The Mammoth Hunters

Ayla and the child were gazing at each other, oblivious to everything around them. He's thin for one who is half-Clan, Ayla thought. They are usually big-boned and muscular. Even Durc wasn't this thin. He's sickly, Ayla's trained medicine woman's eye told her. A problem since birth, with the strong muscle in the chest that pulsed and throbbed and made the blood move, she guessed. But those facts she stored without thinking; she was looking more closely at his face, and his head, for the similarities, and the differences between this child and her son.

His large, brown, intelligent eyes were like Durc's, even to the look of ancient wisdom far beyond his years – she felt a pang of longing and a lump in her throat – but there was also pain and suffering, not all of it physical, which Durc had never known. She was filled with compassion. This child's brows were not as pronounced, she decided after careful study. Even at just three years old, when she left, the bony ridges above Durc's eyes had been well developed. Durc's eyes and protruding brow ridges were all Clan, but his forehead was like this child's. Neither was pushed back and flattened like the Clan, but high and vaulted, like hers.

Her thoughts strayed. Durc would be six years now, she recalled, old enough to go with the men when they practiced with their hunting weapons. But Brun will be teaching him to hunt, not Broud. She felt a flush of anger remembering Broud. She would never forget how the son of Brun's mate had nursed his hatred of her until he could take her baby away, out of spite, and force her out of the clan. She closed her eyes as the pain of remembering tore through her like a knife. She didn't want to believe that she would never see her son again.

She opened her eyes to Rydag, and took a deep breath.

I wonder how old this boy is? He's small, but he must be close to Durc's age, she thought, comparing the two again. Rydag's skin was fair, and his hair was dark and curly, but lighter and softer than the bushy brown hair more common to the Clan. The biggest difference between this child and her son, Ayla noted, was his chin and neck. Her son had a long neck like hers – he had choked on his food sometimes, which the other Clan babies never did – and a receding but distinct chin. This boy had the Clan's short neck, and forward-thrusting jaw. Then she remembered. Latie said he couldn't talk.

Suddenly, in a moment of understanding, she knew what this child's life must be like. It was one thing for a girl of five, who had lost her family in an earthquake and who had been found by a clan of people not capable of fully articulate speech, to learn the sign language they used to communicate. It was quite another to live with speaking people and not be able to talk. She remembered her early frustration because she had been unable to communicate with the people who took her in, but even worse, how difficult it had been to make Jondalar understand her before she learned to speak again. What if she had not been able to learn?

She made a sign to the boy, a simple greeting gesture, one of the first she had learned so long ago. There was a moment of excitement in his eyes, then he shook his head and looked puzzled. He had never learned the Clan way of speaking with gestures, she realized, but he must have retained some vestige of the Clan memories. He had recognized the signal for an instant, she was sure of it.

"Can Rydag touch the little horse?" Latie asked again.

"Yes," Ayla said, taking his hand. He is so slight, so frail, she thought, and then understood the rest. He could not run, like other children. He could not play normal rough-and-tumble games. He could only watch – and wish.

With a tenderness of feeling Jondalar had never seen on her face before, Ayla picked the boy up and put him on Whi

A large, motherly woman emerged from the strange dwelling, and seeing Rydag on the horse, which had kicked perilously close to her head, her first reaction was to rush to his aid. But as she neared, she became aware of the silent drama of the scene.

The child's face was filled with wonder and delight. How many times had he watched with wishful eyes, prevented by his weakness, or his difference, from doing what other children did? How many times had he wished he could do something to be admired or envied for? Now, for the first time, as he sat on the back of a horse, all the children of the Camp, and all the adults, were watching him with wishful eyes.

The woman from the dwelling saw and wondered, Had this stranger truly understood the boy so quickly? Accepted him so easily? She saw the way Ayla was looking at Rydag, and knew it was so.

Ayla saw the woman studying her, then smile at her. She smiled back and stopped beside her.

"You have made Rydag very happy," the woman said, holding out her arms to the youngster Ayla lifted off the horse.

"It is little," Ayla said.

The woman nodded. "My name is Nezzie," she said.

"I am named Ayla."

The two women looked at each other, considered each other carefully, not with hostility, but testing the ground for a future relationship.

Questions she wanted to ask about Rydag spun through Ayla's mind, but she hesitated, not sure if it was proper to ask. Was Nezzie the boy's mother? If so, how had she come to give birth to a child of mixed spirits? Ayla was puzzled again about a question that had bothered her since Durc was born. How did life begin? A woman only knew it was there when her body changed as the baby grew. How did it get inside a woman?

Creb and Iza had believed that a new life began when women swallowed the totem spirits of men. Jondalar thought the Great Earth Mother mixed the spirits of a man and a woman together and put them inside the woman when she became pregnant. But Ayla had formed her own opinion. When she noticed that her son had some of her characteristics, and some of the Clan's, she realized that no life started to grow inside her until after Broud forced his penetration into her.

She shuddered at the memory, but because it was so painful she couldn't forget it, and she had come to believe it was something about a man putting his organ inside the place where babies were born from that caused life to start inside a woman. Jondalar thought it was a strange idea when she told him, and tried to convince her it was the Mother who created life. She didn't quite believe him, now she wondered. Ayla had grown up with the Clan, she was one of them, for all that she looked different. Though she had hated it when he did it, Broud was only exercising his rights. But how could a man of the Clan have forced Nezzie?

Her thoughts were interrupted by the commotion of another small hunting band arriving. As one man approached, he pulled back his hood, and both Ayla and Jondalar gaped with surprise. The man was brown! The color of his skin was a rich deep brown. He was nearly the color of Racer, which was rare enough for a horse. Neither of them had ever seen a person with brown skin before.

His hair was black, tight wiry curls that formed a woolly cap like the fur of a black mouflon. His eyes were black, too, and they sparkled with delight as he smiled, showing gleaming white teeth and a pink tongue in contrast to his dark skin. He knew the stir he created when strangers first saw him, and rather enjoyed it.

He was a perfectly ordinary man in other respects, medium height, hardly more than an inch or so taller than Ayla, and medium build. But a compact vitality, an economy of movement, and an easy self-confidence created an impression of someone who knew what he wanted and wouldn't waste any time going after it. His eyes took on an added gleam when he saw Ayla.