The Plains of Passage - Jean M. Auel [351]
“Yes, this region is always cold and dry especially in winter. Everyone says it’s because the glaciers are so close. They are on the mountains to the south, and the Great Ice is not very far north. Most of the land in between is flathead … I mean Clan country. It starts a little west of here.” Jondalar noticed Ayla’s expression at his slip of the tongue, and he felt embarrassed. “Anyway, there’s another saying about mammoths and water, but I can’t remember exactly how it goes. It’s something like, ‘If you can’t find water, look for a mammoth.’ ”
“I can understand that saying,” Ayla said, looking beyond him. Jondalar turned to see.
The female mammoths had moved upstream and joined forces with a few males. Several females were working on a narrow, almost vertical, bank of ice that had built up along the river’s edge. The bigger males, including one dignified elder with streaks of gray hair, whose impressive, if less useful, tusks had grown so long that they were crossed in front, were scraping and gouging out huge chunks of ice from the banks. Then, lifting them high with their trunks, the mammoths threw the ice down with a loud crash to shatter into more usable pieces, all accompanied by bellowings, snortings, stompings, and trumpetings. The huge woolly creatures seemed to be making a game of it.
The noisy business of breaking ice was a practice that all mammoths learned. Even young ones only two or three years old, who had barely lost their baby tushes, showed wear on the outside edges at the ends of their tiny two-inch tusks from scraping ice, and the tips of the twenty-inch prongs of ten-year-olds were worn smooth from moving their heads up and down against the vertical surfaces. By the time the young mammoths reached twenty-five, their tusks were beginning to grow forward, upward, and inward, and the way they used them changed. The lower surfaces began to show some of the wear of scraping ice and brushing aside what snow did fall on the dry grass and plants of the steppes. Ice breaking, though, could be a dangerous business, since tusks often broke along with the ice. But even broken ends were often worn smooth again by later scraping and gouging of ice.
Ayla noticed that other animals had gathered around. The herds of woolly animals, with their powerful tusks, broke up enough ice for themselves, including their young and old, and for a community of followers as well. Many animals benefited by trailing close on the heels of migrating mammoths. The big woollies not only created piles of loose chunks of ice in winter that were chewed for moisture by animals other than themselves, in summer they sometimes used their tusks and feet to dig holes in dry riverbeds, which would fill with water. The waterholes thus created were also used by other animals to slake their thirst.
As they followed the frozen waterway, the woman and man rode, and often walked, fairly close to the banks of the Great Mother River. With so little snow, there was no soft blanket of concealing white to cover the land, and the dormant vegetation exposed its drab winter face. The tall stalks of last summer’s phragmite reeds and spikes of cattails rose valiantly from their frozen bed of marshland, while dead ferns and sedges lay prostrate near the ice heaped up along the edges. Lichens clung to rocks like the scabs of healing wounds, and mosses had shriveled into brittle dry mats.
The long, skeletal fingers of leafless limbs rattled in the sharp and piercing wind, though only a practiced eye could discern whether they were willow, birch, or alder brush. The deep green conifers—spruces, firs, and pines—were easier to distinguish, and though the larches had dropped their needles, their shape was revealing. When they climbed to higher elevations to hunt, they saw recumbent dwarf birch and knee pine clinging close to the ground.
Small game provided most of their meals; big game usually required more time to stalk and hunt than they wanted to spend, although they didn’t hesitate to try for a deer when they saw one. The meat froze