The valley of horses_ a novel - Jean M. Auel [70]
All right, Whinney, Ayla thought after she put the wood and water down. She patted and scratched the foal for a moment, then put some grain into her basket. She ate some cold leftover rabbit and wished she had some hot tea, but she drank cold water instead. It was cold in the cave. She blew on her hands and put them under her arms to warm them, then got out a basket of tools which she kept near the bed.
She had made a few new ones shortly after she arrived and had been meaning to make more, but something else always seemed more important. She picked out her hand-axe, the one she had carried with her, and took it outside to examine in better light. If handled properly, a hand-axe could be self-sharpening. Tiny spalls usually chipped off the edge with use, always leaving a sharp edge behind. But mishandling could cause a large flake to break off, or even break the brittle stone into fragments.
Ayla didn’t notice the clop of Whinney’s hooves coming up behind her; she was too accustomed to the sound. The young animal tried to put her nose in Ayla’s hand.
“Oh, Whinney!” she cried, as the brittle flint hand-axe fell on the hard stone ledge and broke in several pieces. “That was my only hand-axe. I need it to chop wood.” I don’t know what is wrong, she thought. My fire goes out just when it turns cold. Hyenas come, as though they didn’t expect to find a fire, all ready to attack you. And now, my only hand-axe breaks. She was getting worried, a streak of bad luck was not a good omen. I’ll have to make a new hand-axe now, before I do anything else.
She picked up the pieces of the hand-axe—it might be possible to shape them to some other purpose—and put them near the cold fireplace. From a niche behind her sleeping place, she took out a bundle wrapped in the hide of a giant hamster and tied with a cord, and brought it down to the rocky beach.
Whinney followed, but when her nudging and butting caused the woman to push her away rather than pet her, she left Ayla to her stones and wandered around the wall into the valley.
Ayla unwrapped the bundle carefully, reverently; an attitude assimilated early from Droog, the clan’s master tool-maker. It held an assortment of objects. The first she picked up was an oval stone. The first time she worked the flint, she had searched for a hammerstone that felt good in her hand and had the right resilience when struck against flint. All stone working tools were important, but none had the significance of the hammerstone. It was the first implement to touch the flint.
Hers had only a few nicks, unlike Droog’s hammerstone, battered from repeated use. But nothing could have convinced him to give it up. Anyone could rough out a flint tool, but the truly fine ones were made by expert toolmakers who cared for their implements and knew how to keep a hammerstone spirit happy. Ayla worried about the spirit of her hammerstone, though she never had before. It was so much more important now that she had to be her own master toolmaker. She knew rituals were required to avert bad luck if a hammerstone broke, to placate the stone’s spirit and coax it into lodging in a new stone, and she didn’t know them.
She put the hammerstone aside and examined a sturdy piece of legbone from a grazing animal for signs of splintering from the last time she used it. After the bone hammer, she looked over a retoucher, the canine tooth of a large cat dislodged from a jawbone she had found in the pile at the bottom of the wall, and then she checked the other pieces of bone and stone.
She had learned to knap flint by watching Droog and then practicing. He didn’t mind showing her how to work the stone. She paid attention and she knew he approved of her efforts, but she was not his apprentice. It wasn’t worthwhile to consider a female; the range of tools they were allowed to make was limited.