They started back to the Great Mother River with Ayla leading the way over the same trail that she had followed to find the S’Armunai Camp, but when they reached the river crossing, they decided to ford the smaller tributary and then head southwest. They rode across country over the windy plains of the ancient lowland basin that separated the two major mountain systems, heading for the river.
Despite the scant snowfall, they often had to take cover from blizzardlike conditions. In the intense cold, the dry snowflakes were picked up and blown from place to place by the unremitting winds until they were ground into frozen grit, sometimes mixed with the pulverized particles of rock dust—loess—from the margins of the moving glaciers. When the wind blew especially hard, it blasted their skin raw. The withered grass in the most exposed places had long since been flattened, but the winds that kept snow from accumulating, except in sheltered pockets, bared the sere and yellowed fodder enough for the horses to graze.
For Ayla, the trek back was much faster—she was not trying to follow a trail over difficult terrain—but Jondalar was surprised at the distance they had to travel before reaching the river. He hadn’t realized how far north they had been. He guessed that the S’Armunai Camp was not far from the Great Ice.
His speculation was correct. If they had gone north, they could have reached the massive frontal wall of the continental ice sheet in a walk of a handful or two of days. In early summer, just before they started on their Journey, they had hunted mammoths at the frozen face of the same vast northern barrier, but far to the east. Since then, they had traveled down the full length of the eastern side of a great curved arc of mountains, around the southern base, and up the western flank of the range almost to the land-spanning glacier again.
Leaving behind the last outliers and flysch foothills of the mountains that had dominated their travels, they turned west when they reached the Great Mother River and began approaching the northern foreland of the even larger and loftier range to the west. They were retracing their steps, looking for the place where they had left their equipment and supplies, following the same route they had begun earlier in the season, when Jondalar thought they had plenty of time … until the night that Whinney was taken by the wild herd.
“The landmarks seem familiar—it should be around here,” he said.
“I think you’re right. I remember that bluff, but everything else looks so different,” Ayla said, surveying the changed landscape with dismay.
More snow had accumulated and settled in this vicinity. The edge of the river was frozen, and, with the snow blown into drifts and filling every depression, it was hard to know where the bank ended and the river began. Strong winds and ice, which had formed on branches during an alternate freezing and thawing earlier in the season, had brought down several trees. Brush and brambles sagged under the weight of the frozen water clinging to them; covered with snow, they often appeared to the travelers to be hillocks or mounds of rocks until they broke through when they attempted to climb them.
The woman and man stopped near a small stand of trees and carefully scanned the area, trying to find something that would give them a hint of the site of their stashed tent and food.
“We must be close. I know this is the right area, but everything is so different,” Ayla said, then paused and looked at the man. “Many things are different from what they seem, aren’t they, Jondalar?”
He looked at her with a puzzled expression. “Well, yes, in winter things look different than in summer.”
“I don’t mean just the land,” Ayla said. “It’s hard to explain. It’s like when we left, and S’Armuna told you to tell your mother that she sends her love, but she said Bodoa sends it. That was the name your mother called her, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, I’m sure that’s what she meant. When she was young she was probably called Bodoa.”
“But she had to give up her own name when she became S’Armuna. Just like the Zelandoni you talk about, the one you knew as Zolena,” Ayla said.
“The name is given up willingly. It’s part of becoming One Who Serves the Mother,” Jondalar said.
“I understand. It was the same when Creb became The Mog-ur. He didn’t have to give up his birth name, but when he was conducting a ceremony as The Mog-ur, he was a different person. When he was Creb, he was like his birth totem, the Roe Deer, shy and quiet, never saying much, almost as though he were watching from a hiding place. But when he was Mog-ur, then he was powerful and commanding, like his Cave Bear totem,” Ayla said. “He was never quite what he seemed.”
“You’re a little like that, Ayla. Most of the time you listen a lot and don’t say much, but when someone is hurting or in trouble, you almost become a different person. You take control. You tell people what to do, and they do it.”
Ayla frowned. “I never thought of it that way. It’s just that I want to help.”
“I know that. But it’s more than wanting to help. You usually know what to do, and most people recognize that. I think that’s why they do what you say. I think you could be One Who Serves the Mother, if you wanted to,” Jondalar said.
Ayla’s frown deepened. “I don’t think I would want that. I wouldn’t want to give up my name. It’s the only thing I have left from my real mother, from the time before I lived with the Clan,” the young woman said. Then she suddenly tensed and pointed at a snow-covered mound that seemed unusually symmetrical. “Jondalar! Look over there.”
The man looked where she pointed, not seeing what she saw at first; then the shape leaped into his awareness. “Could that be …?” he said, urging Racer forward.
The mound was in the middle of a tangle of briars, which increased their excitement. They dismounted. Jondalar found a sturdy branch and beat their way through the thicket of canes. When he reached the middle and hit the symmetrical mound, the snow fell away, revealing their upturned bowl boat.
“That’s it!” Ayla cried.
They stomped and beat down the long thorny runners until they could reach the boat and the carefully wrapped packages cached underneath.
Their storage place had not been entirely effective, though it was Wolf who gave them the first indication. He was obviously agitated by a scent still clinging to the area, and when they found wolf scat, they understood why. Wolves had vandalized their cache. Attempts to tear open carefully wrapped bundles had succeeded in some cases. Even the tent was torn, but they were surprised it wasn’t worse. Wolves usually couldn’t stay away from leather, and once they got hold of it, they loved to chew it up.
“The repellent! That must have been what kept them from doing more damage,” Jondalar said, pleased that Ayla’s mixture had kept not just their canine traveling companion away from their things, but had later kept away the other wolves as well. “And all the while I thought that Wolf was making our Journey more difficult. Instead, if it hadn’t been for him, we probably wouldn’t even have a tent. Come here, boy,” Jondalar said, patting his chest and inviting the animal to jump up and put his paws on it. “You did it again! Saved our lives, or at least our tent.”
Ayla watched him grab the thick far of the wolf’s neck and smiled. She was pleased to see his change in attitude toward the animal. It wasn’t that Jondalar had ever been unkind to him, or even that he disliked him. It was just that he’d never been so openly friendly and affectionate before. It was obvious that Wolf enjoyed the attention, too.
Though they would have sustained much more damage if it hadn’t been for the wolf repellent, it hadn’t kept the wolves away from their emergency food stores. They suffered a devastating loss. Most of their dried meat and cakes of traveling food were gone, and many of the packets of dried fruit, vegetables, and grain had been torn open or were missing, perhaps taken by other animals after the wolves had left.
“Maybe we should have taken more of the food the S’Armunai offered us when we left,” Ayla said, “but they had little enough for themselves. I suppose we could go back.”
“I’d rather not go back,” Jondalar said. “Let’s see what we have. With hunting, we may have enough to make it as far as the Losadunai. Thonolan and I met some of them and stayed overnight with them. They asked us to come back and spend some time with them.”
“Would they give us food to continue our Journey?” Ayla asked.
“I think so,” Jondalar said. Then he smiled. “In fact, I know they will. I have a future claim on them!”
“A future claim?” Ayla said, with a questioning frown. “Are they your kin? Like the Sharamudoi?”
“No, they’re not kin, but they are friendly, and they have traded with the Zelandonii. Some of them know the language.”
“You’ve talked about it before, but I never have quite understood what a ‘future claim’ means, Jondalar.”
“A future claim is a promise to give whatever is asked for, at some time in the future, in exchange for something given or, more usually, won in the past. Mostly it’s used to pay a debt when someone has been gaming and lost more than that person can pay, but it’s used in other ways, too,” the man explained.
“What other ways?” Ayla asked. She had a feeling there was more to the idea, and that it would be important for her to understand.
“Well, sometimes to repay someone for something he’s done, usually something special, but difficult to value,” Jondalar said. “Since there is no limit placed on it, a future claim can be a heavy obligation, but most people will not ask for more than is appropriate. Often just accepting the obligation of a future claim shows trust and good faith. It’s a way of offering friendship.”
Ayla nodded. There was more to it.
“Laduni owes me a future claim,” the man continued. “It is not a major claim, but he is required to give me whatever I ask, and I could ask for anything. I think he’ll be glad to fulfill his obligation with nothing more than a little food, which he would probably give us anyway.”
“Is it far to the Losadunai?” Ayla asked.
“It’s quite a distance. They live at the western end of these mountains, and we’re at the eastern end, but it’s not hard traveling if we follow the river. We will have to cross it, though. They live on the other side, but we can do that farther upstream,” Jondalar said.
They decided to camp there overnight, and they carefully went through all their belongings. It was mostly food that was gone. When they put all they could salvage together, it made a meager pile, but they realized the situation could have been worse. They would have to hunt and gather extensively along the way, but most of their gear was intact and would be entirely serviceable with some mending and repairing, except for the meat-keeper, which had been chewed to shreds. The bowl boat had protected their cache from the weather, if not from the wolves. In the morning they had to make a decision about whether or not to continue dragging along the round, skin-covered boat.
“We’re getting into more mountainous country. It could be more trouble taking it than leaving it behind,” Jondalar said.
Ayla had been checking over the poles. Of the three poles she had used to keep their food away from animals, one was broken, but they only needed two for the travois. “Why don’t we take it along for now, and if it turns out to be a real problem, we can always leave it later,” she said.
Traveling west, they soon left behind the low-lying basin of windy plains. The east-west course of the Great Mother River, which they followed, marked the line of a great battle between the most powerful forces of the earth, waged in the infinitely slow motion of geologic time. To the south was the foreland of the high western mountains, whose uppermost reaches were never warmed by the gentle days of summer. The lofty prominences accumulated snow and ice year after year and, farther back, the tallest peaks of the range glistened in the clear, cold air.
The highlands on the north were the basic crystalline rock of an immense massif, rounded and smoothed vestiges of ancient mountains worn down over eons of time. They had risen from the land in the earliest epoch and were anchored to the deepest bedrock. Against that immovable foundation, the irresistible force of continents, moving slowly and inexorably from the south, had crushed and folded the earth’s crust of hard rock, uplifting the massive system of mountains that stretched across the land.
But the ancient massif did not escape unscathed from the great forces that created the high-peaked mountains. The tilting, faulting, and breaking of the rock, seen in the disruption of its solidified crystal structure, told a story in stone of the violent folding and thrusting it endured as it held firm against the inconceivable pressures from the south. In the same epoch, not only were the high western range on their left, and another even farther west, uplifted by moving continents pushing against unyielding bedrock, but so were the long curved eastern range they had skirted, and the entire series of ranges that continued eastward to the tallest peaks on earth.
Later, during the age of ice, when yearly temperatures were lower, the frozen crown extended far down the sides of the massive mountain ranges, covering even moderate elevations with a sparkling crystal crust. Filling in and enlarging valleys and rifts as it slowly crept along, the glacial ice left behind outwashing sheets and terraces of gravel, and it carved sharp projecting towers of stone out of the rough-hewn younger pinnacles. Snow and ice also covered the northern highlands in winter. But only the highest elevation, nearest the frosted mountains, sustained an actual glacier, an enduring layer of ice that persisted summer and winter.
With the rounded roots of the eroded mountains to the north sprawling out in comparatively level tablelands and terraces, the upper courses of the rivers that flowed across the ancient land had shallow valleys and gentle grades, though they became more rugged through the middle of their courses. Except for those that fell directly off the face of the massif, rivers coming down the steeper slopes of the southern side flowed faster. The demarcation between the gentle northern highland and the mountainous south was the fertile land of rich loess through which the Great Mother River flowed.
Ayla and Jondalar were heading almost due west as they continued their Journey, traveling along the northern bank of the waterway through the open plains of the river valley. While no longer the huge voluminous Mother of rivers that she had been downstream, the Great Mother River was still substantial, and after a few days, true to character, she separated once again into several channels.
Half a day’s travel beyond, they reached another large tributary whose roiling confluence, tumbling down from higher ground, looked formidable, with icicles extended into frozen curtains and mounds of broken ice lining both banks. No longer were the rivers joining on the north coming from the uplands and foothills of the familiar mountains they were leaving behind. This water came from the unfamiliar terrain to the west. Rather than cross the perilous river, or attempt to follow it upstream, Jondalar decided to backtrack and cross the several branches of the Mother instead.
It turned out to be a good choice. Though some of the channels were wide and choked with ice along the edges, for the most part the frigid water barely reached as high as the horses’ flanks. They didn’t think much about it until later that evening, but Ayla and Jondalar, the two horses, and the wolf had finally crossed the Great Mother River. After their dangerous and traumatic adventures on other rivers, they accomplished it with so little incident that it seemed an anticlimax, but they were not sorry.
In the deep cold of winter, simply traveling was dangerous enough. Most people were snugly settled in warm lodges, and friends and kin would come looking if anyone was outside for too long. Ayla and Jondalar were entirely on their own. If anything happened, they had only each other, and their animal companions, to depend on.
The land gradually sloped upward, and they began to notice a subtle shift in the vegetation. Fir and larch appeared among the spruce and pine near the river. The temperature on the plains of the river valleys was extremely cold; due to atmospheric inversions, often colder than it was higher in the surrounding mountains. Although snow and ice whitened the highlands that flanked them, snow seldom fell on the river valley. The few light, dry sittings that did produced little buildup on the frozen ground, except in hollows and depressions, and sometimes not even there. When snow was lacking, the only way they could get drinking water for themselves and the animals was to use their stone axes to chop ice from the frozen river and then melt it.
It made Ayla more aware of the animals that roamed the plains along the valley of the Mother. They were the same varieties as those they had seen on the steppes all along the way, but the cold-loving creatures predominated. She knew these animals could subsist on the dry vegetation that was easily available on the subfreezing but essentially snowless plains, but she wondered how they found water.
She thought that wolves and other carnivores probably derived some of their liquid requirement from the blood of those they hunted for food, and they ranged over a large territory and could find pockets of snow or loose ice to chew. But what about horses and the other grazing and browsing animals? How did they find water in a land that in winter was a frozen desert? There was enough snow in some areas, but others were barren regions of rock and ice. Yet no matter how dry, if there was some kind of fodder, it was inhabited by animals.
Although still rare, Ayla saw more woolly rhinoceroses than she had ever seen in one place, and though they didn’t herd together, whenever she saw rhinos, they often saw musk-oxen, too. Both species preferred the open, windy, dry land, but the rhinos liked grass and sedge, and musk-oxen, true to the goatlike creatures they were, browsed on woodier brush. Large reindeer and the gigantic megaceroses with massive antlers also shared the frozen land, and horses with thick winter coats, but if there was one animal that stood out among the populations in the valley of the upper course of the Great Mother River, it was mammoths.
Ayla never grew tired of watching the huge beasts. Though they were occasionally hunted, they were so unafraid that they seemed almost tame. They often allowed the woman and man to come quite close, sensing no danger from them. The danger was, if anything, to the humans. Though woolly mammoths were not the most gigantic examples of their species, they were the most gigantic animals the humans had ever seen—or that most people were ever likely to see—and with their shaggy coats even more filled out for winter, and their immense curved tusks, they looked bigger, up close, than Ayla remembered.
Their enormous tusks began, in calves, with inch-and-a-half-long tushes, enlarged upper incisors. After a year, the baby tushes were lost and replaced by permanent tusks that grew continually from then on. While the tusks of mammoths were social adornments, important in interactions with their own kind, they also had a more practical function. They were used to break up ice, and the ice-breaking abilities of mammoths were phenomenal.
The first time Ayla observed the practice, she had been watching a herd of females approach the frozen river. Several of them used their tusks, somewhat smaller and straighter than the ivory shafts of males, to tear out ice that was caught in the lee of rock crevices. It puzzled her at first, until she noticed a small one pick up a piece with her little trunk and put it in her mouth.
“Water!” Ayla said. “That’s how they get water, Jondalar. I was wondering about that.”
“You’re right. I never thought much about it before, but now that you mention it, I think Dalanar said something about that. But there are lots of sayings about mammoths. The only one I remember is, ‘Never go forth when mammoths go north,’ though you could say the same for rhinos.”
“I don’t understand that saying,” Ayla said.
“It means a snowstorm is coming,” Jondalar said. “They always seem to know. Those big woollies don’t like snow much. It covers up their food. They can use their tusks and their trunks to brush away some, but not when it gets really deep, and they get bogged down in it. It’s especially bad when it’s thawing and freezing. They lie down at night when it’s still slushy from the afternoon sun, and by morning their fur is frozen to the ground. They can’t move. They are easy to hunt then, but if there are no hunters around and it doesn’t thaw, they can slowly starve. Some have been known to freeze to death, especially little ones.”
“What does that have to do with going north?”
“The closer you get to the ice, the less snow there is. Remember how it was when we went hunting mammoths with the Mamutoi? The only water around was the stream coming from the glacier itself, and that was summer. In winter, that’s all frozen.”
“Is that why there’s so little snow around here?”
“Yes, this region is always cold and dry especially in winter. Everyone says it’s because the glaciers are so close. They are on the mountains to the south, and the Great Ice is not very far north. Most of the land in between is flathead … I mean Clan country. It starts a little west of here.” Jondalar noticed Ayla’s expression at his slip of the tongue, and he felt embarrassed. “Anyway, there’s another saying about mammoths and water, but I can’t remember exactly how it goes. It’s something like, ‘If you can’t find water, look for a mammoth.’ ”
“I can understand that saying,” Ayla said, looking beyond him. Jondalar turned to see.
The female mammoths had moved upstream and joined forces with a few males. Several females were working on a narrow, almost vertical, bank of ice that had built up along the river’s edge. The bigger males, including one dignified elder with streaks of gray hair, whose impressive, if less useful, tusks had grown so long that they were crossed in front, were scraping and gouging out huge chunks of ice from the banks. Then, lifting them high with their trunks, the mammoths threw the ice down with a loud crash to shatter into more usable pieces, all accompanied by bellowings, snortings, stompings, and trumpetings. The huge woolly creatures seemed to be making a game of it.
The noisy business of breaking ice was a practice that all mammoths learned. Even young ones only two or three years old, who had barely lost their baby tushes, showed wear on the outside edges at the ends of their tiny two-inch tusks from scraping ice, and the tips of the twenty-inch prongs of ten-year-olds were worn smooth from moving their heads up and down against the vertical surfaces. By the time the young mammoths reached twenty-five, their tusks were beginning to grow forward, upward, and inward, and the way they used them changed. The lower surfaces began to show some of the wear of scraping ice and brushing aside what snow did fall on the dry grass and plants of the steppes. Ice breaking, though, could be a dangerous business, since tusks often broke along with the ice. But even broken ends were often worn smooth again by later scraping and gouging of ice.
Ayla noticed that other animals had gathered around. The herds of woolly animals, with their powerful tusks, broke up enough ice for themselves, including their young and old, and for a community of followers as well. Many animals benefited by trailing close on the heels of migrating mammoths. The big woollies not only created piles of loose chunks of ice in winter that were chewed for moisture by animals other than themselves, in summer they sometimes used their tusks and feet to dig holes in dry riverbeds, which would fill with water. The waterholes thus created were also used by other animals to slake their thirst.
As they followed the frozen waterway, the woman and man rode, and often walked, fairly close to the banks of the Great Mother River. With so little snow, there was no soft blanket of concealing white to cover the land, and the dormant vegetation exposed its drab winter face. The tall stalks of last summer’s phragmite reeds and spikes of cattails rose valiantly from their frozen bed of marshland, while dead ferns and sedges lay prostrate near the ice heaped up along the edges. Lichens clung to rocks like the scabs of healing wounds, and mosses had shriveled into brittle dry mats.
The long, skeletal fingers of leafless limbs rattled in the sharp and piercing wind, though only a practiced eye could discern whether they were willow, birch, or alder brush. The deep green conifers—spruces, firs, and pines—were easier to distinguish, and though the larches had dropped their needles, their shape was revealing. When they climbed to higher elevations to hunt, they saw recumbent dwarf birch and knee pine clinging close to the ground.
Small game provided most of their meals; big game usually required more time to stalk and hunt than they wanted to spend, although they didn’t hesitate to try for a deer when they saw one. The meat froze quickly, and even Wolf didn’t have to hunt for a while. Rabbit, hare, and an occasional beaver, abundant in the mountainous region, were more usual fare, but the steppe animals of drier continental climates, marmots and giant hamsters, were also prevalent, and they were always glad to see ptarmigan, the fat white birds with the feathered feet.
Ayla’s sling was often put to good use; they tended to save the spear-throwers for larger game. It was easier to find stones than to make new spears to replace missiles that were lost or broken. But some days hunting took more of their time than they wished, and anything that took time made Jondalar edgy.
They often supplemented their diet, which was heavily concentrated on lean meat, with the inner bark of conifers and other trees, usually cooked into a broth with meat, and they were delighted when they found berries, frozen but still clinging to the bush. Juniper berries, which were particularly good with meat if they didn’t use too many, were prevalent; rose hips were more sporadic, but usually plentiful when found, and always sweeter after freezing; creeping crowberry, with a needlelike evergreen foliage, had small shiny black berries that often persisted through the winter, as did blue bearberries and red lingonberries.
Grains and seeds were also added to the meat soups, gathered painstakingly from dried grasses and herbs that still bore seed heads, though it took time to find them. Most of the foliage of seed-bearing herbs had long since disintegrated, the plants lying dormant until spring thaws would awaken them to new life. Ayla wished for the dried vegetables and fruits that had been destroyed by the wolves, though she didn’t begrudge the supplies she had given to the S’Armunai.
Though Whinney and Racer were grass eaters almost exclusively in summer, Ayla noticed that their diet had extended to browsing on twig tips, chewing through to the inner bark of trees, and included a particular variety of lichen, the kind reindeer preferred. She collected some and tested small amounts on herself, then made some for both of them. They found the taste strong but tolerable, and she was experimenting with ways to cook it.
Another source of winter food was small rodents such as voles, mice, and lemmings; not the animals themselves—Ayla usually let Wolf have those as a reward for helping to sniff them out—but their nests. She looked for the subtle features that hinted at a burrow, then broke through the frozen ground with a digging stick to find the small animals surrounded by the seeds, nuts, and bulbs they had laid by.
And Ayla also had her medicine bag. When she thought of all the damage that had been done to the things they had cached, she shuddered to think about what would have happened if she had left her medicine bag. Not that she would have, but the thought of losing it made her stomach churn. It was so much a part of her that she would have felt lost without it. But even more, the materials in the otter-skin bag, and the long history of lore accumulated by trial and error that had been passed down to her, kept the travelers healthier than either of them fully realized.
For example, Ayla knew that various herbs, barks, and roots could be used to treat, and avoid getting, certain diseases. Though she didn’t call them deficiency diseases, or have a name for the vitamins and trace minerals the herbs contained, or even know exactly how they worked, she carried many of them with her in her medicine bag, and she regularly made them into the teas they drank.
She also used the vegetation that was readily available even in winter, such as the needles of evergreens, particularly the newest growth from the tips of branches, which were rich in the vitamins that prevented scurvy. She regularly added them to their daily teas, mostly because they liked the tangy, citruslike flavor, though she did know they were beneficial and had a good idea of when and how to use them. She had often made needle tea for people with soft bloody gums whose teeth became loose during long winters of subsisting essentially on dried meats, either by choice or necessity.
They developed a pattern of opportunistic foraging as they moved west that allowed them as much time as possible for traveling. Though an occasional meal was skimpy, they seldom missed one entirely, but with so little fat in their diet and the constant exercise every day, they did lose weight. They didn’t talk about it often, but they were both getting weary of the traveling and longed to reach their destination. During the day, they didn’t talk much at all.
Riding the horses, or walking and leading them, Ayla and Jondalar often went single-file, close enough to hear a comment if it was spoken in a loud voice, but not close enough for casual conversation. As a result, they both had long stretches of quiet time to think their own thoughts, which they sometimes talked about in the evening when they were eating or lying together side by side in their sleeping furs.
Ayla often thought about their recent experiences. She had been thinking about the Camp of the Three Sisters, comparing the S’Armunai and their cruel leaders, like Attaroa and Brugar, with their relatives, the Mamutoi, and their cooperative and friendly sister-brother coleaders. And she wondered about the Zelandonii, the people of the man she loved. Jondalar had so many good qualities, she felt sure they had to be basically good people, but considering their feelings toward the Clan, she still wondered how they would accept her. Even S’Armuna had made oblique references to their strong aversion to the ones they called flatheads, but she felt sure no Zelandonii would ever be as cruel as the woman who had been the leader of the S’Armunai.
“I don’t know how Attaroa could do the things she did, Jondalar,” Ayla remarked as they were finishing an evening meal. “It makes me wonder.”
“What do you wonder about?”
“My kind of people, the Others. When I first met you, I was so grateful just to finally find someone like me. It was a relief to know I wasn’t the only one in the world. Then, when you turned out to be so wonderful, so good and caring and loving, I thought all of my kind of people would be like you,” she said, “and it made me feel good.” She was going to add, until he reacted with such disgust when she told him about her life with the Clan, but she changed her mind when she saw Jondalar smiling, flushed with embarrassed delight, obviously pleased.
He had felt a rush of warmth at her words, thinking that she was pretty wonderful, too.
“Then, when we met the Mamutoi, Talut and the Lion Camp,” Ayla continued, “I was sure the Others were all good people. They helped each other, and everyone had a voice in the decisions. They were friendly and laughed a lot, and they didn’t reject an idea just because they hadn’t heard about it before. There was Frebec, of course, but he turned out not to be so bad, either. Even those at the Summer Meeting who sided against me for a while because of the Clan, and even some of the Sharamudoi, did it out of misplaced fear, not evil intentions. But Attaroa was as vicious as a hyena.”
“Attaroa was only one person,” Jondalar reminded her.
“Yes, but look how many she influenced. S’Armuna used her sacred knowledge to help Attaroa kill and hurt people, even if she did feel sorry about it later, and Epadoa was willing to do anything Attaroa said,” Ayla said.
“They had reasons for it. The women had been badly treated,” Jondalar said.
“I know the reasons. S’Armuna thought she was doing the right thing, and I think Epadoa loved to hunt and loved Attaroa for letting her do it. I know that feeling. I love to hunt, too, and I went against the Clan and did things I wasn’t supposed to so I could hunt.”
“Well, Epadoa can hunt for the whole Camp now, and I don’t think she was so bad,” Jondalar said. “She seemed to be discovering the kind of love a mother feels. Doban told me she promised him she would never hurt him again and would never let anyone else hurt him,” Jondalar said. “Her feelings for him may be even stronger because she hurt him so much and now she has a chance to make up for it.”
“Epadoa didn’t want to hurt those boys. She told S’Armuna that she was afraid if she didn’t do what Attaroa wanted, she would kill them. Those were her reasons. Even Attaroa had reasons. There was so much in her life that was bad, she became an evil thing. She wasn’t human anymore, but no reasons are good enough to excuse her. How could she do the things she did? Even Broud, as bad as he was, was not as bad, and he hated me. He never purposely hurt children. I used to think my kind of people were so good, but I’m not so sure anymore,” she said, looking sad and distressed.
“There are good people and bad people, Ayla, and everyone has some good and some bad in them,” Jondalar said, his wrinkled forehead showing his concern. He sensed that she was trying to fit the new sensibilities she had gathered from her latest unpleasant experience into her personal scheme of things, and he knew it was important. “But most people are decent and try to help each other. They know it’s necessary—after all, you never know when you may need help—and most people would rather be friendly.”
“But there are some who are twisted, like Attaroa,” Ayla said.
“That’s true.” The man nodded, having to agree. “And there are some who only give what they must and would rather not give at all, but that doesn’t make them bad.”
“But one bad person can bring out the worst in good people, like Attaroa did to S’Armuna and Epadoa.”
“I suppose the best we can do is try to keep the evil and cruel ones from causing too much harm. Maybe we should count ourselves lucky there aren’t more like her. But, Ayla, don’t let one bad person spoil the way you feel about people.”
“Attaroa can’t make me feel any different about the people I know, and I’m sure you are right about most people, Jondalar, but she has made me more wary, and more cautious.”
“It doesn’t hurt to be a little cautious, at first, but give people a chance to show their good side before you judge them bad.”
The highland on the north side of the river paced along with them as they continued their westward trek. Wind-sculptured evergreens on the rounded tops and level plateaus of the massif were silhouetted against the sky. The river split out again into several channels across a lowland basin that formed an embayment. The southern and northern boundaries of the valley maintained their characteristic differences, but the base rock was cracked and down-faulted to great depths between the river and the limestone foreland of the high southern mountain. Toward the west was the steep limestone edge of a fault line. The course of the river turned northwest.
The east end of the lowland basin was also bordered by a fault ridge, caused not so much by uplifting of the limestone as by the depression of the land of the embayment. Toward the south, the land spread out on a level grade for some distance before it rose up toward the mountains, but the granite plateau in the north drew closer to the river, until it was rising steeply just across the water.
They camped within the low embayment. In the valley near the river, the smooth gray bark and the bare branches of beech made an appearance among the spruce, fir, pine, and larch; the area was protected enough to shelter the growth of a few large-leafed deciduous trees. Milling around near the trees in seeming confusion was a small herd of mammoths, both females and males. Ayla edged closer to see what was going on.
One mammoth was down, a giant of an elder with enormous tusks that crossed in front. She wondered if it was the same group they had seen earlier breaking ice. Could there be two mammoths who were so old in the same region? Jondalar walked up beside her.
“I’m afraid he’s dying. I wish there was something I could do for him,” Ayla said.
“His teeth are probably gone. Once that happens, there is nothing anyone can do, except what they are doing. Staying with him, keeping him company,” Jondalar said.
“Perhaps none of us can ask for more,” Ayla said.
In spite of their relatively compact size, each adult mammoth consumed large quantities of food every day, primarily woody-stemmed tall grass and occasional small trees. With such a rough diet, their teeth were essential. They were so important that a mammoth’s lifespan was determined by its teeth.
A woolly mammoth developed several sets of large grinding molars throughout its span of some seventy years, usually six to a side both upper and lower. Each tooth weighed about eight pounds and was especially adapted to grinding coarse grasses. The surface was made up of many extremely hard, thin, parallel ridges—plates of dentine covered with enamel—and had higher crowns and more ridges than the teeth of any other of its species, before or since. Mammoths were primarily grass eaters. The shreds of bark that they tore from trees, particularly in winter, the spring forbs, and the occasional leaves, branches, and small trees, were only incidental to their main diet of tough fibrous grass.
The earliest and smallest grinders were formed near the front of each jaw, and the rest grew in behind and moved forward in a steady progression during the animal’s life, with only one or two teeth in use at any one time. As hard as it was, the important grinding surface wore down as it moved toward the front, and the roots dissolved. Finally the last thin useless fragments of tooth were dropped as the new ones moved into place.
The final teeth were in use by age fifty, and when they were nearly gone, the old gray-hair could not chew the tough grass anymore. Softer leaves and plants could still be eaten, spring plants, but in other seasons they were not available. In desperation, the undernourished elder often left the herd, searching for greener pastures, but found only death. The herd knew when the end was close, and it wasn’t uncommon to see them sharing the elder’s last days.
The other mammoths were as protective of the dying as they were of newborns, and they gathered around trying to make the fallen one get up. When all was over, they buried the dead ancestor under piles of dirt, grass, leaves, or snow. Mammoths were even known to bury other dead animals, including humans.
Ayla and Jondalar and their four-legged traveling companions found their way getting steeper and more difficult when they left behind the lowland and the mammoths. They were approaching a gorge. A foot of the ancient massif of the north had stretched too far south and was split by the dividing waters of the river. They climbed higher as the river rushed through the narrow defile, moving too fast to freeze but carrying with it ice floes from quieter sections farther west. It was strange to see moving water after so much ice. In front of the high-peaked ramparts to the south were mesas, massiflike hills topped with extensive plateaus, carrying thick stands of conifers, their branches sprinkled with snow. The thin limbs of deciduous trees and brush were etched in white from a coating of freezing rain, which accentuated each twig and branch, captivating Ayla with their winter beauty.
The altitude continued to increase, the lowlands between the ridges never dipping quite as low as the preceding ones. The air was cold, crisp, and clear, and even when it was cloudy, no snow fell. Precipitation decreased as winter deepened. The only moisture in the air was the warm breath expelled by humans and animals.
The river of ice became smaller each time they passed a frozen tributary valley. At the west end of the lowland was another gorge. They climbed the rocky ridge, and when they reached the highest place, they looked ahead and stopped, awed by the sight. Ahead the river had split again. The travelers didn’t know it was the last time that it would divide into the branches and channels that had characterized its progress across the flat plains over which it had flowed for so much of its length. The gorge just before the lowlands curved sharply as it gathered the separate channels into one, causing a furious whirlpool that carried ice and floating debris into its depths, before disgorging it in a gush farther downstream, where it rapidly refroze.
They stopped at the highest place, looked down, and watched a small log whirling around and around, going deeper and deeper with each spiraling turn.
“I would not want to fall into that,” Ayla said, shuddering at the thought.
“Nor would I,” Jondalar responded.
Ayla’s gaze was drawn to another site in the distance. “Where are those clouds of steam coming from, Jondalar?” she asked. “It’s freezing, and the hills are covered with snow.”
“There are pools of hot water over there, water warmed by the hot breath of Doni Herself. Some people are afraid to go near such places, but the people I want to visit live near such a deep hot well, or so they told me. The hot wells are sacred to them, even though some smell very bad. It’s said they use the water to cure illness.”
“How long before we reach those people you know? The ones who use water to cure illness,” she asked. Anything that might add to her wealth of medical knowledge always piqued her interest. Besides, food was getting scarcer, or they didn’t want to take the time to look for it—but they had gone to bed hungry a couple of days.
The slope of the land increased noticeably beyond the last flat basin. They were hemmed in by highlands on both sides as the mountains pressed in. The mantel of ice to the south was increasing in height as they continued west. Far to the south and still somewhat west, two peaks soared far above all the other rugged mountaintops, one higher than the other, like a mated pair watching over their brood of children.
Where the highland leveled out near a shallower place in the river, Jondalar turned south, away from the river, toward a cloud of rising steam in the distance. They climbed a low ridge and looked down from the top across a snow-covered meadow at a steaming pool of water near a cave.
Several people had noticed their approach and stared in consternation, too shocked to move. One man, however, was aiming a spear at them.