The valley of horses_ a novel - Jean M. Auel [186]
“We can’t make a fire here,” Thonolan said. “We’ll have to keep going. Where did Carlono say that Mamutoi Camp was?”
“At the north end of the delta, close to the sea,” Jondalar replied, and he looked with longing in that direction as he spoke. The pain in his side had become more intense and he wasn’t sure if he could swim across another channel. All he could see was surging water, tangled pockets of debris, and a few trees marking an occasional island. “No telling how far that is.”
They squished through the mud to the north side of the narrow strip of land and plunged into the cold water. Jondalar noted a stand of trees downstream and made for it. They staggered up a beach of gray sand at the far side of the channel, breathing heavily. Rivulets of water ran from their long hair and soaked leather clothing.
The late afternoon sun broke through a rift in the overcast sky with a wash of golden brilliance but little warmth. A sudden gust from the north brought a chill that quickly penetrated wet clothes. They had been warm enough while they were active, but the effort had sapped their reserves. They shivered in the wind, then plodded toward the scant shelter of a sparse stand of alder.
“Let’s make camp here,” Jondalar said.
“It’s still light. I’d rather keep going.”
“It will be dark by the time we make a shelter and try to get a fire started.”
“If we keep going, we could probably find the Mamutoi Camp before dark.”
“Thonolan, I don’t think I can.”
“How bad is it?” Thonolan asked. Jondalar lifted his tunic. A wound on his rib was discoloring around a gash that had no doubt bled, but had been closed off by water-swelled tissue. He noticed the hole punctured in the leather then, wondering if his rib was broken.
“I wouldn’t mind a rest and a fire.”
They looked around them at the wild expanse of swirling muddy water, shifting sandbars, and an unkempt profusion of vegetation. Tangled tree limbs attached to dead trunks were pulled by the current unwillingly toward the sea, digging in wherever they could find purchase in the fluctuating bottom. In the distance a few stands of greening brush and trees were anchored to some of the more stable islands.
Reeds and marsh grasses took hold anywhere they could root. Nearby, three-foot tussocks of sedge, whose clumps of sprawling grassy leaves looked sturdier than they were, matched in height by the straight sword-shaped leaves of sweetflag, grew between mats of spike rush that was barely an inch tall. In the marsh near the water’s edge, ten-foot-tall scouring rushes, cattails, and bulrushes dwarfed the men. Soaring over all, stiff-leafed phragmite reeds with tops of purple plumes reached thirteen feet or more.
The men had only the clothes on their backs. They had lost everything when the boat went down, even the backframes they had traveled with from the beginning. Thonolan had adopted the dress of the Shamudoi, and Jondalar wore the Ramudoi variation, but after his dunking in the river when he met the flatheads, he had kept a pouch of tools tied to his belt. He was grateful for it now.
“I’m going to see if there are some old stalks on those Cattails that are dry enough for a fire drill,” Jondalar said, trying to ignore the pain in his side. “See if you can find some dry wood.”
The cattails provided more than an old-growth woody stalk for a fire drill. The long leaves woven around an alder-wood frame made a lean-to, which helped contain the heat from the fire. The green tops and young roots, baked in the coals along with the sweet rhizomes of the sweetflag and the underwater base of the bulrushes, supplied the beginning of a meal. A slender alder sapling, sharpened to a point and hurled with the accuracy of hunger, brought a couple