Then she was alone in the absolute darkness.
She moaned. She ran. She struck her left thigh on a projection of rock. She fell on the stone. She struggled to her feet. She heard pursuit. She fled deeper into the passage.
Then she stopped. No longer did she hear sounds from behind her.
She crouched down. She waited, frightened. She crouched in the pitch blackness breathing heavily, terrified.
There was no sound behind her.
She went further in the tunnel, slowly, carefully, silently. Then again she stopped, crouched down, waited.
Again there was no sound from behind her. The pounding of her heart seemed loud. She did not move.
Perhaps the men were searching elsewhere. There were many caves in the cliffs. There were other females to thong. There were bags of salt to find. There was fur to locate, and flint to be sacked and carried off. Surely not all the women would be caught. There was no pursuit. She waited, scarcely breathing now. Perhaps the intruders had gone. Perhaps they wished only to strike with swiftness and, swiftly, be gone. Perhaps they had taken enough fur, and flint and salt, and women, to satisfy them. Perhaps even now they were on their way back to their own camp.
She gradually became sure of this as the minutes passed. I am safe, she thought.
Then, from far down the passage behind her, she heard a sound, and, to her misery, saw the flicker of torches.
She, moaning, leaped to her feet and ran deeper in the passage. Then suddenly she stopped, terrified. She knew that there was, at a place in this passage, a drop to the left of some fifty feet. She recalled it when Old Woman, with her torch, had shown her the passage months ago. Occasionally in the shelters there were such crevices and pits. One pit, in another shelter, was used for refuse. It was more than twenty feet deep, and had sheer sides. She hugged the right side of the passage. Her foot dislodged a small pebble and she heard it drop away from her to the left. It made a clear sound as it struck the stone, in two places below. She almost cried out with anguish. She heard a shout from behind her, reverberating in the twisting passage. Looking over her shoulder she saw the flicker of torches, four of them. She moved, back against the stone, past the crevice. She then sped on. Her thigh felt wet and she knew it was bleeding, from where she had struck it on the projection of stone.
Suddenly her left foot splashed in cold water. She cried out in misery, startled. She stopped, and felt about herself in the darkness. She heard the dripping of water. She scraped her right forearm on the stone. There were other passages, she knew, some hundred yards beyond the crevice, passages other than that leading to the cave of the hands, the animal paintings, which had once been shown to her by Old Woman. She sank to her knees, moaning, disoriented. She shuddered. She realized she did not know where she was. She was lost.
From somewhere behind her, seemingly from far away, she heard shouts.
She crouched very still, hoping that her pursuers would choose other tunnels, would give up the chase.
But the noises came closer. Then, again, as though from afar this time, she saw the dim flicker of torches.
She struggled to her feet. Gasping, weeping, she put forth her hands, her fingers, and felt the stone sides of the tunnel. Irrationally, heedlessly, she sped forward. The torches, the noises, were behind her. Then suddenly, crying out, she plunged forward; she seized at nothingness; sprawling, knees and hands scraped, she struck stone some two feet below; she lay there sobbing; then, crawling, weeping, holding her hand before her, she moved deeper into the tunnel; she crawled for some four to five minutes; she could hear the sound of pursuit from behind, louder now; then to her misery she felt solid stone before her. In the darkness groping, frantically, she tried to discover an opening. Wildly she stood up. She felt about the sides, and before her, and over her head, and at her feet. There was no opening. She had fled into a blind tunnel. She sank to her knees in the darkness at the wall of stone; she leaned against it, putting the side of her face against the cool, granular surface which prevented her further advance.
She rose to her feet and put her back against the wall of stone, putting her hands back, feeling it with the palms of her hands.
She watched the torches growing closer, heard the sounds of the men. She saw them then, far down the tunnel, stepping down from the ledge from which she had fallen, then approaching. There were four torches, six men, primitive hunters. She pressed back against the wall, in terror, watching them approach. They came closer. Then the first of them lifted his torch, and she was illuminated. Her hair was wild; her eyes were deep, frantic, filled with fear; she wore the brief, wrap-around skirt of deerskin, exposing the left thigh; about her neck was knotted the several loops of the necklace of shells, of claws and leather. She faced them, a bare-breasted, cornered, primitive woman. But, too, she was Brenda Hamilton, a woman of our time, at the mercy of primitive hunters. Inwardly she moaned. Had she hoped to elude them? They could follow her even in the twisting darkness of the caves; had she been calm they could have followed her, by the simple woman smell she could not help but leave; but she had been running, terrified, broken out in the sweat, the unmistakable secretions, of driven feminine quarry; she had been game to them; the chase was now ended; the snare was readied; they had followed their girl quarry, their woman fugitive, easily; the outcome had never been in doubt; behind her, marking her trail, belying her passage, like a traitor’s signal, perfidious, treacherous, had hung the perfume, stimulatory to hunters, excitatory to predatory males, of her terror; the female fear-smell. She, caught, had had no chance. The others, too, lifted their torches. They regarded her, she could see, with pleasure, with anticipation. Their leader, a heavily bearded fellow, lifted his hand. In it, coiled, were several narrow loops of leather thongs. He grinned. Then he handed his torch to another man and approached her. In his hand were the thongs. She could not take her eyes from them. He held them up before her. She felt almost hypnotized. She could not take her eyes from them. In his hand were the thongs with which to bind her. She felt her shoulder blades, the deliciousness of her ass, press back against the stone.