The clan of the cave bear_ a novel - Jean M. Auel [195]
“I have never known you to be derelict in your duty. You have always been an example for the other women. I can only blame your behavior on your illness. I know how sick you are, though you try to hide it. I respected your wishes and made no mention of it, but I was sure you were ready to walk in the world of the spirits last autumn. I was well aware Ayla believed this was her one chance to have a child. I suspect she is right. Yet, I saw her put all thoughts of herself aside when you were ill, Iza, and she pulled you through. I don’t know how she did it. Maybe it was Mog-ur who placated the spirits that wanted you to join them and convinced them to allow you to stay, but it wasn’t Mog-ur alone.
“I was ready to grant his request and allow her to become medicine woman. I had come to respect her as much as I once respected you. She has been an admirable woman, a model of dutiful obedience, in spite of the son of my mate. Yes, Iza, I am aware of Broud’s harsh treatment of her. Even her one lapse early last summer was provoked by him in some way, though I don’t fully understand how. It is unworthy of him to pit himself against a woman the way he does; Broud is a very brave and strong hunter and has no reason to feel his manhood is threatened by any female. But perhaps he did see something I overlooked. Perhaps he’s right, I have been blind to her. Iza, if you had come to me before, I might have considered your request, I might have let her son live. It is too late now. When she returns on her child’s naming day, both Ayla and her son will die.”
The next day Ayla tried to make a fire. There were still a few sticks of dry wood left from her previous stay. She twirled a stick between her palms against another piece of wood, but she didn’t have the endurance to maintain the sustained effort required to make it smolder, and it was fortunate for her that she couldn’t. Droog and Crug found their way to the mountain meadow while she and the baby slept. They would have smelled a fire or the remains of one and found her. As it was, they walked so close to the cave that if the baby had whimpered in his sleep, they would have heard. But the entrance to the small hole in the rock wall was so well hidden by the thick old stand of hazelnut bushes, they didn’t notice it.
But fortune smiled on her even more. The spring rains dripping sullenly from a leaden sky, turning the bank of the small creek into a sink of mud, and the ground of the meadow into a sodden marsh, and casting a pall over her spirits, washed away all traces of her. So expert were the hunters at tracking, they could identify the individual footprints of each member of the clan, and their sharp eyes would easily have seen broken-off shoots or disturbed earth from dug-up bulbs or roots if she had gathered any food. Her very weakness saved her from discovery.
When Ayla went out later and saw the men’s footprints in the mud near the spring that gave rise to the creek, where they had stopped for a drink of water, her heart nearly stopped. It made her afraid to go outside. She started at every gust that shook the brush fronting her cave, and strained to hear imagined sounds.
The food she had brought with her was nearly gone. She searched through the baskets she had made to store food during the long, lonely stay of her temporary death curse. All she found were some dried nuts, rotten, and the droppings of small rodents, evidence that her store had been found and long since eaten. She found the rotten, dried remains of the surplus of food Iza had given her when she used the cave as shelter during her woman’s curse—totally inedible.
Then she remembered the cache of dried deer meat in the stone pit at the back of the cave, from the deer she killed for a warm wrap. Ayla found the small mound of rocks and moved them. The preserved meat in the cache was undisturbed, but the easing of her tensions was shortlived. The branches at the mouth of the cave moved, and Ayla’s heart raced.
“Uba!” she gestured with shocked surprise as the girl entered