The Plains of Passage - Jean M. Auel [28]
With the rugged terrain leading to open fields of grass, it was their favored habitat. The rich seeds from the nearby grasslands, stored safely in caches while the squirrels hibernated, sustained them in spring to breed so that at just the time new plants appeared, they would bear their young. The protein-rich forbs were essential for the young to reach maturity before winter. But no ground squirrels chose to show themselves while the people were passing, and Wolf seemed unable, or unwilling to flush them.
As they continued south, the great granite platform beneath the broad plain that stretched far to the east warped upward into rolling hills. Once, in ages long past, the land they were traveling over had been mountains that had long since worn down. Their stumps were a stubborn shield of rock that resisted the immense pressures that buckled land into new mountains, and the fiery inner forces that could shake and rend a less stable earth. Newer rock had formed on the ancient massif, but outcrops of the original mountains still pierced the sedimentary crust.
In the time when mammoths grazed the steppes, the grasses and herbs, like the animals of that ancient land, flourished not only in great abundance, but with a surprising range and diversity, and in unexpected associations. Unlike later grasslands, these steppes were not arranged in wide belts of certain limited kinds of vegetation, determined by temperature and climate. They were, instead, a complex mosaic with a richer diversity of plants, which included many varieties of grasses and prolific herbs and shrubs.
A well-watered valley, a highland meadow, a hilltop, or a slight dip in elevation, each invited its own community of plant life, which grew close beside complexes of unrelated vegetation. A slope facing south might harbor warm-climate growth, surprisingly different from the cold-adapted boreal vegetation on the north face of the same hill.
The soil of the rugged upland Ayla and Jondalar were traversing was poor, and the grass cover thin and short. The wind had eroded deeper gullies, and in the upper valley of an old spring-flood tributary, the riverbed had gone dry and, lacking vegetation, had drifted into sand dunes.
Though later found only in high mountain reaches, in this rough terrain not far from lowland rivers, singing voles and pikas were busily cutting grass, to be dried and stored. Instead of hibernating in winter, they built tunnels and nests under the snowdrifts that accumulated in dips and hollows and on the lee side of rocks, and fed on their stored hay. Wolf spied the small rodents and took out after them, but Ayla didn’t bother with her sling. They were too small to make a meal for people, except in large numbers.
Arctic herbs, which did well in the wetter northern land of bogs and fens, benefited in spring from the additional moisture of the melting drifts and grew, in an unusual association, alongside small hardy alpine shrubs on exposed outcrops and windswept hills. Arctic cinquefoil, with small yellow flowers, found protection from the wind in the same sheltered pockets and niches preferred by pikas, while on exposed surfaces, cushions of moss campion with purple or pink blossoms formed their own protective hummocks of leafy stems in the cold drying winds. Beside them, mountain avens clung to the rocky outcrops and hills of this rugged lower land, just as it did on mountainsides, its low evergreen branches of tiny leaves and solitary yellow flowers spreading out, over many years, into dense mats.
Ayla noticed the fragrant scent of pink catchfly, just beginning to open their blooms. It made her realize that it was getting late, and she glanced toward the sun lowering in the western sky to verify the hint her nose had detected. The sticky flowers opened at night, offering a haven to insects—moths and flies—in return