by Jean M. Auel
They could not build a fire directly on the ice and had planned to use the bowl boat as a base for the river stones they had brought to build the fire on. But first they had to empty all the burning stones out of the round craft. As Ayla picked up the heavy mammoth hide, it occurred to her that they could just as well use it as a base upon which to build a fire. Even if it scorched a little, it wouldn’t matter. It pleased her that she had thought to bring it. Everyone, including the horses, had water and a little food.
While they were stopped, the sun disappeared entirely behind heavy clouds, and before they started on their way again, thick snow began falling with grim determination. The north wind howled across the icy expanse; there was nothing on the whole vast sheet covering the massif to stand in its way. A blizzard was in the making.
42
As the snowfall thickened, the force of the wind from the northwest suddenly increased. It slammed into them with a blast of cold air that shoved them along as though they were no more than an insignificant piece of the horizontal curtain of white that surrounded them.
“I think we’d better wait this out,” Jondalar shouted to be heard above the howl.
They fought to set up their tent while the icy blasts seized the small shelter, tore the stakes out of the ice, and left the tent billowing and flapping. The violent, sinewy wind threatened to rip the sheet of leather from the grasp of the two puny living souls trying to make their way across the ice, daring to present an obstacle to the furious, snow-choked blizzard raging across the flat surface.
“How are we going to keep the tent down?” Ayla asked. “Is it always this bad up here?”
“I don’t remember it blowing this hard before, but I’m not surprised.”
The horses were standing mutely, their heads down, stoically enduring the storm. Wolf was close beside them, digging out a hole for himself. “Maybe we could get one of the horses to stand on the loose end and hold it down until we get it staked,” Ayla suggested.
With one thing leading to another, they came up with a makeshift solution, using the horses as both stakes and tent supports. They draped the leather tent over the backs of both horses, then Ayla coaxed Whinney to stand on one of the edges, turned under, hoping the mare wouldn’t shift too much and let it up. Ayla and Jondalar huddled together, with the wolf under their bent knees, sitting, almost under the bellies of the horses, on the other end of the tent that was wrapped around underneath them.
It was dark before the squall blew itself out, and they had to camp for the night at the same place, but they set the tent up properly first. In the morning, Ayla was puzzled by some dark stains near the edge of the tent that Whinney had stood on. She wondered about them as they hurried to break camp early the next morning.
They made more progress the second day, in spite of climbing over pressure mounds of broken ice and working their way around an area of several yawning cracks, all oriented in the same direction. A storm blew up in the afternoon again, though the wind was not as strong, and it blew over more quickly, allowing them to continue their Journey during the late afternoon.
Toward evening, Ayla noticed that Whinney was limping. She felt her heart beat faster and a rush of fear when she looked closer and saw red smudges on the ice. She picked up Whinney’s foot and examined her hoof. It was cut to the quick and bleeding.
“Jondalar, look at this. Her feet are all cut up. What did that to her?” Ayla said.
He looked, and then he examined Racer’s hooves while Ayla was looking at the rest of Whinney’s. He found the same kind of injuries, then frowned. “It must be the ice,” he said. “You’d better check Wolf, too.”
The pads of the wolf’s paws showed damage, though not quite as bad as the horses’ hooves. “What are we going to do?” Ayla said. “They’re crippled, or will be soon.”
“It never occurred to me that the ice could be so sharp it could cut up their hooves,” Jondalar said, very upset. “I tried to think of everything, but I didn’t think about that.” He was stricken with remorse.
“Hooves are hard, but they’re not like stone. More like fingernails. They can be damaged. Jondalar, they can’t go on. They’ll be so crippled in another day that they won’t be able to walk at all,” Ayla said. “We’ve got to help them.”
“But what can we do?” Jondalar said.
“Well, I still have my medicine bag. I can treat their injuries.”
“But we can’t stay here until they’re healed. And as soon as they start walking again, it will be just as bad.” The man stopped and closed his eyes. He didn’t even want to think what he was thinking, much less say it, but he could see only one way out of their dilemma. “Ayla, we’re going to have to leave them,” the man said, as gently as he could.
“Leave them? What do you mean, ‘leave them’? We can’t leave Whinney, or Racer. Where would they find water? Or food? There’s nothing to graze on the ice, not even twig tips. They’d starve, or freeze. We can’t do that!” Ayla said, her face showing her distress. “We can’t leave them here like that! We can’t, Jondalar!”
“You’re right, we can’t leave them here like that. It wouldn’t be fair. They would suffer too much … but … we do have spears and the spear-throwers …” Jondalar said.
“No! No!” Ayla screamed. “I won’t let you!”
“It would be better than leaving them here to die slowly, to suffer. It’s not like horses haven’t been … hunted before. That’s what most people do.”
“But these aren’t like other horses. Whinney and Racer are friends. We’ve been through so much together. They’ve helped us. Whinney saved my life. I can’t leave her.”
“I don’t want to leave them anymore than you do,” Jondalar said, “but what else can we do?” The idea of killing the stallion after traveling so far together was almost more than he could bear, and he knew how Ayla felt about Whinney.
“We’ll go back. We’ll just have to turn back. You said there was another way around!”
“We’ve already traveled two days on this ice, and the horses are almost crippled. We can try to go back, Ayla, but I don’t think they will make it,” Jondalar said. He wasn’t even sure if Wolf would be able to make it. Guilt and remorse filled him. “I’m sorry, Ayla. It’s my fault. It was stupid of me to think we could cross this glacier with the horses. We should have gone the long way around, but I’m afraid it’s too late now.”
Ayla saw tears in his eyes. She had not often seen him in tears. Though it was not so unusual for men of the Others to cry, it was his nature to hide those emotions. In a way, it made his love for her more intense. He had given of himself, almost completely, only to her, and she loved him for it, but she could not give up Whinney. The horse was her friend; the only friend she had had in the valley, until Jondalar came.
“We’ve got to do something, Jondalar!” she sobbed.
“But what?” He had never felt so desolate, so totally frustrated at his inability to find some solution.
“Well, for now,” Ayla said, wiping her eyes, her tears freezing on her face, “I’m going to treat their injuries. I can do that much, anyway.” She got out her otter-skin medicine bag. “We’ll have to make a good fire, hot enough to boil water, not just melt ice.”
She took the mammoth hide off the brown burning stones and spread it out on the ice. She noticed some scorch marks on the supple leather, but they hadn’t damaged the tough old hide. She put the river rocks on a different spot, but near the middle, as a base upon which to build a fire. At least they didn’t have to worry about conserving fuel anymore. They could leave most of it behind.
She didn’t talk, she couldn’t, and Jondalar had nothing to say either. It seemed impossible. All the thought, planning, and preparation that had gone into the trek across this glacier, only to be stopped by something they hadn’t even considered. Ayla stared at the small fire. Wolf crawled up to her and whined, not in pain, but because he knew something was wrong. Ayla checked his paws again. They weren’t
as bad. He had more control over where he put his feet, and he carefully licked off snow and ice when they stopped to rest. She didn’t want to think about losing him, either.
She hadn’t consciously thought of Durc for some time, though he was always there, a memory, a cold pain that she would never forget. She found herself musing about him. Has he started to hunt with the clan, yet? Has he learned to use a sling? Uba would be a good mother to him, she would take care of him, make his food, make him warm winter clothes.
Ayla shivered, thinking about the cold, then thought about the first winter clothes Iza had made for her. She had loved the rabbit skin hat with the fur worn on the inside. The winter foot-coverings had fur inside, too. She recalled stomping around in a pair of new ones, and she remembered how the simple foot-coverings were made. It was just a piece of hide, gathered up and tied at the ankle. They conformed to the shape of the foot after a while, though at first they were rather clumsy, but that was part of the fun of new ones.
Ayla kept staring at the fire, watching the water start to simmer. Something was nagging her. Something important, she was sure. Something about …
Suddenly she drew in her breath. “Jondalar! Oh, Jondalar!”
She seemed agitated to him. “What’s the matter, Ayla?”
“It’s not what’s wrong, it’s what’s right,” she cried. “I just remembered something!”
He thought she was acting strangely. “I don’t understand,” he said. He wondered if the thought of losing her two horses was too much for her. She pulled at the heavy tarp of mammoth hide under the fire, knocking a hot coal directly onto the leather.
“Give me a knife, Jondalar. Your sharpest knife.”
“My knife?” he said.
“Yes, your knife,” she said. “I’m going to make boots for the horses!”
“You’re going to do what?”
“I’m going to make boots for the horses, and Wolf, too. Out of this mammoth hide!”
“How do you make horse boots?”
“I’ll cut circles out of the mammoth leather, then cut holes around the edges, thread some cord through, and tie it around the horses’ ankles. If mammoth hide can keep our feet from getting cut up by the ice, it’s bound to protect theirs,” Ayla explained.
Jondalar thought for a moment, visualizing what she described; then he smiled. “Ayla! I think it will work. By the Great Mother, I think it will work! What a wonderful idea! Whatever made you think of it?”
“That’s the way Iza made boots for me. That’s how the people of the Clan make foot-coverings. Hand-coverings, too. I’m trying to remember if that’s the kind Guban and Yorga wore. It’s hard to tell, because after a while they shape to your feet.”
“Will that hide be enough?”
“It should be. While I’ve got the fire going, I’ll finish preparing this remedy for the cuts, and maybe some hot tea for us. We haven’t had any for a couple of days, and we probably won’t again until we get down off this ice. We’re going to have to conserve fuel, but I think a cup of hot tea would taste very good right now.”
“I think you’re right!” Jondalar agreed, smiling again and feeling good.
Ayla very carefully examined each hoof on both horses, trimmed away the rough places, applied her medication, then tied the mammoth-hide horse boots on them. They tried to shake off the strange foot-coverings at first, but they were tied on securely, and the horses quickly got used to them. Then she took the set she had made for Wolf and tied them on. He chewed and gnawed at them, trying to get rid of the unfamiliar encumbrances, but after a while he stopped fighting them, too. His oversize wolf feet were in much better shape.
The next morning they loaded a slightly lighter pack on the horses; they had burned some of the brown coal, and the heavy mammoth hide was now on their feet. Ayla unloaded them when they stopped for a rest, and she took on a little more of the load herself. But she couldn’t begin to carry what the sturdy horses could. In spite of traveling, their hooves and feet seemed much improved by that night. Wolf’s seemed perfectly normal, which was a great relief for both Ayla and Jondalar. The boots provided an unexpected benefit: they acted as a kind of snow-shoe when there was deep snow, and the large, heavy animals didn’t sink in as far.
The pattern of the first day held, with some variation. They made their best time in the morning; the afternoons brought snow and wind of varying intensity. Sometimes they were able to travel a little farther after the storm, other times they had to stay where they stopped in the afternoon through the night, and on one occasion for two days, but none of the blizzards were as fierce as the one they had encountered the first day.
The surface of the glacier wasn’t quite as flat and smooth as it had appeared on that first glistening day in the sun. They floundered through deep drifts of soft powdered snow piled high from localized snowstorms. Other times, where driving winds cleared the surface, they crunched over sharp projections and slid into shallow ditches, their feet catching in narrow spaces and their ankles twisting under them on the uneven surface. Instant squalls blew down without warning, the fierce winds almost never let up, and they felt constant anxiety about unseen crevasses covered over with flimsy bridges or overhanging cornices of snow.
They detoured around open cracks, especially near the center, where the dry air held so little moisture that the snows were not heavy enough to fill the crevasses. And the cold, the deep, bitter, bone-chilling cold, never let up. Their breath froze on the fur of their hoods around their mouths; a drop of water spilling from a cup was frozen before it touched the ground. Their faces, exposed to raw winds and bright sun, cracked, peeled, and blackened. Frostbite was a constant threat.
The strain was beginning to tell. Their responses were beginning to deteriorate, and so was their judgment. A furious afternoon storm had held on into the night. In the morning, Jondalar was anxious to get under way. They had lost much more time than he had planned. In the bitter cold, it took longer for the water to heat, and their supply of burning stones was dwindling.
Ayla was going through her backpack; then she began searching around her sleeping fur. She couldn’t remember how many days they had been on the ice, but as far as she was concerned, it was too many, she thought as she searched.
“Hurry up, Ayla! What’s taking you so long?” Jondalar snapped.
“I can’t find my eye protectors,” she said.
“I told you not to lose them. Do you want to go blind?” he exploded.
“No, I don’t want to go blind. Why do you think I’m looking for them?” Ayla retorted. Jondalar snatched her fur up and shook it vigorously. The wooden goggles fell to the ground.
“Be careful where you put them next time,” he said. “Now let’s get moving.”
They quickly packed up their camp, but Ayla sulked and refused to talk to Jondalar. He came over and double-checked her lashings, as he usually did. Ayla grabbed Whinney’s rope and started out taking the lead, moving the horse away before Jondalar could examine her pack.
“Don’t you think I know how to pack a horse myself? You said you wanted to get moving. Why are you wasting time?” she flung back over her shoulder.
He had just been trying to be careful, Jondalar thought angrily. She doesn’t even know the way. Wait until she wanders around in circles for a while. Then she will come asking me to lead, he thought, falling in behind her.
Ayla was cold and fatigued from the grueling march. She plunged ahead, careless of her surroundings. If he wants to hurry so much, then we’ll hurry, she thought. If we ever get to the end of this ice, I hope I never see a glacier again.
Wolf was nervously racing between Ayla in the lead and Jondalar following behind. He didn’t like the sudden change in their positions. The tall man had always started out ahead before. The wolf struck out ahead of the woman, who was trudging blindly on, oblivious to everything except the miserable cold and her injured feelings. Suddenly he stopped directly in front of her, blocking her way.
Ayl
a, leading the mare, went around him. He ran back around and stopped in front of her again. She ignored him. He nudged at her legs; she shoved him aside. He ran ahead a short distance, then sat down whining to get her attention. She plodded past him. He raced back toward Jondalar, pranced and whined in front of him, then bounded a few steps toward Ayla, whining, then advanced toward the man once more.
“Is something wrong, Wolf?” Jondalar said, finally noticing the animal’s agitation.
Suddenly he heard a terrifying sound, a muffled boom. His head shot up as fountains of light snow filled the air ahead.
“No! Oh no!” Jondalar cried out in anguish, running forward. When the snow settled, a lone animal stood on the brink of a yawning crack. Wolf pointed his nose straight up and wailed a long, desolate howl.
Jondalar threw himself flat on the ice at the edge of the crevasse and looked over the edge. “Ayla!” he cried in desperation. “Ayla!” His stomach was a hard knot. He knew it was useless. She would never hear him. She was dead, at the bottom of the deep crack in the ice.
“Jondalar?”
He heard a small frightened voice coming from far away.
“Ayla?” He felt a rush of hope and looked down. Far below him, standing on a narrow ice ledge that hugged the wall of the deep trench, was the terrified woman. “Ayla, don’t move!” he commanded. “Stand perfectly still. That ledge could go, too.”
She’s alive, he thought. I can’t believe it. It’s a miracle. But how am I going to get her out?
Inside the icy chasm, Ayla leaned in toward the wall, clinging desperately to a crack and a projecting piece, petrified with fear. She had been plodding through snow halfway to her knees, lost in her own thoughts. She was tired, so tired of it all: tired of the cold, tired of fighting her way through deep snow, tired of the glacier. The trek across the ice had drained her energy, and she was bone-weary with exhaustion. Though she struggled on, her only thought was to reach the end of the massive glacier.