by Jean M. Auel
6
Jondalar rubbed the stubble on his chin and reached for his pack that was propped against a stunted pine. He withdrew a small packet of soft leather, untied the cords and opened the folds, and carefully examined a thin flint blade. It had a slight curvature along its length—all blades cleaved from flint were bowed a little, it was a characteristic of the stone—but the edge was even and sharp. The blade was one of several especially fine tools he had put aside.
A sudden wind rattled the dry limbs of the lichen-scabbed old pine. The gust whipped the tent flap open, billowed through, straining the guy lines and tugging at the stakes, and slapped it shut again. Jondalar looked at the blade, then shook his head and wrapped it up again.
“Time to let the beard grow?” Thonolan said.
Jondalar hadn’t noticed his brother’s approach. “One thing about a beard,” he said. “In summer it may be a bother. Itches when you sweat—more comfortable to shave it off. But it sure helps keep your face warm in winter, and winter is coming.”
Thonolan blew on his hands, rubbing them, then squatted down by the small fire in front of the tent and held them over the flames. “I miss the color,” he said.
“The color?”
“Red. There’s no red. A bush here and there, but everything else just turned yellow and then brown. Grass, leaves.” He nodded in the general direction of the open grassland behind him, then looked toward Jondalar standing near the tree. “Even the pines look drab. There’s ice on puddles and the edges of streams already, and I’m still waiting for fall.”
“Don’t wait too long,” Jondalar said, moving over and hunkering down in front of the fire opposite his brother. “I saw a rhino earlier this morning. Going north.”
“I thought it smelled like snow.”
“Won’t be much yet, not if rhinos and mammoths are still around. They like it cold, but they don’t like much snow. They always seem to know when a big storm is coming and head back toward the glacier in a hurry. People say, ‘Never go forth when mammoths go north.’ It’s true for rhinos, too, but this one wasn’t hurrying.”
“I’ve seen whole hunting parties turn back without throwing a single spear, just because the woollies were moving north. I wonder how much it snows around here?”
“The summer was dry. If the winter is too, mammoths and rhinos may stay all season. But we’re farther south now, and that usually means more snow. If there are people in those mountains to the east, they should know. Maybe we should have stayed with the people who rafted us across the river. We need a place to stay for the winter, and soon.”
“I wouldn’t mind a nice friendly cave full of beautiful women right now,” Thonolan said with a grin.
“I’d settle for a nice friendly Cave.”
“Big Brother, you wouldn’t want to spend a winter without women any more than I would.”
The bigger man smiled. “Well, the winter would be a lot colder without a woman, beautiful or not.”
Thonolan looked at his brother speculatively. “I’ve often wondered about that,” he said.
“What?”
“Sometimes there’s a real beauty with half the men trying for her, but she looks only at you. I know you aren’t stupid; you know it—yet you pass her by and go pick out some little mouse sitting in a corner. Why?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes the ‘mouse’ just thinks she’s not beautiful, because she has a mole on her cheek or thinks her nose is too long. When you talk to her, there’s often more to her than the one everybody is after. Sometimes women who aren’t perfect are more interesting; they’ve done more, or learned something.”
“Maybe you’re right. Some of those shy ones blossom out, after you’ve paid attention to them.”
Jondalar shrugged and stood up. “We’re not going to find women, or a Cave, this way. Let’s break camp.”
“Right!” Thonolan said eagerly, then turned his back to the fire—and froze! “Jondalar!” he gasped, then strained to sound casual. “Don’t do anything to attract his attention, but if you look over the tent, you’ll see your friend from this morning, or one just like him.”
Jondalar peered over the top of the tent. Just on the other side, swaying from side to side as he shifted his massive tonnage from one foot to the other, was a huge, double-horned, woolly rhinoceros. With his head turned to the side, he was eying Thonolan. He was nearly blind directly ahead; his small eyes were set far back and his vision was poor to begin with. Acute hearing and a sharp sense of smell more than made up for his eyesight.
He was obviously a creature of the cold. He had two coats, a soft undercoat of thick downy fur and a shaggy outer one of reddish brown hair, and beneath his tough hide was a three-inch layer of fat. He carried his head low, downward from his shoulders, and his long front horn sloped forward at an angle that barely cleared the ground as he swayed. He used it for sweeping snow away from pasturage—if it wasn’t too deep. And his short thick legs were easily mired in deep snow. He visited the grasslands of the south only briefly—to graze on their richer harvest and store additional fat—in late fall and early winter after it became cold enough for him, but before the heavy snows. He could not stand heat, with his heavy coats, any more than he could survive in deep snow. His home was the bitter-cold, crackling dry tundra and steppes near the glacier.
The long, tapering, anterior horn could be put to a far more dangerous use than sweeping snow, however, and there was nothing between the rhino and Thonolan but a short distance.
“Don’t move!” Jondalar hissed. He ducked down behind the tent and reached for his pack with the spears.
“Those light spears won’t do much good,” Thonolan said, though his back was toward him. The comment stayed Jondalar’s hand for a moment; he wondered how Thonolan knew. “You’d have to hit him in a vulnerable place like an eye, and that’s too small a target. You need a heavy lance for rhino,” Thonolan continued, and his brother realized he was guessing.
“Don’t talk so much, you’ll draw his attention,” Jondalar cautioned. “I may not have a lance, but you don’t have a weapon at all. I’m going around the back of the tent and try for him.”
“Wait, Jondalar! Don’t! You’ll just make him angry with that spear; you won’t even hurt him. Remember when we were boys, how we used to bait rhinos? Someone would run, get the rhino chasing him, then dodge away while someone else got his attention. Keep him running until he was too tired to move. You get ready to draw his attention—I’m going to run and try to make him charge.”
“No! Thonolan,” Jondalar yelled, but it was too late. Thonolan was sprinting.
It was always impossible to outguess the unpredictable beast. Rather than charging after the man, the rhino made a rush for the tent billowing in the wind. He rammed it, gouged a hole in it, snapped thongs and got snared in them. When he disentangled himself, he decided he didn’t like the men or their camp and left, trotting off harmlessly. Thonolan, glancing over his shoulder, noticed the rhino was gone and came loping back.
“That was stupid!” Jondalar yelled, slamming his spear into the ground with a force that broke the wooden shaft just below the bone point. “Were you trying to get yourself killed? Great Doni, Thonolan! Two people can’t bait a rhino. You have to surround him. What if he had gone after, you? What in Great Mother’s underworld am I supposed to do if you get hurt?”
Surprise, then anger flashed across Thonolan’s face. Then he broke into a grin. “You were really worried about me! Yell all you want, you can’t bluff me. Maybe I shouldn’t have tried it, but I wasn’t going to let you make some stupid move, like going for a rhino with such a light spear. What in Great Mother’s underworld am I supposed to do if you get hurt?” His smile grew, and his eyes lit up with the delight of a small boy who had succeeded in pulling off a trick. “Besides, he didn’t come after me.”
Jondalar looked blank in the face of his brother’s grin. His outburst had been more relief than anger, but it took him a while to grasp that Thonola
n was safe.
“You were lucky. I guess we both were,” he said, expelling a long breath. “But we’d better make a couple of lances, even if we just sharpen points for now.”
“I haven’t seen any yew, but we can watch for ash or alder on the way,” Thonolan remarked as he began to take down the tent. “They should work.”
“Anything will work, even willow. We should make them before we go.”
“Jondalar, let’s get away from this place. We need to reach those mountains, don’t we?”
“I don’t like traveling without lances, not with rhinos around.”
“We can stop early. We need to fix the tent anyway. If we go, we can look for some good wood, find a better place to camp. That rhino might come back.”
“And he might follow us, too.” Thonolan was always eager to start in the morning, and restless about delays, Jondalar knew. “Maybe we should try to reach those mountains. All right, Thonolan, but we stop early, right?”
“Right, Big Brother.”
The two brothers strode along the edge of the river at a steady, ground-covering pace, long since adjusted to each other’s step and comfortable with each other’s silences. They had grown closer, talked out each other’s heart and mind, tested each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Each assumed certain tasks by habit, and each depended on the other when danger threatened. They were young and strong and healthy, and unselfconsciously confident that they could face whatever lay ahead.
They were so attuned to their environment that perception was on a subliminal level. Any disturbance that posed a threat would have found them instantly on guard. But they were only vaguely aware of the warmth of the distant sun, challenged by the cold wind soughing through leafless limbs; black-bottomed clouds embracing the white-walled breastworks of the mountains before them; and the deep, swift river.
The mountain ranges of the massive continent shaped the course of the Great Mother River. She rose out of the highland north of one glacier-covered range and flowed east. Beyond the first chain of mountains was a level plain—in an earlier age the basin of an inland sea—and, farther east, a second range curved around in a great arc. Where the easternmost alpine foreland of the first range met the flysch foothills at the northwestern end of the second, the river broke through a rocky barrier and turned abruptly south.
After dropping down karst highlands, she meandered across grassy steppes, winding into oxbows, breaking into separate channels and rejoining again as she wove her way south. The sluggish, braided river, flowing through flat land, gave the illusion of changelessness. It was only an illusion. By the time the Great Mother River reached the uplands at the southern end of the plain that swung her east again and gathered her channels together, she had received into herself the waters of the northern and eastern face of the first, massive, ice-mantled range.
The great swollen Mother swept out a depression as she curled east in a broad curve toward the southern end of the second chain of peaks. The two men had been following her left bank, crossing the occasional channels and streams still rushing to meet her as they came to them. Across the river to the south the land rose in steep craggy leaps; on their side rolling hills climbed more gradually from the river’s edge.
“I don’t think we’ll find the end of Donau before winter,” Jondalar remarked. “I’m beginning to wonder if there is one.”
“There’s an end, and I think we’ll find it soon. Look how big she is.” Thonolan waved an expansive arm toward the right, “Who would have thought she’d get that big? We have to be near the end.”
“But we haven’t reached the Sister yet, at least I don’t think we have. Tamen said she is as big as the Mother.”
“That must be one of those stories that get bigger with the telling. You don’t really believe there’s another river like that flowing south along this plain?”
“Well, Tamen didn’t say he’d seen it himself, but he was right about the Mother turning east again, and about the people who took us across her main channel. He could be right about the Sister. I wish we’d known the language of that Cave with the rafts; they might have known about a tributary to the Mother as big as she is.”
“You know how easy it is to exaggerate great wonders that are far away. I think Tamen’s ‘Sister’ is just another channel of the Mother, farther east.”
“I hope you’re right, Little Brother. Because if there is a Sister, we’re going to have to cross it before we reach those mountains. And I don’t know where else we’re likely to find a place to stay for the winter.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
A movement, apparently at odds with the natural way of things, which brought it to the level of consciousness, caught Jondalar’s attention. By the sound, he identified the black cloud in the distance, moving with no regard for the prevailing wind, and he stopped to watch as the V-formation of honking geese approached. They swooped lower as a single entity, darkening the sky with their numbers, then broke up into individuals as they neared the ground with lowered feet and flapping wings, braking to a rest. The river swerved around the steep rise ahead.
“Big Brother,” Thonolan said, grinning with excitement, “those geese wouldn’t have set down if there wasn’t a marsh up ahead. Maybe it’s a lake or a sea, and I’ll wager the Mother empties into it. I think we’ve reached the end of the river!”
“If we climb that hill, we should get a better view.” Jondalar’s tone was carefully neutral, but Thonolan had the impression his brother didn’t quite believe him.
They climbed quickly, breathing hard when they reached the top, then caught their breath in amazement. They were high enough to see for a considerable distance. Beyond the turn the Mother widened, and her waters became choppy, and, as she approached a vast expanse of water, she rolled and spumed. The larger body of water was cloudy with mud churned up from the bottom, and filled with debris. Broken limbs, dead animals, whole trees bobbed and spun around, caught by conflicting currents.
They had not reached the end of the Mother. They had met the Sister.
High in the mountains in front of them, the Sister had begun as rivulets and streams. The streams became rivers that raced down rapids, spilled over cataracts, and coursed straight down the western face of the second great mountain range. With no lakes or reservoirs to check the flow, the tumultuous waters gained force and momentum until they gathered together on the plain. The only check to the turbulent Sister was the glutted Mother herself.
The tributary, nearly equal in size, surged into the mother stream, fighting the controlling influence of swift current. She backed up and surged again, throwing a tantrum of crosscurrents and undertows; temporary maelstroms that sucked floating debris in a perilous spin to the bottom and spewed it up a moment later downstream. The engorged confluence expanded into a hazardous lake too large to see across.
Fall flooding had peaked and a marshland of mud sprawled over the banks where the waters had recently receded, leaving a morass of devastation: upturned trees with roots reaching for the sky, waterlogged trunks and broken branches; carcasses and dying fish stranded in drying puddles. Water birds were feasting on the easy pickings; the near shore was alive with them. Nearby, a hyena was making short work of a stag, undisturbed by the flapping wings of black storks.
“Great Mother!” Thonolan breathed.
“It must be the Sister.” Jondalar was too awed to ask his brother if he believed now.
“How are we going to get across?”
“I don’t know. We’ll have to go back upstream.”
“How far? She’s as big as the Mother.”
Jondalar could only shake his head. His forehead knotted with concern. “We should have taken Tamen’s advice. It could snow any day; we don’t have time to backtrack very far. I don’t want to be caught in the open when a big storm blows.”
A sudden gust of wind caught Thonolan’s hood and whisked it back, baring his head. He pulled it on again, closer to his face, and shiver
ed. For the first time since they had set out, he had serious doubts about surviving the long winter ahead. “What do we do now, Jondalar?”
“We find a place to make camp.” The taller brother scanned the area from their vantage point. “Over there, just upstream, near that high bank with a stand of alder. There’s a creek that joins the Sister—the water should be good.”
“If we tie both backframes to one log, and attach a rope to both our waists, we could swim across and not get separated.”
“I know you are hardy, Little Brother, but that’s foolhardy. I’m not sure I could swim across, much less pulling a log with everything we have. That river is cold. Only the current keeps it from freezing—there was ice at the edge this morning. And what if we get tangled up in the branches of some tree? We’d get swept downstream, and maybe pulled under.”
“Remember that Cave that lives close to the Great Water? They dig out the centers of big trees and use them to cross rivers. Maybe we could …”
“Find me a tree around here big enough,” Jondalar said, flinging his arm at the grassy prairie, with only a few thin or stunted trees.
“Well … someone told me about another Cave that makes shells out of birchbark … but that seems so flimsy.”
“I’ve seen them, but I don’t know how they’re made, or what kind of glue they use so they won’t leak. And the birch trees in their region grow bigger than any I’ve seen around here.”
Thonolan glanced around, trying to think of some other idea that his brother couldn’t put down with his implacable logic. He noticed the stand of straight tall alders on the high knoll just to the south, and grinned. “How about a raft? All we’d have to do is tie a bunch of logs together, and there are more than enough alders on that hill.”
“And one long enough, and strong enough to make a pole to reach the bottom of the river to guide it? Rafts are hard to control even on small shallow rivers.”