People of the Sea(88)

Then he heard the weeping. He stopped to listen, and fog coiled around him.

“A baby? It sounds like a baby.”

Sunchaser’s bushy black brows met over his nose as he started forward again. The closer he went, the more it sounded as though the cries came from his hidden rock shelter. His heart pounded, pumping wary blood through his charged limbs.

Cautiously, he studied the edge of the cliff. Entering the rock

shelter took a trick of wits, and the fog made the task even harder. Surely no one could have found the shelter without guidance.

Shh. Be still. Perhaps Mammoth Above sent someone to help you. Yes, that must be it. But… a baby?

Sunchaser spotted the three boulders piled beside the ancient tree stumps. The trees had been struck by lightning sometime in the distant past. Now only charred, worm-eaten remnants remained. Beginning there, Sunchaser counted the scallops of the cliff’s rim. In, out, in, out… He came to a halt when he saw the tracks of the mammoth in the soft sand along the cliff. Swiftly, he turned all the way around, but the fog prevented him from seeing a distance of more than three or four body lengths away.

“Mammoth?” he called softly. “Are you out there? Did you come to speak to me?”

No response came. He stood listening for a while longer, then resumed counting the scallops. Below the cliff, the surf broke onto the rocks, sending white spray high.

At the sixteenth scallop, he found the tiny indentation in the rock. Using it as a finger hold he got down on his stomach and slowly, gingerly, lowered himself over the precipice, feeling for the ledge of stone below. For a panicky moment, he hung over empty air. Then, just when he thought he would fall to his doom, his toes struck solid rock. It wasn’t really that far down, only eight or nine hands. Helper jumped it with no trouble at all. But Sunchaser wasn’t that brave. The edge of the cliff protruded, making it impossible to see the ledge from above unless you leaned far out and looked down. With painstaking care, he planted himself, then released his hold on the indentation and sank back against the stone wall.

The baby’s cries had become sharp, almost angry-sounding.

Sunchaser took his time, edging along warily. One hundred and fifty hands below, waves continued to splash and pound the rocks. He glimpsed the shapes of two gulls as they dove through the fog before him.



He rounded the bend and entered the rock shelter—and then he stopped breathing.

Helper looked up as though saying, “Look what I found.” He had curled his big body around a woman who lay on her side atop Sunchaser’s elk hide robes, fast asleep. The baby lay beside her. The woman had unlaced the front of her antelope hide dress and pulled out her right breast for the baby. But the infant had lost the nipple and was wriggling frantically in an effort to find it again.

Sunchaser exhaled a confused breath and knelt by the child. Gently, he positioned the baby’s head so it could nurse. When the child’s mouth closed around the nipple, it quieted instantly. Helper lowered his head in apparent satisfaction.

Sunchaser shook his head. “What is this, Mammoth Above? I don’t understand.” The woman was beautiful. Sixteen or seventeen summers, he guessed. Maybe ten hands tall. Much too skinny, as slender as a blade of grass, but waist-length hair fell over her chest, shrouding her full breasts like a black silk veil. She had a perfect oval face, with a turned-up nose and full lips. Sunchaser frowned. The yellow stains of old bruises covered her cheeks, and beneath the web of her hair, a long gash ran the width of her forehead. The wound was raw and swollen.

“That’s recent, isn’t it?” he whispered to himself. “No more than a moon old.”

Her chest rose and fell in the deep rhythm of a dead sleep. To have slept through her baby’s cries and his arrival, she must have been exhausted.

His gaze darted over the shelter. Medium-sized, it stretched five body lengths long and four wide. The high ceiling arched over his head. Against the southern wall, his pack and three baskets sat beside three rolled-up elk hides. Next to the hides, he’d leaned the dog travois. He’d brought few belongings with him, but all of them had come in with the aid of Helper jiauling the travois. The



woman had apparently brought even fewer. Her open pack leaned against the woodpile near the smoldering fire in the center of the floor. He looked in it: a loop of sinew, several pieces of dried rabbit, a mouse hide pacifier for the baby. Her only other possession appeared to be a very male-looking atlatl about the length of her forearm, made of sturdy oak, with finger grooves and sinew lacings for a sure grip while launching a. dart. The hooked end had been crafted out of polished shell and inset onto the weapon’s shaft.