The clan of the cave bear_ a novel - Jean M. Auel [81]
Girls of the Clan were expected to be well-versed in the skills of adult women by the time they were seven or eight. Many came of age then and were mated soon after. In the nearly two years since they found her—alone, near starvation, unable to find food for herself—she had learned not only how to find food, but how to prepare and preserve it. She was capable of many other important skills as well, and if not as proficient at them as the older, more experienced women, she was at least as adept as some of the younger ones.
She could skin and dress a hide and make wraps, cloaks, and pouches used in various ways. She could cut thongs of even widths in one long spiral from a single hide. Her cords made of long animal hair, sinew, or fibrous bark and roots were strong and heavy or thin and fine depending on their use. Her baskets, mats, and nets woven from tough grasses, roots, and barks were exceptional. She could make a rough hand-axe from a nodule of flint or flake off a sharp-edged piece to use as a knife or scraper so well even Droog was impressed. She could gouge bowls out of sections of logs and smooth them to a fine finish. She could make fire by twirling a sharpened stick between her palms against another piece of wood until a smoldering hot coal developed that fired dry tinder; easier to do if two people alternated the tedious, difficult chore of keeping the sharpened stick moving under a constant firm pressure. But more surprising, she was picking up Iza’s medical lore with what seemed to be a natural instinct. Iza was right, Creb thought, she’s learning even without the memories.
Ayla was slicing pieces of yam to put into a skin pot that was boiling over a cooking fire. After cutting away the parts that had spoiled, there wasn’t much left of each one. The back of the cave, where they were stored, was cool and dry, but vegetables started to soften and rot so late in the winter. Her daydreaming about the coming season had begun a few days before when she had noticed a trickle of water in the ice-locked stream, one of the first signs that it would soon be breaking free. She could hardly wait for spring with its first greens, new buds, and the sweet maple sap that rose and oozed out of notches cut into the bark. It was collected and boiled long in large skin pots until it became a thick, viscous syrup or crystallized into sugar, and stored in birchbark containers. Birch had a sweet sap, too, but not as sweet as maple.
She was not alone in being restless and bored with the long winter, and the inside of the cave. Earlier that day the wind had shifted to the south for a few hours, bringing warmer air from the sea. The melting water ran down the long icicles hanging from the apex of the cave’s triangular mouth. They froze again when the temperature dropped, lengthening and thickening the glistening, pointed shafts that had been growing all winter, when the wind veered and brought the chilling blasts from the east again. But the breath of warm air turned the thoughts of everyone to the end of winter.
The women were talking and working, moving their hands rapidly in quick conversational gestures while preparing the food. Toward the end of winter, when food supplies ran low, they combined resources and cooked communally, though still eating separately, except for special occasions. There were always more feasts in winter—it helped to break up the monotony of their confinement—though as the season drew to a close, their feasts were often meager fare. But they had enough food. Fresh meat from small game or an aging deer that the hunters managed to bring in between blizzards was welcomed, though not essential. They still had an adequate supply of dried food on hand. The women were still caught up in the storytelling mood and Aba was telling a woman’s story.
“ … but the child was deformed. His mother took him out as she was told by the leader, but she could not bear to leave him to die. She climbed high up in a tree with him and tied him to