After Ayla made herself a new sling

After Ayla made herself a new sling out of Zoug’s scraps to replace the old one that had finally worn out, she decided to look for a place to practise away from the cave. She was always afraid someone would catch her . She started upstream along the watercourse that flowed near the cave, then began ascending the mountain along a tributary creek, forcing her way through heavy underbrush.
She was stopped by a steep rock wall over which the creek spilled in a cascading spray. Jutting rocks, whose jagged outline were softened by a deep cushion of lush green moss, separated the falling water bouncing from rock to rock, into long thin streams that splashed up, creating veils of mist, and fell again. The water collected itself in a foaming pool that filled a shallow rocky basin at the foot of the waterfall before it continued down to meet the larger waterway. The wall presented a barrier that ran parallel to the stream, but as Ayla hiked along its base, back towards the cave, the sheer drop angled up in a steep, but climbable, grade. At the top, the ground levelled out and as she continued , she came to the upper course of the creek and began to follow it upstream again.
Moist, grey-green lichen draped the pine and spruce that dominated the higher elevation. Elevation. Squirrels darted up the tall trees and across an underlying turf of variegated moss, carpeting earth and stones and fallen logs alike in a continuous cover that shaded from light yellow to deep green. Ahead she could see bright sunshine filtering trough the evergreen woods. As she followed the creek, the trees thinned out, intermixed with a few deciduous trees dwarfed to brush, then opened out to a clearing. She emerged from the woods into a small field whose far end terminated in the grey- brown rock of the mountain, sparsely covered with clinging growth as it soared to higher reaches.
The creek, which meandered across one side of the meadow, found its source in a large spring gushing out of the side of a rock wall near a large hazelnut clump growing against the rock. The mountain range was honeycombed with underground fissures and chutes that filtered the glacial run-off which appeared again as clear, sparkling springs.
From the book “The clan of the cave bear”, by Jean M. Auel