The Plains of Passage - Jean M. Auel [434]
“That’s the way Iza made boots for me. That’s how the people of the Clan make foot-coverings. Hand-coverings, too. I’m trying to remember if that’s the kind Guban and Yorga wore. It’s hard to tell, because after a while they shape to your feet.”
“Will that hide be enough?”
“It should be. While I’ve got the fire going, I’ll finish preparing this remedy for the cuts, and maybe some hot tea for us. We haven’t had any for a couple of days, and we probably won’t again until we get down off this ice. We’re going to have to conserve fuel, but I think a cup of hot tea would taste very good right now.”
“I think you’re right!” Jondalar agreed, smiling again and feeling good.
Ayla very carefully examined each hoof on both horses, trimmed away the rough places, applied her medication, then tied the mammoth-hide horse boots on them. They tried to shake off the strange foot-coverings at first, but they were tied on securely, and the horses quickly got used to them. Then she took the set she had made for Wolf and tied them on. He chewed and gnawed at them, trying to get rid of the unfamiliar encumbrances, but after a while he stopped fighting them, too. His oversize wolf feet were in much better shape.
The next morning they loaded a slightly lighter pack on the horses; they had burned some of the brown coal, and the heavy mammoth hide was now on their feet. Ayla unloaded them when they stopped for a rest, and she took on a little more of the load herself. But she couldn’t begin to carry what the sturdy horses could. In spite of traveling, their hooves and feet seemed much improved by that night. Wolfs seemed perfectly normal, which was a great relief for both Ayla and Jondalar. The boots provided an unexpected benefit: they acted as a kind of snow-shoe when there was deep snow, and the large, heavy animals didn’t sink in as far.
The pattern of the first day held, with some variation. They made their best time in the morning; the afternoons brought snow and wind of varying intensity. Sometimes they were able to travel a little farther after the storm, other times they had to stay where they stopped in the afternoon through the night, and on one occasion for two days, but none of the blizzards were as fierce as the one they had encountered the first day.
The surface of the glacier wasn’t quite as flat and smooth as it had appeared on that first glistening day in the sun. They floundered through deep drifts of soft powdered snow piled high from localized snowstorms. Other times, where driving winds cleared the surface, they crunched over sharp projections and slid into shallow ditches, their feet catching in narrow spaces and their ankles twisting under them on the uneven surface. Instant squalls blew down without warning, the fierce winds almost never let up, and they felt constant anxiety about unseen crevasses covered over with flimsy bridges or overhanging cornices of snow.
They detoured around open cracks, especially near the center, where the dry air held so little moisture that the snows were not heavy enough to fill the crevasses. And the cold, the deep, bitter, bone-chilling cold, never let up. Their breath froze on the fur of their hoods around their mouths; a drop of water spilling from a cup was frozen before it touched the ground. Their faces, exposed to raw winds and bright sun, cracked, peeled, and blackened. Frostbite was a constant threat.
The strain was beginning to tell. Their responses were beginning to deteriorate, and so was their judgment. A furious afternoon storm had held on into the night. In the morning, Jondalar was anxious to get under way. They had lost much more time than he had planned. In the bitter cold, it took longer for the water to heat, and their supply of burning stones was dwindling.
Ayla was going through her backpack; then she began searching around her sleeping fur. She couldn’t remember how many days they had been on the ice, but