The Mammoth Hunters - Jean M. Auel [132]
A check of the cave and its contents told its story. A wolverine or a hyena, Ayla couldn’t tell which since both had been in the cave at different times and their tracks were intermixed, had broken into one of the caches of dried meat. It was cleaned out. One basket of grain they had picked for Whinney and Racer, which had been left fairly exposed, had been chewed into in several places. A variety of small rodents judging by the tracks—voles, pikas, ground squirrels, jerboas, and giant hamsters—had made off with the bonanza and hardly a seed was left. They found one nest stuffed with the plunder beneath a pile of hay nearby. But most of the baskets of grains and roots and dried fruits, which had either been set into holes dug into the dirt floor of the cave, or protected by rocks piled on them, suffered far less damage.
Ayla was glad they had decided to put the soft leather hides and furs she had made over the years in a sturdy basket and stash it in a cairn. The large pile of rocks had proved too much for the marauding beasts, but the leather left over from the clothes Ayla had made for Jondalar and herself before they left, which had not been put away, was chewed to shreds. Another cairn which held, among other things, a rawhide container filled with carefully rendered fat stored in small sausagelike sections of deer intestines, had been the object of repeated assaults. One corner of the parfleche had been torn out by teeth and claws, one sausage broken into, but the cairn had stood.
In addition to getting into the stored food, the animals had prowled through other storage areas, knocked over stacks of handcrafted and smoothed wooden bowls and cups, dragged around baskets and mats twined and woven in subtle patterns and designs, defecated in several places, and in general created havoc with whatever they could find. But the actual damage was much less than it first appeared, and they had essentially ignored her large pharmacopoeia of dried and preserved herbal medicines.
By evening, Ayla was feeling much better. They had cleaned and restored order to the cave, determined that the loss was not too great, cooked and eaten a meal, and even explored the valley to see what changes had taken place. With a fire in the hearth, sleeping furs spread out over clean hay in the shallow trench which Ayla had used as a bed, and Whinney and Racer comfortably settled in their place on the other side of the entrance, Ayla finally felt at home.
“It’s hard to believe I’m back,” Ayla said, sitting on a mat in front of the fire beside Jondalar. “I feel as though I’ve been gone a lifetime, but it hasn’t been long at all.”
“No, it hasn’t been long.”
“I’ve learned so much, maybe that’s why it seems long. It was good that you convinced me to go with you, Jondalar, and I’m glad we met Talut and the Mamutoi. Do you know how afraid I was to meet the Others?”
“I knew you were worried about it, but I was sure once you got to know some people, you’d like them.”
“It wasn’t just meeting people. It was meeting the Others. To the Clan, that’s what they were, and though I’d been told all my life I was born to the Others, I still thought of myself as Clan. Even when I was cursed and knew I couldn’t go back, I was afraid of the Others. After Whinney came to live with me, it was worse. I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid they wouldn’t let me keep her, or would kill her for food. And I was afraid they wouldn’t allow me to hunt. I didn’t want to live with people who wouldn’t let me hunt if I wanted to, or who might make me do something I didn’t want to do,” Ayla said.
Suddenly the recollection of her fears and anxieties filled her with discomfort and nervous energy. She got up and walked to the mouth of the cave, then pushed aside the heavy windbreak and walked out onto the top of the jutting wall that formed a broad