She added alfalfa and clover to her diet, and welcomed the starchy, slightly sweet groundnuts, finding the roots by tracing rambling surface vines. Milk-vetch pods were swelling with rows of oval green vegetables in addition to edible roots, and she had no trouble distinguishing between them and their poisonous cousins. When the season for the buds of day lilies passed, the roots were still tender. A few early-ripening varieties of low-crawling currents had begun to turn color, and there were always a few new leaves of pigweed, mustard, or nettles for greens.

Her sling did not lack for targets. Steppe pikes, souslik marmots, great jerboas, varying hares – gray brown now instead of winter white – and an occasional, omnivorous, mouse-hunting giant hamster abounded on the plains. Low-flying willow grouse and ptarmigan were a special treat, though Ayla could never eat ptarmigan without remembering that the fat birds with the feathered feet had always been Creb's favorite.

But those were only the smaller creatures feasting on the plain's summer bounty. She saw herds of deer – reindeer, red deer, and enormous antlered giant deer; compact steppe horses, asses, and onagers, which resembled both; huge bison or a family of saiga antelope occasionally crossed her path. The herd of reddish brown wild cattle, with bulls six feet at the withers, had spring calves nursing at the ample udders of cows. Ayla's mouth watered for the taste of milk-fed veal, but her sling was not an adequate weapon to hunt aurochs. She glimpsed migrating woolly mammoths, saw musk oxen in a phalanx with their young at their backs facing down a pack of wolves, and carefully avoided a family of evil-tempered woolly rhinoceroses. Broud's totem, she recalled, and suitable, too.