Plains of Passage (99 page)

But the ancient massif did not escape unscathed from the great
forces that created the high-peaked mountains. The tilting, faulting, and breaking of the rock, seen in the disruption of its solidified crystal structure, told a story in stone of the violent folding and thrusting it endured as it held firm against the inconceivable pressures from the south. In the same epoch, not only were the high western range on their left, and another even farther west, uplifted by moving continents pushing against unyielding bedrock, but so were the long curved eastern range they had skirted, and the entire series of ranges that continued eastward to the tallest peaks on earth.

Later, during the age of ice, when yearly temperatures were lower, the frozen crown extended far down the sides of the massive mountain ranges, covering even moderate elevations with a sparkling crystal crust. Filling in and enlarging valleys and rifts as it slowly crept along, the glacial ice left behind outwashing sheets and terraces of gravel, and it carved sharp projecting towers of stone out of the rough-hewn younger pinnacles. Snow and ice also covered the northern highlands in winter. But only the highest elevation, nearest the frosted mountains, sustained an actual glacier, an enduring layer of ice that persisted summer and winter.

With the rounded roots of the eroded mountains to the north sprawling out in comparatively level tablelands and terraces, the upper courses of the rivers that flowed across the ancient land had shallow valleys and gentle grades, though they became more rugged through the middle of their courses. Except for those that fell directly off the face of the massif, rivers coming down the steeper slopes of the southern side flowed faster. The demarcation between the gentle northern highland and the mountainous south was the fertile land of rich loess through which the Great Mother River flowed.

Ayla and Jondalar were heading almost due west as they continued their Journey, traveling along the northern bank of the waterway through the open plains of the river valley. While no longer the huge voluminous Mother of rivers that she had been downstream, the Great Mother River was still substantial, and after a few days, true to character, she separated once again into several channels.

Half a day’s travel beyond, they reached another large tributary whose roiling confluence, tumbling down from higher ground, looked formidable, with icicles extended into frozen curtains and mounds of broken ice lining both banks. No longer were the rivers joining on the north coming from the uplands and foothills of the familiar mountains they were leaving behind. This water came from the unfamiliar terrain to the west. Rather than cross the perilous river, or attempt to follow it upstream, Jondalar decided to backtrack and cross the several branches of the Mother instead.

It turned out to be a good choice. Though some of the channels were wide and choked with ice along the edges, for the most part the frigid water barely reached as high as the horses’ flanks. They didn’t think much about it until later that evening, but Ayla and Jondalar, the two horses, and the wolf had finally crossed the Great Mother River. After their dangerous and traumatic adventures on other rivers, they accomplished it with so little incident that it seemed an anticlimax, but they were not sorry.

In the deep cold of winter, simply traveling was dangerous enough. Most people were snugly settled in warm lodges, and friends and kin would come looking if anyone was outside for too long. Ayla and Jondalar were entirely on their own. If anything happened, they had only each other, and their animal companions, to depend on.

The land gradually sloped upward, and they began to notice a subtle shift in the vegetation. Fir and larch appeared among the spruce and pine near the river. The temperature on the plains of the river valleys was extremely cold; due to atmospheric inversions, often colder than it was higher in the surrounding mountains. Although snow and ice whitened the highlands that flanked them, snow seldom fell on the river valley. The few light, dry sittings that did produced little buildup on the frozen ground, except in hollows and depressions, and sometimes not even there. When snow was lacking, the only way they could get drinking water for themselves and the animals was to use their stone axes to chop ice from the frozen river and then melt it.

It made Ayla more aware of the animals that roamed the plains along the valley of the Mother. They were the same varieties as those they had seen on the steppes all along the way, but the cold-loving creatures predominated. She knew these animals could subsist on the dry vegetation that was easily available on the subfreezing but essentially snowless plains, but she wondered how they found water.

She thought that wolves and other carnivores probably derived some of their liquid requirement from the blood of those they hunted for food, and they ranged over a large territory and could find pockets of snow or loose ice to chew. But what about horses and the other grazing and browsing animals? How did they find water in a land that in winter was a frozen desert? There was enough snow in some areas, but others were barren regions of rock and ice. Yet no matter how dry, if there was some kind of fodder, it was inhabited by animals.

Although still rare, Ayla saw more woolly rhinoceroses than she had ever seen in one place, and though they didn’t herd together, whenever she saw rhinos, they often saw musk-oxen, too. Both species preferred the open, windy, dry land, but the rhinos liked grass and sedge, and musk-oxen, true to the goatlike creatures they were, browsed on
woodier brush. Large reindeer and the gigantic megaceroses with massive antlers also shared the frozen land, and horses with thick winter coats, but if there was one animal that stood out among the populations in the valley of the upper course of the Great Mother River, it was mammoths.

Ayla never grew tired of watching the huge beasts. Though they were occasionally hunted, they were so unafraid that they seemed almost tame. They often allowed the woman and man to come quite close, sensing no danger from them. The danger was, if anything, to the humans. Though woolly mammoths were not the most gigantic examples of their species, they were the most gigantic animals the humans had ever seen—or that most people were ever likely to see—and with their shaggy coats even more filled out for winter, and their immense curved tusks, they looked bigger, up close, than Ayla remembered.

Their enormous tusks began, in calves, with inch-and-a-half-long tushes, enlarged upper incisors. After a year, the baby tushes were lost and replaced by permanent tusks that grew continually from then on. While the tusks of mammoths were social adornments, important in interactions with their own kind, they also had a more practical function. They were used to break up ice, and the ice-breaking abilities of mammoths were phenomenal.

The first time Ayla observed the practice, she had been watching a herd of females approach the frozen river. Several of them used their tusks, somewhat smaller and straighter than the ivory shafts of males, to tear out ice that was caught in the lee of rock crevices. It puzzled her at first, until she noticed a small one pick up a piece with her little trunk and put it in her mouth.

“Water!” Ayla said. “That’s how they get water, Jondalar. I was wondering about that.”

“You’re right. I never thought much about it before, but now that you mention it, I think Dalanar said something about that. But there are lots of sayings about mammoths. The only one I remember is, ‘Never go forth when mammoths go north,’ though you could say the same for rhinos.”

“I don’t understand that saying,” Ayla said.

“It means a snowstorm is coming,” Jondalar said. “They always seem to know. Those big woollies don’t like snow much. It covers up their food. They can use their tusks and their trunks to brush away some, but not when it gets really deep, and they get bogged down in it. It’s especially bad when it’s thawing and freezing. They lie down at night when it’s still slushy from the afternoon sun, and by morning their fur is frozen to the ground. They can’t move. They are easy to hunt then, but
if there are no hunters around and it doesn’t thaw, they can slowly starve. Some have been known to freeze to death, especially little ones.”

“What does that have to do with going north?”

“The closer you get to the ice, the less snow there is. Remember how it was when we went hunting mammoths with the Mamutoi? The only water around was the stream coming from the glacier itself, and that was summer. In winter, that’s all frozen.”

“Is that why there’s so little snow around here?”

“Yes, this region is always cold and dry especially in winter. Everyone says it’s because the glaciers are so close. They are on the mountains to the south, and the Great Ice is not very far north. Most of the land in between is flathead … I mean Clan country. It starts a little west of here.” Jondalar noticed Ayla’s expression at his slip of the tongue, and he felt embarrassed. “Anyway, there’s another saying about mammoths and water, but I can’t remember exactly how it goes. It’s something like, ‘If you can’t find water, look for a mammoth.’ ”

“I can understand that saying,” Ayla said, looking beyond him. Jondalar turned to see.

The female mammoths had moved upstream and joined forces with a few males. Several females were working on a narrow, almost vertical, bank of ice that had built up along the river’s edge. The bigger males, including one dignified elder with streaks of gray hair, whose impressive, if less useful, tusks had grown so long that they were crossed in front, were scraping and gouging out huge chunks of ice from the banks. Then, lifting them high with their trunks, the mammoths threw the ice down with a loud crash to shatter into more usable pieces, all accompanied by bellowings, snortings, stompings, and trumpetings. The huge woolly creatures seemed to be making a game of it.

The noisy business of breaking ice was a practice that all mammoths learned. Even young ones only two or three years old, who had barely lost their baby tushes, showed wear on the outside edges at the ends of their tiny two-inch tusks from scraping ice, and the tips of the twenty-inch prongs of ten-year-olds were worn smooth from moving their heads up and down against the vertical surfaces. By the time the young mammoths reached twenty-five, their tusks were beginning to grow forward, upward, and inward, and the way they used them changed. The lower surfaces began to show some of the wear of scraping ice and brushing aside what snow did fall on the dry grass and plants of the steppes. Ice breaking, though, could be a dangerous business, since tusks often broke along with the ice. But even broken ends were often worn smooth again by later scraping and gouging of ice.

Ayla noticed that other animals had gathered around. The herds of woolly animals, with their powerful tusks, broke up enough ice for
themselves, including their young and old, and for a community of followers as well. Many animals benefited by trailing close on the heels of migrating mammoths. The big woollies not only created piles of loose chunks of ice in winter that were chewed for moisture by animals other than themselves, in summer they sometimes used their tusks and feet to dig holes in dry riverbeds, which would fill with water. The waterholes thus created were also used by other animals to slake their thirst.

   As they followed the frozen waterway, the woman and man rode, and often walked, fairly close to the banks of the Great Mother River. With so little snow, there was no soft blanket of concealing white to cover the land, and the dormant vegetation exposed its drab winter face. The tall stalks of last summer’s phragmite reeds and spikes of cattails rose valiantly from their frozen bed of marshland, while dead ferns and sedges lay prostrate near the ice heaped up along the edges. Lichens clung to rocks like the scabs of healing wounds, and mosses had shriveled into brittle dry mats.

The long, skeletal fingers of leafless limbs rattled in the sharp and piercing wind, though only a practiced eye could discern whether they were willow, birch, or alder brush. The deep green conifers—spruces, firs, and pines—were easier to distinguish, and though the larches had dropped their needles, their shape was revealing. When they climbed to higher elevations to hunt, they saw recumbent dwarf birch and knee pine clinging close to the ground.

Small game provided most of their meals; big game usually required more time to stalk and hunt than they wanted to spend, although they didn’t hesitate to try for a deer when they saw one. The meat froze quickly, and even Wolf didn’t have to hunt for a while. Rabbit, hare, and an occasional beaver, abundant in the mountainous region, were more usual fare, but the steppe animals of drier continental climates, marmots and giant hamsters, were also prevalent, and they were always glad to see ptarmigan, the fat white birds with the feathered feet.

Ayla’s sling was often put to good use; they tended to save the spear-throwers for larger game. It was easier to find stones than to make new spears to replace missiles that were lost or broken. But some days hunting took more of their time than they wished, and anything that took time made Jondalar edgy.

They often supplemented their diet, which was heavily concentrated on lean meat, with the inner bark of conifers and other trees, usually cooked into a broth with meat, and they were delighted when they found berries, frozen but still clinging to the bush. Juniper berries, which were particularly good with meat if they didn’t use too many, were prevalent; rose hips were more sporadic, but usually plentiful
when found, and always sweeter after freezing; creeping crowberry, with a needlelike evergreen foliage, had small shiny black berries that often persisted through the winter, as did blue bearberries and red lingonberries.

Grains and seeds were also added to the meat soups, gathered painstakingly from dried grasses and herbs that still bore seed heads, though it took time to find them. Most of the foliage of seed-bearing herbs had long since disintegrated, the plants lying dormant until spring thaws would awaken them to new life. Ayla wished for the dried vegetables and fruits that had been destroyed by the wolves, though she didn’t begrudge the supplies she had given to the S’Armunai.