seldom rained. Instead, the air felt dryer, and colder, with a sharp wind that seemed to sap even the moisture from exhaled breath. But an occasional break in the clouds at evening vanquished the dull monotony of the heavens with a sunset so glowing, and so brilliant as it reflected off the moisture-laden upper skies, it left the travelers without words to describe it, daunted by its sheer beauty.

It was a land of far horizons. Low rolling hill followed low rolling hill, with no jagged peaks to lend distance and perspective, and no reed-green marshes to relieve the endless grays, browns, and dusty golds. The plains seemed to go on forever in all directions, except toward the north. There the vast sweep was swallowed by a dense misty fog that hid all signs of the world beyond, and deceived the eye about the distance to it.

The character of the land was neither grassy steppes nor frozen tundra, but a blend of both. Frost and drought-resistant tufted grasses, herbs with dense root systems, miniature woody shrubs of sagebrush and wormwood mingled with white arctic bell heather, miniature rhododendron, and pink crowberry flowers dominating the dainty purple blooms of alpine heath. Blueberry bushes no more than four inches high promised, nonetheless, a profusion of full-sized berries, and prostrate birch crawled along the ground like woody vines.

But even dwarfed trees Were scarce with two sets of growing conditions opposing them. On true northern tundra, summer temperature is too low for germination and growth of tree seeds. On steppes, howling winds, that absorb moisture before it can accumulate, sweep across the landscape, and are as much a prohibiting factor as the cold. The combination left the land both frozen and dry.

Landscape even more bleak greeted the band of hunters as they pushed toward the thick white fog ahead. Bare rock and rubble was exposed, but it was covered with lichens; clinging scaly crusts of yellow, gray, brown, even bright orange that seemed more rock than plant. A few flowering herbs and miniature shrubs persisted, and the tough grasses and sedges covered sizable patches. Even in this wild, dreary place of cold dry winds that seemed incapable of supporting life, life went on.

Clues began to appear that hinted at the secret hidden within the mists. Scratches etched into large slabs of rock; long ridges of sand, stones, and gravel; large stones out of place, as though dropped from the sky by an invisible giant hand. Water washed across the stony ground, in thin streams and gushing cloudy torrents, with no discernible pattern, and as they drew closer cold moisture in the air could at last be felt. Dirty snow lingered in shaded nooks, and in a depression beside a large boulder, old snow surrounded a small pool. Deep within it were shelves of ice of a rich and vivid shade of blue.

The wind shifted in the afternoon, and by the time the travelers set up camp, it was snowing, a dry, blowing snow. Talut and the others were conferring, disturbed. Vincavec had Called to the Mammoth Spirit several times to no avail. They had expected to find the great beasts before this.

At night, lying quietly in her bed, Ayla became aware of mysterious sounds that seemed to be coming from deep within the earth: grindings, poppings, chortlings, gurglings. She couldn’t identify them, had no idea where they came from, and it made her nervous. She tried to sleep, but she kept waking up. Finally toward morning, exhaustion overcame her, and she gave in to slumber.

Ayla knew it was late when she woke up. It seemed unusually bright and everyone else was out of the tent. She grabbed her parka, but got only as far as the opening. When she looked out, she stopped and stared with her mouth hanging open. The shift in the wind had cleared away the summer mist of steaming ice temporarily. She bent her head back to look up at the wall of a glacier towering over her that was so incredibly massive the top was lost in clouds.

Its sheer size made it seem closer than it was, but some gigantic chunks that had once tumbled down the steep jagged wall were strewn together in a jumbled heap perhaps a quarter-mile away. Several people were standing around them. She realized they were the scale that had given her a proper sense of the true size of the immense barrier of ice. The glacier was an incredible spectacle, and incredibly beautiful. In the sunlight—Ayla suddenly noticed the sun was out—it sparkled with millions of shattered crystals of ice that glinted with tints of prismatic hues, but the deep underlying color had tones of the same startling blue that she had seen in the pool. There were no words adequate to describe it; overwhelming had no meaning beside its magnificence, its grandeur, its power.

Ayla finished dressing hurriedly, feeling she had missed out on something. She poured herself a cup of what seemed to be leftover tea with a slight film of ice already forming on top, and discovered it was meat broth instead. She paused only a moment before deciding it was fine, and drank it down. Then she scooped out a ladleful of congealed cooked grains, wrapped them in a thick slice of cold roast meat, and headed toward the rest of the hunters at a fast pace.

“I wondered if you were ever going to wake up,” Talut said, when he saw her coming.

“Why didn’t you wake me?” Ayla asked, then took her last bite.

“It’s not wise to wake someone who is sleeping so soundly, unless it’s an emergency,” Talut answered.

“The spirit needs time for its night travels, so it can come back refreshed,” Vincavec added, coming around to greet her. He made a motion to take both her hands, but she evaded them, quickly brushed his cheek with hers, and was off to examine the ice.

The huge chunks had obviously fallen with some force. They were deeply imbedded, and the ground was churned up around them. That they had also been there for several years was soon apparent, as well. An accumulation of windblown grit, picked up from the rock that was ground to flour at the margins of the ice, coated the top surfaces with a thick layer of dark gray dirt, striated in some places with intervening white layers of compact snow. The surfaces themselves were pitted and rough from melting and refreezing unevenly over the years, and a few small tenacious plants had actually taken root on the ice.

“Come up here, Ayla,” Ranec called. She looked up and saw him standing on top of a high block, tilted slightly askew. She was surprised to see Jondalar beside him. “It’s easy if you come around the side.”