The Plains of Passage - Jean M. Auel [136]
On her left bank, between the river and the sharply folded glistening crests of granite and slate to the north, lay a platform, a foreland of limestone, primarily, covered with a mantle of loess. It was a rough and rugged land subject to violent extremes. Harsh black winds from the south desiccated the land in summer; high pressure over the northern glacier hurled frigid blasts of freezing air across the open space in winter; fierce gale storms rising in the sea frequently bore down from the east. The occasional soaking rains and the fast drying winds, along with the temperature extremes, caused the limestone underlying the porous loess soil to fracture, which created steeply scarped faces on flat open plateaus.
Tough grasses survived on the dry windy landscape, but trees were almost entirely absent. The only woody vegetation were certain kinds of brush that could withstand both arid heat and searing cold. An occasional thin-branched tamarisk bush, with its feathery foliage and spikes of tiny pink flowers, or a buckthorn, with black round berries and sharp thorns, dotted the landscape, and even a few small, bushy, black currant shrubs could be seen. Most prevalent were several varieties of artemisia, including a wormwood unknown to Ayla.
Its black stalks looked bare and dead, but when she picked some, thinking it would make fuel for a fire, she discovered it was not dry and brittle but green and living. After a brief wet squall, loose-toothed leaves with a silvery down on the underside uncurled and grew out from the stalks and numerous small yellowish flowers, like tightly cupped centers of daisies, appeared on branching spikes. Except for its darker stems, it resembled the more familiar, lighter-colored species that often grew alongside fescue and crested hair grass, until the wind and sun dried the plains. Then it once again appeared lifeless and dead.
With its variety of grasses and brush, the southern plains supported hosts of animals. None they hadn’t seen on the steppes farther north, but in different proportions, and some of the more cold-loving species, such as the musk-ox, never ventured so far south. On the other hand, Ayla had never seen so many saiga antelope in one place before. They were a widespread animal, seen almost everywhere on the open plains, but were not usually very numerous.
Ayla stopped and was watching a herd of the strange, clumsy-looking animals. Jondalar had gone to investigate an inlet in the river with some slender tree trunks stuck into the bank that looked out of place. There were no trees on this side of the river, and the arrangement seemed purposeful. When he caught up, she seemed to be looking off in the distance.
“I couldn’t tell for sure,” he said. “Those logs might have been put there by some River People; someone could tie a boat there. But it could be driftwood from upstream, too.”
Ayla nodded, then pointed toward the dry steppes. “Look at all those saigas.”
Jondalar didn’t see them at first. They were the color of the dust. Then he saw the outline of their straight horns with coiled ridges, tipped slightly forward at the ends.
“They remind me of Iza. The spirit of the Saiga was her totem,” the woman said, smiling.
The saiga antelopes always made Ayla smile, with their long overhanging noses and peculiar gait, which did not hinder their speed, she noted. Wolf liked to chase them, but they were so fast that he seldom got very close to them, at least not for long.
These saiga seemed to favor the black-stemmed wormwood in particular, and they banded together in much larger than usual herds. A small herd of ten or fifteen animals was common, usually females, with