The Plains of Passage - Jean M. Auel [298]
“You saved both of them from going over that cliff!” Jondalar said. “I didn’t know if you had, and I was afraid to ask. The last thing I remember, before I was hit on the head, was seeing you on Racer’s back, having some trouble controlling him.”
“I had to get used to the rein, that’s all. The biggest problem was that other stallion, but now he’s gone and I’m sorry. Whinney came to my whistle as soon as they stopped herding her away from me,” Ayla said.
Racer was just as glad to see Jondalar. He dropped his head, then flipped it up in greeting, and he would have walked to the man if he hadn’t been tied. The stallion, his ears forward and his tail lifted high, whinnied to Jondalar with eager anticipation as he approached. Then he lowered his head to nuzzle the man’s hand. Jondalar greeted the stallion like a friend he thought he would never see again, hugging, scratching, stroking, and talking to the animal.
He frowned when he thought of another question, one he almost hated to ask. “What about Wolf?”
Ayla smiled, then pierced the air with an unfamiliar whistle. Wolf came bounding out of the brush, so glad to see Jondalar that he couldn’t keep still. He ran to him, wagging his tail, barked a little yip, then jumped up and put his paws on the man’s shoulders and licked his jaw. Jondalar grabbed him by the ruff as he’d seen Ayla do so many times, roughed it up a bit, then pressed his forehead against the wolf’s.
“He’s never done that to me before,” Jondalar said, surprised.
“He missed you. I think he wanted to find you as much as I did, and I’m not sure I would have been able to track you without him. We’re quite a distance from the Great Mother River, and there were long stretches of rocky dry ground that showed no tracks. But his nose found the trail,” Ayla said. Then she greeted the wolf.
“But he was waiting there in that brush all the time? And he didn’t come until you signaled? It must have been hard to teach him that, but why did you?”
“I had to teach him to hide because I didn’t know who might be coming here, and I didn’t want them to know about him. They eat wolf meat.”
“Who eats wolf meat?” Jondalar asked, wrinkling his nose with repugnance.
“Attaroa and her hunters.”
“Are they that hungry?” Jondalar asked.
“Maybe they were once, but now they do it as a ritual. I watched them one night. They were initiating a new hunter, making a young woman part of their Wolf Pack. They keep it a secret from the other women, go away from the lodges to a special place. They had a live wolf in a cage and killed it, butchered it, then cooked it and ate it. They like to think they are getting the strength and cunning of the wolf that way. It would be better if they just watched wolves. They’d learn more,” Ayla said.
No wonder she seemed so disapproving of the Wolf Women and their hunting skills, Jondalar thought, suddenly understanding why she didn’t like them. Their initiation rites threatened her wolf. “So you taught Wolf to stay in hiding until you called him. That’s a new whistle, isn’t it?” he said.
“I’ll teach it to you, but even if he does stay in hiding—most of the time—when I tell him, I still worry about him. Whinney and Racer, too. Horses and wolves are the only animals I’ve ever seen Attaroa’s women kill,” she said, looking around at her beloved animals.
“You’ve learned a lot about them, Ayla,” Jondalar said.
“I had to learn everything I could, so I could get you out of there,” she said. “But maybe I learned too much.”
“Too much? How could you learn too much?”
“When I first found you, I only thought about getting you out of that place, and then getting away from here as soon as we could, but now we can’t go.”
“What do you mean we can’t go? Why not?” Jondalar said, frowning.
“We can’t leave those children living