The Plains of Passage - Jean M. Auel [288]
“Of course women can hunt. My mother was a hunter before she became leader, and the woman I traveled with was one of the best hunters I know. She loved to hunt and was very good at tracking. I could throw a spear farther, but she was more accurate. She could knock a bird out of the sky or kill a rabbit on the run with a single stone from her sling.”
“More stories!” Attaroa snorted. “It’s easy enough to make claims for a woman that doesn’t exist. My women didn’t hunt; they weren’t allowed to. When Brugar was leader, no women were even allowed to touch a weapon, and it was not easy for us when I became leader. No one knew how to hunt, but I taught them. Do you see these practice targets?”
Attaroa pointed to a series of sturdy posts stuck in the ground. Jondalar had noticed them in passing before, though he hadn’t known what they were for. Now he saw a large section of a horse carcass hanging from a thick wooden peg near the top of one. A few spears were sticking out of it.
“All the women must practice every day, and not just jabbing the spears hard enough to kill—throwing them, too. The best of them become my hunters. But even before we learned to make and use spears, we were able to hunt. There is a certain cliff north of here, near the place I grew up. People there chase horses off that cliff at least once every year. We learned to hunt horses like that. It is not so difficult to stampede horses off a cliff, if you can entice them up.”
Attaroa looked at Epadoa with obvious pride. “Epadoa discovered how much horses like salt. She makes the women save the water they pass and uses it to lead the horses along. My hunters are my wolves,” Attaroa said, smiling in the direction of the women with spears who had gathered around.
They took evident pleasure in her praise, standing taller as she spoke. Jondalar hadn’t paid much attention to their clothing before, but now he realized that all of the hunters wore something that came from a wolf. Most of them had a fringe of wolf fur around their hoods and at least one wolf tooth, but often more, dangling around their necks. Some of them also had a fringe of wolf fur around the cuffs of their parkas, or the hem, or both, plus additional decorative panels. Epadoa’s hood was entirely wolf fur, with a portion of a wolf’s head, with fangs bared, decorating the top. Both the hem and cuffs of her parka were fringed, wolf paws hung down from her shoulders in front, and a bushy tail hung behind from a center panel of wolf skin.
“Their spears are their fangs, they kill in a pack, and bring the food back. Their feet are their paws, they run steady all day, and go a long way,” Attaroa said in a rhythmic meter that he felt sure had been repeated many times. “Epadoa is their leader, Zelandonii. I wouldn’t try to outsmart her. She is very clever.”
“I’m sure she is,” Jondalar said, feeling outnumbered. But he also couldn’t help feeling a touch of admiration for what they had accomplished, starting with so little knowledge. “It just seems such a waste to have men sitting idle when they could be contributing, too, helping to hunt, helping to gather food, making tools. Then the women alone wouldn’t have to be working so hard. I’m not saying women cannot do it, but why should they have to do it all, for both men and women?”
Attaroa laughed, the harsh, demented laugh that gave him a chill. “I have wondered the same thing. Women are the ones who produce new life; why do we need men at all? Some of the women don’t want to give men up yet, but what good are they? For Pleasures? It’s men who get the Pleasure. Here we don’t worry about giving men Pleasures any more. Instead of sharing a hearth with a man, I have put women together. They share the work, they help each other with their children, they understand each other. When there are no men around, the Mother will have to mix the spirits of women, and only female children will be born.”
Would it work? Jondalar wondered. S’Amodun had said that very few babies had been born in the last few