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Winter came, and with it the diminished activity they shared with all living things that followed the cycle of the seasons. Life still pulsed, but at a slower pace. For the first time, Ayla looked forward to the cold season. The rushed and active warm seasons allowed little time for Iza to continue training her. With the first snows, the medicine woman began her lessons again. The pattern of the clan’s life repeated itself with only minor variations, and winter again drew to a close.

Spring was late, and wet. The melt from the highlands, abetted by heavy rains, swelled the stream to a surging turbulence overflowing its banks and sweeping along whole trees and brush in its headlong flight to the sea. A logjam downstream diverted its course, taking over part of the path the clan had made. A brief reprieve of warmth, just long enough to unfold tentative blossoms on fruit trees, was reversed by late spring hailstorms that ravaged the delicate blooms, dashing hopes of the promised harvest. Then, as though nature had a change of heart and wanted to make up for the offer of fruits withheld, the early summer crop produced vegetables, roots, squashes, and legumes in bountiful profusion.

The clan missed their accustomed spring visit to the seacoast for salmon, and everyone was pleased when Brun announced they would make the trip to fish for sturgeon and cod. Though members of the clan often walked the ten miles to the inland sea to gather molluscs and eggs from the multitude of birds that nested on the cliffs, catching the huge fish was one of the few clan activities that was a community effort of both men and women.

Droog had his own reason for wanting to go. The heavy spring runoff had washed down fresh nodules of flint from the chalk deposits of higher elevations and left them stranded on the floodplain. He had scouted the coast earlier and seen several alluvial deposits. The fishing trip would be a good opportunity to replenish their supply of tools with new ones of high-quality stone. It was easier to knap the flint at the site than to carry the heavy rocks back to the cave. Droog hadn’t made tools for the clan for some time. They’d had to make do with their own rougher implements when the brittle stone of their favorite ones broke. They could all make usable tools, but few compared with Droog’s.

A lighthearted spirit of holiday accompanied their preparations. It wasn’t often that the entire clan left the cave at one time, and the novelty of camping on the beach was exciting, especially for the children. Brun planned for one or two of the men to make daily excursions back to make sure nothing was disturbed in their absence. Even Creb looked forward to the change of scene. He seldom wandered very far from the cave.

The women worked on the net, repairing weakened strands and making a new section from cords of fibrous vines, stringy barks, tough grasses, and long animal hairs to lengthen it. Although it was a strong, tough material, sinew was not used. As with leather, water made it hard and stiff and it didn’t absorb the softening fat well.

The massive sturgeon, often upward of twelve feet in length and weighing over a ton, migrated from the sea, where it spent most of the year, into freshwater streams and rivers to spawn in early summer. The fleshy feelers on the underside of its toothless mouth gave the ancient, sharklike fish a fearsome appearance, but its diet consisted of invertebrates and small fish foraged from the bottom. The smaller cod, usually no more than twenty-five pounds, but ranging up to two hundred pounds and more, migrated seasonally northward into shallower water in summer. Although mostly a bottom feeder, it sometimes swam near the surface and into freshwater outlets when migrating or chasing food.

For the fourteen days of the sturgeon’s summer spawning, the mouths of the streams and rivers were full. Though the fish that chose the smaller waterways did not reach the size of the giants that churned their way up the great rivers, the sturgeon that found their way into the clan’s net would be more