The valley of horses_ a novel - Jean M. Auel [58]
“Wait, Jondalar! Don’t! You’ll just make him angry with that spear; you won’t even hurt him. Remember when we were boys, how we used to bait rhinos? Someone would run, get the rhino chasing him, then dodge away while someone else got his attention. Keep him running until he was too tired to move. You get ready to draw his attention—I’m going to run and try to make him charge.”
“No! Thonolan,” Jondalar yelled, but it was too late. Thonolan was sprinting.
It was always impossible to outguess the unpredictable beast. Rather than charging after the man, the rhino made a rush for the tent billowing in the wind. He rammed it, gouged a hole in it, snapped thongs and got snared in them. When he disentangled himself, he decided he didn’t like the men or their camp and left, trotting off harmlessly. Thonolan, glancing over his shoulder, noticed the rhino was gone and came loping back.
“That was stupid!” Jondalar yelled, slamming his spear into the ground with a force that broke the wooden shaft just below the bone point. “Were you trying to get yourself killed? Great Doni, Thonolan! Two people can’t bait a rhino. You have to surround him. What if he had gone after, you? What in Great Mother’s underworld am I supposed to do if you get hurt?”
Surprise, then anger flashed across Thonolan’s face. Then he broke into a grin. “You were really worried about me! Yell all you want, you can’t bluff me. Maybe I shouldn’t have tried it, but I wasn’t going to let you make some stupid move, like going for a rhino with such a light spear. What in Great Mother’s underworld am I supposed to do if you get hurt?” His smile grew, and his eyes lit up with the delight of a small boy who had succeeded in pulling off a trick. “Besides, he didn’t come after me.”
Jondalar looked blank in the face of his brother’s grin. His outburst had been more relief than anger, but it took him a while to grasp that Thonolan was safe.
“You were lucky. I guess we both were,” he said, expelling a long breath. “But we’d better make a couple of lances, even if we just sharpen points for now.”
“I haven’t seen any yew, but we can watch for ash or alder on the way,” Thonolan remarked as he began to take down the tent. “They should work.”
“Anything will work, even willow. We should make them before we go.”
“Jondalar, let’s get away from this place. We need to reach those mountains, don’t we?”
“I don’t like traveling without lances, not with rhinos around.”
“We can stop early. We need to fix the tent anyway. If we go, we can look for some good wood, find a better place to camp. That rhino might come back.”
“And he might follow us, too.” Thonolan was always eager to start in the morning, and restless about delays, Jondalar knew. “Maybe we should try to reach those mountains. All right, Thonolan, but we stop early, right?”
“Right, Big Brother.”
The two brothers strode along the edge of the river at a steady, ground-covering pace, long since adjusted to each other’s step and comfortable with each other’s silences. They had grown closer, talked out each other’s heart and mind, tested each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Each assumed certain tasks by habit, and each depended on the other when danger threatened. They were young and strong and healthy, and unselfconsciously confident that they could face whatever lay ahead.
They were so attuned to their environment that perception was on a subliminal level. Any disturbance that posed a threat would have found them instantly on guard. But they were only vaguely aware of the warmth of the distant sun, challenged by the cold wind soughing through leafless limbs; black-bottomed clouds embracing the white-walled breastworks of the mountains before them; and the deep, swift river.
The mountain ranges of the massive continent shaped the course of the Great Mother River. She rose out of the highland north of one glacier-covered range and flowed east. Beyond the first chain of mountains was a level plain—in an earlier age the basin of an inland sea—and, farther east, a second range curved around in a great