The clan of the cave bear_ a novel - Jean M. Auel [104]
She lost weight, lost her appetite, was quiet and subdued even within Creb’s hearth. Not even Uba could make her smile, though she often picked the baby up the moment she returned to the hearth at night and held her until they both fell asleep. Iza worried about her, and when a day of bright sunshine followed one of freezing rain, she decided it was time to give Ayla a little respite before the winter closed in on them completely.
“Ayla,” Iza said loudly as they stepped outside the cave before Broud could make his first demand. “I was checking my medicines and I don’t have any snowberry stems for stomachaches. It’s easy to identify. It’s a bush covered with white berries that stay on after the leaves have fallen.”
Iza neglected to mention that she had many other remedies in stock for stomachaches. Broud frowned as Ayla raced into the cave for her collecting basket. But he knew that gathering Iza’s magic plants was more important than getting him a drink of water, or tea, or a piece of meat, or the fur skins he purposely forgot to wrap around his legs as leggings, or his hood, or an apple, or two stones from the stream to crack nuts because he didn’t like the stones near the cave, or any of the other inconsequential tasks he might think of for her to do. He stalked away when Ayla emerged from the cave with her basket and digging stick.
Ayla ran into the forest grateful to Iza for the chance to be alone. She glanced around her as she walked, but her mind wasn’t on snowberry bushes. She didn’t pay any attention to her direction and didn’t notice when her feet began to take her along a small creek to a mist-veiled mossy falls. Without thinking, she headed up the steep incline and found herself at her high mountain meadow above the cave. She had not been back since wounding the porcupine.
She sat on the bank near the creek, throwing stones into the water absentmindedly. It was cold. The previous day’s rain had been snow at the higher elevation. A thick blanket of white covered the open ground and patches between the snow-dusted trees. The still air glowed with a clarity that matched the sparkling snow reflecting, with untold millions of tiny crystals, the brilliant sun in a sky so blue it was almost purple. But Ayla couldn’t see the serene beauty of the early winter landscape. It only reminded her that soon the cold would force the clan into the cave and she would not be able to get away from Broud again until spring. As the sun rose higher in the sky, sudden showers of snow fell from branches and plopped to the ground beneath.
The long cold winter loomed bleakly ahead with Broud hounding her day in and day out. I just can’t satisfy him, she thought. It doesn’t matter what I do, how hard I try, nothing helps. What else can I do? She happened to glance at a patch of bare ground and saw a partially rotted pelt and a few scattered quills, all that remained of the porcupine. A hyena probably found him, she thought—or a wolverine. With a twinge of guilt, she thought about the day she hit it. I should never have taught myself to use a sling, it was wrong. Creb would be angry, and Broud … Broud wouldn’t be angry, he’d be glad if he ever found out. It would really give him an excuse to beat me. Wouldn’t he just love to know. Well, he doesn’t and he won’t. It gave her a feeling of pleasure to know she had done something he didn’t know about that would give him a reason to get after her. She felt like doing something, like slinging a stone to work out her frustrated rebellion.
She remembered throwing her sling under a bush and looked for it. She spied the piece of leather under a nearby bush and