Ayla also tames a wolf, invents the needle and ponders her theory that pregnancies are caused by men. Meanwhile, Ayla and Jondalar get to know the members of the mammoth-hunting earthlodge, most of whom have names that sound the same either forward or backward -Talut, Mamut, Danug, Frebec - and have little in the way of character to distinguish them from each other. Auel coyly refers to Ranec once or twice.
So Ayla and Jondalar drift apart, and Ayla becomes engaged to ''the dark carver,'' as Mrs. In it Ayla and Jondalar yearn for each other but can't express their longing because they are both too proud. This she does by repeating over and over again a scene that one would be more likely to encounter in a teen-age romance magazine. Auel has to keep rushing for her bicycle pump - or whatever they used in the Pleistocene Epoch - to inflate it again. Indeed, the 600-page plot of ''The Mammoth Hunters'' is so flimsy that the air keeps leaking out and poor Mrs. But in ''The Mammoth Hunters'' - as well as I can recall after having finished it more than an hour ago - she mostly kills a mammoth and has some steamy sex with both Jondalar and a dark-skinned ivory carver named Ranec, who also loves her. In the next volume, ''The Valley of the Horses,'' she tamed animals, mastered the slingshot, started fires with flint and iron pyrite, and nursed back to health the handsome Jondalar of the Zelandonii. Auel's first book, ''The Clan of the Cave Bear,'' Ayla survived earthquake, rape and the rejection of the Neanderthals who had raised her. Auel's new novel, ''The Mammoth Hunters,'' the third installment in the author's phenomenally successful ''Earth's Children'' series starring Ayla, the super cave woman of the ice age.Īt the very least, the thrill of the story is wearing a little thin.
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