The Plains of Passage - Jean M. Auel [432]
It was dark before the squall blew itself out, and they had to camp for the night at the same place, but they set the tent up properly first. In the morning, Ayla was puzzled by some dark stains near the edge of the tent that Whinney had stood on. She wondered about them as they hurried to break camp early the next morning.
They made more progress the second day, in spite of climbing over pressure mounds of broken ice and working their way around an area of several yawning cracks, all oriented in the same direction. A storm blew up in the afternoon again, though the wind was not as strong, and it blew over more quickly, allowing them to continue their Journey during the late afternoon.
Toward evening, Ayla noticed that Whinney was limping. She felt her heart beat faster and a rush of fear when she looked closer and saw red smudges on the ice. She picked up Whinney’s foot and examined her hoof. It was cut to the quick and bleeding.
“Jondalar, look at this. Her feet are all cut up. What did that to her?” Ayla said.
He looked, and then he examined Racer’s hooves while Ayla was looking at the rest of Whinney’s. He found the same kind of injuries, then frowned. “It must be the ice,” he said. “You’d better check Wolf, too.”
The pads of the wolf’s paws showed damage, though not quite as bad as the horses’ hooves. “What are we going to do?” Ayla said. “They’re crippled, or will be soon.”
“It never occurred to me that the ice could be so sharp it could cut up their hooves,” Jondalar said, very upset. “I tried to think of everything, but I didn’t think about that.” He was stricken with remorse.
“Hooves are hard, but they’re not like stone. More like fingernails. They can be damaged. Jondalar, they can’t go on. They’ll be so crippled in another day that they won’t be able to walk at all,” Ayla said. “We’ve got to help them.”
“But what can we do?” Jondalar said.
“Well, I still have my medicine bag. I can treat their injuries.”
“But we can’t stay here until they’re healed. And as soon as they start walking again, it will be just as bad.” The man stopped and closed his eyes. He didn’t even want to think what he was thinking, much less say it, but he could see only one way out of their dilemma. “Ayla, we’re going to have to leave them,” the man said, as gently as he could.
“Leave them? What do you mean, ‘leave them’? We can’t leave Whinney, or Racer. Where would they find water? Or food? There’s nothing to graze on the ice, not even twig tips. They’d starve, or freeze. We can’t do that!” Ayla said, her face showing her distress. “We can’t leave them here like that! We can’t, Jondalar!”
“You’re right, we can’t leave them here like that. It wouldn’t be fair. They would suffer too much … but … we do have spears and the spear-throwers …” Jondalar said.
“No! No!” Ayla screamed. “I won’t let you!”
“It would be better than leaving them here to die slowly, to suffer. It’s not like horses haven’t been … hunted before. That’s what most people do.”
“But these aren’t like other horses. Whinney and Racer are friends. We’ve been through so much together. They’ve helped us. Whinney saved my life. I can’t leave her.”
“I don’t want to leave them any more than you do,” Jondalar said, “but what else can we do?” The idea of killing the stallion after traveling so far together was almost more than he could bear, and he knew how Ayla felt about Whinney.
“We’ll go back. We’ll just have to turn back. You said there was another way around!”
“We’ve already traveled two days on this ice, and the horses are almost crippled. We can try to go back, Ayla, but I don’t think they will make it,” Jondalar said. He wasn’t even sure if Wolf would be able to make it. Guilt and remorse