CRO-MAGNON (28 page)

As with the other clan members, her utterances were brief, monotonic, and augmented by gestures. At the graphic pantomime for “hard birth,” Leya felt a shudder.

Wim glanced at the men by fire. “I be that way with Gar. He be too big.”

Leya surveyed the men, relaxing after a successful three-day hunt “topside” on the bush tundra. Gar was easy to pick out, as he was not only the youngest but also the huskiest of the six adult men. Leya wasn’t surprised that Wim had experienced trouble birthing him. She tried to picture Gar as a newborn, the image of a big head and bulky shoulders on the body of a
baban
bringing a smile—a rarity these days.

“
You know other Shortface women who birth mixed
tot
?” Wim said.

Tot
for
baban.
Leya tucked the word away.

“
I’ve heard of them.” Leya looked away. “ Sometimes they die.”

“
Ay.
Shortface get small hips. Wim help when time. But fear hard birth.”

Leya felt discouraged by the fairly complicated but clear statement. The richness of the vocabulary of simple words and complex gestures amazed her. Her tribe believed Flatheads could not communicate accurately. That was wrong she now saw, as were many of the People’s perceptions.

Why then did the people of the clan live the way they did—tying animal skins around their bodies, subsisting on grilled meat and raw cattail shoots, engaging dangerous animals at close quarters? Ranging out from a central camp, rather than following the game seasonally? Failing to use camp-following wolves to aid in the hunt? Not trapping fish?

Why was the clan’s way of life so primitive? She thought perhaps their ancestors, facing difficult conditions, had developed a one-day-at-a-time mindset that had carried forward. Plus, although she thought they were more intuitive than her own people, they did not seem to reason as well.

The following morning, Leya’s bone bruise felt healed enough for her to help the women forage. A cold front had moved in during the night and the air was raw enough for her to wear her new fur cloak despite its considerable weight. She tagged along as the women trekked up the ravine to the edge of the tundra, now lush with grasses, bushes and stunted trees.

She had been trying to teach them to utilize a broader range of edibles than cattails and the few other plants they favored. Season by season there were leaves, stalks, roots, seeds, and nuts to be had if one knew what to look for. Plus fruits and berries.

According to Wim, legend had it that in the past it had been colder, and only cattails were available. That certainly was not the case now, Leya thought. So why hadn’t the clan adapted?

She was stooped low, rummaging for mushrooms, when she heard the whimper. Pushing aside the drooping branches of a small willow, she saw something gray squirm against a carpet of sphagnum, damp with snowmelt.

She jumped back. They were pretty high here, but perhaps not too high for the lethal vipers that had already left their winter dens in the woods below. Or had something been snake-bit? And if so, was . . .

The thing whined again, and she saw a furry head move. She stepped forward, pushed aside a clump of sweet fern, and came upon a wolf pup. Its eyes bugged in a thin face and she could see its individual ribs. It was starving. Wolves were social creatures, and she wondered what calamity had befallen the pup’s
mator
and why the rest of the pack had not stepped in.

She knelt, made a cooing sound, and saw the pup tremble. Clearly, it had been abandoned. Leya was no stranger to wolves, as her tribe sometimes bred them as hunting companions, allowing them to live on the edges of the camp but never within. She could see that the pup was a day or two from death. She wondered if it had been weaned, and if not, whether it could take solid food. Reaching into her pocket, she withdrew a package of deer meat she had cooked, dried, and smoked.

No sooner had she set the food down than the pup gobbled it, wagged its scraggly tail, and looked up for more, it’s bowed neck accentuating the unusual yellow color of its tiny ruff. But the handful of meat constituted the whole of Leya’s lunch.

Sliding her hands under the bone-thin body, she could see the pup was male. It made no protest as she deposited it in the buckskin bag over her shoulder.

“
I’ll call you Fel,” she said, that being the People’s word for “foundling.”

As the clan did not seem to utilize wolves except as food, Leya wondered if she dared take the pup back to camp. But what else could she do? If she left it here it would surely starve, if a predator didn’t find it first.

Wim had stayed in camp that morning as she often did, so Leya consulted Kam. Although she had sensed some resentment in the leader’s mate, perhaps in response to the other women going to a newcomer for advice, the older woman assured her that Bor was interested in the Shortfaces’ reported taming of wolves and would accept the pup into the clan as long as Leya provided his food.

When they returned to camp, Leya saw Kam speak a few words to the leader, who glanced her way and nodded. She also saw Caw glaring at her. She grilled some deer meat, not knowing whether Fel was up to digesting it raw, and let him gorge until his shrunken belly was full.

When Fel finished eating and waddled off toward the brush, Caw stood up from the fire, a scowl on his big face, and started after the pup. Leya ran ahead of him. Caw brushed her aside and she ran to get in front again. This time Caw knocked her sprawling. Despair gripped her. If Caw was bent on . . .

Suddenly Gar was there, blocking the other man’s way. “Bor say wolf pup stay.”

Caw glared at the younger man. Even for a Flathead, Caw was broad-shouldered and muscular. But Gar, though slightly shorter, was even more so. Leya sensed that if Caw ever got the chance to kill Gar with impunity he would not hesitate, and she felt a strange fear.

“
No try get between me and woman,” Caw said, pressing forward.

Gar stood his ground, until the two men’s deep chests touched. To Leya, picking herself off the ground, they seemed like two bison—big, strong, indomitable.

“
If need be,” Gar said, “I do more than try.”

Caw held his ground long enough to preserve his honor. Then he glared at Leya, who had scrambled forward again. “We see how proud you be tonight, Shortface.” He spit at her feet, turned, and strode away.

“
Thank you, Gar,” Leya said as Fel toddled out of the bushes, sat at her feet, and nuzzled her leg with his cold nose.

Gar grunted, still watching Caw.

Leya glanced toward the fire and saw the other men watching. This was the second confrontation between Caw and Gar over her. She knew it did not bode well.

She looked at the broken-nosed young clansman. “I hope I haven’t gotten you in trouble.”

Gar took his gaze off the retreating Caw and turned to Leya, a smile lighting his ugly face. “No trouble.”

The smile became a frown.

“
But Caw right. You his woman now. Try not make angry,
ay?
”

#

Leya shifted her buttocks to ease the pain in her lower back, while Fel nestled against her fur cloak. Outside the cave, the wind trailed a many-colored ribbon of tiny birch leaves across an ashen sky. Even this early in the fall, the air was cold and damp because of the Big Ice to the north, and the clan had begun to hunker down for the winter.

“
Are you sure I’m only two-of-three through my pregnancy?” she asked Wim. In the months since her arrival, the old woman had become her confidante. Kam had grown aloof because of the other women’s increasing reliance on Leya’s advice, while Em and Jym seemed more companions than mentors.

“
You tell me,” Wim said. “You show me use tally stick count days. This morning you tell me five moons and most of other go by since first night with Caw.”

“
But I’m so big! Bigger than I should be at this stage.”

“
Ay.”
Wim glanced at Leya’s swollen belly. “Not good.”

“
I’m worried about the birth and I’m worried about the
tot
if I should survive,” Leya said, using the clan word for
baban.

Wim frowned. “Clan know you much use to us.”

That must be true, Leya thought. Throughout spring, summer, and early fall she had passed to the clan much of the accumulated knowledge of her people.

She had seen the hunters’ risky practice of running a large animal like an aurochs to near exhaustion, then moving in to thrust their spears and finally rushing even closer to club the stricken animal, and she marveled that the men did not sustain more injuries. She knew it was only a matter of time until the next man ran afoul of a kicking hoof or hooking horn. As long as they used their heavy flint-tipped spears, she knew, they would encounter this problem. Why the clan did not seem to view bone, ivory, and antler as companion materials to stone and wood, she could not fathom, for she could see they were not the dull brutes that her own people imagined.

One stormy day she’d shown them how to fashion slim javelins from ash saplings, to haft bone points with dried sinew and superheated birch pitch, and to fletch them with molted ptarmigan feathers in order to spear big game from a distance. And also how to make a spear-straightener from an antler, since the slim shafts sometimes bent during the prey’s death throes. But the idea did not catch on, and the hunters continued to rely on their thick-shafted spears. When she’d tried to expound on the merits of javelins, Gar, the clan’s most successful hunter, had lifted his heavy weapon with its leaf-shaped flint point.

“
Kill quick.”

“
That’s true,” Leya said, glancing around the campfire. “The stone point is sharper than bone. But it requires a thick shaft to haft it tightly and to withstand the shock of thrusting, and that prevents throwing from a distance.”

“
Stone point kill good,” Ull said as if Gar had not already raised the issue. “One thrust.” He demonstrated, his half-crippled arm shortening the jab.

“
Why do you have to kill with one thrust?” Leya said.

“
Quick kill safe.”

“
You should know better than anyone that that’s not true.” Despite her effort at gentle persuasion, her voice grew exasperated. “Look at the injuries you’ve taken—broken bones, twisted joints, bowed ribs.”

“
Hurt go with hunt,” Ull said.

“
Stone point easy to make,” Bor said.

Even the leader, the most experienced hunter, was focused on expediency, Leya thought. Everything had to be done right now in as few steps as possible. Perhaps their simplistic view of the world was due to the small groups they lived in. Maybe it resulted from their long occupancy of this cold land. And their isolation didn’t help. Probably each clan had its own language, with little or nothing in common with neighboring languages, and this made it difficult to exchange ideas across generations and distances, whereas the People’s tribes spoke dialects of the same language.

At other times, Leya had found opportunities to demonstrate her extensive knowledge of medicines gleaned from her tribe’s shaman, Sugn, and from her mother, Alys, in the days when she’d dreamed of becoming a shaman herself. When Nim complained of toothache, she wound a length of gut around the offending tooth and yanked it, then applied an astringent salve made from yarrow tops. When Em contracted a rash while gathering cattails, she steeped the leaves of sweet fern with pounded cattail roots to make a soothing poultice.

For the increasing stiffness in Bor’s right knee, she fashioned a reusable poultice of rabbit fur and applied a decoction of cedar twigs, nettle root, and needles of ground-pine, then showed the leader how to make a pain-killing tea from willow leaves and bark. And when one of the young children complained of stomach pain, she decocted a tea from twigs and bark of birch for the pain and from the leaves of the plantain weed for possible internal sores.

But most important, she thought, she convinced the clan to vary their meat-and-cattail diet. She got them to store rose hips in a pit for consumption throughout the winter to prevent bleeding gums. Why this should work she did not know, but Sugn had insisted it did. Further, she showed the men how to mix pounded rose hips and various berries with jerked meat and boiled marrow to make a nourishing and spoil-resistant trail food.

And of course, many of these techniques depended on what she considered one of her two crowning accomplishments—showing the clan how to line a pit with the inner bark of birch backed with rawhide, in order to boil water. Almost every part of an animal could then be used, together with vegetables, to make a nourishing stew. She was amazed that they knew how to make cups from birch bark but had not applied the technique to their cooking. Truly, the clan was stuck in the past.

The other big achievement had been convincing Bor to set aside the brain of an aurochs—though any other large brain would do—so she could teach the women how to brain-tan an animal hide. She also showed them how to make a frame to stretch the hide for scraping and how to smoke it more fully to render it waterproof, prevent shrinkage, and repel mosquitoes. As she explained, using her now fluent command of the clan’s tongue, the now-pliable hide could be used in concert with needle and sinew to make tailored clothing, and the warm garments would reduce the daily need for large amounts of food.