The Lion Camp rejoiced to see the plains teeming with life again, and remarked upon each species as it appeared, especially the animals who thrived in deep cold. Those were the ones who most helped them to survive. A sighting of the enormous, unpredictable rhinos, with two horns, the front one long and low-slung, and two coats of reddish fur, a soft downy underwool and an outer layer of long guard hair, always brought exclamations of wonder.
Nothing, however, created such sheer excitement among the Mamutoi as the sight of mammoths. When the usual time for them to pass by drew near, someone from the Lion Camp was always on the lookout. Except from a distance, Ayla hadn't seen a mammoth since she lived with the Clan, and she was as excited as anyone when Danug came running down the slope one afternoon shouting, "Mammoths! Mammoths!"
She was among the first to rush out of the lodge to see them. Talut, who often carried Rydag perched up on his shoulders, had been on the steppes with Danug, and she noticed Nezzie, with the boy on her hip, was straggling behind. She started back to help, then saw Jondalar take him from the woman and hoist him up to his shoulders. He received warm smiles from both. Ayla smiled, too, though he didn't see her. The expression was still on her face when she turned to Ranec who had jogged to catch up with her. Her tender, beautiful smile evoked in him an intense feeling of warmth and a fierce wish that she was already his. She couldn't help but respond to the love in his dark, flashing eyes and the compelling grin. Her smile remained for him.
On the steppes, the Lion Camp watched the huge shaggy creatures with silent awe. They were the largest animals in their land – indeed, they would have been in almost any land. The herd, with several young in it, was passing close by, and the old matriarch eyed the people warily. She stood about ten feet high at the shoulders, and had a high domed head and a hump on the withers, used to store additional fat for winter. A short back that sloped down steeply to the pelvis completed the characteristic and immediately recognizable profile. Her skull was large in proportion to her size, more than half the length of her relatively short trunk, from the end of which two sensitive, mobile, finger projections extended, an upper and a lower one. Her tail was short, also, and her ears were small, to conserve heat.
Mammoths were eminently suited to their frigid domain. Their skin was very thick, insulated by three inches or more of subcutaneous fat, and closely covered with a soft, dense undercoat, about an inch long. The coarse long outer hair, up to twenty inches in length, was a dark reddish-brown, and hung in neat layers over the thick winter downy wool, as a warm, moisture-shedding cover and windbreak. With efficient rasplike grinders, they consumed a winter diet of coarse dry grass, plus twigs and bark of birches, willows, and larches with as much ease as they did their summer diet of green grasses, sedges, and herbs.
Most impressive of all, the mammoths' immense tusks inspired amazement and awe. Originating close together out of the lower jaw, they first pointed steeply downward, then curved strongly outward, upward, and finally inward. In old males, a tusk could reach sixteen feet in length, but by then, they were crossed over in front. In young animals the tusks were effective weapons and built-in tools for uprooting trees and clearing snow from pasture and feed, but when the two points curved up and overlapped, they got in the way, and were more hindrance than help.
The sight of the enormous animals brought a flood of memories to Ayla of the first time she had seen mammoths. She recalled wishing, then, that she could go hunting with the men of the Clan, and remembered that Talut had invited her to go on the first mammoth hunt with the Mamutoi. She did like to hunt, and the idea that she might actually join the hunters this time gave her a tingle of anticipation. She began to really look forward to the Summer Meeting.
The first hunt of the season had important symbolic meaning. As massive and majestic as woolly mammoths were, the Mamutoi feeling for them went beyond wonder at their size. They depended upon the animal for much more than food, and in their need and desire to assure the continuance of the great beasts, they conceived a special relationship with them. They held them in reverence because they based their own identity on them.
Mammoths had no real natural enemies; no carnivorous animal regularly depended on them for sustenance. The huge cave lions, twice the size of any large feline, which normally preyed on the large grazers – aurochs, bison, giant deer, elk, moose, or horse – and could kill a full-grown adult, occasionally brought down a young, sick, or very old mammoth, but no four-legged predator, singly or in groups, could kill an adult mammoth in its prime. Only the Mamutoi, the human children of the Great Earth Mother, had been given the ability to hunt the largest of Her creatures. They were the chosen ones. Among all Her creations, they were preeminent. They were the Mammoth Hunters.
After the mammoth herd passed, the people of the Lion Camp followed eagerly behind them. Not to hunt them, that would come later. They were after the soft, downy wool of their winter undercoats, which was being shed in large handfuls through the coarser outer guard hairs. The naturally colored dark red wool, which was gathered from the ground and spiny brush that caught and held it, was considered a special gift from the Spirit Mammoth.
As chance provided, the white wool of mouflon which was shed naturally by the wild sheep in spring, the unbelievably soft earthy-brown downy wool of musk-ox, and the lighter red rhinoceros underwool were also gathered with great enthusiasm. In their minds, they offered thanks and appreciation to the Great Earth Mother who gave Her children everything they needed from her abundance, vegetable products and animals, and materials like flint and clay. They only had to know where and when to look.
Though fresh vegetables – carbohydrates – were enthusiastically added to their diet, fur all the rich variety available to them, the Mamutoi hunted little in spring and early summer, unless stored supplies of meat were very low. The animals were too lean. The deep, hard winter sapped them of the required concentrated sources of energy in the form of fat. Their perambulations were driven by the need to replenish. A few male bison were picked off, if the fur at the nape of the neck was still black, indicating fat still present in some measure, and a few pregnant females of several species, for the tender fetus meat and skin which made soft baby clothes, or undergarments. The major exception was reindeer.
Vast herds of reindeer migrated north, the antlered females with the last year's young leading the way along remembered trails to their traditional calving grounds, followed by the males. As with other herding animals, their ranks were thinned by wolves that ranged along their flanks searching out the weak and the old, and by several species of felines: large lynxes, long-bodied leopards, and an occasional massive cave lion. The large carnivores played host with their leavings to a great variety of secondary carnivores and scavengers, both four-legged and flying: foxes, hyenas, brown bears, civets, small steppe cats, wolverines, weasels, ravens, kites, hawks, and many more.
The two-legged hunters preyed on them all. The fur and feathers of their hunting competitors were not disdained, though reindeer were the primary game of the Lion Camp – not for the meat, although it did not go to waste. The tongue was considered a treat and much of the meat was dried for use in traveling food, but it was the hides they wanted. Commonly grayish-fawn, but ranging in color from creamy white to almost black, with a reddish-brown cast in the young, the coat of the most northern ranging deer was both lightweight and warm. Because their fur was naturally insulating, no finer cold-weather clothing could be found than that made from reindeer hide, and it was without equal for bedding and ground sheets. With surrounds and pit traps, the Lion Camp hunted them every year, to replenish their own supplies and for gifts to take with them when they set out on their own summer migrations.