The Land of Painted Caves - Jean M. Auel [189]
Wolf’s mother was a female who had come into heat at the wrong time of year and was driven out of her pack by the alpha female. She happened to meet an elderly male who had left his pack, not able to keep up anymore. He felt invigorated for a while, having a young female to himself, but he died before the winter was out, leaving her to raise her litter alone when most mother wolves would have had the help of a whole pack.
When Ayla had rescued him, Wolf was barely four weeks old and the last survivor of her litter, but that was the age when a mother wolf would normally have brought her cubs out of their birthing den to imprint on the wolf pack. Instead Wolf imprinted on the human pack of Mamutoi, with Ayla as his alpha mother. He didn’t know his canine siblings—he wasn’t raised with other wolf cubs. He was raised by Ayla along with the children of the Lion Camp. Since a wolf pack and a human family group have many characteristics in common, he adapted to living with people.
After the fight, Wolf managed to drag himself close enough to the Camp of the Ninth Cave for Ayla to find him. Almost everyone at the Summer Meeting rooted for his recovery. The First even helped Ayla treat his wounds. His ear had been nearly torn off, and though Ayla stitched it back together, it healed with a cocky turn that many thought gave him a raffish air, a look of free-spirited charm, which made people smile when they saw him.
The incident had made her understand that he not only had to heal from his physical wounds, he had to heal from the stressful ones that had caused him to attack the young man who carried the skin of the wolf he had killed, and reminded him of the fight. The young canine had never been in a fight with wolves before. It made him much more wary of the scent that he recognized at a deep level as his own kind.
The Sacred Site that the First wanted to visit was a painted cave that was several days’ walk to the east and south. And the Eleventh Cave had to negotiate the same swift current getting back across the major waterway they had just crossed. They needed to put in to the large river some distance upstream if they wanted to reach the other side anywhere near the mouth of The River, which would take them back home. They were both heading for a particular Cave that was, Ayla was told, near the place where a small stream joined Big River. The smaller waterway began in a highland to the south that was near the Sacred Site the First wanted Ayla to see next. They started east, back upstream along Big River, the next morning.
The Eleventh was not the only Cave of Zelandonii that used rafts to navigate the rivers of their territory. Many generations before some descendants of the same ancestors of river runners who had settled the Eleventh Cave decided to start a new Cave on the other side of Big River close to the place where they usually started back. They had camped in the area many times, often searching for caves and sheltering abris when the weather turned bad, and they explored the area while they hunted and gathered food. They came to know the region quite well.
Later, for the usual reasons—their home became too crowded, or someone had a disagreement with her brother’s mate or his uncle—a small group broke off and formed a new Cave. There was still far more uninhabited land than people to fill it. For the original Cave, it was a definite advantage to have a place to go that had friends, food, and a place to sleep. The two closely related Caves worked out ways to exchange services and goods, and the new Cave thrived. They became known as the First Cave of Zelandonii in the land south of Big River, which was shortened over time to the First Cave of the South Land Zelandonii.
The Donier wanted to make arrangements with them