The valley of horses_ a novel - Jean M. Auel [50]
She didn’t have a large hide to cut down, but she finally devised a way to wear rabbit skins, dehaired, as a summer wrap that left her bare from the waist up, and she used other skins as a breast band. She planned to make a trip to the steppes in the morning, with her new spears and hopes of finding animals to hunt.
The gradual slope of the northern side of the valley gave easy access to the steppes east of the river; the sheer wall made the western plains too difficult to reach. She saw several herds of deer, bison, horses, even a small band of saiga antelopes, but she brought back nothing more than a brace of ptarmigan and a great jerboa. She just couldn’t get close enough to jab anything with her spears.
As the days passed, hunting a large animal was a constant preoccupation. She had often watched the men of the clan talk about hunting—they talked about almost nothing else—but they always hunted cooperatively. Their favorite technique, like that of a pack of wolves, was to cut an animal out of a herd and run it down in relays, until it was so exhausted, they could get close enough to make the fatal thrust. But Ayla was alone.
They had talked sometimes of the way the cats lay in wait to pounce, or made a furious dash to bring down prey with fangs and claws. But Ayla had neither fangs nor claws, nor the short-run speed of a cat. She wasn’t even very comfortable handling her spears; they were rather large to grasp and long. Yet, she had to find a way.
It was the night of the new moon when she finally got an idea she thought might work. She often thought of the Clan Gathering when the moon turned its back on the earth and bathed the far reaches of space with its reflected light. The Cave Bear Festival was always held when the moon was new.
She was thinking about the hunt reenactments made by the different clans. Broud had led the exciting hunt dance for their clan, and the vivid re-creation of chasing a mammoth into a blind canyon with fire had won the day. But the host clan’s portrayal of digging a pit trap on the path a woolly rhinoceros usually took to water, and then surrounding it and chasing him into it, had brought them in a close second in that competition. Woolly rhinos were notoriously unpredictable, and dangerous.
The next morning, Ayla looked to see if the horses were there, but she didn’t greet them. She could identify each member of the herd individually. They were company, almost friends, but there was no other way, not if she was going to survive.
She spent the greater part of the next several days observing the herd, studying their movements: where they normally watered, where they liked to graze, where they spent the nights. As she watched, a plan began to take shape in her mind. She worried over details, tried to think of every contingency, and finally set to work.
It took a full day to chop down small trees and brush and drag them halfway across the field, piling them up near a break in the trees along the stream. She gathered pitchy barks and limbs of fir and pine, dug through rotted old stumps for residual hard lumps that caught fire quickly, and pulled up bunches of dry grass. In the evening, she bound the lumps and pieces of pitch to branches with grass to make torches that would start quickly and burn smoky.
The morning of the day she planned to start, she got out her hide tent and the aurochs horn. Then she scrounged through the pile at the foot of the wall for a flat sturdy bone and scraped one side until it tapered to a sharp edge. Then, with hopes she would need them, she got out every cord and thong she cound find, and pulled lianas down from the trees and piled them on the rocky beach. She hauled loads of driftwood and deadfall to the beach, too, so she’d have enough for fires.
By early evening, everything was ready, and Ayla paced back and forth along the beach as far as the jutting wall, checking on the herd’s movements. Anxiously, she watched