The Mammoth Hunters - Jean M. Auel [292]
Ayla usually counted her years at the end of winter, beginning her new year with the season of new life, and the spring of her eighteenth year had been glorious with a profusion of meadow flowers and the fresh green of new growth. It was welcomed as it could be only in a place of frigid winter wastelands, but after the Spring Festival the season ripened quickly. As the bright flowers of the steppes faded, they were replaced by the fast-growing, lush crop of new grass—and the roaming grazers it brought. The seasonal migrations had begun.
Animals in great numbers and many different varieties were on the move across the open plains. Some converged until their numbers became uncountable, others assembled in smaller herds or family groups, but all derived their sustenance, their life, from the great, windswept, incredibly rich grasslands, and the glacier-fed river systems that cut through it.
Huge hordes of big-horned bison covered hills and dips with a living, bawling, restless, undulating mass that left raw, trampled earth behind. Wild cattle, aurochs, were strung out for miles in the open woodlands along the major river valleys as they traveled northward, sometimes commingled with herds of elk and massive-antlered giant deer. Shy roe deer traveled through riverine woodlands and boreal forests in small parties to spring and summer feeding grounds, along with unsociable moose who also frequented the bogs and melt lakes of the steppes. Wild goats and mouflon, usually mountain-dwelling, took to the open plains in the cold northern lands, and mingled at watering places with small family groups of saiga antelope, and larger herds of steppe horses.
The seasonal movement of woolly animals was more limited. With their thick layer of fat and heavy double coats of fur, they were adapted for life near the glacier and could not survive too much warmth. They lived year-round in the northern periglacial regions of the steppes, where the cold was deeper but dry, and snow was slight, feeding in winter on the coarse, dry standing hay. The sheeplike musk-oxen were permanent inhabitants of the frozen north, and moved in small herds within a limited territory. Woolly rhinoceroses, who usually gathered only in family groups, and the larger herds of woolly mammoths ranged farther, but in winter they stayed north. In the slightly warmer and wetter continental steppes to the south, deep snows buried feed and caused the heavy animals to flounder. They went south in spring to fatten on the tender new grass, but as soon as it warmed, they would move north again.
The Lion Camp rejoiced to see the plains teeming with life again, and remarked upon each species as it appeared, especially the animals who thrived in deep cold. Those were the ones who most helped them to survive. A sighting of the enormous, unpredictable rhinos, with two horns, the front one long and low-slung, and two coats of reddish fur, a soft downy underwool and an outer layer of long guard hair, always brought exclamations of wonder.
Nothing, however, created such sheer excitement among the Mamutoi as the sight of mammoths. When the usual time for them to pass by drew near, someone from the Lion Camp was always on the lookout. Except from a distance, Ayla hadn’t seen a mammoth since she lived with the Clan, and she was as excited as anyone when Danug came running down the slope one afternoon shouting, “Mammoths! Mammoths!”
She was among the first to rush out of the lodge to see them. Talut, who often carried Rydag perched up on his shoulders, had been on the steppes with Danug, and she noticed Nezzie, with the boy on her hip, was straggling behind. She started back to help, then saw Jondalar take him from the woman and hoist him up to his shoulders. He received warm smiles from both. Ayla smiled, too, though he didn’t see her. The expression was still on her face when she turned to Ranec who had jogged to catch up with her. Her tender, beautiful smile evoked in him an intense feeling of warmth and a fierce wish that she was already his. She couldn’t help but respond to the love