The Valley of Horses Read online

  “Creb, if you’re watching me from the spirit world, don’t be angry,” she said with the silent sign language. “You must know why I need to do it.”

  She found a long smooth stick and made a notch in it with her flint knife. Then she thought a while and added two more. She fit her first three fingers over the notches and held them up. I think it’s been more days than that, but I’m sure of that many. I’ll mark it again tonight, and every night. She studied the stick again. I think I’ll put a little extra nick above this one, to mark the day I started bleeding.

  The moon went through half its phases after she made the spears, but she still didn’t know how she was going to hunt the large animal she needed. She was sitting at the opening of her cave looking at the wall across and the night sky. The summer was waxing into full heat and she was savoring the cool evening breeze. She had just completed a new summer outfit. Her full wrap was often too hot to wear, and although she went naked near the cave, she needed the pouches and folds of a wrap to hold things when she went very far from it. After she had become a woman, she liked to wear a leather band wrapped tightly around her full breasts when she went hunting. It was more comfortable to run and jump. And in the valley she didn’t have to put up with surreptitious glances from people who thought she was odd for wearing it.

  She didn’t have a large hide to cut down, but she finally devised a way to wear rabbit skins, dehaired, as a summer wrap that left her bare from the waist up, and she used other skins as a breast band. She planned to make a trip to the steppes in the morning, with her new spears and hopes of finding animals to hunt.

  The gradual slope of the northern side of the valley gave easy access to the steppes east of the river; the sheer wall made the western plains too difficult to reach. She saw several herds of deer, bison, horses, even a small band of saiga antelopes, but she brought back nothing more than a brace of ptarmigan and a great jerboa. She just couldn’t get close enough to jab anything with her spears.

  As the days passed, hunting a large animal was a constant preoccupation. She had often watched the men of the clan talk about hunting—they talked about almost nothing else—but they always hunted cooperatively. Their favorite technique, like that of a pack of wolves, was to cut an animal out of a herd and run it down in relays, until it was so exhausted, they could get close enough to make the fatal thrust. But Ayla was alone.

  They had talked sometimes of the way the cats lay in wait to pounce, or made a furious dash to bring down prey with fangs and claws. But Ayla had neither fangs nor claws, nor the short-run speed of a cat. She wasn’t even very comfortable handling her spears; they were rather large to grasp and long. Yet, she had to find a way.

  It was the night of the new moon when she finally got an idea she thought might work. She often thought of the Clan Gathering when the moon turned its back on the earth and bathed the far reaches of space with its reflected light. The Cave Bear Festival was always held when the moon was new.

  She was thinking about the hunt reenactments made by the different clans. Broud had led the exciting hunt dance for their clan, and the vivid re-creation of chasing a mammoth into a blind canyon with fire had won the day. But the host clan’s portrayal of digging a pit trap on the path a woolly rhinoceros usually took to water, and then surrounding it and chasing him into it, had brought them in a close second in that competition. Woolly rhinos were notoriously unpredictable, and dangerous.

  The next morning, Ayla looked to see if the horses were there, but she didn’t greet them. She could identify each member of the herd individually. They were company, almost friends, but there was no other way, not if she was going to survive.

  She spent the greater part of the next several days observing the herd, studying their movements: where they normally watered, where they liked to graze, where they spent the nights. As she watched, a plan began to take shape in her mind. She worried over details, tried to think of every contingency, and finally set to work.

  It took a full day to chop down small trees and brush and drag them halfway across the field, piling them up near a break in the trees along the stream. She gathered pitchy barks and limbs of fir and pine, dug through rotted old stumps for residual hard lumps that caught fire quickly, and pulled up bunches of dry grass. In the evening, she bound the lumps and pieces of pitch to branches with grass to make torches that would start quickly and burn smoky.

  The morning of the day she planned to start, she got out her hide tent and the aurochs horn. Then she scrounged through the pile at the foot of the wall for a flat sturdy bone and scraped one side until it tapered to a sharp edge. Then, with hopes she would need them, she got out every cord and thong she cound find, and pulled lianas down from the trees and piled them on the rocky beach. She hauled loads of driftwood and deadfall to the beach, too, so she’d have enough for fires.

  By early evening, everything was ready, and Ayla paced back and forth along the beach as far as the jutting wall, checking on the herd’s movements. Anxiously, she watched a few clouds building up in the east and hoped they would not move in and obscure the moonlight she was counting on. She cooked herself some grain and picked a few berries, but couldn’t eat much. She kept picking up her spears to make practice lunges and putting them down.

  At the last moment, she dug through the pile of driftwood and bones until she found the long humerus from the foreleg of a deer with its knobby end. She smashed it against a large piece of mammoth ivory and winced at the recoil through her arm. The long bone was undamaged; it was a good solid club.

  The moon rose before the sun set. Ayla wished she knew more about hunting ceremonies, but women had always been excluded. Women brought bad luck.

  I never brought bad luck to myself, she thought, but I’ve never tried to hunt a big animal before. I wish I knew something that would bring good luck. Her hand went to her amulet, and she thought of her totem. It was her Cave Lion, after all, that had led her to hunt in the first place. That’s what Creb said. What other reason could there be for a woman to become more skilled with her chosen weapon than any man? Her totem was too strong for a woman—it gave her masculine traits, Brun had thought. Ayla hoped her totem would bring her luck again.

  Twilight was fading into darkness when Ayla walked to the bend in the river and saw the horses finally settling down for the night. She gathered up the flat bone and the tent hide, and ran through the tall grass until she came to the break in the trees where the horses watered in the morning. The green foliage was gray in the waning daylight, and the more distant trees were black silhouettes against a sky ablaze with color. Hoping the moon would shed enough light to see, she laid the tent on the ground and began to dig.

  The surface was hard-packed, but, once she broke through it, digging was easier with the sharpened bone shovel. When a pile of soil was mounded on the hide, she dragged it into the woods to dump it. As the hole became deeper, she laid the hide out on the bottom of the pit and hauled the dirt up with it. She felt her way more than seeing, and it was hard work. She had never dug a pit by herself before. The large cooking pits, lined with rocks and used to roast whole rumps, had always been a community effort by all the women, and this pit had to be deeper and longer.

  The hole was about waist high when she felt water and realized she should not have dug so close to the stream. The bottom filled quickly. She was ankle deep in mud before she gave up and climbed out, breaking down one edge as she lifted out the hide.

  I hope it’s deep enough, she thought. It will have to be—the more I dig, the more water comes in. She glanced at the moon, surprised at how late it was. She was going to have to work fast to finish, and she wasn’t going to get the short rest she had planned.

  She ran toward the place where the brush and trees were piled, and tripped on an unseen root, falling heavily. This is no time to be careless! she thought, rubbing her shin. Her knees and palms stung, and she was sure the slippery ooze down one leg was blood, though she couldn’t see it.

  Wi
th sudden insight, she understood how vulnerable she was, and had a moment of panic. What if I break my leg? There’s no one here to help me—if anything happens. What am I doing out here at night? With no fire? What if an animal attacks? She vividly recalled a lynx that leaped at her once, and reached for her sling, imagining glowing eyes in the night.

  She found the weapon still securely tucked into her waist thong. It brought reassurance. I’m dead anyway, or supposed to be. If something is going to happen, it will happen. I can’t worry now. If I don’t hurry, it will be morning before I’m ready.

  She found her brush pile and began to drag the small trees toward the pit. She couldn’t surround the horses by herself, she had reasoned, and there were no blind canyons in the valley, but, with an intuitive leap, she got an idea. It was the stroke of genius to which her brain—the brain that had differentiated her from the Clan far more than had physical appearance—was especially suited. If there were no canyons in the valley, she thought, perhaps she could make one.

  It didn’t matter that the idea had been thought of before. It was new to her. She didn’t think of it as a great invention. It seemed only a minor adaptation to the way Clan men hunted; only a minor adaptation that might, just might, enable a lone woman to kill an animal that no man of the Clan would dream of hunting alone. It was a great invention, born of necessity.

  Ayla watched the sky anxiously as she wove branches, constructing a barrier angling out from both sides of the pit. She filled in the gaps and made it higher with brush as the stars winked out in the eastern sky. The earliest birds had started their warbling greeting and the sky was lightening when she stood back and looked over her handiwork.

  The pit was roughly rectangular, somewhat longer than it was wide, and muddy around the edges where the last wet loads had been hauled out. Loose piles of dirt, spilled from the hide, were strewn on the trampled grass within the triangular area defined by the two walls of brush corning together at the muddy hole. Through a gap where the pit separated the two fences, the river could be seen, reflecting the glowing eastern sky. On the other side of the rippling water, the steep southern wall of the valley loomed darkly; only near the top were its contours distinguishable.

  Ayla turned around to check the position of the horses. The other side of the valley had a more gradual slope, growing steeper toward the west as it rose to form the jutting wall in front of her cave, and leveling out to rolling grassy hills far down the valley on the east. It was still dark there, but she could see the horses beginning to move.

  She grabbed the hide and the flat bone shovel and raced back to the beach. The fire was down. She added wood, then fished out a hot coal with a stick and put it in the aurochs horn, grabbed the torches, the spears, and the club, and ran back to the pit. She laid a spear down on either side of the hole, the club beside one, then loped around in a wide circle to get behind the horses before they began to move.

  And then, she waited.

  The waiting was harder than the long night of working. She was keyed up, anxious, wondering if her plan would work. She checked her coal, and waited; looked over the torches, and waited. She thought of countless things she hadn’t thought of before, that she should have done, or done differently, and waited. She wondered when the horses were going to begin their meandering move toward the stream, thought about prodding them on, thought better of it, and she waited.

  The horses began to mill around. Ayla thought they seemed more nervous than usual, but she had never been this close to them, and she wasn’t sure. Finally, the lead mare started toward the river and the rest followed behind, stopping to graze along the way. They definitely became nervous as they drew nearer the river and picked up Ayla’s scent and the smell of disturbed earth. When the lead mare appeared to be veering off, Ayla decided it was time.

  She lit a torch with the coal, then a second from the first. When they were burning well, she started after the herd, leaving the aurochs horn behind. She ran, whooping and hollering and waving the torches, but she was too far from the herd. The smell of smoke brought an instinctive fear of prairie fires. The horses picked up speed and quickly outdistanced her. They were heading toward their watering place and the brush fence, but, sensing danger, some made a break toward the east. Ayla angled in the same direction, running as fast as she could, hoping to head them off. As she drew closer, she saw more of the herd swerving to avoid the trap, and she ran into their midst yelling. They dodged around her. Ears laid back, nostrils flaring, they passed her by on either side, screaming in fear and confusion. Ayla was getting panicky, as well, afraid they were all going to get away.

  She was near the eastern end of the brush barrier when she saw the dun mare coming toward her. She screamed at the horse, held her torches wide, and ran straight for what seemed a sure head-on collision. At the last moment, the mare dodged, the wrong way—for her. She found her escape blocked and galloped along the inside of the fence, trying to find a way out. Ayla pounded behind her, panting for breath, feeling her lungs were about to burst.

  The mare saw the gap with its beckoning glimpse of the river and headed for it. Then she saw the open pit—too late. She gathered her legs under her to leap over the hole, but her hooves slipped on the muddy edge. She crashed into the pit with a broken leg.

  Ayla dashed up, breathing hard; she picked up a spear and stood looking at the wild-eyed mare that was screaming, tossing her head, and floundering in the mud. Ayla grasped the shaft with both hands, braced her legs, and plunged the point toward the pit. Then she realized that she had driven the spear into a flank, wounding the horse, but not mortally. She raced around to the other side, slipping on the mud and nearly falling in the hole herself.

  Ayla picked up the other spear and this time took more careful aim. The mare was neighing in confusion and pain, and, as the point of the second spear bored into her neck, she lurched forward in a last valiant effort. Then she sank back with a whinny that was more like a whimper, with two wounds and a broken leg. A hard blow with the club finally ended her pain.

  Realization came slowly to Ayla; she was too dazed to comprehend her achievement yet. At the edge of the pit, leaning heavily on the club she still held and gasping for breath, she stared at the fallen mare in the bottom of the hole. The shaggy grayish coat was streaked with blood and covered with mud, but the animal did not move.

  Then, slowly, it filled her. An urge, like none she had ever known, rose out of her depths, grew in her throat, and burst from her mouth in a primal scream of victory. She did it!

  At that moment, in a lonely valley in the middle of a vast continent, somewhere near the undefined boundary of the desolate northern loess steppes and the wetter continental steppes to the south, a young woman stood with a bone club in her hand—and felt powerful. She could survive. She would survive.

  But her exultation was short-lived. As Ayla looked down at the horse, it suddenly occurred to her that she would never be able to drag the whole animal out of the pit; she would have to butcher it in the bottom of the muddy hole. And then she would have to get it back to the beach, quickly, with the whole skin in reasonably good condition, before too many other predators picked up the scent of blood. She would have to cut the meat into thin strips, salvage the other parts she wanted, keep the fires going, and keep watch while the meat dried.

  And she was already exhausted from the grueling night’s work and the anxious chase. But she wasn’t a man of the Clan who could relax, now that his exciting part was over, and leave the job of butchering and processing to the women. Ayla’s work had just begun. She heaved a great sigh, then jumped down into the pit to slit the mare’s throat.

  She ran back to the beach for the tent hide and the flint tools, and, on her return, she noticed that the herd at the far end of the valley was still moving. She forgot them as she struggled in the cramped space of the pit, covered with blood and mud, hacking out hunks of meat and trying not to damage the hide any worse than it was.

  Carrion birds were p
icking shreds of meat off discarded bones when she had piled up as much meat on the tent hide as she thought she could haul. She dragged it to the beach, added fuel to the fire, and dumped her load as close as she could. She ran back dragging the empty hide, but had her sling out and stones flying before she reached the pit. She heard the yip of a fox and saw it limp away. She would have killed one if she hadn’t run out of stones. She picked up more stones from the riverbed and took a drink before she started back to work.

  The stone was sure and fatal to the wolverine that had braved the heat of the fire and was trying to drag a large hunk of meat away when Ayla returned with a second load. She dragged her meat to the fire, then went back to get the glutton, hoping she’d have time to skin it, too. Wolverine fur was particularly useful for winter wear. She added more wood to the fire and eyed the driftwood pile.

  She wasn’t as lucky with the hyena when she returned to the pit. It managed to make off with a whole shank She hadn’t seen so many carnivores in the valley since she arrived. Foxes, hyenas, wolverines had all gotten a taste of her kill. Wolves, and their fiercer, doglike relatives, dholes, paced just beyond the range of her sling. Hawks and kites were braver, only flapping wings and backing off slightly as she approached. She expected to see a lynx, or a leopard, or even a cave lion anytime.

  By the time she hauled the filthy hide out of the hole, the sun had passed its zenith and was starting down, but not until she had dragged her last load to the beach did she give in to her fatigue and sink to the ground. She hadn’t slept all night; she hadn’t eaten all day; and she didn’t want to move. But the smallest of the creatures after their share of her kill finally made her get up again. The buzzing flies caused her to notice how filthy she was, and they bit. She forced herself up and walked into the stream without bothering to remove her clothes, gratefully letting the water wash over her.