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Around noon she found a streambed with a few drying pools of water, which tasted slightly acrid, but she filled her waterbag. She dug up some cattail roots; they were stringy and bland, but she chewed on them as she plodded. She didn’t want to go on, but she didn’t know what else to do. Dispirited and apathetic, she wasn’t paying much attention to where she was going. She didn’t notice the pride of cave lions basking in the afternoon sun until one roared a warning.
Fear charged through her, tingling her into awareness. She backed up and turned west to skirt the lions’ territory. She had traveled north far enough. It was the spirit of the Cave Lion that protected her, not the great beast in his physical form. Just because he was her totem did not mean she was safe from attack.
In fact, that was how Creb knew her totem was the Cave Lion. She still bore four long parallel scars on her left thigh, and had a recurring nightmare of a gigantic claw reaching into a tiny cave where she had run to hide when she was a child of five. She had dreamed about that claw the night before, she recalled. Creb had told her she had been tested to see if she was worthy, and marked to show she had been chosen. Absently, she reached down and felt the scars on her leg. I wonder why the Cave Lion would choose me, she thought.
The sun was blinding as it sank low in the western sky. Ayla had been hiking up a long incline, looking for a place to make camp. Dry camp, again, she thought, and was glad she had filled her waterbag. But she would have to find more water soon. She was tired and hungry, and upset that she had allowed herself to get so close to the cave lions.
Was it a sign? Was it just a matter of time? What made her think she could escape a death curse?
The glare on the horizon was so bright that she nearly missed the abrupt edge of the plateau. She shielded her eyes, stood on the lip, and looked down a ravine. There was a small river of sparkling water below, flanked on both sides by trees and brush. A gorge of rocky cliffs opened out into a cool, green, sheltered valley. Halfway down, in the middle of a field, the last long rays of the sun fell on a small herd of horses, grazing peacefully.
Read on for an excerpt from
The Plains of Passage
Book Four in the Earth’s Children® Series
by Jean M. Auel
The woman caught a glimpse of movement through the dusty haze ahead and wondered if it was the wolf she had seen loping in front of them earlier.
She glanced at her companion with a worried frown, then looked for the wolf again, straining to see through the blowing dust.
“Jondalar! Look!” she said, pointing ahead.
Toward her left, the vague outlines of several conical tents could just be seen through the dry, gritty wind.
The wolf was stalking some two-legged creatures that had begun to materialize out of the dusty air, carrying spears aimed directly at them.
“I think we’ve reached the river, but I don’t think we’re the only ones who wanted to camp there, Ayla,” the man said, pulling on the lead rein to halt his horse.
The woman signaled her horse to a stop by tightening a thigh muscle, exerting a subtle pressure that was so reflexive she didn’t even think of it as controlling the animal.
Ayla heard a menacing growl from deep in the wolf’s throat and saw that his posture had shifted from a defensive stance to an aggressive one. He was ready to attack! She whistled, a sharp, distinctive sound that resembled a bird call, though not from a bird anyone had ever heard. The wolf gave up his stealthy pursuit and bounded toward the woman astride the horse.
“Wolf, stay close!” she said, signaling with her hand at the same time. The wolf trotted beside the dun yellow mare as the woman and man on horseback slowly approached the people standing between them and the tents.
A gusty, fitful wind, holding the fine loess soil in suspension, swirled around them, obscuring their view of the spear holders. Ayla lifted her leg over and slid down from the horse’s back. She knelt beside the wolf, put one arm over his back and the other across his chest, to calm him and hold him back if necessary. She could feel the snarl rumbling in his throat and the eager tautness of muscles ready to spring. She looked up at Jondalar. A light film of powdery dirt coated the shoulders and long flaxen hair of the tall man and turned the coat of his dark brown mount to the more common dun color of the sturdy breed. She and Whinney looked the same. Though it was still early in the summer, the strong winds off the massive glacier to the north were already desiccating the steppes in a wide band south of the ice.
She felt the wolf tense and strain against her arm, then saw someone new appear from behind the spear holders, dressed as Mamut might have dressed for an important ceremony, in a mask with aurochs’s horns and in clothes painted and decorated with enigmatic symbols.
The mamut shook a staff at them vigorously and shouted, “Go away, evil spirits! Leave this place!”
Ayla thought it was a woman’s voice shouting through the mask, but she wasn’t sure; the words had been spoken in Mamutoi, though. The mamut dashed toward them shaking the staff again, while Ayla held back the wolf. Then the costumed figure began chanting and dancing, shaking the staff and high-stepping toward them quickly, then back again, as though trying to scare them off or drive them away, and succeeding, at least, in frightening the horses.
She was surprised that Wolf was so ready to attack, wolves seldom threatened people. But, remembering behavior she had observed, she thought she understood. Ayla had often watched wolves when she was teaching herself to hunt, and she knew they were affectionate and loyal to their own pack. But they were quick to drive strangers away from their territory, and they had been known to kill other wolves to protect what they felt was theirs.
To the tiny wolf pup she had found and brought back to the Mamutoi earthlodge, the Lion Camp was his pack; other people would be like strange wolves to him. He had growled at unknown humans who had come to visit when he was barely half-grown. Now, in unfamiliar territory, perhaps the territory of another pack, it would be natural for him to feel defensive when he first became aware of strangers, especially hostile strangers with spears. Why had the people of this Camp drawn spears?
Ayla thought there was something familiar about the chant; then she realized what it was. The words were in the sacred archaic language that was understood only by the mamuti. Ayla didn’t understand all of it, Mamut had just begun to teach her the language before she left, but she did gather that the meaning of the loud chant was essentially the same as the words that had been shouted earlier, though cast in somewhat more cajoling terms. It was an exhortation to the strange wolf and horse-people spirits to go away and leave them alone, to go back to the spirit world where they belonged.
Speaking in Zelandonii so the people from the Camp wouldn’t understand, Ayla told Jondalar what the mamut was saying.
“They think we’re spirits? Of course!” he said. “I should have known. They’re afraid of us. That’s why they’re threatening us with spears. Ayla, we may have this problem every time we meet people along the way. We are used to the animals now, but most peo
ple have never thought of horses or wolves as anything but food or pelts,” he said.
“The Mamutoi at the Summer Meeting were upset in the beginning. It took them a while to get used to the idea of having the horses and Wolf around, but they got over it,” Ayla said.
