The valley of horses_ a novel - Jean M. Auel [150]
There was another area of his development, she noticed, in which the young lion was ahead of his contemporaries. Baby was a precocious hunter. After the first time, when he had taken such delight in chasing onagers, he always accompanied the woman. Rather than playing at stalking and hunting with other cubs, he was practicing on real prey. A lioness would have forcibly restricted his participation, but Ayla encouraged and in fact welcomed his assistance. His instinctive hunting methods were so compatible with hers that they hunted as a team.
Only once did he initiate the chase prematurely and scatter a herd in advance of the pit. Then, Ayla was so disgusted with him that Baby knew he’d made a grievous mistake. He watched her closely next time and held himself in check until she started. Though he hadn’t succeeded in killing a trapped animal before she arrived, she was sure it would not be long before he killed something.
He discovered that hunting smaller game with Ayla and her sling was great fun, too. If Ayla was gathering food in which he had no interest, he would chase anything that moved—if he wasn’t sleeping. But when she hunted, he learned to freeze when she did at the sight of game. Waiting and watching while she took out her sling and a stone, he was off as she made her cast. She often met him dragging the kill back, but sometimes she found him with his teeth around the animal’s throat. She wondered if it had been her stone, or if he had finished the job by closing the windpipe, the way lions suffocated an animal to kill it. In time, she learned to look when he froze, scenting prey before she saw it, and it was a smaller animal he first opened by himself.
Baby had been playing around with a hunk of meat she had given him, not especially interested in it, then had gone to sleep. He woke up, when he heard Ayla climbing up the steep side to the steppes above her cave, hungry. Whinney was not around. Cubs left unattended in the wild were open season for hyenas and other predators; he had learned the lesson early and well. He leaped up after Ayla and reached the top ahead of her, then walked beside her. She saw him stop before she noticed the giant hamster, but it had seen them and started to run before she hurled the stone. She wasn’t sure if her aim had been true.
Baby was off the next instant. When she came upon him with his jaws buried in the bloody entrails, she wanted to find out who had made the kill. She shoved him aside to see if she could find a stone mark. He resisted for only an instant—long enough for her to look at him sternly—then gave way without argument. He had eaten enough food from her hand to know she always provided. Even after examining the hamster, she wasn’t sure how it had died, but she gave it back to the lion, praising him. Tearing through the skin himself was an achievement.
The first animal she was sure he killed himself was a hare. It was one of the few times her stone slipped. She knew she had made a bad throw—the stone came to rest only a few feet beyond her—but the motion of throwing had signaled the young cave lion to give chase. She found him disemboweling the animal.
“How wonderful you are, Baby!” She praised him lavishly with her unique mixture of sounds and hand signs, as all Clan boys were praised when they killed their first small animal. The lion didn’t understand what she said, but he understood he had pleased her. Her smile, her attitude, her posture, all communicated her feeling. Though he was young for it, he had satisfied his own instinctive need