The valley of horses_ a novel - Jean M. Auel [194]
There were two of them, Ayla saw. She knelt to examine them. Her main concern was as a medicine woman, but she was astonished and curious as well. She knew they were men, though they were the first men of the Others she could remember seeing. She had not been able to visualize a man, but the moment she saw these two, she recognized why Oda had said men of the Others looked like her.
She knew immediately that the man with the darker hair was beyond hope. He lay in an unnatural position, his neck broken. The toothmarks on his throat proclaimed the cause. Though she had never seen him before, his death upset her. Tears of grief welled in her eyes. It wasn’t that she loved him, but that she felt she had lost something beyond value before she ever had a chance to appreciate it. She was devastated that the first time she saw someone of her own kind, he was dead.
She wanted to acknowledge his humanity, to honor him with a burial, but a close look at the other man made her realize that it would be impossible. The man with the yellow hair still breathed, but his life was pumping out of him through a gash in his leg. His only hope was to get him back to the cave as quickly as possible so she could treat him. There was no time for a burial.
Baby sniffed the darker-haired man while she worked to staunch the flow of blood out of the other man’s leg with a tourniquet made of her sling and a smooth stone for pressure. She pushed the lion away from the body. I know he’s dead, Baby, but he’s not for you, she thought. The cave lion jumped down from the ledge and went to make sure his deer was still in the cleft in the rock where he had left it. Familiar growls told Ayla he was preparing to feed.
When the pumping blood slowed to a seepage, she whistled for Whinney and then jumped down to set up the travois. Whinney was more nervous now, and Ayla remembered that Baby had a mate. She patted and hugged the horse for reassurance. She examined the sturdy woven mat between the two poles that dragged the ground behind the horse and decided it would hold the man with the yellow hair, but she didn’t know what to do about the other one. She didn’t want to leave him there for the lions.
When she climbed back up, she noticed that the loose rock at the back of the blind canyon looked very unstable—much of it had piled up behind a larger boulder that was none too stable itself. Suddenly, she remembered Iza’s burial. The old medicine woman had been carefully laid in a shallow depression in the floor of the cave, then rocks and boulders had been piled over her. It gave Ayla an idea. She dragged the dead man to the back of the blind canyon near the slide of loose rock.
Baby came back to see what she was doing, his muzzle bloody from the deer. He followed her back to the other man and sniffed at him while Ayla dragged him to the edge of the rock, below which waited the skittish mare and the travois.
“Move out of the way now, Baby!”
As she tried to ease the man down to the travois, his eyelids fluttered and he moaned with pain, then closed his eyes again. She was just as glad he was unconscious. He was heavy, and the struggle to move him would be painful to him. When she finally got him wrapped into the travois, she returned to the stone ledge with a long sturdy spear and went to the rear. She looked down at the dead man and felt sorrow for the fact of his death. Then she leaned the spear against the rock and, with the formal silent motions of the Clan, addressed the world of the spirits.
She had watched Creb, the old Mog-ur, consign the spirits of Iza to the next world with his eloquent flowing movements. She had repeated the same gestures when she found Creb’s body in the cave after the earthquake, though she had never known the full meaning of the holy gestures. That wasn’t important—she knew the intent. Memories rushed back and tears came to her eyes as she moved through the beautiful silent ritual for the unknown stranger, and sent him on his