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.
With 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 coming 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 waked.
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.