The Plains of Passage - Jean M. Auel [18]
At a quick glance, the overall color of the woolly mammoths was a reddish brown, but a closer look revealed many variations of the basic shade. Some were more red, some more brown, some tended toward yellow or gold, and a few looked almost black from a distance. The thick, double-layered coats covered them entirely, from their broad trunks and exceptionally small ears, to their stubby tails ending in dark tufts, and their stumpy legs and broad feet. The two layers of fur contributed to the differences in color.
Though much of the warm, dense, amazingly silky-soft underwool had been shed earlier in the summer, the next year’s growth had already started, and was lighter in color than the fluffy, though coarser, wind-breaking overlayer, and gave it depth and highlights. The darker outer hairs, of varying lengths, some up to forty inches long, hung down like a skirt along the flanks, and quite thickly from the abdomen and dewlap—the loose skin of the neck and chest—creating a padding underneath them when they lay down on frozen ground.
Ayla was entranced by a pair of young twins with beautiful reddish golden far accented by spiky black guard hairs, who peeked out from behind the huge legs and long ochre skirt of their hovering mother. The dark brown hair of the old matriarch was shot with gray. She noticed, as well, the white birds that were constant companions of the mammoths, tolerated or ignored whether they sat on the top of a shaggy head, or adroitly avoided a massive foot, while they feasted on the insects that the great beasts disturbed.
Wolf whined his eagerness to investigate the interesting animals more closely, but Ayla held him back, while Jondalar got the restraining rope from Whinney’s basket. The grizzled matriarch turned to look in their direction for a long moment—they noticed that one of her long tusks was broken off—then she turned her attention back to more important activity.
Only very young males stayed with the females, they usually left the natal herd sometime after they reached puberty at about twelve, but several young bachelors, and even a few older ones were included in this group. They had been drawn by a female with a deep chestnut-colored coat. She was in heat, and that was the cause of the commotion Ayla and Jondalar had heard. A female in heat, estrus, the reproductive period when females were able to conceive, was sexually attractive to all males, sometimes more than she liked.
The chestnut female had just rejoined her family group after outdistancing three young males in their twenties, who had been chasing her. The males, who had given up, but only temporarily, were standing away from the close-packed herd resting, while she sought respite from her exertions within the midst of the excited females. A two-year-old calf rushed up to the object of the male’s attention, was greeted by a gentle touch of a trunk, found one of the two breasts between her front legs and began to suckle, while the female reached for a trunkful of grass. She had been chased and harassed by the males all day, and had had little opportunity to feed her calf, or even to eat or drink herself. She was not to have much chance then.
A medium-size bull approached the herd and began touching the other females with his trunk, well down from the tail between their hind legs, smelling and tasting, to test their readiness. Since mammoths continued to grow all their lives, his size indicated he was older than the three who had been chasing the beleaguered female before, probably in his thirties. As he neared the chestnut-furred mammoth, she moved away at a fast walk. He immediately abandoned the others and started after her. Ayla gasped when he released his huge organ from its sheath and it started to swell into a long curving S-shape.
The young man beside her heard the sudden intake of breath and glanced at her. She turned