THE SHELTERS OF STONE

When she went to get her clothes, Wolf approached her, head lowered and tail wagging. When he was young, she'd had to train him to stay away from them when they shared Pleasures on their Journey. It had annoyed Jondalar to have the wolf bother them, and she hadn't liked being interrupted, either. When it wasn't enough to tell Wolf, quite forcefully, to go away when he came sniffing around to see what they were doing, Ayla had been required to tie a rope around his neck to keep him away, sometimes quite a distance away. Eventually he had learned, but he always approached her cautiously afterward until she signaled him that it was all right.

The horses, patiently grazing nearby, came at their whistles. They rode to the edge of the plateau and stopped again to look down at the valleys of the primary river and its tributary, and the complement of limestone cliffs that paralleled their courses. From the high field they could see the confluence of the small river flowing from the northwest and the main stream as it approached from the east. The smaller river flowed into the primary just before the larger river turned south, while it was still moving down a west-flowing section of its course. To the south, at the end of a series of cliffs, they saw the geologic block of limestone that contained the tremendous overhanging ledge of the Ninth Cave, with its long front terrace. But as Ayla looked down at the home of the Ninth Cave, it was not the remarkable size of its overhanging shelter that held her attention, but another most unusual formation.

Long before, during a formative orogeny, a period of mountain building when impressive peaks were folded and raised at the leisurely pace of geologic time, a pillar of igneous rock broke away from the place of its volcanic birth and fell into a stream. The wall of stone from which the pillar had come had taken the shape of its crystal structure as fiery magma cooled into basalt, forming itself into great columns with flat sides meeting at angles.

As the rock that broke loose was moved along, pushed by torrential floods and dragged by glacial ice, the columnar piece of basalt, though bashed and battered, retained its basic shape. The pillar of stone was eventually deposited on the floor of an inland sea, along with deep layers of accumulated sediments of marine life that were creating limestone. Later earth movements raised the sea floor, which eventually became a land of rounded hills and cliffs along river valleys. As water, weather, and wind eroded the great faces of vertical limestone into the shelters and caves used by the Zelandonii, they also exposed the erratic, the battered piece of basalt from a distant location shaped like a column.

As if its sheer size weren't enough to make the site unique, the huge abri was made even more unusual by the strange long stone embedded near the top and jutting out of the front of the huge limestone overhang. Though buried deeply into the cliff at one end, it was weathering out at such an angle that it seemed about to fall, making a distinctive landmark that added a striking element to the extraordinary rock shelter of the Ninth Cave. Ayla had seen it when she first arrived and, with a shiver of recognition, felt she had seen it before. "Does that stone have a name?" she asked, pointing to it. "It's called the Falling Stone," Jondalar said. "That's a good name for it," she said. "And didn't your mother mention names for those rivers?"

"The main river doesn't really have a name," Jondalar said. "Everyone just calls it The River. Most people think of it as the most important river in the region, even though it's not the biggest. It flows into a much larger one south of here-in fact, we call that one Big River-but many of the Zelandonii Caves live near this one, and everyone knows it's the one that's meant when someone says The River.

"The little tributary down there is called Wood River," Jondalar continued. "Many trees grow near it, and there is more wood in that valley than in most. It's not used by hunters much." Ayla nodded in tacit understanding.

The valley of the feeder stream, flanked on the right by limestone cliffs and on the left by steep hills, was not like most of the open grassy valleys of the main river and its other nearby tributaries. It was dense with trees and vegetation, especially upstream. Unlike more open areas, woodlands were not prized by hunters, because hunting was more difficult. Animals were harder to see with trees and brush to hide behind and use for camouflage, and those that migrated in large herds tended to prefer valleys with sizable fields of grass. On the other hand, the valley did provide wood, for constructions, and implements, and for fire. Fruits and nuts were also collected, and several other plants that were gathered for food and other uses, along with smaller animals that fell to snares and traps. In a land of relatively few trees, no one disdained the value of Wood River Valley's contributions.