In the feeding, Spear cut meat first, for he was the leader. He would give meat, then, to the hunters. Later they would cut their own meat. Pieces, then, by Spear, or Tooth, or others, would be thrown to pregnant women, and to the children. The smaller children were thrown separate pieces, that they might eat; the older children were thrown a larger piece of meat which the oldest and strongest, who might be male or female, but was usually female, for at this age the females tended to be larger than boys of comparable age, would divide among them. The leader of the older children in Spear’s group was the girl, Butterfly, who was not popular with the children, for she played her favorites in the distribution of the meat; the young boys hated her, for she made them beg her for meat; in time, of course, as she grew older, and the young boys grew tall and straight, and strong beyond her, and she became a woman and they became hunters, their situation would be, to the pleasure of the boys, well reversed. She would learn to lift her body to them.
As the men were eating, and the meat had been thrown to the pregnant females and the children, the other females would creep nearer, for the men, if they wished, to feed them. They might not steal meat or take it for themselves, for they were women. The only exceptions to this were Old Woman and Nurse, who took meat when they wished, neither challenged. Old Woman was simply Old Woman; and Nurse was important for the small children, the infants. Sometimes a mother did not have milk. In some human groups, the Bear People, for instance, nursing mothers were extended the same meat rights as pregnant females, but this was not so in Spear’s group. In Spear’s group such women obtained their meat like other women, by begging and by being pleasing to hunters. Spear had discovered that a woman who needs meat to make milk in her body for her baby will kick well. After the hunters were finished, of course, anyone, woman or child, might fall on the remains of the repast, to pick what bones might be left, to poke about in the ashes for bits of gristle or to lick grease from the charred wood of the fire. After these were finished, Ugly Girl would, the others not stopping her, creep to the fire, scratching and smelling for what might be left. It was not always the case, of course, that a woman would beg for meat, or lift her body to the men to be fed. Such women, though rare, often wandered away from the groups. Usually they died; if they did not die they did not have children. Women who wished the touch of hunters, who accepted being owned by them, who willingly, eagerly, lifted their bodies for meat, would be those women who would survive, whose children would be born, whose young would take in time their place, in turn, as hunters and the women of hunters.
Tree now circled the camp, not losing the scent. It was not difficult to follow.
He carried his pouch, his rope, his spear.
13
For four days Brenda Hamilton had wandered in a generally southward direction, in the morning keeping the sun on her left and, in the evening, on her right.
At the end of the second day she had come to the end of the rolling grassland in which she had first found herself. She had dug roots and found wild strawberries, and had drunk at small pools of rain water. Once she had come to a larger watering hole, near which were the prints of numerous animals. The water had been muddy there, and she bad not drunk. She had gone around the hole and continued on her journey. She saw only one herd of animals, a herd of some twenty horses. They were the size of large ponies, and had an unusual mane, stiff and erect, like a brush. They were tawny in color, and kept well away from her, even when she attempted to approach them more closely. She did not know, but they had been hunted. They knew the smell of men. If she had gone further to the north she would have found more animals, herds of bison and smaller groups of aurochs. In the mud at the watering hole she had found no prints of paws, except those of tiny animals, rodents and insectivores, with one exception, those of a pair of apparently large animals, feline, it seemed, who had come to the water to drink together. The great majority of the prints at the watering hole were those of small, hoofed animals, doubtless mostly those of horses, of the sort of which she had seen one herd. There were other prints, too, hoofed, which, being smaller, she conjectured were those of various, lesser ungulates. The larger paw prints had frightened her. She had not lingered at the watering hole. They were the prints, though she would not learn this until later, of one of the most beautiful, and dangerous, animals of the Pleistocene, the giant cheetah.
In the late afternoon of the second day she bad come to what seemed to be an endless, linear stand of deciduous trees, oak, elm and ash, and yew and maple, and others she did not recognize, stretching northeast by southwest. Entering the trees she discovered a long, swift stream, quite cold, flowing southwestward. She drank at this and, finding a wide place, using a pole to thrust ahead of her to test her footing, she forded it, and then, on the southern bank, followed it southwestward. Within an hour the grasslands, at first visible through the trees on her left, bad disappeared, to be replaced with darkly green, forested country. By nightfall she could no longer, either, through the trees, see the grasslands on her right.
She had left the fields.
She had come to the forests.
The forests, with their darkness, and their sounds, frightened her.
She tried to make a fire by rubbing sticks together, and striking rocks, and failed.
It was cold at night.
She slept fitfully. Once she awakened and screamed. Not more than twenty paces from her, in the moonlight, she saw the dark forms of more than a dozen doglike creatures, curious, watching her. When she screamed, they moved away, scurrying, but then continued to watch. She wept and screamed and threw rocks and sticks at them. Two snarled, but then the pack turned, and, as one, faded into the trees.