The Plains of Passage - Jean M. Auel [75]
She took out all the various kinds of dried preserved food she had brought with them and spread it out on top of their sleeping roll. There were berries—blackberries, raspberries, bilberries, elderberries, blueberries, strawberries, alone or mixed together—that had been mashed and dried into cakes. Other sweet varieties were cooked down, then dried to a leathery texture, sometimes with added pieces of small hard apples, tart but high in pectin. Whole berries and wild apples, along with other fruits such as wild pears and plums, were sliced or left whole, and sweetened a bit as they dried in the sun. Any of them could be eaten as they were, or soaked or cooked with water, and were often used to flavor soups or meats. There also were grains and seeds, some that had been partially cooked and then parched; some shelled and roasted hazelnuts; and the stone-pine cones full of rich nuts she had collected from the valley the day before.
Vegetables were also dried—stems, buds, and particularly starchy roots, such as cattail, thistle, licorish fern, and various lily corms. Some were steam-cooked in ground ovens before being dried, but others were dug, peeled, and strung immediately on cords made of the stringy bark of certain plants or sinew from the backbone or leg tendons of various animals. Mushrooms were also strung, and for flavor were often hung over smoky fires to dry, and certain edible lichens were steamed and dried into dense, nutritious loaves. Their provisions were rounded out by a large selection of dried smoked meat and fish, and in a special packet, put aside for emergencies, was a mixture of ground-up dried meat, clean rendered fat, and dried fruits, molded into small cakes.
The dried food was compact and kept well; some of it was more than a year old and had come from the previous winter’s supplies, but the quantities of certain items were quite limited. Nezzie had collected it for them from friends and relatives who had brought it to the Summer Meeting. Ayla had drawn sparingly from their store of food; for the most part they were living off the land. It was the season for it. If they could not survive by harvesting the bounty of the Great Earth Mother when Her offerings were rich, they could never hope to survive traveling across country during leaner times.
Ayla packed everything back up. She had no intention of depending on their dried traveling food for their morning meal, though the steppes had fewer fat birds to feed after they ate. A pair of sandgrouse fell to her sling and were roasted on a spit; some pigeon eggs that would never hatch were lightly cracked and put directly in the fire in their shells. Contributing to a filling breakfast was the fortunate find of a marmot’s cache of spring beauty corms. The hole in the ground was under their sleeping furs and filled with the sweet and starchy vegetables, which had been gathered earlier by the small animal when the rootlike corms were at their peak. They were cooked with the rich pine nuts Ayla had gathered the day before, which were released from the pine cones by fire and cracked with a rock. Some fresh ripe dewberries rounded out the meal.
After they left the flooded valley, Ayla and Jondalar continued south, veering slightly toward the west, drawing imperceptibly closer to the mountain range. Though it was not an exceptionally high range, the taller peaks of the mountains were perpetually covered with snow, often shrouded with mists and clouds.
They were