to a muted hush. From somewhere in the dark wood’s depths Kit heard the keening cry of a hunting hawk and the soft plip-plop of snow dropping from branches.
Assured that there was no danger, the group continued, following the deeply entrenched trail into the wood. Here and there Kit spied animal tracks crossing the trail: the small traces of mice and rabbits and the larger tracks of ferret, marmot, and some of the smaller antelope-like animals. Once he saw what must have been the tracks of one of the larger predators they were trying to avoid—either lion or wolf, he could not tell, but his companions would know, and they did not seem to pay them any mind.
If not for the ribbon of beaten-down snow, Kit would have quickly lost his way; the wood was dark and wreathed in hoarfrost and frozen mist. Abruptly, they arrived at a crease in the land—a little canyon formed by a tributary that carried spring melt and summer rain into the larger valley. Here the canyon formed a cliff with a sheer drop of fifty or sixty feet. The group did not linger at the edge but continued along the rim for a way until they came to a defile leading down to the bottom of the dry streambed. They followed the defile as it curved around and back to the cliff.
And there, directly below the sheer drop, lay a fantastic heap of bones. Devoid of flesh, and partially covered with snow, they made a stark white-on-white mound at the bottom of the streambed. All at once, Kit understood what he was looking at: a crude but brutally efficient method of hunting that consisted of driving the fleeing prey over a cliff, where they would either be killed by the fall or injured and finished off by the hunters. Judging by the massive tangle of carcasses, the River City Clan had been using this kill zone for some considerable time.
There were bones of all kinds: some big as dinosaur bones—though Kit was fairly certain there were none of those around . . . mammoths, then? . . . or mastodons maybe, were those the same?—all jumbled together with those of elk, deer, and antelope; and some that looked like they might have come from giant oxen or buffalo—definitely bovine in nature—and even some from horses.
Without any discussion—there never was any, in fact—the clansmen began dragging the larger bones from the heap, disentangling them and reforming them into a smaller, more ordered heap. Why some bones were chosen and others discarded, Kit could not readily tell, but he joined in all the same. The work party soon sorted out a number of sizeable piles; then, using the ropes made of braided hemp they had brought with them, they bound the bones into bundles. These unwieldy collections were then heaved onto their shoulders and muscled up out of the defile.
When all the bones had been trundled up out of the graveyard, each clansman hefted a bundle or two onto his back and trudged off into the wood once more. Kit could only manage to lift the smaller bundle he himself had made, but picked that up and followed his companions walking single file into the dark, snow-clotted forest and to a clearing that was suspiciously circular in nature—an almost perfect circle, which Kit concluded had been made somehow by the clan. He could not determine how they could have achieved this, lacking anything but simple stone axes. Yet here it was: an almost perfect circle sixty feet or so in diameter, surrounded by tall pines and larches, but offering a clear and unobstructed view of the sky overhead.
And in the precise centre of the clearing: the Bone House.
Kit recognised it at once as the dwelling made of bone that En-Ul had pictured for him—a simple, mound-shaped hut formed of the interlocked skeletons of all manner of animals. There were no windows as such, and but a single low tunnel for a door, over which hung the entire skull of a giant elk with splayed antlers big as palm branches. The lintels of this door were solid ivory in the form of two enormous curving mammoth tusks. More elephant tusks lined the foundation of the house, whose framework was made up of the most fantastical conglomeration of skeletal fragments: pelvises, spines, leg bones, vertebrae, and rib bones by the score; there were skulls from more than a dozen different creatures—deer of several kinds, as well as bison,