The Animal Wife by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

voices when a meal of meat is near, I knew the people weren't angry with me—or not most of them. Even so, I thought it best to apologize. "I didn't know you were saving this mammoth for some other hunter. I'm sorry, Uncles," I said respectfully.
    "Never mind," said Maral. "After all, you killed meat for us. The women will thank you for that!"
    The women! Already I heard them on the trail above, laughing and talking, making no effort to be quiet. "Wait," Maral told them, lest they rush up to the mammoths too soon. Impatiently the women crowded together near the foot of the trail while Maral threw stone after stone, hitting the cow mammoth in the eyes and ears to see if she flinched. She might have been living—I thought I heard her sigh—but her terrible strength was gone.
    After a while Maral turned his back on her. Seeing that the mammoth was safe, the women hurried to the calf and lost no time in slashing chunks off him. Before the last women were at the carcass, the first were carrying meat back to the cave.
    Their haste surprised me. Where were the manners of these women? I had been the hunter of the mammoth calf! At the Fire River, or at any other place I had ever heard of, people share the meat by how they are related to the hunter—the back legs for his in-laws, the front legs for his kin, the skin for his wife, and so on. Here, Maral was my uncle and also, I supposed, my in-law. Much of the meat should have been given to him. Instead the women were snatching whatever parts they could, without a thought for the owners.
    "Father!" I whispered. "What's this? Why doesn't someone stop them?"
    "Stop whom?" asked Father.
    "Stop the women from grabbing! Don't they care for the hunter? Are they animals that they don't divide meat?"
    Father laughed. "Do we divide water? No—we only divide what is scarce. Our women are always hungry for meat, and here, when there's plenty, they help themselves. Think about it! If we had a bison, we would divide it. But the meat of a bison is small beside the meat lying here. Lions and hyenas will eat their fill and still there will be more. Is one part of a mammoth so different from another that we should bother to divide mammoth meat?"
    "What about the ivory?"
    "Ah! The ivory! Ivory is different. The women won't help themselves to ivory."
    "Who gets it?"
    "Are you a child? How is it that you don't know?" he asked.
    I couldn't answer. As far as I knew, all the men had thrown their spears into the mammoth. Perhaps they didn't know whose spear had killed her; perhaps that was why they all crouched at the carcass in the moonlight, poking the wounds to learn their depth, trying to decide. But whoever's spear had killed, it wasn't mine.
    Father then answered his own question. "You don't know because your Uncle Bala's people won't hunt mammoths." This was true, of course. On the plain near the Fire River, where the riverbanks were low, the mammoths stayed together in large herds and drank fearlessly. Those mammoths chased people just as they chased lions. The lions stayed far away from the mammoths, and so did we. Father was right about us and mammoths.
    He explained, "No one man can kill a mammoth. No one man can own the tusks. But the men whose spears made the big wounds and any man who risked his life in hunting her, they will have shares. Me, for instance—I'll have a share. I'll need it," he added, running his eyes over the moonlit backs of his two women as they bent to their work of butchering. Perhaps he was thinking of his tangled marriage exchange.
    I looked at "the cow's tusks, curved moonlit shapes against the sky. One man standing on another man's shoulders would not be as tall as one of these tusks. If someone else had speared the calf, my spear would have been in my hand when the time had come to kill the mother. I might have thrown it into her and earned a share of the ivory. With ivory of my own, I could give gifts in my own marriage exchange and could even have