The Mammoth Hunters

by Jean M. Auel

  Deegie walked down the passageway toward the Mammoth Hearth carrying heavy outer wear.

  “I was hoping I would find you, Ayla. I want to check those snares I set to see if I caught any white foxes to trim Branag’s parka. Do you want to come with me?”

  Ayla, just waking up, looked up at the partially uncovered smoke hole. “It does look nice out. Let me get dressed.”

  She pulled back the covers, sat up, stretched and yawned, then went to the curtained-off area near the horse annex. On her way, she passed by a platform bed on which a half-dozen children were sleeping, sprawled on top of each other in a heap, like a litter of wolf pups. She saw Rydag’s large brown eyes open, and smiled at him. He closed them again, and snuggled down between the youngest, Nuvie, almost four years, and Rugie, who was approaching eight. Crisavec, Brinan, and Tusie were also in the pile, and lately, she had seen Fralie’s youngest, Tasher, who was not yet three, beginning to take notice of the other youngsters. Latie, verging on womanhood, Ayla noticed, played with them less and less.

  The children were benevolently spoiled. They could eat and sleep where and when they wanted. They seldom observed the territorial customs of their elders; the entire lodge was theirs. They could demand the attention of adult members of the Camp, and often found it was welcomed as an interesting diversion; no one was in any particular hurry or had anyplace to go. Wherever their interests led the children, an older member of the group was ready to assist or explain. If they wanted to sew skins together, they were given the tools, and scraps of leather, and strings of sinew. If they wanted to make stone tools, they were given pieces of flint, and stone or bone hammers.

  They wrestled and tumbled, and invented games, which were often versions of adult activities. They made their own small hearths, and learned to use fire. They pretended to hunt, spearing pieces of meat from the cold storage chambers, and cooked it. When playing “hearths” extended to mimicking the copulating activities of their elders, the adults smiled indulgently. No part of normal living was singled out as something to be hidden or repressed; all of it was necessary instruction to becoming an adult. The only taboo was violence, particularly extreme or unnecessary violence.

  Living so closely together, they had learned that nothing could destroy a Camp, or a people, like violence, particularly when they were confined to the earthlodge during the long, cold winters. Whether by accident or design, every custom, manner, convention, or practice, even if not overtly directed at it, was aimed at keeping violence to a minimum. Sanctioned conduct allowed a wide range of individual differences in activities that did not, as a rule, lead to violence, or that might be acceptable outlets for draining off strong emotions. Personal skills were fostered. Tolerance was encouraged; jealousy or envy, while understood, was discouraged. Competitions, including arguments, were actively used as alternatives, but were ritualized, strictly controlled, and kept within defined boundaries. The children quickly learned the basic rules. Yelling was acceptable; hitting was not.

  As Ayla checked the large waterbag, she smiled again at the sleeping children, who had been up until late the night before. She enjoyed having children around again. “I should get snow before we leave. We are low on water, and it hasn’t snowed for a while. Clean snow nearby is getting hard to find.”

  “Let’s not take the time,” Deegie said. “We have water at our hearth, and so does Nezzie. We can get more when we come back.” She was putting on her warm winter outdoor clothes while Ayla was dressing. “I have a waterbag, and some food to take with us, so if you’re not hungry, we can just go.”

  “I can wait for the food, but I need to make some hot tea,” Ayla said. Deegie’s eagerness to leave was infecting her. They were still just beginning to stir around outside the lodge, and spending some time alone just with Deegie seemed like fun.

  “I think Nezzie has some hot tea, and I don’t think she’d mind if we had a cup.”

  “She makes mint in the morning; I will just get something to add to it … something I like to drink in the morning. I think I will get my sling, too.”

  Nezzie insisted that the two young women eat some hot cooked grains as well, and gave them slices of meat from her roast of the night before to take along. Talut wanted to know which way they planned to go, and the general location of Deegie’s snares. When they stepped outside the main entrance, the day had begun; the sun had risen above a bank of clouds on the horizon, and begun its journey across a clear sky. Ayla noticed the horses were already out. She didn’t blame them.

  Deegie showed Ayla the quick twist of the foot that turned the leather loop, attached to the elongated circular frame woven across with sturdy willow withes, into a convenient snowshoe hitch. With a little practice, Ayla was soon striding across the top of the snow alongside Deegie.

  Jondalar watched them leaving from the entrance to the annex. With a frown, he looked at the sky and considered following them, then changed his mind. He saw a few clouds, but nothing to portend danger. Why was he always so worried about Ayla whenever she left the earthlodge? It was ridiculous for him to follow her around. She wasn’t going out alone, Deegie was with her, and the two young women were perfectly able to take care of themselves … even if it did snow … or worse. They’d notice him following after a while, and then he’d just be in the way when they wanted to be off by themselves. He let the drape fall, and turned back inside, but he couldn’t shake his feeling that Ayla might be in danger.

  “Oh, look, Ayla!” Deegie cried, on her knees examining the frozen solid white-furred carcass dangling from a noose pulled tight around its neck. “I set other traps. Let’s hurry and check them.”

  Ayla wanted to stay and examine the snare, but she followed after Deegie. “What are you going to do with it?” she asked when she caught up.

  “It depends on how many I get. I wanted to make a fringe on a fur parka for Branag, but I’m making him a tunic, too, a red one—not as bright as your red. It will have long sleeves and take two hides, and I’m trying to match the color of the second skin to the first. I think I’d like to decorate it with the fur and teeth of a winter fox. What do you think?”

  “I think it will be beautiful.” They shussed through the snow for a while, then Ayla said, “What do you think would be best for a white tunic?”

  “It depends. Do you want other colors or do you want to keep it all white?”

  “I think I want it to be white, but I’m not sure.”

  “White fox fur would be nice.”

  “I thought about that, but … I don’t think it would be quite right,” Ayla said. It wasn’t so much the color that was bothering her. She remembered that she had selected white fox furs to give to Ranec at her adoption ceremony, and didn’t want any reminders about that time.

  The second snare had been sprung, but it was empty. The sinew noose had been bitten through, and there were wolf tracks. The third had also caught a fox, and it had apparently frozen hard in the snare, but it had been gnawed at, most of it was eaten, in fact, and the fur was useless. Again Ayla pointed out wolf tracks.

  “I seem to be trapping foxes for wolves,” Deegie said.

  “It looks like only one, Deegie,” Ayla said.

  Deegie was beginning to fear she would not get another good fur, even if one had been caught in her fourth snare. They hurried to the place where she had set it.

  “It should be over there, near those bushes,” she said as they approached a small wooded copse, “but I don’t see …”

  “There it is, Deegie!” Ayla shouted, hurrying ahead. “It look good, too. And look at that tail!”

  “Perfect!” Deegie sighed with relief “I wanted at least two.” She untangled the frozen fox from the noose, tied it together with the first fox, and slung them over the branch of a tree. She was feeling more relaxed now that she had trapped her two foxes. “I’m hungry. Why don’t we stop and have something to eat here?”

  “I do feel hungry, now that you say it.”

  They were in a sp
arsely wooded glen, more brush than trees, formed by a creek that had cut through thick deposits of loess soil. A sense of bleak and weary exhaustion pervaded the small vale in the waning days of the long harsh winter. It was a drab place of blacks and whites and dreary grays. The snow cover, broken by the woody underbrush, was old and compacted, disturbed by many tracks, and seemed used and grimy. Broken branches exposing raw wood showed the ravages of wind, snow, and hungry animals. Willow and alder clung close to the earth, bent by the weight of climate and season to prostrate shrubs. A few scrawny birch trees stood tall and thin, scraping bare branches noisily together in the wind, as though clamoring for the fulfilling touch of green. Even the conifers had lost their color. The twisted pines, bark scabbed with patches of gray lichen, were faded, and the tall larches were dark and sagged heavily from their burden of snow.

  Dominating one shallow slope was a mound of snow armed with long canes spiked with sharp thorns—the dry, woody stems of runners which had been sent out the previous summer to claim new territory. Ayla noted it in her mind, not as an impenetrable thicket of thorny briars, but as a place to look for berries and healing leaves in their proper season. She saw beyond the bleak, tired scene to the hope it held, and after the long confinement, even a winter-weary landscape looked promising, especially with the sun shining.

  The two young women piled snow together to make seats on what would be the bank of a little stream if it were summer. Deegie opened her haversack and took out the food she had packed, and even more important, the water. She opened a birchbark packet and gave Ayla a compact cake of traveling food—the nutritious mixture of dried fruits and meat and energy-giving essential fat, shaped into a round patty.

  “Mother made some of her steamed loaves with pine nuts last night and gave me one,” Deegie said, opening another packet and breaking off a piece for Ayla. They had become a favorite of hers.

  “I will have to ask Tulie how to make these,” Ayla said, taking a bite before she unwrapped the slices of Nezzie’s roast, and put some down beside each of them. “I think we are having a feast out here. All we need are some fresh spring greens.”

  “That would make it perfect. I can hardly wait for spring. Once we have the Back Breaking Celebration, it seems to get harder and harder to wait,” Deegie replied.

  Ayla was enjoying the companionable outing with just herself and Deegie, and was even beginning to feel warm in the shallow depression, protected from winds. She untied the thong at her throat and pushed back her hood, then straightened her sling around her head. She closed her eyes and tipped her face up to the sun. She saw the circular afterimage of the dazzling orb against the red background of her lowered eyelids, and felt the welcoming warmth. After she opened her eyes again, she seemed to see with greater clarity.

  “Do people always wrestle at Back Breaking Celebrations?” Ayla asked. “I have never seen anyone wrestle without moving his feet before.”

  “Yes, it’s to honor …”

  “Look, Deegie! It is spring!” Ayla interrupted, jumping up and rushing toward a willow shrub nearby. When the other woman joined her, she pointed to the hint of swelling buds along a slender twig, and one, coming into season too early to survive, that had burst forth in bright spring green. The women smiled at each other in wonder, full of the discovery, as though they had invented spring themselves.

  The sinew snare loop still dangled not far from the willow. Ayla held it up. “I think this is a very good way to hunt. You do not have to look for animals. You make a trap and come back later to get them, but how do you make it, and how do you know that you will catch a fox?”

  “It’s not hard to make. You know how sinew gets hard if you wet it and let it dry, just like leather that is not treated?”

  Ayla nodded.

  “You make a little loop at the end,” Deegie continued, showing her the loop. “Then you take the other end and put it through to make another loop, just big enough for a fox’s head to go through. Then you wet it, and let it dry with the loop open so it will stay open. Then you have to go where the foxes are, usually where you’ve seen them or caught them before. My mother showed me this place. Usually there are foxes here every year, you can tell if there are tracks. They often follow the same paths when they are near their dens. To set the snare, you find a fox trail, and where it goes through bushes or near trees, you set the loop right across the trail, at about the height of their heads, and fasten it, like this, here and here,” Deegie demonstrated as she explained. Ayla watched, her forehead furrowed in concentration.

  “When the fox runs along the trail, the head goes through the loop, and as he runs, it tightens the noose around his neck. The more the fox struggles, the tighter the noose gets. It doesn’t take long. Then the only problem is finding the fox before something else does. Danug was telling me about the way people to the north have started setting snares. He says they bend down a young sapling and tie it to the noose so that it comes loose as soon as the animal is caught, and jerks it up when the tree springs back. That keeps the fox off the ground until you get back.”

  “I think that’s a good idea,” Ayla said, walking back toward their seats. She looked up, then suddenly, to Deegie’s surprise, she whipped her sling off her head and was scanning the ground. “Where is a stone?” she whispered. “There!”

  With a movement so swift Deegie could hardly follow, Ayla picked up the stone, set it in her sling, whipped it around and let fly. Deegie heard the stone land, but only when she got back to the seats did she see the object of Ayla’s missile. It was a white ermine, a small weasel about fourteen inches long overall, but five of the inches was a white furry tail with a black tip. In summer the elongated, soft-furred animal would have a rich brown coat with a white underbelly, but in winter the sinuous little stoat turned pure silky white, except for its black nose, sharp little eyes, and the very tip of its tail.

  “It was stealing our roast meat!” Ayla said.

  “I didn’t even see it next to that snow. You’ve got good eyes,” Deegie said. “And you’re so quick with that sling, I don’t know why you need to worry about snares, Ayla.”

  “A sling is good for hunting when you see what you want to hunt, but a snare can hunt for you when you are not even there. Both are useful to know,” Ayla replied, taking the question seriously.

  They sat down to finish their meal. Ayla’s hand kept returning to rub the soft thick fur of the little weasel as they talked. “Ermines have the nicest fur,” she said.

  “Most of those long weasels do,” Deegie said. “Minks, sables, even wolverines have good fur. Not so soft, but the best for hoods, if you don’t want frost clinging around your face. But it’s hard to snare them, and you can’t really hunt them with a spear. They’re quick and vicious. Your sling seemed to work, though I still don’t know how you did it.”

  “I learned to use the sling hunting those kinds of animals. I only hunted meat eaters in the beginning and learned their ways first.”

  “Why?” Deegie asked.

  “I was not supposed to hunt at all, so I did not hunt any animals that were food, only those that stole food from us.” She snorted a wry chuckle of realization. “I thought that would make it all right.”

  “Why didn’t they want you to hunt?”

  “Women of the Clan are forbidden to hunt … but they finally allowed me to use my sling.” Ayla paused for an instant, remembering. “Do you know, I killed a wolverine long before I killed a rabbit?” She smiled at the irony.

  Deegie shook her head in amazement. What a strange childhood Ayla must have had, she thought.

  They got up to leave, and as Deegie went to get her foxes, Ayla picked up the soft, white little ermine. She rubbed her hand along the body all the way to the tip of the tail.

  “That is what I want!” Ayla said, suddenly. “Ermine!”

  “But that’s what you have,” Deegie said.

  “No. I mean for the white tunic. I want to trim it with white ermine fur, and the tails. I
like those tails with the little black tips.”

  “Where are you going to get enough ermine to decorate a tunic?” Deegie asked. “Spring is coming, they will be changing color again soon.”

  “I do not need very many, and where there is one, there are usually more nearby. I will hunt them. Now,” Ayla said. “I need to find some good stones.” She started pushing snow out of the way, looking for stones near the bank of the frozen creek.

  “Now?” Deegie said.

  Ayla stopped and looked up. She had almost forgotten Deegie’s presence in her excitement. She could make tracking and stalking more difficult. “You do not have to wait for me, Deegie. Go back. I will find my way.”

  “Go back? I wouldn’t miss this for anything.”

  “You can be very quiet?”

  Deegie smiled. “I have hunted before, Ayla.”

  Ayla blushed, feeling she said the wrong thing. “I did not mean …”

  “I know you didn’t,” Deegie said, then smiled. “I think I could learn some things from someone who killed a wolverine before she killed a rabbit. Wolverines are more vicious, mean, fearless, and spiteful than any animal alive, including hyenas. I’ve seen them drive leopards away from their own kills, they’ll even stand up to a cave lion. I’ll try to stay out of your way. If you think I’m scaring the ermine off, tell me, and I’ll wait for you here. But don’t ask me to go back.”

  Ayla smiled with relief, thinking how wonderful it was to have a friend who understood her so quickly. “Ermine are as bad as wolverines. They are just smaller, Deegie.”

  “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “We still have roast meat left. It might be useful, but first we must find tracks … after I get a good supply of stones.”