The Plains of Passage

  "Here's meat for tonight," Jondalar said, handing the hare to Ayla. "It almost makes me wonder if this one didn't come by just to help me test the new spears. They're light and easy. You'll have to try one out."

  "I think it's more likely that we camped in the middle of his regular run," Ayla said, "but that was a good throw. I would like to try the light spear. Right now, though, I think I'll start this cooking and see what I can find for the rest of our meal."

  She cleaned out the entrails but did not skin the hare, so the winter fat would not be lost. Then she skewered it on a sharpened willow branch and propped it up over the fire between two forked sticks. Next, through she had to break the ice to dig them out, Ayla collected several cattail roots, and the rhizomes from some dormant licorice fern. She pounded both of them together with a rounded stone in a wooden bowl with water to extract the tough, stringy fibers, then let the white starchy pulp settle in the bottom of the bowl while she looked through her supplies to see what else she had.

  When the starch had settled and the liquid was almost clear, she carefully poured off most of it and added dried blue elderberries. While she waited for them to plump up and absorb more of the water, she stripped away the outer bark of a birch tree, scraped off some of the soft, sweet, edible cambium layer underneath, and added it to her root-starch-and-berry mixture. She gathered cones of the stone pines, and when she put them on the fire, she was pleased to see that several of them still had large, hard-shelled pine nuts in them that the heat had helped to crack.

  When the hare was cooked, she broke off some of the blackened skin and rubbed the inside on a few stones she had put in the fire, to spread some fat on them. Then she took small handfuls of the doughy root starch, mixed with the berries, the sweet, flavorful licorice-fern root stalk, and the sweetening and thickening sap from the birch cambium, and dropped them on the hot rocks.

  Jondalar had been watching her. She could still surprise him with her extensive knowledge of growing things. Most people, particularly women, knew where to find edible plants, but he had never met anyone who knew so much. When she had several of the doughy, unleavened biscuits cooked, he took a bite out of one.

  "This is delicious!" he said. "You really are amazing, Ayla. Not very many people can find growing food to eat in the cold of winter."

  "It's not the cold of winter, yet, Jondalar, and not so hard to find things to eat now. Wait until the ground is frozen solid," Ayla said, then took the hare off the spit, peeled back the crispy charcoaled skin, and put the meat on the mammoth-ivory platter, from which they both would eat.

  "I think you could find something to eat even then," Jondalar said.

  "But maybe not plants," she said, offering him a tender leg of hare.

  When they finished the hare and the cattail-root biscuits, Ayla gave the leftovers to Wolf, including the bones. She started their herb tea steeping, adding some birch cambium for the wintergreen flavor, then took the pine cones out of the edge of the fire. They sat by the fire for a while, sipping their tea and eating pine nuts, cracked with rocks or sometimes with their teeth. After their meal, they made preparations for an early start, checked to make sure the horses were all right, then settled into their warm furs for the night.

  Ayla looked down the corridor of a long, winding cave, and the line of fires that were showing the way cast light upon beautiful draped and flowing formations. She saw one that resembled the long flowing tail of a horse. As she approached, the dun-yellow animal nickered and swished its dark tail, seeming to beckon her closer. She started to follow, but the rocky cave grew dark, and the stalagmites crowded in.

  She looked down to see where she was going, and when she looked up, it wasn't a horse that was beckoning, after all. It seemed to be a man. She strained to see who it was, and was startled to see Creb stepping out of the shadows. He motioned her on, urging her to hurry and come with him; then he turned and limped away.

  She started to follow him, then heard a horse whinny. When she turned around to look for the yellow mare, the dark tail disappeared into a herd of dark-tailed horses. She ran after them, but they turned into flowing stone and then into a jumble of stone columns. When she looked back, Creb was disappearing down a dark tunnel.

  She ran after him, trying to catch up with him, until she came to a fork, but she didn't know which branch Creb had taken. She was in a panic, looking at one and then the other. Finally she started up the right fork, and she found a man standing in the middle of it, blocking her way.

  It was Jeren! He was filling the entire passage, standing with his legs apart and his arms crossed in front of him, shaking his head no. She pleaded with him to let her get by, but he didn't understand. Then, with a short, carved staff, he pointed toward the wall behind her.

  When she turned to look, she saw a dark yellow horse running and a yellow-haired man running after. Suddenly the herd surrounded the man, hid him from sight. Her stomach churned into a knot of fear. As she ran to him, she heard horses whinnying, and Creb was at the mouth of the cave, beckoning with great urgency, telling her to hurry, before it was too late. Suddenly the pounding hooves of horses were louder. She heard whinnying, neighing, and, with a sinking feeling of horror and panic, the sound of a horse screaming.

  Ayla bolted awake. Jondalar was up, too. There was a commotion outside the tent, horses neighing and hooves stamping. They heard Wolf snarling, then a yelp of pain. They threw back their covers and rushed out of the tent.

  It was very dark, with only a sliver of a moon, which shed little light, but there were more horses in the pine woods than the two they had left there. They could tell from the sounds, though they couldn't see anything. As she ran toward the sounds of horses, Ayla tripped on an exposed root and fell heavily to the ground, knocking the wind out of her.

  "Ayla! Are you all right?" Jondalar said, searching for her in the dark. He'd only heard her fall.

  "Here I am," she said, her voice hoarse, trying to catch her breath. She felt his hands on her, and she tried to get up. When they heard the sounds of horses racing off into the night, she pulled herself up and they ran toward the place where the horses were tied. Whinney was gone!

  "She's gone," Ayla cried. She whistled and called her name. There was an answering whinny in the distance.

  "That's her! That's Whinney! Those horses, they've taken her. I have to get her back!" The woman started after the horses, stumbling through the woods in the dark.

  Jondalar caught up to her in a few strides. "Ayla, wait! We can't go now, it's dark. You can't even see where you're going."

  "But I have to get her back, Jondalar!"

  "We will. In the morning," he said, taking her in his arms.

  "They'll be gone by then," the woman wailed.

  "But it'll be light then, and we'll see their tracks. We'll follow them. We'll get her back, Ayla. I promise, we'll get her back."

  "Oh, Jondalar. What will I do without Whinney? She's my friend. For a long time, she was my only friend," Ayla said, giving in to the logic of his argument, but breaking down into tears.

  The man held her and let her cry for a moment, then said, "Right now, we need to see if Racer is gone, too, and find Wolf."

  Ayla suddenly remembered hearing the wolf yelp in pain, and she grew concerned for him and for the young stallion. She whistled once for Wolf, and then she made the sound she used to call the horses.

  They heard a whinny first, and then a whine. Jondalar went to find Racer, while Ayla followed the sound of the wolf in pain until she found him. She reached down to comfort the animal and felt something wet and sticky.

  "Wolf! You're hurt." She tried to pick him up to carry him to the fireplace, where she could restart the fire and see. He yelped in pain as she staggered under his weight. Then he struggled out of her arms, but stayed up on his own legs, and though she knew it cost him some effort, he walked back to their camp on his own.

  Jondalar also returned to the camp, leading Racer, while Ayla was stirring up the fire. "H
is rope held," the man announced. He had gotten into the habit of using sturdy ropes to hold the stallion, who had always been a little harder for him to handle than Whinney was for Ayla.

  "I'm so glad he's safe," the woman said, hugging the stallion's neck, then stepping back to look him over more closely, just to make sure. "Why didn't I use a stronger rope, Jondalar?" Ayla said, angry with herself. "If I had been more careful, Whinney wouldn't have gotten away." Her relationship with the mare was closer. Whinney was a friend, who did what she wanted because the horse wanted to, and Ayla only used a light tether to keep the horse from wandering too far afield. It had always been enough.

  "It wasn't your fault, Ayla. The herd wasn't after Racer. They wanted a mare, not a stallion. Whinney wouldn't have gone if the horses hadn't made her go."

  "But I knew those horses were out there, and I should have realized they might come for Whinney. Now she's gone, and even Wolf is hurt."

  "Is it very bad?" Jondalar asked.

  "I don't know," Ayla said. "It hurts him too much when I touch him to be certain, but I think his rib is either badly bruised or broken. He must have gotten kicked. I'll give him something for pain, and I'll try to find out for sure in the morning ... before we look for Whinney." Suddenly she reached out for the man. "Oh, Jondalar, what if we don't find her? What if I've lost her forever?" she cried.

  25

  "Look, Ayla," Jondalar said, bending down on one knee to examine the ground that was covered with the imprint of horse hooves. "The whole herd must have been here last night. The trail is clear. I told you it would be easy to track them once it got light."

  Ayla looked down at the tracks, then up toward the northeast in the direction they seemed to be heading. They were near the edge of the small woods, and she could see far into the distance across the open grassy plain, but as hard as she tried, she could not see a single horse. She found herself thinking, The tracks are plain enough here, but who knows how long we will be able to follow them?

  The young woman had not slept at all after she had been awakened by the commotion and discovered that her beloved friend was gone. The moment the sky lightened, shading from ebony to indigo, she was up, though it was still too dark to see any distinctive features on the land. She had stirred up the fire and started water boiling for tea while the heavens transformed, shifting through a monochromatic spectrum of gradually paler shades of blue.

  Wolf had crept near her while she was staring into the flames, but he had to whine to get her attention. She had taken the opportunity to examine him closely. Though he had winced when she prodded deeply, she was grateful to find no broken bones. A bruise was bad enough. Jondalar had gotten up soon after the morning tea was ready, still well before it was light enough to search for signs.

  "Let's hurry and leave right away, so they don't get too far ahead of us," Ayla said. "We can pile everything into the bowl boat and ... no ... we can't do that." She suddenly realized that, without the mare she wanted to find, they couldn't just pack up and go. "Racer doesn't know how to pull the pole drag, so we can't take it or the bowl boat. We can't even take Whinney's pack-saddle basket."

  "And if we're going to have any chance to catch up with that herd, we'll have to ride double on Racer. That means we can't even take his pack-saddle. We'll have to cut our load down to bare necessities," Jondalar said.

  They stopped to digest the new situation the loss of Whinney had put them in. Both of them realized there were some hard decisions to make.

  "If we take just the sleeping rolls and the ground cover, which could be used as a low tent, and roll them up together, that should fit on Racer's back behind us," Jondalar suggested.

  "A low tent should be enough," Ayla agreed. "That's all we ever took when we went with the hunters of our clan. We used a stick to prop up the front, and rocks or heavy bones that we found to weigh it down around the edges." She began to remember the times that she and several women accompanied the men when they went hunting. "The women had to carry everything except the hunting spears, and we had to move fast to keep up, so we traveled light."

  "What else did you take? How light do you think we can travel?" Jondalar asked, his curiosity piqued.

  "We'll need the fire-making kit and some tools. A chopper to cut wood to burn, and to break up the bones of any animals we might need to butcher. We can burn dried dung and grass, too, but we should have something to cut the stems. A knife to skin animals, and a sharp one to cut meat," she began. Ayla was remembering not only the times that she accompanied the hunters, but the time she traveled alone after she left the clan.

  "I'll wear my belt with the loops for holding my axe, and my ivory-handled knife," Jondalar said. "You should wear yours, too."

  "A digging stick is always a help, and it can be used to prop up the tent. Some extra warm clothes in case it turns really cold and extra foot-coverings," the woman continued.

  "An extra pair of boot liners. That's a good idea. Under tunics and pants, fur mitts, and we can always wrap our sleeping furs around us, if we have to."

  "A waterbag or two..."

  "We can tie those to our belts, too, and with enough cord to make a loop to go over the arm, we can wear them close to the body if it gets too cold, so they won't freeze."

  "I'll need my medicine bag, and maybe I should take the sewing kit —it doesn't take much room—and my sling."

  "Don't forget the spear-throwers and spears," Jondalar added. "Do you think I should take any flint-knapping tools, or flint blanks, in case a knife or something breaks?"

  "Whatever we take, it should be no more than I can carry on my back ... or could if I had a carrying basket."

  "If anyone carries anything on his back, I think it should be me," Jondalar said, "hut I don't have my backframe."

  "I'm sure we can make a back-carrier of some kind, probably out of one of the pack-saddles and some rope or thong, but how can I sit behind you if you're wearing it?" Ayla asked.

  "But I'm going to sit behind..." They looked at each other and smiled. They even had to decide how to ride, and both of them had made their own assumptions. It was the first time Ayla had smiled all morning, Jondalar noticed.

  "You have to guide Racer, so I have to be in back," Ayla said.

  "I can guide him with you in front of me," the man said, "but if you are behind you won't be able to see anything but my back. I don't think you'd be happy if you couldn't see ahead, and we both need to be watching the trail. It may be harder to follow over hard ground or where there are other tracks to confuse it, and you are a good tracker."

  Ayla's smile widened. "You're right, Jondalar. I don't know if I could stand it if I couldn't see ahead." She understood that he had been worrying about following the trail left by the horses, just as she had, and had even considered her feelings. Tears suddenly filled her eyes with the love she felt overflowing inside her, and then the tears overflowed to match.

  "Don't cry, Ayla. We'll find Whinney."

  "I wasn't crying about Whinney. I was thinking how much I love you, and the tears just came out."

  "I love you, too," he said, reaching for her, feeling a constriction in his own throat.

  Suddenly, she was in his arms, sobbing on his shoulder, and the tears that came were for Whinney as well. "Jondalar, we've got to find her."

  "We will. We'll just keep looking until we do. Now, how about fixing up a backpack for me. Something that can hold the spear-throwers and some spears on the outside, where they will be easy to reach."

  "That shouldn't be too hard. We'll have to take dried traveling food, of course," Ayla said, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.

  "How much do you think we'll need?" he asked.

  "It depends. How long will we be gone?" she asked.

  The question stopped them both. How long would they be gone? How long would it take them to find Whinney and get her back?

  "It probably won't take more than a few days to track the herd and find her, but perhaps we should take enough f
or half a moon cycle," Jondalar said.

  Ayla paused, thinking of the counting words. "That's more than ten days, maybe as much as three hands, fifteen days. Do you think it will take that long?"

  "No, I don't think so, but it's best to be prepared," Jondalar said.

  "We can't leave this camp alone for that long," Ayla said. "Some kind of animal will come and tear it apart, wolves or hyenas or wolverines or bears ... no, bears are sleeping, but something. They'll chew up the tent, the bowl boat, anything leather, and the extra food. What will we do with everything we have to leave behind?"

  "Maybe Wolf could stay behind and watch the camp?" Jondalar said, wrinkling his forehead. "Wouldn't he stay if you told him to? He's hurt, anyway. Wouldn't it be better for him not to travel?"

  "Yes, it would be better for him, but he won't stay. He would for a while, but he'd come looking for us if we didn't get back within a day or so."

  "Maybe we could tie him close to the camp..."

  "No! He would hate that, Jondalar!" Ayla exclaimed. "You wouldn't like to be made to stay someplace that you didn't want to be! Besides, if wolves or something did come, they could attack him and he wouldn't be able to fight, or run out of their way. We'll just have to think of some other way to protect our things."

  They walked back to their camp in silence, Jondalar a little chagrined and Ayla worried, but both of them still trying to resolve the problem of what to do with their gear while they were gone. As they approached the tent, Ayla remembered something.

  "I have an idea," she said. "Maybe we could put everything in the tent and close it up. I still have some of that wolf repellent I made to keep Wolf from chewing on things. I could soften it up and spread it on the tent. That might keep some animals away."