Whinney sighed and took the opportunity to grab as many mouthfuls of grass as she could while her two-legged companions debated their next move. Racer twitched his tail impatiently. He wanted to roll so bad, but those blasted baskets.... Wolf busied himself digging into a nearby rabbit warren, where he soon found nearly a dozen bite-size baby bunnies. He gulped them down quickly, before Ayla could see them and try to adopt any. He enjoyed being the spoiled youngest child.

"If we just keep going west, won't we get there anyway?" Ayla asked. "It would take more time to backtrack, and you keep saying we should not delay our journey any more than we have to." Except for Pleasures, she added to herself. We always seem to have plenty of time for that.

"Ermmm..." Jondalar scratched his head, his brow furrowed to perfection. He looked around at the fertile, rolling hills with their rich variety of animal life - none of which was in sight at the moment, except two horses and a smug-looking wolf. There was a small stream nearby, and far across it was a prominent elevation that resembled some kind of animal with a long, pointy snout, ovoid body, and rough-textured, pointy tail... there was something about it that bothered him slightly, as if perhaps it should seem familiar. The sun was already sinking behind it, leaving them in a shadow that was fast growing longer and chillier. "I think we'd better camp here for the night; there's water, and it's too late to go much farther. The horses are tired, too." He gave Racer a friendly slap. Racer rolled his eyes and nodded.

They unloaded the horses, who promptly found a good dusty hollow to roll in, and set up their tent. Ayla started a fire and fed it up with dead wood from the stunted trees along the stream bank, plus some larger branches that must have been washed down from somewhere else by spring floods. While stones from the streambed heated for cooking, she harvested the usual amazing quantity and variety of roots and other edible things. She wished they had gotten a nice young Megaceros, though. Her mouth had been watering for a good sirloin and all this digging increased her appetite. Wolf looked contented; he must have found something.

The veggie stew flavored with a little dried meat made a fine evening meal. Afterwards, they sipped some mint tea while the fat grubs that Ayla had found in a rotten log toasted on sticks over the embers. Jondalar thought the crisped tidbits were delicious, even without salt. Ayla's ability to find food any place, any time, amazed and delighted him almost as much as her ability to inspire and enjoy Pleasures any place, any time. Just thinking about it made his loincloth feel too tight.

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After they were done making the tent shake, Ayla and Jondalar dropped off into the deep sleep brought on by vigorous exercise. Ayla's dreams were full of strange scenes that she could not quite focus on. She followed the trail of an animal, but when she finally caught sight of it, it turned into a hill. There was a cave in the hillside. Ayla approached the cave, but when she tried to enter it, Creb stood in the entrance, barring her way. He shook his head sadly, saying "You must not go this way, you must go thataway." He pointed in the direction of a tapering rocky ridge at one end of the hill that looked like the scaly tail of an animal. Then he turned into an opossum, and vanished with a nasty, wet-fur smell and a sound like evil laughter.

"No, no, Creb, come baaaack!" Ayla wailed, struggling in the grip of clinging vines that grew around the cave entrance. Then she was awake, and it was Jondalar's arms holding her, his eyes like mountain pools in the dawn light.

"Ayla, Ayla, what's wrong?" he cried out worriedly, his brow seriously furrowed.

"Oh, Jondalar," Ayla sobbed, "I dreamed about Creb again. He said we should go thataway." She pointed in the direction of the ridge.

"Through the back of the tent?" Jondalar asked. Sometimes he wondered about this woman.

"No, you big lunk. The ridge at the end of the hill, that looks like a tail - it points the way we should go."

"Oh." He pondered this. Kissing and licking her various body parts always helped him think, so breakfast was understandably late.

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After cleaning up the evening meal's leftovers, they packed up the horses and headed across the stream. Ayla glanced nervously at the animal-shaped hill as they passed by. There was no cave in its side. They rode past the tapered ridge of bare rock that was this end of the hill, and continued in the direction in which it pointed. Jondalar could see no reason to get Ayla ticked off at him again, and maybe there was a good reason for going a little more out of their way. The Mother often sent messages in dreams. Jondalar sometimes wondered about Her sense of humor, though.

Despite their somewhat late start they had traveled as far as a man could walk in a whole day before the sun reached midheaven. They paused to rest the horses and let them graze a little before going on. Wolf flopped down for a nap while Ayla and Jondalar surveyed the broad landscape from a hilltop. The sky was clear, nearly as blue as Jondalar's eyes. To the east they could still see the mountains they had crossed the lower reaches of after leaving the Sharamudoi. To the west, the hills vanished into the sun-shimmer of midday. To the north -- "Look, Ayla, do you see smoke over there?" Jondalar exclaimed suddenly.

"Yes!" she answered, "and it can't be very far. Oh, let's go see, can't we? I'd love to see some people again."

Jondalar smiled at her eagerness. "Yes, of course we must visit, but not too long. I wonder what sort of people they are?" His brow furrowed a moment in thought. "I hope they don't freak out too much when they see the animals. Well, we'll just go in slowly, leading the horses. You will have to keep Wolf behind at first."

Ayla rolled her eyes -- as if she wouldn't.

Soon they arrived at the top of a long, low ridge, and looked down into a broad valley through which a sparkling stream meandered. Trees and shrubs flanked the stream. The smoke arose from a stone-ringed firepit near a large earthlodge built not far from the stream, on an elevated area well above possible spring floods. People who were busying themselves around the firepit and elsewhere suddenly stopped whatever they were doing and turned to stare at the strange couple with the horses. Small children scampered to their mothers and peeped out from behind their ample thighs.

"Jondalar -- they look a lot like Mamutoi, don't they?" Ayla inquired.

"Ermmm, I don't know. You recall the Sungaea, they are similar too, but they have a lot of differences."

"Yes, I suppose you're right,"Ayla responded. "They look friendly, though. See, they're waving to us. I think they want us to come down there."

Jondalar shrugged. "Well, here goes nothing." He stepped forward and went down the gentle slope toward the group of people, who had all gathered in the area near the firepit. They seemed to be smiling, he noted as they drew nearer.

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"For Ton's sake!" Mactruc rumbled. "It looks like that Frenchie, what was his name? Jon-something?"

"Jondalar," the daughter of his hearth, Yummie, said. "I wonder where his brother is," she continued, her brow furrowed. She noticed Wormie quivering like a pot of congealed broth. "Oh, stick a bone in it, will you?" she sneered. "I think he brought his own, this time."

"Horsies, horsies!" Yummie's little daughter Thonie said.

"An' a WUFF!" chimed in Wormie's blue-eyed daughter Dollie.

"Better get out the Root, Tonka," Mactruc said, with a wink to the old shaman. "Looks like we got Visitors, and they must have some pretty Mother-danged good stories."

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