The Mammoth Hunters - Jean M. Auel [309]
“I don’t know how a man can establish a hearth when he doesn’t even have a woman, but I just said they were presumptuous. We can still trade with them. Of course we should stop, Talut.” The headwoman’s expression changed to an enigmatic smile. “Yes, by all means. I think it would be interesting for the ‘Mammoth’ Camp to meet our Mammoth Hearth.”
“Good. We’d better leave early, then,” Talut said, but he regarded her with puzzlement, and shook his head wondering what his clever and astute sister was thinking.
When the Lion Camp reached a large sinuous river gouging a channel between steep banks of loess soil, similar to the setting near their lodge, Talut headed out to a promontory between ravines and carefully scanned the surrounding terrain. He saw deer and aurochs near the water on the floodplain below, grazing in a green meadow dotted with small trees. Some distance farther, he noticed a large pile of jumbled bones against a high bank where the river turned sharply. Tiny figures scuttled over the accumulation of dried bones, and he saw several of them carrying away pieces.
“They are still here,” he announced. “They must be building.”
The travelers trooped down a slope toward the Camp, situated on a broad terrace no more than fifteen feet above the level of the river, and if Ayla had been surprised at the lodge of the Lion Camp, she was astounded by the Mammoth Camp. Rather than a single large, sod-covered, semisubterranean longhouse that Ayla had likened to a cave or even a human-sized burrow, in this Camp several individual round lodges were clustered together on the terrace. They, too, were solid and sturdy under a thick layering of sod covered with clay, and patches of grass grew around the edges, but not on the top. They reminded Ayla of nothing so much as huge, bald, marmot mounds.
As they approached, she could understand why the tops were bare. Just as they did, the Mammoth Camp used the roofs of their dwellings as viewing platforms. Two of the lodges each supported a crowd of onlookers, and though the watchers had turned their attention to the visitors, that was not the reason they were up on the rounded roofs. When the Lion Camp passed around a lodge that blocked their view, Ayla saw the object of their interest, and was astonished.
Talut had been right. They were building. Ayla had overheard Tulie’s remarks about the name these people had chosen for themselves, but after seeing the lodge they were making, it seemed most appropriate. Though it might end up looking like all the others when it was completed, the way they used mammoth bones as structural supports seemed to capture a special quality of the animal. It was true that the Lion Camp had used mammoth bones in the supporting framework of their lodge, and had selected certain pieces and trimmed them to fit, but the bones used in this dwelling did more than support. They were selected and arranged so that the structure managed to convey the essence of the mammoth in a way that expressed the beliefs of the Mamutoi.
To create the design, they first brought up large numbers of the same skeletal parts of many mammoths from the bone pile below. They began with a circle, about sixteen feet across at the base, of mammoth skulls placed so that the solid surface of the foreheads faced inward. The opening was the familiar archway, constructed of two large curved tusks, anchored on each side in the socket of a mammoth skull, and joined at the top. Around the outside and halfway up was a circular wall made of, perhaps, a hundred mammoth mandibles, the V-shaped lower jaws, stacked with the pointed chins down one on top of another four deep.
The overall effect of these stacks of V’s placed side by side was the most impressive concept of the construction, and the most meaningful. Together they created a zigzag pattern, similar to the pattern used to symbolize water on the maps. Arid beyond that, as Ayla had learned from Mamut, the zigzag symbol for water was also