The Mammoth Hunters ec-3

by Jean M. Auel

  The structure of their metaphysical universe paralleled their physical world, and was useful in providing answers to unresolvable questions – questions that could cause great anxiety without some acceptable and, based on their precepts, reasonable explanation. But any structure, no matter how useful, is also limiting. The animals of their world roamed freely, the plants grew at random, and the people were intimately familiar with these patterns. They knew where certain plants grew, and understood the behavior of animals, but it never occurred to them that the patterns could be changed; that animals and plants, and people, were born with an innate capacity for change and adaptation. That, indeed, without it, they would not survive.

  Ayla's control over the animals she had raised was not perceived as natural; no one had ever tried to tame or domesticate an animal before. The mamuti, anticipating the need for explanations to relieve the anxieties caused by this startling innovation, had mentally searched the theoretical construct of their metaphysical world for answers that would satisfy. It was not a simple act of taming animals that she had done. Instead, Ayla had demonstrated a supernatural power far beyond anyone's imagination. Her control over animals, it seemed obvious, could only be explained by her access to the original Spirit form and therefore to the Mother Herself.

  Vincavec, like old Mamut and the rest of the mamuti, was now convinced that Ayla was not just Mamut – One Who Served the Mother – she had to be something more. Perhaps she embodied some supernatural presence; she might even be Mut Herself, incarnate. It was all the more believable because she did not flaunt it. But whatever her power, he was sure some important destiny awaited her. There was a reason for her existence, and he fervently wanted to be a part of it. She was the chosen of the Great Earth Mother.

  "All your explanations have merit," Lomie said, persuasively, after she heard all of Ayla's objections, "but would you be willing to participate in the Calling ceremony, even if you don't think you have any Talent for it? Many people here are convinced that you would bring good luck to the mammoth hunt if you join in the Call, and offering good luck won't hurt you. It would make the Mamutoi very happy."

  Ayla saw no way that she could refuse, but she was not comfortable with the adulation she had been getting. She almost hated to walk through the encampment now, and was looking forward to the mammoth hunt the next day with great excitement, and relief at the chance to get away for a while.

  Ayla woke up and looked out the open triangular end of the lean-to traveling tent. Daylight was beginning to illuminate the eastern edge of the sky. She got up quietly, trying not to wake Ranec or anyone else, and slipped outside. The damp chill of early morning hung in the air, but no swarms of flying insects yet, for which she was grateful. Last night the air had been thick with them.

  She walked to the edge of a black pool of stagnant water covered with slime and pollen; breeding grounds for the swarms of midges, gnats, blackflies, and mostly mosquitoes, that had risen to meet them like a high-pitched humming swirl of dark smoke. The insects had worked themselves under clothing, leaving a trail of red swollen bites, and swarmed around the eyes and choked the mouths of hunters and horses.

  The fifty men and women selected for the first mammoth hunt of the season had reached the disagreeable but inevitable bogs. The permanently frozen ground beneath the surface layer, softened now by spring and summer melt, allowed no drainage to percolate through. Where the accumulation of melt was greater than could be dissipated by evaporation, the result was standing water. On any extended trek in the warmer season, it was likely that tracts of accumulated ground moisture would be found, ranging from large shallow melt lakes to still ponds that reflected the moving sky to swampy mires.

  It had been too late in the afternoon to decide whether to attempt to cross the bog or find a way around it. Camp was quickly set up and fires lit to deter the flying hordes. The first night on the trek, those who had not seen Ayla's firestone used before made the usual exclamations of surprise and awe, but by now it was taken for granted that she would light the fire. The tents they used were simple shelters made of several hides that had been sewn together to make one large covering. Its shape depended upon structural materials that were found or brought with them. A mammoth skull with large tusks still intact might be used to hold up the hide cover, or the supple strength of a living dwarf willow could be bent to the task, even mammoth spears served double duty as tent poles on occasion. Sometimes it was just used as an extra ground cloth. This time the cover hide, which was shared by the hunters from Lion Camp with a few others, was draped across a slanting ridgepole with one end jammed into the ground and the other braced up by the crotch of a tree.

  After they had made camp, Ayla searched around the dense vegetation near the bog and was pleased to find certain small plants with hand-shaped, dark green leaves. Digging down to the underground system of roots and rhizomes, she collected several, and boiled the greenish-yellow goldenseal root to make a healing and insect-repelling wash for the sore eyes and throats of the horses. When she used it on her own mosquito-bitten skin, several others asked to use it and she ended up treating the insect bites of the entire hunting party. She added more of the pounded root to fat to make a salve for the next day. Then she found a patch of fleabane and pulled up several plants to throw on the fire, as an additional deterrent along with ordinary smoke to help keep a small area close to the fire relatively insect free.

  But in the cool damp of morning the flying scourges were quiescent. Ayla shivered and rubbed her arms, but made no move to return for a warmer covering. She stared at the dark water, hardly noticing the gradual encroachment of light from the east filling the entire vault of the sky, and bringing into sharp focus the tangled vegetation. She felt a warm fur drape over her shoulders. Gratefully she pulled it around her, and felt arms encircle her waist from behind.

  "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 gra
sses, 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 eyes 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 pin
k 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.