The Plains of Passage - Jean M. Auel [251]
“That animal can sure run!” he said. “And did you see that magnificent rack? One of his antlers must be twice as big as I am!”
Ayla was smiling, too. “He was magnificent, and beautiful, but I’m glad we didn’t get him. He was too big for us, anyway. We couldn’t take all that meat, and it would have been a shame to kill him when we didn’t need it.”
They rode back to the Mother, and even though their clothes had dried on them somewhat, they were glad to make camp and change. They made a point of hanging their damp clothing near the fire so it could dry further.
The next day they started out heading west; then the river veered toward the northwest. Some distance beyond, they could see another high ridge. The high prominence that reached all the way to the Great Mother River was the farthest northwest finger, the last they would see, of the great chain of mountains that had been with them almost from the beginning. The range had been west of them then, and they had traveled around its broad southern end following the lower course of the Great Mother River. The whitened mountain peaks had marched along to the east of them in a great curving arc, as they rode up the central plain beside the river’s winding middle course. Going west along the Mother’s upper course, the ridge ahead was the last outlier.
No tributaries joined the long river until they were almost up to the ridge, and Ayla and Jondalar realized they must have been between channels again. The river that joined from the east at the foot of the rocky promontory was the other end of the northern channel of the Mother. From there the river flowed between the ridge and a high hill across the water, but there was enough lowland riverbank to ride around the base of the high rocky point.
They crossed another large tributary just on the other side of the ridge, a river whose great valley marked the separation between the two groups of mountain ranges. The high hills to the west were the farthest eastern foreland of the enormous western chain. As the ridge fell behind them, the Great Mother River separated again into three channels. They followed the outer bank of the northernmost stream through the steppes of a smaller northern basin that was a continuation of the central plain.
In the times when the central basin had been a great sea, this wide river valley of grassy steppes, along with the swampy bogs and moors of the riverside wetlands and the grasslands to the north of them, were all inlets to that ancient inland body of water. The inner curve of the eastern mountain chain contained lines of weakness in the hard crust of the earth that became the vents for great outpourings of volcanic material. That material, combined with the ancient sea deposits and the windblown loess, created a rich and fertile soil. But only the skeletal wood of winter gave evidence of it.
The bony fingers and leafless limbs of a few birch trees near the river rattled in the rapacious wind from the north. Dry brushwood, reeds, and dead ferns lined the banks, where crusts of ice were forming that would thicken and build up jagged levees; the beginning of spring ice floes. On the northern faces and higher ground of the rolling hills in the valley divide, the wind combed billowing fields of gray standing hay with rhythmic strokes, while dark evergreen boughs of spruce and pine swayed and shivered in erratic gusts that found their way around to the protected south-facing sides. Powdery snow churned around, then settled lightly on the ground.
The weather had definitely turned cold, but snow flurries were not a problem. The horses, the wolf, and even the people were accustomed to the northern loess steppes with its dry cold and light winter snows. Only in heavy snow, that could bog down and tire the horses, and make feed harder to find, would Ayla begin to worry. She had another worry at the moment. She had seen