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Iza told Ayla to hold open the old magician’s mouth again while she carefully placed the wooden spike at the base of the aching tooth. She gave the peg a sharp blow with a stone held in her hand to loosen it. Creb jumped, but it was not as painful as he thought it would be. Then Iza tied the piece of sinew around the loosened tooth and told Ayla to secure the other end around one of the posts set firmly into the ground that was part of the frame from which the herbs were hanging to dry.
“Now, move his head back until the cord is taut, Ayla,” Iza told the girl. With a quick jerk, Iza yanked on the sinew. “Here it is,” she said, and held up the cord with the heavy molar dangling from it. She sprinkled dried geranium root on the bleeding hole and dipped a small piece of absorbent rabbit skin in an antiseptic solution of balsamgum bark and a few of the dried leaves, and packed his jaw with the damp leather.
“Take your tooth, Mog-ur,” Iza said, putting the decayed molar into the hand of the still-dazed magician. “It’s all over.”
He clenched it in his hand, then let it drop as he lay down. “Must give Ursus,” he fumbled groggily.
The clan watched to see how well Creb recovered after Ayla assisted the medicine woman with her dental surgery. When his mouth healed quickly without any complications, they felt more assured that the girl’s presence didn’t alienate the spirits. It made them more willing to allow her to assist when Iza helped them. As the winter progressed, Ayla learned to treat burns, cuts, bruises, colds, sore throats, stomachaches, earaches, and many of the minor injuries and ailments they fell heir to in the normal course of living.
In time, members of the clan went as easily to Ayla as to Iza for treatment of minor problems. They knew Ayla had been collecting herbs for Iza and saw the medicine woman training her. They knew, too, that Iza was getting old and wasn’t well and Uba was too young. The clan was getting used to the strange girl in their midst and was beginning to accept the idea that a girl born to the Others might someday be the medicine woman of their clan.
It was during the coldest time of the year, after the winter solstice and before the first breakup of spring, that Ovra went into labor.
“It’s too early,” Iza told Ayla. “She should not deliver until spring, and she hasn’t felt movement recently. I’m afraid the birth will not go well. I think her baby will be stillborn.”
“Ovra wanted this baby so much, Iza. She was so happy when she found out she was pregnant. Can’t you do anything?” Ayla asked.
“We’ll do what we can, but there are some things that are beyond help, Ayla,” the medicine woman replied.
The whole clan was concerned about the early labor of Goov’s mate. The women tried to offer moral support while the men waited anxiously nearby. They had lost several members during the earthquake and looked forward to any increases in their number. New babies meant more mouths for Brun’s hunters and the foraging women to feed, but, in time, the babies would grow and provide for them when they grew old. The continuation and survival of the clan was essential to individual survival. They needed each other and were saddened that Ovra would probably not give birth to a living baby.
Goov was more worried for his mate than for the child, and wished there was something he could do. He didn’t like to see Ovra suffering, especially when the outcome had so little hope of being anything but unhappy. She wanted the baby; she had felt inadequate to be the only woman in the clan without children. Even the medicine woman had given birth, as old as she was. Ovra had been elated when she finally became pregnant, and now Goov wished he could think of some way to ease her loss.
Droog seemed to understand the younger man better than anyone. He’d had occasion to have similar feelings about Goov’s mother, though he was glad she had given birth to Goov, and Droog had to admit he was enjoying his new family, once he had gotten used to them. He even had hopes that Vorn might yet develop an interest in toolmaking, and Ona was sheer delight, especially now that she was weaned and was beginning to imitate grown women in her own little-girl way. Droog had never had a girl around his fire before, and she was so young when he had mated Aga, it felt as though Ona had been born to his hearth.
Ebra and Uka were sitting beside Ovra, sympathizing, while Iza prepared medication. Uka had been looking forward to her daughter’s expected child, too, and held Ovra’s hand while she strained. Oga had gone to prepare an evening meal for Brun and Grod along with Broud, and had asked Goov as well. Ika offered to help, but when Goov declined, Oga said she didn’t need help. Goov didn’t feel much like eating and went to visit Droog’s hearth and was finally coaxed by Aba to try a few bites.
Oga was distracted, worried about Ovra, and was beginning to wish she hadn’t turned down Ika’s offer. She didn’t know how it happened, but as she was serving bowls of hot soup to the men, she stumbled. Boiling-hot soup spilled on Brun’s shoulder and arm.
“Aarghhh!” Brun cried as the scalding liquid poured over him. He was dancing around, gritting his teeth at the pain. Every head turned and every breath was held. The silence was broken by Broud.
“Oga! You stupid, clumsy woman!” he gesticulated to cover up his embarrassment that it was his mate who had done such a thing.
“Ayla, go help him, I can’t leave now,” Iza signaled.
Broud advanced toward his mate with his fists doubled, ready to punish her.
“No, Broud,” Brun gestured, putting out his hand to stop the young man. The hot grease from the soup still clung to him and he struggled not to show the pain he felt. “She couldn’t help it. Beating her will do no good.” Oga was crumpled in a heap at Broud’s feet, shaking with humiliation and fear.
Ayla was apprehensive. She had never treated the leader of the clan, and regarded him with inordinate fear. She raced toward Creb’s hearth, grabbed a wooden bowl, then raced to the mouth of the cave. She scooped up a mound of snow and went to the hearth of the leader, dropping to the ground in front of him.
“Iza sent me, she cannot leave Ovra now. Will the leader allow this girl to help him?” she asked when Brun acknowledged her.
Brun nodded. He harbored doubts about Ayla becoming the clan’s medicine woman, but under the circumstances he had little choice but to allow her to treat him. Nervously, she applied the cooling snow to the angry red burn, feeling Brun’s hard muscles relax as the snow eased the pain. She ran back, found the dried horsemint, and added hot water to the leaves. After they softened, she put snow in the bowl to cool it quickly and returned to her patient. With her hand she applied the soothing medication, feeling more tension leave the leader’s rock-hard muscular body as she worked. Brun breathed a little easier. The burn still hurt, but it was far more bearable. He nodded his approval, and the girl relaxed a little.
She does seem to be learning Iza’s magic, Brun thought. And she’s learning to behave well, as a woman should; perhaps all she needed was a little maturity. If anything happens to Iza before Uba grows up, we will be without a medicine woman. Perhaps Iza is wise to train her.
Not long afterward, Ebra came and told her mate that Ovra’s son was stillborn. Brun nodded and glanced in her direction, shaking his head. And a boy, too, he thought. She must be heartbroken, everyone knows how much she wanted this baby. I hope she’ll have an easier time getting pregnant again. Who would think a Beaver totem could fight so hard? Though the leader felt a great pity for the young woman, he said nothing, for no one would mention the tragedy. But Ovra understood Brun’s reason for coming to Goov’s hearth a few days later to tell her she should take as long as she wanted to recuperate from her “illness.” Though the men often congregated at Brun’s fire, the leader seldom visited the other men’s hearths, and very rarely talked to the women if he did. Ovra was grateful for his concern, but nothing could ease her pain.
Iza insisted that Ayla continue to treat Brun, and as the scald healed, the clan accepted her even more. Ayla felt easier around the leader afterward. He was, after all, only human.
12
As the long winter
ended, the tempo of the clan’s life increased to match the pace of life quickening within the rich earth. The cold season enforced not a true hibernation, but an alteration in metabolic rates brought about by reduced activities. In winter they were more sluggish, slept more, ate more, causing an insulating layer of subcutaneous fat to develop as protection against the cold. With a rise in temperature, the trend was reversed, making the clan restless and eager to be out and moving.
The process was assisted by Iza’s spring tonic, compounded of triticum roots, collected early in spring from the coarse grass that resembled rye, dried woodruff leaves, and iron-rich yellow dock root powder, administered universally to young and old alike by the clan’s medicine woman. With new vigor, the clan burst out of the cave ready to begin a new cycle of seasons.
The third winter in the cave had not been too hard on them. The only death was Ovra’s stillborn child, and that didn’t count because it had never been named and accepted. Iza, no longer drained by the demands of nursing a hungry baby, had weathered it well. Creb had suffered no more than usual. Both Aga and Ika were pregnant again, and since both women had given birth successfully before, the clan looked forward to its increase. The first greens, shoots, and buds were gathered and an early hunt planned to provide fresh meat for a spring feast to honor the spirits that awakened new life and to give thanks to the spirits of the clan’s protective totems for seeing them through another winter.
Ayla felt she had special reason to give thanks to her totem. The winter had been both trying and exciting. She grew to hate Broud even more intensely, but she learned she could cope with him. He had thrown his worst at her and she learned to take it in stride. There was a limit beyond which even Broud could not go. Learning more of Iza’s healing magic helped; she loved it. The more she learned, the more she wanted to learn. She found she was as eager to search out the medicinal plants for their own uses—now that she understood them better—as to use plant gathering as a means of escape. As long as the bitter winds and icy blizzards blew, she waited patiently. But with the first hints of change, restless anticipation set in. She looked forward to this spring more than any spring she could remember. It was time to learn to hunt.
As soon as the weather allowed, Ayla took to the woods and fields. She stopped hiding her sling in the small cave near her practice meadow. She kept it with her, tucked into a fold of her wrap or beneath a layer of leaves in her collecting basket. Teaching herself to hunt was not easy. Animals were quick and elusive, and moving targets far more difficult to hit than stationary ones. The women always made noise when they were out gathering, to scare off any lurking animals, and it was a hard habit to break. Many times she became angry with herself for warning an animal of her approach when she caught a glimpse of one darting for cover. But she was determined, and with practice she learned.
Through trial and error she learned to track and began to understand and apply the bits of hunting lore gleaned from the men. Her eye was already trained to pick up small details that differentiated plants, and it took only an extension to learn to define the meaning in the telltale droppings of an animal, a faint print in the dust, a bent blade of grass or a broken twig. She learned to distinguish the spoor of different animals, became familiar with their habits and habitats. Though she didn’t overlook the herbivorous species, she concentrated on the carnivores, her chosen prey.
She watched to see which way the men went when they left to go hunting. But it was not Brun and his hunters that gave her the most concern. More often than not they chose the steppes as their hunting ground, and she didn’t dare try to hunt the open plains with no cover. It was the two older men she worried about most. She had seen Zoug and Dorv occasionally when she was foraging for Iza in the past. They were the ones she was most likely to find hunting the same terrain as herself. She had to be constantly on her guard to avoid them. Even starting out in the opposite direction was no guarantee they wouldn’t double back and catch her with a sling in her hands.
But as she learned to move silently, she sometimes followed them to watch and learn. She was especially careful then. It was more dangerous for her to track the trackers than the objects of their pursuit. It was good training, however. She learned to move noiselessly as much from following the men as from trailing an animal, and could melt into a shadow if one happened to glance her way.
As Ayla gained skill tracking, learned to move with stealth, trained her eye to discern a shape within its camouflaged cover, there were times when she was sure she could have hit a small animal. Though she was tempted, if it was not carnivorous she passed it by without trying. She had made her decision to hunt only predators, and her totem sanctioned only those. Spring buds became blossoms and leafed out the trees, blossoms fell and fruits swelled from their hearts, hanging half-grown and green, and still Ayla had not killed her first animal.
“Get out! Shoo! Scat!”
Ayla started out of the cave to see what the commotion was about. Several women were waving their arms and chasing after a short, squat, shaggy animal. The wolverine headed toward the cave but veered aside with a snarl when it saw Ayla. It dodged between the women’s legs and escaped with a strip of meat in its jaws.
“That sneaky glutton! I just put that meat out to dry,” Oga gesticulated in angry frustration. “I hardly turned my back. He’s been hanging around here all summer, getting braver every day. I wish Zoug would get him! It’s a good thing you were just coming out, Ayla. He almost ran into the cave. Think what a stink he would have left if he’d gotten cornered in there!”
“I think your he is a she, Oga, and probably has a nest somewhere nearby. I’d guess she has several hungry babies that must be getting pretty big by now.”
“That’s all we need! A bunch of them.” Angry words punctuated her gestures. “Zoug and Dorv took Vorn with them early this morning. I wish they’d gone hunting for that wolverine instead of hamsters and ptarmigan down below. Gluttons are good for nothing!”
“They’re good for something, Oga. Their fur doesn’t frost up from your breath in winter. Their pelts make good hats and hoods.”
“I wish that one were a pelt!”
Ayla started back to the hearth. There was really nothing she had to do then, and Iza did say she was running low on a few things. Ayla decided to go out and find the wolverine’s nest. She smiled to herself and quickened her step, and shortly afterward left the cave with her basket, heading into the forest not far from the place where the animal had gone.
Scanning the ground, she spied the print of a claw with long sharp nails in the dust; a little farther on, a bent stem. Ayla started trailing the creature. In a few moments, she heard scuttling sounds, surprisingly close to the cave. She moved ahead softly, hardly disturbing a leaf, and caught sight of the wolverine with four half-grown young, snarling and bickering over the strip of stolen meat. Carefully, she withdrew her sling from a fold of her wrap and fitted a stone into the bulging pocket.
She waited, watching for a chance at a clean shot. A stray shift in the wind brought a strange scent to the wily glutton. She looked up, sniffing the air, alerted to possible danger. It was the moment Ayla was waiting for. Quickly, even as the animal caught the movement, she hurled the stone. The wolverine slumped to the ground as the four young bounded off, startled by the bouncing rock.
She stepped out of the concealing brush and stooped to examine the scavenger. The bearlike weasel was about three feet long from its nose to the tip of its bushy tail, with coarse, long, blackish brown fur. Wolverines were intrepid, scrappy scavengers, fierce enough to drive away predators larger than themselves from their kills, fearless enough to steal drying meat or anything portable they could carry off, and wily enough to break into storage caches. They had musk glands that left behind a skunklike odor and were a bane to the clan even worse than the hyena, who was as much predator as scavenger and didn’t depend for his survival on the kills of others.
The stone from Ayla’s sling had landed above the eye,
just where she aimed. This is one wolverine that won’t steal from us anymore, Ayla thought, filled with a glow of satisfaction that verged on exultation. It was her first kill. I think I’ll give the pelt to Oga, she thought, reaching for her knife to skin the animal. Won’t she be glad to know it won’t bother us anymore. The girl stopped.
What am I thinking of? I can’t give Olga this pelt. I can’t give it to anyone, I can’t even keep it. I’m not supposed to hunt. If anyone found out I killed this wolverine, I don’t know what they’d do. Ayla sat down beside the dead glutton, pulling her fingers through its long coarse coat. Her elation was gone.
She had made her first kill. Maybe it wasn’t a great bison killed with a heavy sharp spear, but it was more than Vorn’s porcupine. There would be no celebration marking her entrance into the ranks of the hunters, no feast held in her honor, not even the looks of praise and congratulations Vorn received when he proudly showed off his small game. If she returned to the cave with the wolverine, all she could expect would be shocked looks and severe punishment. It mattered little that she wanted to help the clan or that she was able to hunt and showed promise of doing well. Women did not hunt, women did not kill animals. Men did.
She heaved a sigh. I knew it, I knew it all along, she said to herself. Even before I started to hunt, before I ever picked up that sling, I knew I wasn’t supposed to. The bravest of the young gluttons came out of its hiding place, tentatively sniffing at the dead animal. Those young ones are going to give us as much trouble as their mother, Ayla thought. They’re close enough to full grown that a couple of them will survive. I’d better get rid of this carcass. If I drag it far away, the young will probably follow her scent. Ayla got up and began to haul the dead wolverine by its tail deeper into the woods. Then she started looking for plants to gather.
