Ayla and the Clan of the Cave Bear

Hunting Women

Deutscher Text T he wonderful novel by Jean Auel: "Ayla in the Clan of the Cave Bear" is about a Cro Magnon woman who has been found by a hord of Neanderthals at the age of five orphaned and wounded. The medizin woman adopts her as her daughter but - like in the story of "the ugly duckling" - all her higher developped abilities and properties are regarded as morbid and of lower quality because they are different. Though she allready had been able to speak she now learns to communicate with grunting noises and gestures and to behave humble like a slave towards every man of the tribe.

H unting is a holy privilege of the men. Women are only allowed to collect plants and herbs. When it gets known that Ayla has secretly learned to skilfully kill small game with a slingshot, she is "banned to death" and expelled by the tribe. She manages to stay alive though for one month all on her own in a small cave in the woods. No other outcast before her has ever succeded to do so and the clan has to accept her back after that.

Ayla and the Clan of the Cave Bear

Cover of the German Pocket- Book Heyne Verlag 1986

E very woman has to give herself to every man at his will and so Ayla is made pregnant by the son of the chieftain because he hates her and wants to humble her. Her newborn son appears to the tribe as a monster unfit to live because of his long neck and would have been killed. But Ayla runs away with him and hides in her cave, where she manages to survive a whole winter alone with her baby. When spring comes, both of them are received as members of the tribe and Ayla is granted a special privilege, she becomes "the woman who hunts". Nevertheless on the long run she can't bear living in the Clan of the Cavebear any longer. When her son is old enough, she leaves him with one of the Clan women and sets out all on her own into the steppe, sets out to search for people of her kind, for big fair people with long streight legs, for people who are able to form words with their lips, to reckon with two hands and whose eyes water like hers when they are sad ...

to search for "the others"

J ean Auel after her big success wrote three more books about the fate of Ayla, the "Earth Children"- Cycle. In the second volume "Ayla in the valley of horses" the young woman lives all on her own for quite some time and tames a wild horse and a young lion for companions till in the end she meets Jondalar, a Cro Magnon man who has roamed the steppe all alone on a long trip and who later (in the third book) takes her back with him to his tribe to "the mammuth hunters". With him ,who had often beek selected by the old women to introduce young girls to the "delights of the big mother", she finally experiences tenderness for the first time of her life. Marvellous descriptions of landscapes and sensitive representation of the "Mother -Worship" and of life in the stone ages as it might have been make up the special charm of this grat series of novels.

Other pages on "Strong Women"

but only in German for the present

	Warrior Women - The Amazons
	Women in War - Scarlett O'Hara GWTW

Jean Auel This Earth’s Children Web Ring site is owned by
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This Earth’s Children Web Ring site is owned by Leora Duncan. Want to join The Earth’s Children Web Ring?
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Alle Grafiken auf dieser Seite sind Copyright © 1998 Teri Williams Carnright, der ich vielmals dafür danke!
All Grafiks at this site are Copyright © 1998 Teri Williams Carnright. I am gratefull for having them.

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