The Plains of Passage - Jean M. Auel [443]
Ayla removed the rest of the mare’s boots, lifting each leg to untie them while Jondalar stood close to steady the animal. Racer still had all his horse boots, although Jondalar noticed they were wearing thin over the sharp hooves; even mammoth hide would not last long worn over hooves.
When they had gathered all their things together and gone to drag the bowl boat closer, they discovered the bottom was wet and soggy. It had developed a leak.
“I don’t think I’d want to try getting across a river in this, any more,” Jondalar said. “Do you think we should leave it?”
“We have to, unless we want to drag it ourselves. We don’t have the poles for the travois. We left them behind when we came flying down that ice, and there are no trees around here for new ones,” Ayla said.
“Well, that settles it!” Jondalar said. “It’s a good thing we don’t need to haul rocks any more, and we’ve lightened our load so much that I think we could carry everything ourselves, even without the horses.”
“If they hadn’t come back, that’s what we’d be doing while we were looking for them,” Ayla said, “but I am so glad they found us.”
“I was worried about them, too,” Jondalar said.
As they descended the steep southwestern face of the ancient massif that supported the harrowing ice field on its worn summit, a light rain fell, flushing out pockets of dirty snow that filled shaded hollows in the open spruce forest they passed through. But a watercolor wash of green tinged the brown earth of a sloping meadow and brushed the tips of shrubs nearby. Below, through openings in the misty fog, they caught glimpses of a river curling from west to north, forced by the surrounding highlands to follow a deep rift valley. Across the river to the south, the rugged alpine foreland faded into a purple haze, but rising wraithlike out of the haze was the high mountain range with ice halfway down its slopes.
“You’re going to like Dalanar,” Jondalar was saying as they rode comfortably side by side. “You’ll like all the Lanzadonii. Most of them used to be Zelandonii, like me.”
“What made him decide to start a new Cave?”
“I’m not sure. I was so young when he and my mother parted, I didn’t really get to know him until I went to live with him, and he taught Joplaya and me how to work the stone. I don’t think he decided to settle and start a new Cave until he met Jerika, but he chose this place because he found the flint mine. People were already talking about Lanzadonii stone when I was a boy,” Jondalar explained.
“Jerika is his mate, and. Joplaya … is your cousin, right?”
“Yes. Close-cousin. Jerika’s daughter, born to Dalanar’s hearth. She’s a good flint knapper, too, but don’t ever tell her I said so. She’s a great tease, always joking. I wonder if she’s found a mate. Great Mother! It’s been so long. They are going to be so surprised to see us!”
“Jondalar!” Ayla said in a loud, urgent whisper. He pulled up short. “Look over there, near those trees. There’s a deer!”
The man smiled. “Let’s get it!” he said, reaching for a spear as he pulled out his spear-thrower and signaled Racer with his knees. Although his method of guiding his mount was not quite the same as hers, after nearly a year of traveling, he was as good a rider as Ayla.
She turned Whinney almost in tandem—she enjoyed being free and unencumbered by the travois for a change—and set her spear in her spear-thrower. Startled by the quick movement, the deer bounded off with high leaps, but they raced after it, coming up on either side and, with the help of the spear-throwers, dispatched the young, inexperienced buck easily. They butchered out their