He laid the parasite on the fresh dusting of snow, turning, dismembering the huge buffalo while his feet went numb in the cold water. Satisfied, he poked and prodded, finding nope of the deep joints frozen. They numbed his fingers, but still weren't as cold as they should have been had they been
trapped in the water under the ice. The gut, he thought, carried a slight trace of heat.
In the blackness, he turned back to the tapeworm. It had stuck to the snow, breaking in two as he lifted it. With some of the thin hide from the buffalo's groin, he bound up the parasite and turned his tracks for Heron's.
In his own mind, no doubt remained. In all their talks, Heron had never mentioned long-horned buffalo in the valley. No, this beast came from somewhere else . . . beyond the ice.
Sitting beside a crackling fire in Heron's shelter, Wolf Dreamer stared at the tapeworm he'd thawed. He prodded it. Dead. His eyes raised to stare absently at one of the drawings on the rock. Beneath the soot stains and dust, he could make out the effigy. A web drawn in a spiral. A fist knotted in his gut, a curious shimmering hazing the edges of his vision,
Why did Heron draw that in red all those years ago? What does it mean? Why a web? He shook his head vigorously, snapping his concentration back to the dead tapeworm.
Heron stretched out on her side across the fire, head propped on one hand, dark eyes watching him. Her long hair fell across her tan dress in silver and black strands that shimmered in the firelight. "What are you thinking?"
"That tapeworms don't live after they've been frozen."
"Then?"
"Then there's no way the buffalo could have been frozen."
"What else did you notice? "
He frowned at her, meeting and holding her probing eyes. Was this another test? "His paunch was full of green stuff, grass, plants, a couple of late-blooming flowers. His summer coat was just beginning to thicken. . . . and the tapeworms were alive."
"What do you think that means?"
"There's a place on the other side of the ice where buffalo live."
"You say he felt warm?"
. "Maybe. My fingers were cold. I couldn't really tell, but the gut seemed to feel warmer. How long would a buffalo take to go cold? He had to have been under there for a while;
the body was all ripped up—like it had been caught and pulled loose a dozen times."
"Caught under there?" She tapped her fingers, looking up at the gray-mottled rock walls over their heads. "So he came through a ..."
"... hole," he breathed. In the firelight, the muscles of his smooth jaw quivered.
Chapter 34
Poised on the balls of his feet, One Who Cries waited. The big cow spun, wheeling, trunk high to scent Wind Woman, little eyes hot and black in her shaggy head.
He could feel the tremors of her tramping feet through the very rock he crouched behind. Like he always did when he hunted mammoth, he wished he could let the runniness in his bowels and bladder loose. The cow turned away again and One Who Cries raised on his feet. Like lightning, his arm rolled back, then snapped forward, his atlatl sending the long dart arching to strike near the cow's anus where the skin was thin, sensitive.
Once more, it worked. The dart Singing Wolf had so carefully crafted struck home, the shaft itself separating, the main part falling back to earth, the lethal point and foreshaft deeply embedded in the beast, continuing to slice tissue as the animal moved. The shaft clattered as it fell to earth.
The cow bellowed, whirling on her feet, trunk whipping back and forth. Hot breath rasped from her mouth as she sniffed for her tormentor.
One Who Cries scuttled through the rock, bent low.
It wasn't much of an outcrop to hide in. Just an angular upthrust of black shale that created a sort of hogsback. Nevertheless, the mammoth couldn't traverse it. She could only circle, and try to avoid the narrow-walled gully that erosion had cut along the lower border of the rock. If she fell there,
the six-foot drop would kill her much quicker than One Who Cries' stone-tipped darts.
One Who Cries bent low, scurrying through a gap in the rock, panting and puffing, zigzagging between the walls of shale that thrust up around him. Seeing his chance, he scrambled for the long dart shaft, grabbing it up, sprinting for the safety of the rocks.
The cow caught a glimpse of him, screaming rage. She charged forward, accelerating her huge body in an amazing burst of speed. She stopped on the verge of bad footing, questing with her trunk. She'd almost caught him the first time he'd retrieved his dart shaft using the same tactic.
Heart pounding so hard he thought it would break his ribs, One Who Cries waited—safely out of reach. "Got to goad her, make her madder.''
Laughing and dancing, he sailed a flat, hand-sized slab of rock to pelt her in the face. A shrill trumpet of fury smashed at him as he dodged away, yipping and whistling. He jumped a tilted gray slab, adrenaline pumping, and rolled to one side, crabbing through the narrow crevice as the berserk mammoth -circled, gouging the resisting ground with her tusks, flinging ripped moss and grass to the air, broadcasting her frustration at his taunting.