Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel Read Free Book Online Page B

himself again, he quietly got up and left to find his sleeping place and a deep dreamless sleep, his dreams already spent.
    Mog-ur was the last. In solitude he meditated on the experience and after a time felt a familiar uneasiness. They could know the past with the depth and grandeur that exalted the soul, but Creb sensed a limitation that never occurred to the others. They could not see ahead. They could not even think ahead. He alone had a bare inkling of the possibility.
    The Clan could not conceive a future any different from the past, could not devise innovative alternatives for tomorrow. All their knowledge, everything they did, was a repetition of something that had been done before. Even storing food for seasonal changes was the result of past experience.
    There had been a time, long before, when innovation came easier, when a broken sharp-edged stone gave someone the idea to break a stone on purpose to make a sharp edge, when the warm end of a twirled stick made someone twirl it harder and longer just to see how warm it could get. But as more memories built up, crowding and enlarging the storage capacity of their brain, changes came harder. There was no more room for new ideas that would be added to their memory bank, their heads were already too large. Women had difficulty giving birth; they couldn’t afford new knowledge that would enlarge their heads even more.
    The Clan lived by unchanging tradition. Every facet of their lives from the time they were born until they were called to the world of the spirits was circumscribed by the past. It was an attempt at survival, unconscious and unplanned except by nature in a last-ditch effort to save the race from extinction, and doomed to failure. They could not stop change, and resistance to it was self-defeating, antisurvival.
    They were slow to adapt. Inventions were accidental and often not utilized. If something new happened to them, it could be added to their backlog of information; but change was accomplished only with great effort, and once it was forced on them, they were adamant in following the new course. It came too hard to alter it again. But a race with no room for learning, no room for growth, was no longer equipped for an inherently changing environment, and theyhad passed beyond the point of developing in a different way. That would be left for a newer form, a different experiment of nature.
    As Mog-ur sat alone on the open plain watching the last of the torches sputter and die, he thought of the strange girl Iza had found, and his uneasiness grew until it became a physical discomfort. Her kind had been met before, but only recently in his concept of reckoning, and not many of the chance meetings had been pleasant. Where they had come from was a mystery—her people were newcomers to their land—but since they arrived things had been changing. They seemed to bring change with them.
    Creb shrugged off his uneasiness, carefully wrapped the cave bear’s skull in his cloak, reached for his staff, and hobbled to bed.

3
    The child turned over and began to thrash.
    “Mother,” she moaned. Flailing her arms wildly, she called out again, louder, “Mother!”
    Iza held her, murmuring a soft rumbling undertone. The warm closeness of the woman’s body and her soothing sounds penetrated the girl’s feverish brain and quieted her. She had slept fitfully through the night, awakening the woman often with her tossing and moaning and delirious mutterings. The sounds were strange, different from the words spoken by Clan people. They flowed easily, fluently, one sound blending into another. Iza could not begin to reproduce many of them; her ear was not even conditioned to hearing the finer variations. But that particular set of sounds was repeated so often, Iza guessed it was a name for someone close to the child, and when she saw that her presence comforted the girl, she sensed who the someone was.
    She can’t be very old, Iza thought, she didn’t even know how to