Mammoth Hunters (102 page)

“You’re cold, Ayla. You’ve been out here a long time,” Ranec said.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she replied.

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. Just an uneasy feeling. I can’t explain it.”

“You’ve been troubled ever since the Calling ceremony, haven’t you?” Ranec said.

“I hadn’t thought about it. You may be right.”

“But you didn’t participate. You only watched.”

“I didn’t want to participate, but I’m not sure. Something may have happened,” Ayla said.

Immediately after breakfast, the hunters packed up and started traveling again. At first they attempted to skirt the bog, but there appeared to be no way around without making a long detour. Talut and several other hunt leaders peered into the dense, swampy thicket overhung by a cold misty fog, conferred with some of the others, and finally decided on a route that seemed to offer the easiest passage through.

The waterlogged ground near the edge soon gave way to a quivering fen. Many of the hunters removed their footwear and plunged into the cold, muddy water barefoot. Ayla and Jondalar led the nervous horses in more carefully. Cold-loving vines and long beards of greenish-gray lichen hung from dwarf birch, willow, and alder growing so closely together they formed a miniature arctic jungle. Footing was treacherous. With no solid ground to bind the roots and give stability, the trees grew at unlikely angles and sprawled along the ground, and the hunters struggled to make their way across fallen trunks, twisted brush, and partially submerged roots and branches that snared unsuspecting feet. Tufts of reeds and sedge grass looked deceitfully more substantial
than they were, and mosses and ferns camouflaged stinking stagnant pools.

Progress was slow and exhausting. By midmorning, when they stopped to rest, everyone was sweating and warm, even in the shade. Starting out again, Talut ran into a particularly tenacious branch of an alder, and exploding in a rare outburst of anger, chopped at the tree furiously with his massive axe. The bright orange liquid seeping out of gashes in the offending tree resembled blood, and gave Ayla an unpleasant feeling of foreboding.

Nothing was so welcome as firm ground. Tall ferns and even taller grasses, more than the height of a man, grew on the rich clearing near the bog. They turned east to avoid wetlands that extended toward the west, then climbed a rise out of the depression in the plains filled by the bogs, and sighted the joining of a large river and a tributary. Talut, Vincavec, and the leaders of some of the other Camps stopped to consult maps marked on ivory, and scratched more marks on the ground with knives.

As they approached the river, they passed through the middle of a birch forest. Not a forest of the tall sturdy trees of warmer climates, these birches were stunted and dwarfed by the harsh periglacial conditions, yet they were not without beauty. As though pruned and shaped on purpose into endlessly fascinating individual shapes, each tree had a distinctive, pale, delicate grace. But the thin, frail, pendulent branches were misleading. When Ayla tried to break one, it was tough as sinew, and in the wind, they flailed the competing vegetation into submission.

“They’re called the ‘Old Mothers.’ ”

Ayla spun around and saw Vincavec.

“An appropriate name, I think. They remind one never to misjudge the strength of an old woman. This is a sacred grove, and they are guardians of somuti,” he said, pointing toward the ground.

The small quivering light green birch leaves did not entirely block out the sun, and dappled patterns of shade danced lightly on the forest floor thick with leaf mold. Then Ayla noticed, sprouting from the moss under certain trees, the large, white-spotted, bright red mushrooms.

“Those mushrooms, is that what you call somuti? They are poisonous. They can kill you,” Ayla said.

“Yes, of course, unless you know the secrets of preparing
them. That is so they will not be used inappropriately. Only those who are chosen may explore the world of somuti.”

“Do they have medicinal qualities? I know of none,” she asked.

“I don’t know. I’m not a Healer. You’d have to ask Lomie,” Vincavec said. Then, before she knew it, he had taken both her hands, and was looking at her, or rather, looking into her, she felt. “Why did you fight me at the Calling ceremony, Ayla? I had prepared the way to the underland for you, but you resisted me.”

Ayla felt a strange sense of internal conflict, pulled two ways. Vincavec’s voice was warm and compelling, and she felt a great desire to lose herself in the black depths of his eyes, to float in the cool dark pools, to give in to anything he wished. But she also felt an overpowering need to break away, to hold herself apart and maintain her own identity. With a wrenching effort of will, she tore her eyes away, and caught a glimpse of Ranec watching them. He quickly turned aside.

“You may have prepared a way, but I wasn’t prepared,” Ayla said, avoiding Vincavec’s gaze. She looked up when he laughed. His eyes were gray, not black.

“You’re good! You’re strong, Ayla. I’ve never met anyone like you. You are so right for the Mammoth Hearth, for the Mammoth Camp. Tell me you’ll share my hearth,” Vincavec said, with every bit of persuasion and feeling he could bring to bear.

“I have Promised Ranec,” she said.

“That doesn’t matter, Ayla. Bring him along, if you wish. I would not mind sharing the Mammoth Hearth with so gifted a carver. Take us both! Or I’ll take you both.” He laughed again. “It would not be the first time. A man has a certain appeal, too!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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