The Plains of Passage - Jean M. Auel [348]
“What other ways?” Ayla asked. She had a feeling there was more to the idea, and that it would be important for her to understand.
“Well, sometimes to repay someone for something he’s done, usually something special, but difficult to value,” Jondalar said. “Since there is no limit placed on it, a future claim can be a heavy obligation, but most people will not ask for more than is appropriate. Often just accepting the obligation of a future claim shows trust and good faith. It’s a way of offering friendship.”
Ayla nodded. There was more to it.
“Laduni owes me a future claim,” the man continued. “It is not a major claim, but he is required to give me whatever I ask, and I could ask for anything. I think he’ll be glad to fulfill his obligation with nothing more than a little food, which he would probably give us anyway.”
“Is it far to the Losadunai?” Ayla asked.
“It’s quite a distance. They live at the western end of these mountains, and we’re at the eastern end, but it’s not hard traveling if we follow the river. We will have to cross it, though. They live on the other side, but we can do that farther upstream,” Jondalar said.
They decided to camp there overnight, and they carefully went through all their belongings. It was mostly food that was gone. When they put all they could salvage together, it made a meager pile, but they realized the situation could have been worse. They would have to hunt and gather extensively along the way, but most of their gear was intact and would be entirely serviceable with some mending and repairing, except for the meat-keeper, which had been chewed to shreds. The bowl boat had protected their cache from the weather, if not from the wolves. In the morning they had to make a decision about whether or not to continue dragging along the round, skin-covered boat.
“We’re getting into more mountainous country. It could be more trouble taking it than leaving it behind,” Jondalar said.
Ayla had been checking over the poles. Of the three poles she had used to keep their food away from animals, one was broken, but they only needed two for the travois. “Why don’t we take it along for now, and if it turns out to be a real problem, we can always leave it later,” she said.
Traveling west, they soon left behind the low-lying basin of windy plains. The east-west course of the Great Mother River, which they followed, marked the line of a great battle between the most powerful forces of the earth, waged in the infinitely slow motion of geologic time. To the south was the foreland of the high western mountains, whose uppermost reaches were never warmed by the gentle days of summer. The lofty prominences accumulated snow and ice year after year and, farther back, the tallest peaks of the range glistened in the clear, cold air.
The highlands on the north were the basic crystalline rock of an immense massif, rounded and smoothed vestiges of ancient mountains worn down over eons of time. They had risen from the land in the earliest epoch and were anchored to the deepest bedrock. Against that immovable foundation, the irresistible force of continents, moving slowly and inexorably from the south, had crushed and folded the earth’s crust of hard rock, uplifting the massive system of mountains that stretched across the land.
But the ancient massif did not escape unscathed from the great forces that created the high-peaked mountains. The tilting, faulting, and breaking of the rock, seen in the disruption of its solidified crystal structure, told a story in stone of the violent folding and thrusting it endured as it held firm against the inconceivable pressures from the south. In the same epoch, not only were the high western range on their left, and another even farther west, uplifted by moving continents pushing against unyielding bedrock, but so were the long curved eastern range they had skirted, and the entire series of ranges that continued eastward to the tallest