by Jean M. Auel
“Tulie is right,” Nezzie said. “Most young women spend years making and accumulating gifts to give away at their Matrimonials, or if they are adopted.”
“Are so many people adopted by the Mamutoi?” Jondalar asked.
“Not outsiders,” Nezzie said, “but Mamutoi often adopt other Mamutoi. Every Camp needs a sister and brother to be headwoman and headman, but not every man is lucky enough to have a sister like Tulie. If something happens to one or the other, or if a young man or a young woman wants to start a new Camp, a sister or a brother may be adopted. But, don’t worry. I have many things that you can give, Ayla, and even Latie has offered some of her things for you to give.”
“But I have things to give, Nezzie. I have things in cave at valley,” Ayla said. “I spent years making many things.”
“It’s not necessary for you to go back …” Tulie said, privately thinking that whatever she might have would be very primitive with her flathead background. How could she tell the young woman that her gifts probably would not be suitable? It could be awkward.
“I want to go back,” Ayla insisted. “Other things I need. My healing plants. Food stored. And food for horses.” She turned to Jondalar. “I want to go back.”
“I suppose we could. If we hurried and didn’t stop along the way, I think we could make it … if the weather clears.”
“Usually, after the first cold snap like this, we get some nice weather,” Talut said. “It’s unpredictable, though. It can turn any time.”
“Well, if we get some decent weather maybe we’ll take a chance and go back to the valley,” Jondalar said, and was rewarded by one of Ayla’s beautiful smiles.
There were some things he wanted, too. Those firestones had made quite an impression, and the rocky beach at the bend of the river in Ayla’s valley had been full of them. Someday, he hoped, he would return and share with his people everything he had learned and discovered: the firestones, the spear-thrower, and for Dalanar, Wymez’s trick of heating flint. Someday …
“Hurry back,” Nezzie called out, holding her hand up with the palm facing her, and waving goodbye.
Ayla and Jondalar waved back. They were mounted double on Whinney, with Racer on a rope behind, and looked down on the people of the Lion Camp who had gathered to see them off. As excited as she felt about returning to the valley that had been her home for three years, Ayla felt a pang of sorrow at leaving behind people who already seemed like family.
Rydag, standing on one side of Nezzie, and Rugie on the other, clung to her as they waved. Ayla couldn’t help noticing how little resemblance there was between them. One was a small image of Nezzie, the other half-Clan, yet they had been raised as brother and sister. With a sudden insight, Ayla recalled that Oga had nursed Durc, along with her own son, Grev, as milk brothers. Grev was fully Clan and Durc only half; the difference between them had been as great.
Ayla signaled Whinney with pressure of legs and shift in position, so second nature she hardly thought of it as guiding the mare. They turned and started up the slope.
The trip back was not the leisurely one they had made on their way out. They traveled steadily, making no exploratory side trips or hunting forays, no early stops to relax or enjoy Pleasures. Expecting to return, they had noted landmarks as they were traveling from the valley, certain outcrops, highlands, and rock formations, valleys and watercourses, but the changing season had altered the landscape.
In part, the vegetation had changed its aspect. The protected valleys where they had stopped had taken on a seasonal variation that caused an uneasy sense of unfamiliarity. The arctic birch and willow had lost all their leaves, and their scrawny limbs shivering in the wind seemed shriveled and lifeless. Conifers—white spruce, larch, stone pine—hale and proud in their green-needled vigor, were prominent instead, and even the isolated dwarfs on the steppes, contorted by winds, gained substance by comparison. But more confusing were the changes in surface features wrought, in that frigid periglacial land, by permafrost.
Permafrost—permanently frozen ground—any part of the earth’s crust, from the surface to deep bedrock, that remains frozen year-round, was brought on, in that land far south of polar regions so long ago, by continent-spanning sheets of ice, a mile or two—or more—high A complex interaction of climate, surface, and underground conditions created and maintained the frozen ground. Sunshine had an effect, and standing water, vegetation, soil density, wind, snow.
Average yearly temperatures only a few degrees lower than those that would later maintain temperate conditions, were enough to cause the massive glaciers to encroach upon the land and the formation of permafrost farther south. The winters were long and cold, and occasional storms brought heavy snows and intense blizzards, but the snowfall over the season was relatively light, and many days were clear. The summers were short, with a few days so hot they belied the nearness of any glacial mass of ice, but generally it was cloudy and cool, with little rain.
Though some portion of the ground was always frozen, permafrost was not a permanent, unchanging state; it was as inconstant and fickle as the seasons. In the depths of winter when it was frozen solid all the way through, the land seemed passive, hard, and ungiving, but it was not what it seemed. When the season turned, the surface softened, only a few inches where thick ground cover or dense soils or too much shade resisted the gentle warmth of summer, but the active layer thawed down several feet on sunny slopes of well-drained gravels with little vegetation.
The yielding layer was an illusion, though. Beneath the surface the iron-hard grip of winter still ruled. Impenetrable ice held sway, and with the thaw and forces of gravity, saturated soils, and their burden of rocks and trees, crept and slid and flowed across the water-lubricated table of ground still frozen below. Slumps occurred and cave-ins as the surface warmed, and where the summer melt could find no outlet, bogs and swamps and thaw-lakes appeared.
When the cycle turned once more, the active layer above the frozen ground turned hard again, but its cold and icy countenance disguised a restless heart. The extreme stresses and pressures caused heaving, thrusting, and buckling. The frozen ground split and cracked and then filled with ice, which, to relieve stress, was expelled as ice wedges. Pressures filled holes with mud, and caused fine silt to rise in silt boils and frost blisters. As the freezing water expanded, mounds and hills of muddy ice—pingos—rose up out of swampy lowlands reaching heights up to two hundred feet and diameters of several hundred.
As Ayla and Jondalar retraced their steps, they discovered that the relief of the landscape had changed, making landmarks misleading. Certain small streams they thought they remembered had disappeared. They had iced over closer to their source, and become dry downstream. Hills of ice had appeared where none had been before, risen out of summer bogs and swampy lowlands where dense, fine-textured substrates caused poor drainage. Stands of trees grew on talik—islands of unfrozen layers surrounded by permafrost—which sometimes gave a misleading impression of a small valley, where they could not recall having seen one.
Jondalar was not familiar with the general terrain and more than once deferred to Ayla’s better memory. When she was unsure, Ayla followed Whinney’s lead. Whinney had brought her home more than once before, and seemed to know where she was going. Sometimes riding double on the mare, other times trading off, or walking to give the horse a rest, they pushed on until they were forced to stop for the night. Then they made a simple camp with a small fire, their hide tent, and sleeping furs. They cooked cracked, parched wild grain into a hot mush, and Ayla brewed a hot herbal beverage.
In the morning, they drank a hot tea for warmth while they packed up, then on the way they ate ground dried meat and dried berries that were mixed with fat and shaped into small cakes. Except for a hare they accidentally flushed, which Ayla brought down with her sling, they didn’t hunt. But they did supplement the traveling food Nezzie had given them with the oily rich and nutritious pignon seeds from the cones of stone pines, gathered a
t stopping places along the way, and thrown on the fire to open with a pop.
As the terrain around them gradually changed, becoming rocky and more rugged with ravines and steep-walled canyons, Ayla felt a growing sense of excitement. The territory had a familiar feel, like the landscape south and west of her valley. When she saw an escarpment with a particular pattern of coloration in the strata, her heart leaped.
“Jondalar! Look! See that!” she cried, pointing. “We’re almost there!”
Even Whinney seemed excited, and without being urged, increased her pace. Ayla watched for another landmark, a stone outcrop with a distinctive shape which reminded her of a lioness crouching. When she found it, they turned north until they came to the edge of a steep slope strewn with gravel and loose rocks. They stopped and looked over the edge. At the bottom, a small river, flowing east, glinted in the sun as it splashed over rocks. They dismounted and carefully picked their way down. The horses started across, then paused to drink. Ayla found the stepping-stones jutting out of the water, with only one wide space to jump, that she had always used. She took a drink, too, when they reached the other side.
“The water is sweeter here. Look how clear it is!” she exclaimed. “It’s not muddy at all. You can see the bottom. And look, Jondalar, the horses are here!”
Jondalar smiled affectionately at her exuberance, feeling a similar, if milder, sense of homecoming at the sight of the familiar long valley. The harsh winds and frost of the steppes brushed the protected pocket with a lighter touch, and even stripped of summer leaves, a richer, fuller growth was apparent. The steep slope, which they had just descended, rose precipitously to a sheer rock wall as it advanced down the valley on the left. A wide fringe of brush and trees bordered the opposite bank of the stream running along its base, then thinned out to a meadow of golden hay billowing in waves in the afternoon sun. The level field of waist-high grass sloped gradually up to the steppes on the right, but it narrowed and the incline steepened toward the far end of the valley until it became the other wall of a narrow gorge.
Halfway down, a small herd of steppe horses had stopped grazing and was looking their way. One of them neighed. Whinney tossed her head and answered. The herd watched them approach until they were quite close. Then, as the strange scent of humans continued to advance, they wheeled as one, and with pounding hooves and flying tails, galloped up the gentle slope to the open steppes above. The two humans on the back of one horse stopped to watch them go. So did the young horse attached by a rope.
Racer, with head high and ears pitched forward, followed them as far as his lead would allow, then stood with neck outstretched and nostrils wide, watching after them. Whinney nickered to him as they started down the valley again, and he came back and followed behind.
As they hurried upstream toward the narrow end of the valley, they could see the small river swirling in a sharp turn around a jutting wall and a rocky beach on the right. On the other side of it was a large pile of rocks, driftwood, and bones, antlers, horns, and tusks of every variety. Some were skeletons from the steppes, others were the remains of animals caught in flash floods, carried downstream, and thrown against the wall.
Ayla could hardly wait. She slid off Whinney’s back and raced up a steep, narrow path alongside the bone pile to the top of the wall, which formed a ledge in front of a hole in the face of the rock cliff. She almost ran inside, but checked herself at the last minute. This was the place where she had lived alone, and she had survived because never for a moment did she forget to be alert to possible danger. Caves were used not only by people. Edging up along the outside wall, she unwound her sling from her head and stooped to pick up some chunks of rock.
Carefully, she looked inside. She saw only darkness, but her nose detected a faint smell of wood burned long ago, and a somewhat fresher musky scent of wolverine. But that, too, was old. She stepped inside the opening and let her eyes adjust to the dim light, and then looked around.
She felt the pressure of tears filling her eyes, and struggled to hold them back to no avail. There it was, her cave. She was home. Everything was so familiar, yet the place where she had lived for so long seemed deserted and forlorn. The light streaming in from the hole above the entrance showed her that her nose had been right, and closer inspection brought a gasp of dismay. The cave was in a shambles. Some animal, perhaps more than one, had indeed broken in, and had left the evidence scattered around. She wasn’t sure how much damage had been done.
Jondalar appeared at the entrance then. He came in, followed by Whinney and Racer. The cave had been home to the mare, too, and the only home Racer knew until they met the Lion Camp.
“It looks as if we’ve had a visitor,” he said when he became aware of the devastation. “This place is a mess!”
Ayla heaved a big sigh and wiped a tear away. “I’d better get a fire going and torches lit so we can see how much has been ruined. But first I’d better unpack Whinney so she can rest and graze.”
“Do you think we should just let them run free like that? Racer looked like he was ready to follow those horses. Maybe we should tie them up.” Jondalar had some misgivings.
“Whinney has always run free,” Ayla said, feeling a little shocked. “I can’t tie her up. She’s my friend. She stays with me because she wants to. She went to live with a herd once, when she wanted a stallion, and I missed her so much, I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t had Baby. But she came back. She will stay, and, as long as she does, so will Racer, at least until he grows up. Baby left me. Racer might, too, just like children leave their mothers’ hearths when they grow up. But horses are different from lions. I think if he becomes a friend, like Whinney, he might stay.”
Jondalar nodded. “All right, you know them better than I do.” Ayla was, after all, the expert. The only expert when it came to horses. “Why don’t I make the fire while you unpack her, then?”
As he went to the places where Ayla had always kept the fire-starting materials and wood, not realizing how familiar her cave had become to him in the short summer he had lived there with her, Jondalar wondered how he could make Racer a good friend. He still didn’t understand completely how Ayla communicated with Whinney so that she went where the woman wanted her to when they were riding, and staved nearby though she had the freedom to leave. Maybe he’d never learn, but he would like to try. Still, until he learned, it wouldn’t hurt to keep Racer on a rope, at least when they traveled where there might be other horses.
A check of the cave and its contents told its story. A wolverine or a hyena, Ayla couldn’t tell which since both had been in the cave at different times and their tracks were intermixed, had broken into one of the caches of dried meat. It was cleaned out. One basket of grain they had picked for Whinney and Racer, which had been left fairly exposed, had been chewed into in several places. A variety of small rodents judging by the tracks—voles, pikas, ground squirrels, jerboas, and giant hamsters—had made off with the bonanza and hardly a seed was left. They found one nest stuffed with the plunder beneath a pile of hay nearby. But most of the baskets of grains and roots and dried fruits, which had either been set into holes dug into the dirt floor of the cave, or protected by rocks piled on them, suffered far less damage.
Ayla was glad they had decided to put the soft leather hides and furs she had made over the years in a sturdy basket and stash it in a cairn. The large pile of rocks had proved too much for the marauding beasts, but the leather left over from the clothes Ayla had made for Jondalar and herself before they left, which had not been put away, was chewed to shreds. Another cairn which held, among other things, a rawhide container filled with carefully rendered fat stored in small sausagelike sections of deer intestines, had been the object of repeated assaults. One corner of the parfleche had been torn out by teeth and claws, one sausage broken into, but the cairn had stood.
In addition to getting into the stored food, the animals had prowled through other storage areas, knocked over stacks of handcrafted an
d smoothed wooden bowls and cups, dragged around baskets and mats twined and woven in subtle patterns and designs, defecated in several places, and in general created havoc with whatever they could find. But the actual damage was much less than it first appeared, and they had essentially ignored her large pharmacopoeia of dried and preserved herbal medicines.
By evening, Ayla was feeling much better. They had cleaned and restored order to the cave, determined that the loss was not too great, cooked and eaten a meal, and even explored the valley to see what changes had taken place. With a fire in the hearth, sleeping furs spread out over clean hay in the shallow trench which Ayla had used as a bed, and Whinney and Racer comfortably settled in their place on the other side of the entrance, Ayla finally felt at home.
“It’s hard to believe I’m back,” Ayla said, sitting on a mat in front of the fire beside Jondalar. “I feel as though I’ve been gone a lifetime, but it hasn’t been long at all.”
“No, it hasn’t been long.”
“I’ve learned so much, maybe that’s why it seems long. It was good that you convinced me to go with you, Jondalar, and I’m glad we met Talut and the Mamutoi. Do you know how afraid I was to meet the Others?”
“I knew you were worried about it, but I was sure once you got to know some people, you’d like them.”
“It wasn’t just meeting people. It was meeting the Others. To the Clan, that’s what they were, and though I’d been told all my life I was born to the Others, I still thought of myself as Clan. Even when I was cursed and knew I couldn’t go back, I was afraid of the Others. After Whinney came to live with me, it was worse. I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid they wouldn’t let me keep her, or would kill her for food. And I was afraid they wouldn’t allow me to hunt. I didn’t want to live with people who wouldn’t let me hunt if I wanted to, or who might make me do something I didn’t want to do,” Ayla said.
Suddenly the recollection of her fears and anxieties filled her with discomfort and nervous energy. She got up and walked to the mouth of the cave, then pushed aside the heavy windbreak and walked out onto the top of the jutting wall that formed a broad front porch to the cave. It was cold out and clear. The stars, hard and bright, glittered out of a deep black sky with an edge as sharp as the wind. She hugged herself, and rubbed her arms as she walked toward the end of the ledge.