THE SHELTERS OF STONE

Ayla and Jondalar studied them and noticed some differences between the wild herd and the animals they had brought with them from the east. Rather than Whinney's dun-yellow color, which was most common all over, or even the rare dark brown of Racer's coat, most of the horses in this herd were a bluish-gray color with a white belly. They all, their two included, had similar stand-up brushlike black manes and black tails, black stripes down their backbones, and black lower legs, with some suggestion of striping on their lower haunches. They were generally small horses, broad backed with rounded bellies, but the herd animals seemed to stand a fraction higher and had slightly shorter muzzles.

The herd was watching Whinney and Racer with as much intensity as the two were watching the herd, but this time Racer's nicker brought a ringing neigh of challenge in return. She and Jondalar looked at each other when they heard the call and saw a large stallion coming toward them from the back of the herd. By tacit agreement, Ayla and Jondalar rode their horses in another direction as fast as they could. Jondalar did not want Racer to be drawn into a fight with the herd stallion, and with Wolf being gone so much of the time, Ayla was afraid the horses, too, might be tempted to leave her and decide to live with their own kind.

In the next few days, Wolf spent some time with them, which made Ayla feel as though her family were back together. They made a point of staying away from a big wild boar digging for truffles, laughed at a pair of otters playing in a pond that was formed by a dam built by a reclusive beaver that had quickly dived into the water when he saw them. They saw the wallow of a bear and some of his hair caught in the bark of a tree, but not the animal itself, and smelled the distinctive musk of a wolverine. They watched a spotted leopard gracefully leap down from a high ledge, and some ibex, wild mountain goats, nimbly vault up the face of an almost perpendicular cliff.

Several female ibex and their young, their tight wool making them seem round and shapeless, with sticks for legs, had come down from the highlands to fatten up on the rich lowland growth. They had long horns that curved over their backs, very wide-set eyes, a hump behind their heads, and hooves that were hard and strong around the edges, with soft, spongy, flexible soles that gripped the hard stone.

Jondalar saw Ayla close her eyes as though concentrating, turning her head back and forth to better hear something. "I think mammoths are coming this way," she said.

"How do you know? I can't see anything."

"I can hear them," she said, "especially the big male."

"I can't hear anything," Jondalar said.

"It's a deep, deep rumbling sound," she said, straining to listen again. "Look, Jondalar! Over there!" she called out, full of excitement, when she saw a herd of mammoths in the distance coming in their direction. Ayla was detecting the long-distance bellow of a male mammoth in musk, which was below the auditory range normally heard by humans, but could be heard by a female mammoth in heat for up to five miles because such low-level sounds did not attenuate as easily over distance. Though Ayla couldn't exactly hear it, she could sense the deep call.

The herd was essentially female and their young, but since one of the young females was in heat, several males were crowding around the edges, always hopeful, though the dominant bull of the region was already in consort with her. She had refused the persistent advances of the lesser males until he arrived. Now he kept the others away, since none of them dared to challenge him, which allowed her to eat and nurse her first young calf in between mating sessions.

The thick coat of the woolly mammoth covered the huge animal completely, from the toes to the end of its long nose, including the small ears. As they came closer, the various shades of their fur became more apparent. The little ones had the lightest-colored hair, the females shaded from bright chestnut in the younger ones to the dark brown of the old matriarch. The males became almost black as they aged. The coat had a very dense underfur out of which grew fairly long, straight hairs that kept them very warm even in the coldest of the winters, especially after consuming the sometimes icy water or eating snow or ice. That's when their bodies tended to become chilled.

"It's early in the season for mammoths," he said. "We never used to see them until fall, late fall. Mammoths, rhinos, musk oxen, and reindeer, those are the winter animals."