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The Journeyers turned west along the high ridge, following the outside bend of the river. The elevation continued to increase on the north side of the river until they were looking down from a high point above the little southward lobe. The drop-off toward the west was quite steep, and they headed north down a slightly more gradual slope through scattered brush. At the bottom, a tributary that curled around the base of the lofty prominence from the northeast cut a deep gorge. They traced it upstream until they found a crossing. It was only hilly on the other side, and they rode beside the feeder until they reached the Great Mother again, then continued west.
In the broad central plain there had been only a few tributaries, but they were now in an area where many rivers and streams fed the Mother from the north. They came upon another large tributary later in the day and their legs got wet in the crossing. It was not like crossing rivers in the warm summertime, when it didn't matter if they got a little wet. The temperature was dipping down to freezing at night. They were chilled by the icy cold water, and they decided to camp on the far bank to get warm and dry.
They continued due west. After passing through the hilly terrain, they reached the lowland again, a marshy grassland, but not like the wetlands downstream. These were on acid soils, and more swampy than marshy, with moors of sphagnum mosses that in places were compacting into peat. They discovered the peat would burn when they made camp one day and inadvertently built a fire on top of a dry patch of it. The following day they collected some on purpose for their next fires.
When they came to a large, fast tributary that fa
The last fork was deep, and there was no way to cross it without getting wet, but on the other side they disturbed a megaceros with an enormous rack of palmate antlers and decided to go after him. The giant deer, with his long legs, easily outdistanced the stocky horses, although Racer and Wolf gave him a good run. Whi
Jondalar, red-faced and windblown, his fur hood thrown back, was smiling when he came back. Ayla felt an unexplainable pang of love and longing as he rode up. He had let his pale yellow beard grow, as he usually did in winter, to help keep his face warm, and she always did like him with a beard. He liked to call her beautiful, but in her mind, he was beautiful.
"That animal can sure run!" he said. "And did you see that magnificent rack? One of his antlers must be twice as big as I am!"
Ayla was smiling, too. "He was magnificent, and beautiful, but I'm glad we didn't get him. He was too big for us, anyway. We couldn't take all that meat, and it would have been a shame to kill him when we didn't need it."
They rode back to the Mother, and even though their clothes had dried on them somewhat, they were glad to make camp and change. They made a point of hanging their damp clothing near the fire so it could dry further.
The next day they started out heading west; then the river veered toward the northwest. Some distance beyond, they could see another high ridge. The high prominence that reached all the way to the Great Mother River was the farthest northwest finger, the last they would see, of the great chain of mountains that had been with them almost from the begi
No tributaries joined the long river until they were almost up to the ridge, and Ayla and Jondalar realized they must have been between cha
They crossed another large tributary just on the other side of the ridge, a river whose great valley marked the separation between the two groups of mountain ranges. The high hills to the west were the farthest eastern foreland of the enormous western chain. As the ridge fell behind them, the Great Mother River separated again into three cha
In the times when the central basin had been a great sea, this wide river valley of grassy steppes, along with the swampy bogs and moors of the riverside wetlands and the grasslands to the north of them, were all inlets to that ancient inland body of water. The i
The bony fingers and leafless limbs of a few birch trees near the river rattled in the rapacious wind from the north. Dry brushwood, reeds, and dead ferns lined the banks, where crusts of ice were forming that would thicken and build up jagged levees; the begi
The weather had definitely turned cold, but snow flurries were not a problem. The horses, the wolf, and even the people were accustomed to the northern loess steppes with its dry cold and light winter snows. Only in heavy snow, that could bog down and tire the horses, and make feed harder to find, would Ayla begin to worry. She had another worry at the moment. She had seen horses in the distance, and Whi
When he happened to look back, Jondalar thought he saw smoke coming from the high hill across the river from the last ridge they had edged around earlier. He wondered if there were people nearby, but he did not see smoke again though he turned around to check several times.
Toward evening, they followed a small feeder upstream through an open woodland of bare-branched willows and birch, to a stand of stone pines. Frosty nights had given a still pond nearby a transparent layer of ice on top, and had frozen the edges of the little creek, but it still ran freely in the center, and they set up camp beside it. A dry snow blew down and dusted the north-facing slopes with white.
Whi