The Plains of Passage - Jean M. Auel [350]
She thought that wolves and other carnivores probably derived some of their liquid requirement from the blood of those they hunted for food, and they ranged over a large territory and could find pockets of snow or loose ice to chew. But what about horses and the other grazing and browsing animals? How did they find water in a land that in winter was a frozen desert? There was enough snow in some areas, but others were barren regions of rock and ice. Yet no matter how dry, if there was some kind of fodder, it was inhabited by animals.
Although still rare, Ayla saw more woolly rhinoceroses than she had ever seen in one place, and though they didn’t herd together, whenever she saw rhinos, they often saw musk-oxen, too. Both species preferred the open, windy, dry land, but the rhinos liked grass and sedge, and musk-oxen, true to the goatlike creatures they were, browsed on woodier brush. Large reindeer and the gigantic megaceroses with massive antlers also shared the frozen land, and horses with thick winter coats, but if there was one animal that stood out among the populations in the valley of the upper course of the Great Mother River, it was mammoths.
Ayla never grew tired of watching the huge beasts. Though they were occasionally hunted, they were so unafraid that they seemed almost tame. They often allowed the woman and man to come quite close, sensing no danger from them. The danger was, if anything, to the humans. Though woolly mammoths were not the most gigantic examples of their species, they were the most gigantic animals the humans had ever seen—or that most people were ever likely to see—and with their shaggy coats even more filled out for winter, and their immense curved tusks, they looked bigger, up close, than Ayla remembered.
Their enormous tusks began, in calves, with inch-and-a-half-long tushes, enlarged upper incisors. After a year, the baby tushes were lost and replaced by permanent tusks that grew continually from then on. While the tusks of mammoths were social adornments, important in interactions with their own kind, they also had a more practical function. They were used to break up ice, and the ice-breaking abilities of mammoths were phenomenal.
The first time Ayla observed the practice, she had been watching a herd of females approach the frozen river. Several of them used their tusks, somewhat smaller and straighter than the ivory shafts of males, to tear out ice that was caught in the lee of rock crevices. It puzzled her at first, until she noticed a small one pick up a piece with her little trunk and put it in her mouth.
“Water!” Ayla said. “That’s how they get water, Jondalar. I was wondering about that.”
“You’re right. I never thought much about it before, but now that you mention it, I think Dalanar said something about that. But there are lots of sayings about mammoths. The only one I remember is, ‘Never go forth when mammoths go north,’ though you could say the same for rhinos.”
“I don’t understand that saying,” Ayla said.
“It means a snowstorm is coming,” Jondalar said. “They always seem to know. Those big woollies don’t like snow much. It covers up their food. They can use their tusks and their trunks to brush away some, but not when it gets really deep, and they get bogged down in it. It’s especially bad when it’s thawing and freezing. They lie down at night when it’s still slushy from the afternoon sun, and by morning their fur is frozen to the ground. They can’t move. They are easy to hunt then, but if there are no hunters around and it doesn’t thaw, they can slowly starve. Some have been known to freeze to death, especially little ones.”
“What does that have to do with going north?”
“The closer you get to the ice, the less snow there is. Remember how it was when we went hunting mammoths with the Mamutoi? The only water around was the stream coming from the glacier itself, and that was summer. In winter, that’s all frozen.”
“Is that why there’s so