The Mammoth Hunters - Jean M. Auel [331]
Ropes had been strung between the supporting uprights, and drapes, which could be used to divide the space, hung from them, bunched up at one end. Thrown over the ropes, or hanging from pegs on the posts, was the most unusual array of objects Ayla had ever seen. Colorful outfits, fantastic and ornate headgear, strings of ivory beads and seashells, pendants of bone and amber, and some things she couldn’t begin to understand.
There were several people in the lodge. Some were sitting around a small fireplace, sipping from cups; a couple more were in the light streaming in through the smoke hole, sewing garments. To the left of the entrance, several people were sitting or kneeling on mats on the floor near large mammoth bones, decorated with red lines and zigzags. Ayla identified a leg bone, a shoulder blade, two lower jawbones, a pelvis bone, and a skull. They were greeted warmly, but Ayla felt they were interrupting something. Everyone seemed to be looking at them, as though waiting to find out why they had come.
“Don’t stop practicing for us,” Deegie said. “I brought Ayla to meet you, but we don’t want to interrupt. We’ll wait until you are ready to stop.” The people turned back to their task, while Deegie and Ayla sat down on mats nearby.
A woman who was kneeling in front of the large femur began tapping out a steady beat with a hammer-shaped section of reindeer antler, but the sounds she was producing were more than rhythmic. As she hit the leg bone in different places, a resonant, melodic sound emerged, which changed in pitch and tone. Ayla looked more closely, wondering what caused the unusual timbre.
The leg bone was about thirty inches long and rested horizontally on two props that kept it off the ground. The epiphysis at the upper end had been removed, and some of the spongy inner material had been taken out, enlarging the natural canal. The bone was painted across the top with evenly spaced zigzag stripes in dark ochre red, similar to the patterns found so frequently on everything from footwear to house construction, but these seemed to serve more than a decorative or symbolic function. After watching for a while, Ayla felt sure the woman who was playing the leg-bone instrument was using the pattern of stripes as a guide to where she should strike to produce the tone she wanted.
Ayla had heard skull drums and Tornec’s scapula played. All had some tonal variation, but she had never heard such a range of musical tones before. These people seemed to think she had some magical gifts, but this seemed more magical than anything she had ever done. A man began to tap on the mammoth shoulder blade like Tornec’s with an antler hammer. The timbre and tone had a different resonance, a sharper quality, yet the sound complemented and added interest to the music that the woman played on the leg bone.
The large triangular-shaped scapula was about twenty-five inches long, with a narrow neck at the top, broadening out to about twenty inches along the bottom edge. He held the instrument by the neck, upright, in a vertical position, with the wide bottom resting on the ground. It was also painted with parallel, zigzag stripes in bright red. Each stripe, about the width of a small finger, was divided by spaces of equal width, and each one had a perfectly straight and even edge. In the center of the broad lower area most frequently struck, the red pattern of stripes was worn away and the bone was shiny from long, repeated use.
When the rest of the mammoth bone instruments joined in, Ayla held her breath. At first she could only listen, overwhelmed by the complex sound of the music, but after a while she