The Mammoth Hunters - Jean M. Auel [293]
On the steppes, the Lion Camp watched the huge shaggy creatures with silent awe. They were the largest animals in their land—indeed, they would have been in almost any land. The herd, with several young in it, was passing close by, and the old matriarch eyed the people warily. She stood about ten feet high at the shoulders, and had a high domed head and a hump on the withers, used to store additional fat for winter. A short back that sloped down steeply to the pelvis completed the characteristic and immediately recognizable profile. Her skull was large in proportion to her size, more than half the length of her relatively short trunk, from the end of which two sensitive, mobile, finger projections extended, an upper and a lower one. Her tail was short, also, and her ears were small, to conserve heat.
Mammoths were eminently suited to their frigid domain. Their skin was very thick, insulated by three inches or more of subcutaneous fat, and closely covered with a soft, dense undercoat, about an inch long. The coarse long outer hair, up to twenty inches in length, was a dark reddish-brown, and hung in neat layers over the thick winter downy wool, as a warm, moisture-shedding cover and windbreak. With efficient rasplike grinders, they consumed a winter diet of coarse dry grass, plus twigs and bark of birches, willows, and larches with as much ease as they did their summer diet of green grasses, sedges, and herbs.
Most impressive of all, the mammoths’ immense tusks inspired amazement and awe. Originating close together out of the lower jaw, they first pointed steeply downward, then curved strongly outward, upward, and finally inward. In old males, a tusk could reach sixteen feet in length, but by then, they were crossed over in front. In young animals the tusks were effective weapons and built-in tools for uprooting trees and clearing snow from pasture and feed, but when the two points curved up and overlapped, they got in the way, and were more hindrance than help.
The sight of the enormous animals brought a flood of memories to Ayla of the first time she had seen mammoths. She recalled wishing, then, that she could go hunting with the men of the Clan, and remembered that Talut had invited her to go on the first mammoth hunt with the Mamutoi. She did like to hunt, and the idea that she might actually join the hunters this time gave her a tingle of anticipation. She began to really look forward to the Summer Meeting.
The first hunt of the season had important symbolic meaning. As massive and majestic as woolly mammoths were, the Mamutoi feeling for them went beyond wonder at their size. They depended upon the animal for much more than food, and in their need and desire to assure the continuance of the great beasts, they conceived a special relationship with them. They held them in reverence because they based their own identity on them.
Mammoths had no real natural enemies; no carnivorous animal regularly depended on them for sustenance. The huge cave lions, twice the size of any large feline, which normally preyed on the large grazers—aurochs, bison, giant deer, elk, moose, or horse—and could kill a full-grown adult, occasionally brought down a young, sick, or very old mammoth, but no four-legged predator, singly or in groups, could kill an adult mammoth in its prime. Only the Mamutoi, the human children of the Great Earth Mother, had been given the ability to hunt the largest of Her creatures. They were the chosen ones. Among all Her creations, they were preeminent. They were the Mammoth Hunters.
After the mammoth herd passed, the people of the Lion Camp followed eagerly behind them. Not to hunt them, that would come later. They were after the soft, downy wool of their winter undercoats, which was being shed in large handfuls through the coarser outer guard hairs. The naturally colored dark red wool, which was gathered from the ground and spiny brush that caught and held it, was considered a special gift from the Spirit Mammoth.
As chance