Read Online Noah Zarc: Mammoth Trouble (Noah Zarc, #1) by D. Robert Pease - Free Book Online Page A

stone and saw the cave.
    Set back into the rock and rising nearly fifty meters, the cave looked like a big amphitheater. Dozens of people were moving back and forth, preparing the meal. A massive fire burned in a pit toward the front of the cave, and women tended slabs of meat suspended over the flames on long, blackened poles.
    I followed the girl to a bank of snow just off the near side of the cave. She dug a hole and laid her meat inside. I groaned in relief when I slid the meat off my lap into another hole she’d dug.
    “Nice refrigerator,” I said.
    She looked at me and frowned. I realized the Triple-B didn’t know how to translate the word, so it just gave it to her in English.
    “Sorry,” I said. “That’s the name we give a place to keep stuff cold.”
    She laughed. “We don’t have any trouble keeping things cold.”
    I really liked her laugh. I didn’t have any real friends my age, only my brother and sister, Obadiah, and lots and lots of robots.
    “My name’s Noah. What’s yours?”
    “Adina, daughter of none.”
    “Adina’s a nice name. Is None your father’s name?”
    She laughed again. “No, I’m the daughter of no one . My mother died while giving me life, and my father died on a hunt shortly after. So I am a daughter of none.”
    “I’m sorry. That sounds awful!”
    “I was so young, I don’t remember them at all.” She grabbed my hand. “Come on, I’ll show you our cave.”
    I followed her through the crowd. They all stared at me when we passed. Even though my chair must have mystified them, no one said anything. I wasn’t sure I’d be so understanding of something so alien.
    “This is where I sleep.” She showed me a pile of furs, neatly folded next to a worn stone shelf. A few possessions lay on the rock.
    “Here’s a doll my mother made for me before I was born.”
    She held up a small object, vaguely person-shaped, carved from bone and strapped together with strips of leather.
    “And here’s my father’s favorite skinning knife.” She handed me a piece of flint chipped and shaped like a crude knife. “Careful, it’s sharp.”
    I took off my gloves, tucked them in my coat pocket, and touched my finger to the edge.
    “Wow, it really is.” I set the knife down before I cut myself.
    “And here’s where we get water.” She skipped over to a depression at the back of the cave, where a long thin band of gray clay separated the stone of the cave’s roof from the floor. All along it, water seeped and filled up a small pool.
    “Taste it.”
    I dipped my hands into the water. It was cool but not as cold as I’d expected. I drank. It was really good—full of minerals, crisp and refreshing.
    “That’s amazing. I don’t think I’ve ever tasted water that, well… had a taste.”
    She shook her head. “Water without taste? How boring!”
    I looked around the cave. The walls toward the back were covered with crude paintings: men fighting mastodons with spears, people dancing around fires, scores of handprints of every size.
    I turned toward the crowd of people swarming the cave—all working on some project or another. Some sat on the ground, grinding grain in worn depressions in the stone floor with smooth round stones in their hands. Others were mending fur garments with bone needles and some kind of thick, twine-like thread. Kids carried wood for the fire.
    At first glance, I thought the shaggy-haired people didn’t have much of a life. They probably struggled every day just to survive, yet they seemed happy. I watched them for a few minutes, laughing and talking with one another.
    “Look, your father’s coming.” Adina looked back toward the trail. Dad walked with a group of men, helping them carry the mastodon’s great tusks.
    “They honor your father by allowing him to carry the creature’s pride.”
    “Its pride?”
    “They say the longer a mastodon’s tusks, the greater its pride. The king of the mastodons was said to have tusks that curled around