The valley of horses_ a novel - Jean M. Auel [57]
“I’ve seen whole hunting parties turn back without throwing a single spear, just because the woollies were moving north. I wonder how much it snows around here?”
“The summer was dry. If the winter is too, mammoths and rhinos may stay all season. But we’re farther south now, and that usually means more snow. If there are people in those mountains to the east, they should know. Maybe we should have stayed with the people who rafted us across the river. We need a place to stay for the winter, and soon.”
“I wouldn’t mind a nice friendly cave full of beautiful women right now,” Thonolan said with a grin.
“I’d settle for a nice friendly Cave.”
“Big Brother, you wouldn’t want to spend a winter without women any more than I would.”
The bigger man smiled. “Well, the winter would be a lot colder without a woman, beautiful or not.”
Thonolan looked at his brother speculatively. “I’ve often wondered about that,” he said.
“What?”
“Sometimes there’s a real beauty with half the men trying for her, but she looks only at you. I know you aren’t stupid; you know it—yet you pass her by and go pick out some little mouse sitting in a corner. Why?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes the ‘mouse’ just thinks she’s not beautiful, because she has a mole on her cheek or thinks her nose is too long. When you talk to her, there’s often more to her than the one everybody is after. Sometimes women who aren’t perfect are more interesting; they’ve done more, or learned something.”
“Maybe you’re right. Some of those shy ones blossom out, after you’ve paid attention to them.”
Jondalar shrugged and stood up. “We’re not going to find women, or a Cave, this way. Let’s break camp.”
“Right!” Thonolan said eagerly, then turned his back to the fire—and froze! “Jondalar!” he gasped, then strained to sound casual. “Don’t do anything to attract his attention, but if you look over the tent, you’ll see your friend from this morning, or one just like him.”
Jondalar peered over the top of the tent. Just on the other side, swaying from side to side as he shifted his massive tonnage from one foot to the other, was a huge, double-horned, woolly rhinoceros. With his head turned to the side, he was eying Thonolan. He was nearly blind directly ahead; his small eyes were set far back and his vision was poor to begin with. Acute hearing and a sharp sense of smell more than made up for his eyesight.
He was obviously a creature of the cold. He had two coats, a soft undercoat of thick downy fur and a shaggy outer one of reddish brown hair, and beneath his tough hide was a three-inch layer of fat. He carried his head low, downward from his shoulders, and his long front horn sloped forward at an angle that barely cleared the ground as he swayed. He used it for sweeping snow away from pasturage—if it wasn’t too deep. And his short thick legs were easily mired in deep snow. He visited the grasslands of the south only briefly—to graze on their richer harvest and store additional fat—in late fall and early winter after it became cold enough for him, but before the heavy snows. He could not stand heat, with his heavy coats, any more than he could survive in deep snow. His home was the bitter-cold, crackling dry tundra and steppes near the glacier.
The long, tapering, anterior horn could be put to a far more dangerous use than sweeping snow, however, and there was nothing between the rhino and Thonolan but a short distance.
“Don’t move!” Jondalar hissed. He ducked down behind the tent and reached for his pack with the spears.
“Those light spears won’t do much good,” Thonolan said, though his back was toward him. The comment stayed Jondalar’s hand for a moment; he wondered how Thonolan knew. “You’d have to hit him in a vulnerable place like an eye, and that’s too small a target. You need a heavy lance for rhino,” Thonolan continued, and his brother realized he was guessing.
“Don’t talk so much, you’ll draw his attention,” Jondalar cautioned. “I may not have a lance, but you don’t have a weapon at all. I’m going around the back of the