Nomads of Gor by John Norman

a girl from the city itself,
           though the latter are sometimes, for the sport of the young
           men, allowed, as it is said, to run for the city. They are then
           hunted from the back of the kaiila with bole and thongs.
           The winter came fiercely down on the herds some days
           before expected, with its fierce snows and the long winds that
           sometimes have swept twenty-five hundred pasangs across the
           prairies; snow covered the grass, brittle and brown already,
           and the herds were split into a thousand fragments, each
           with its own riders, spreading out over the prairie, pawing
           through the snow, snuffing about? pulling up and chewing at
           the grass, mostly worthless and frozen. The animals began to
           die and the keening of women, crying as though the wagons
           were burning and the Turians upon them, carried over the
           prairies. Thousands of the Wagon Peoples, free and slave, dug
           in the snow to find a handful of grass to feed their animals.
           Wagons had to be abandoned on the prairie, as there was no
           time to train new bask to the harness, and the herds must
           needs keep moving.
           At last, seventeen days after the first snows, the edges of
           the herds began to reach their winter pastures far north of
           Turia, approaching the equator from the south. Here the
           snow was little more than a frost that melted in the after-
           noon sun, and the grass was live and nourishing. Still farther
           north, another hundred pasangs, there was no snow and the
           peoples began to sing and once more dance about their fires
           of bask dung.
           "The bask are safe," Kamchak had said. I had seen strong
           men leap from the back of the kaiila and, on their knees,
           tears in their eyes, kiss the green, living grass. "The bosk are
           safe," they had cried, and the cry had been taken up by the
           women and carried from wagon to wagon, "IT he bosk are
           safer"
           This year, perhaps because it was the Omen Year, the
           Wagon Peoples did not advance farther north than was
           necessary to ensure the welfare of the herds. They did not, in
           fact, even cross the western Cartius, far from cities, which
           they often do, swimming the bask and kaiila, floating the
    wagons, the men often crossing on the backs of the seam,,
    ming bask. It was the Omen Year, and not a year, apparently,
    in which to risk war with far peoples, particularly not those?
    Of cities like Ar, whose warriors had mastered the tarn and'
    might, from the air, have wrought great destruction on the
    herds and wagons
    The Wintering was not unpleasant, although, even so far
    north, the days and nights were often quite chilly; the Wagon
    Peoples and their slaves as well, wore boskhide and furs
    during this time; both male and female, slave or free, wore
    furred boots and trousers, coats and the flopping, ear-flapped
    caps that tied under the chin; in this time there was often no
    way to mark the distinction between the free woman and the
    slave girl, save that the hair of the latter must needs be
    unbound; in some cases, of course, the Turian collar was
    visible, if worn on the outside of the coat, usually under the
    furred collar; the men, too, free and slave, were dressed
    similarly, save that the Kajiri, or he-slaves, wore shackles,
    usually with a run of about a foot of chain.
      On the back of the kaiila, the black lance in hand, bending
    down in the saddle, I raced past a wooden wand fixed in the
    earth, on the top of which was placed a dried tospit, a small,
    wrinkled, yellowish-white peachlike fruit, about the size of a
    plum, which grows on the tospit bush, patches