The voyage north that Glade would make across the Great Sea wasn't one she'd planned and most definitely not one she would have chosen, although it was true that she and Demure had often sat together on the shore and looked over a sea that stretched towards the North rather than the West. And they'd often speculated whether this water stretched to the very end of the world or whether there might be land beyond.
"The further North we go," observed Glade, "the further we are from the Sun. And the further away the Sun, the cooler it is. If we travelled across the sea it would just get colder and colder."
"No one would want to live where it's colder than even here," said Demure, shivering under the deer-skin that covered her shoulders even though it was now Spring. "Perhaps the sea has no other shore. Perhaps it goes on forever."
"So where do the ice floes come from?"
Demure shook her head. "Perhaps it's so cold that the sea turns to ice," she ventured.
The lovers were now living together with a tribe of Raft People who tolerated the women's presence in their village for as long as they were willing to provide sexual services whenever requested. This was a tribe with a fairly relaxed attitude towards life. They were generally communal in all that they consumed, whether it was food, drink or sex. Like Glade's own tribe, it was a community of mutual sharing. There was no concept of private property, private life or even privacy.
This openness and generosity was possible because the tribe lived in a region of great bounty. There was fruit from the tree; flesh from the migrating herds of deer and antelope; and, as a result of the tribe's expertise at fishing from rafts, no shortage of food from the sea.
Initially Demure found life amongst this tribe rather disconcerting. All her life she was accustomed to taking advantage of other people's weaknesses and here were people whose weaknesses she didn't know how to exploit. They had no understanding of status. They had no concept of ownership or privilege. Her attempts to gain advantage over other people were met with incomprehension. But eventually even she relaxed. If her talent at manipulation wasn't going to get her anywhere then perhaps it was better if she didn't even try.
Glade was more at home although she still missed the warmth of the South and the shelter of the Forest. She revelled in the license to fuck and the generosity of a people who had plenty to eat and plenty to spare. She became skilled at using the rafts the tribe employed to such advantage and passed on as much of her knowledge as she could to Demure for whom laziness was her chief obstacle to learning. Glade's lover was naturally intelligent, even if her aptitude was most often manifest as deviousness and cunning. Soon enough she also had sufficient skill at handling the rafts to make a useful contribution to food-gathering which in turn ensured that the lovers' presence could continue to be tolerated.
Glade soon discovered that rafting wasn't as simple as just pushing the raft onto the sea's surface. There was skill involved in making a raft behave. One could use sticks with flattened ends that could steer the raft in any direction. There was a variety of sticks to use. Some were employed to spear fish, some to paddle the raft and others to navigate shallow waters. It was also advisable to carry aboard a thin canvass of deer or antelope hide which, supported on a framework of sticks tied together by sinews, could catch the breeze and manoeuvre the raft out to sea where there was a greater haul of fish.
There were many other skills associated with using a raft at which the Raft People were expert, such as how the raft was constructed and how fish were caught. This last employed the art of weaving together intricate nets from sinews and reeds which could be used to catch many fish at once. The Raft People were ingenious in many other ways. They came up with novel and sometimes surprising solutions to the problem of how to capture the fruit of the sea. Sometimes they followed flocks of sea-birds to where they congregated above a great harvest of small fish. Sometimes they left woven baskets on the shore to capture lobsters and crabs when the tide was high. There was always plenty of game and fruits to harvest on the days when the sea was too rough for even the hardiest fisherman.
Glade and Demure became almost complacent. Perchance now, at last, they wouldn't one day need to set off again in pursuit of a new home when the goodwill of their hosts was exhausted. Perhaps the two women could simply settle together as a couple unusual more for their intimate closeness than for their sexual predilection.
Perhaps they could grow old together.
But, inevitably, this was not to be.
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Ivory also had to adjust to unwelcome change. Although she missed Glade terribly, she was kept too occupied during the day to fall victim to depression. At night she was distracted by Ptarmigan's relatively innocuous fondling. Although she'd expected Glade and the chief to be away for more than a couple of days, it was now a quarter the way through the moon's cycle and the expedition had still not returned. With most senior tribesmen accompanying Chief Cave Lion, Ivory felt distinctly vulnerable when she heard that the Mammoth Hunters were no longer alone in the valley.
"What shall we do?" Ptarmigan asked anxiously when this news was brought to them by Leopard, a young man whose voice had barely broken.
"We should chase the invaders away!" gruffly insisted Grey Wolf, the most senior hunter left behind.
Ivory wondered what Glade would say on this occasion. "How many of these strangers are there?" she asked.
"I saw only five or six," said Leopard. "I don't think there are more."
"Even so, few can be a danger," insisted Grey Wolf. "Perhaps we should kill them."
"That's not right," said Ivory with alarm. "Only if the strangers mean us harm should we kill them. If we were to kill them for other reasons, their spirits will curse us. It is imperative that we don't bring evil onto our tribe."
