It was Jeren! He was filling the entire passage, standing with his legs apart and his arms crossed in front of him, shaking his head no. She pleaded with him to let her get by, but he didn't understand. Then, with a short, carved staff, he pointed toward the wall behind her.
When she turned to look, she saw a dark yellow horse running and a yellow-haired man running after. Suddenly the herd surrounded the man, hid him from sight. Her stomach churned into a knot of fear. As she ran to him, she heard horses whinnying, and Creb was at the mouth of the cave, beckoning with great urgency, telling her to hurry, before it was too late. Suddenly the pounding hooves of horses were louder. She heard whinnying, neighing, and, with a sinking feeling of horror and panic, the sound of a horse screaming.
Ayla bolted awake. Jondalar was up, too. There was a commotion outside the tent, horses neighing and hooves stamping. They heard Wolf snarling, then a yelp of pain. They threw back their covers and rushed out of the tent.
It was very dark, with only a sliver of a moon, which shed little light, but there were more horses in the pine woods than the two they had left there. They could tell from the sounds, though they couldn't see anything. As she ran toward the sounds of horses, Ayla tripped on an exposed root and fell heavily to the ground, knocking the wind out of her.
"Ayla! Are you all right?" Jondalar said, searching for her in the dark. He'd only heard her fall.
"Here I am," she said, her voice hoarse, trying to catch her breath. She felt his hands on her, and she tried to get up. When they heard the sounds of horses racing off into the night, she pulled herself up and they ran toward the place where the horses were tied. Whinney was gone!
"She's gone," Ayla cried. She whistled and called her name. There was an answering whinny in the distance.
"That's her! That's Whinney! Those horses, they've taken her. I have to get her back!" The woman started after the horses, stumbling through the woods in the dark.
Jondalar caught up to her in a few strides. "Ayla, wait! We can't go now, it's dark. You can't even see where you're going."
"But I have to get her back, Jondalar!"
"We will. In the morning," he said, taking her in his arms.
"They'll be gone by then," the woman wailed.
"But it'll be light then, and we'll see their tracks. We'll follow them. We'll get her back, Ayla. I promise, we'll get her back."
"Oh, Jondalar. What will I do without Whinney? She's my friend. For a long time, she was my only friend," Ayla said, giving in to the logic of his argument, but breaking down into tears.
The man held her and let her cry for a moment, then said, "Right now, we need to see if Racer is gone, too, and find Wolf."
Ayla suddenly remembered hearing the wolf yelp in pain, and she grew concerned for him and for the young stallion. She whistled once for Wolf, and then she made the sound she used to call the horses.
They heard a whinny first, and then a whine. Jondalar went to find Racer, while Ayla followed the sound of the wolf in pain until she found him. She reached down to comfort the animal and felt something wet and sticky.
"Wolf! You're hurt." She tried to pick him up to carry him to the fireplace, where she could restart the fire and see. He yelped in pain as she staggered under his weight. Then he struggled out of her arms, but stayed up on his own legs, and though she knew it cost him some effort, he walked back to their camp on his own.
Jondalar also returned to the camp, leading Racer, while Ayla was stirring up the fire. "His rope held," the man announced. He had gotten into the habit of using sturdy ropes to hold the stallion, who had always been a little harder for him to handle than Whinney was for Ayla.
"I'm so glad he's safe," the woman said, hugging the stallion's neck, then stepping back to look him over more closely, just to make sure. "Why didn't I use a stronger rope, Jondalar?" Ayla said, angry with herself. "If I had been more careful, Whinney wouldn't have gotten away." Her relationship with the mare was closer. Whinney was a friend, who did what she wanted because the horse wanted to, and Ayla only used a light tether to keep the horse from wandering too far afield. It had always been enough.
"It wasn't your fault, Ayla. The herd wasn't after Racer. They wanted a mare, not a stallion. Whinney wouldn't have gone if the horses hadn't made her go."
"But I knew those horses were out there, and I should have realized they might come for Whinney. Now she's gone, and even Wolf is hurt."
"Is it very bad?" Jondalar asked.
"I don't know," Ayla said. "It hurts him too much when I touch him to be certain, but I think his rib is either badly bruised or broken. He must have gotten kicked. I'll give him something for pain, and I'll try to find out for sure in the morning… before we look for Whinney." Suddenly she reached out for the man. "Oh, Jondalar, what if we don't find her? What if I've lost her forever?" she cried.
25
"Look, Ayla," Jondalar said, bending down on one knee to examine the ground that was covered with the imprint of horse hooves. "The whole herd must have been here last night. The trail is clear. I told you it would be easy to track them once it got light."
Ayla looked down at the tracks, then up toward the northeast in the direction they seemed to be heading. They were near the edge of the small woods, and she could see far into the distance across the open grassy plain, but as hard as she tried, she could not see a single horse. She found herself thinking, The tracks are plain enough here, but who knows how long we will be able to follow them?
The young woman had not slept at all after she had been awakened by the commotion and discovered that her beloved friend was gone. The moment the sky lightened, shading from ebony to indigo, she was up, though it was still too dark to see any distinctive features on the land. She had stirred up the fire and started water boiling for tea while the heavens transformed, shifting through a monochromatic spectrum of gradually paler shades of blue.
Wolf had crept near her while she was staring into the flames, but he had to whine to get her attention. She had taken the opportunity to examine him closely. Though he had winced when she prodded deeply, she was grateful to find no broken bones. A bruise was bad enough. Jondalar had gotten up soon after the morning tea was ready, still well before it was light enough to search for signs.
"Let's hurry and leave right away, so they don't get too far ahead of us," Ayla said. "We can pile everything into the bowl boat and… no… we can't do that." She suddenly realized that, without the mare she wanted to find, they couldn't just pack up and go. "Racer doesn't know how to pull the pole drag, so we can't take it or the bowl boat. We can't even take Whinney's pack-saddle basket."
"And if we're going to have any chance to catch up with that herd, we'll have to ride double on Racer. That means we can't even take his pack-saddle. We'll have to cut our load down to bare necessities," Jondalar said.
They stopped to digest the new situation the loss of Whinney had put them in. Both of them realized there were some hard decisions to make.
"If we take just the sleeping rolls and the ground cover, which could be used as a low tent, and roll them up together, that should fit on Racer's back behind us," Jondalar suggested.
"A low tent should be enough," Ayla agreed. "That's all we ever took when we went with the hunters of our clan. We used a stick to prop up the front, and rocks or heavy bones that we found to weigh it down around the edges." She began to remember the times that she and several women accompanied the men when they went hunting. "The women had to carry everything except the hunting spears, and we had to move fast to keep up, so we traveled light."