Yanan lived 20,000 years ago, near Woman Lake in central Siberia. Only thirteen when her story begins, she is passionate and courageous, and her companions – hunters of deer, gatherers of roots and twigs, shamans, babies at the breast – are all, like her, bound to the harsh realities of hunger, cold, death by violence or childbirth, and the cycles of love and jealousy, of marriage and kinship.
As Yanan recounts the terrible adventures of her brief life she departs, from time to time, on spirit journeys that evoke the lives of animals with extraordinary intimacy. The forces in Yanan's spiritual world take the forms of wolf and raven, bear and horse, cave lion and mammoth, since hunting peoples, looking to animals as the source of all life, know that wild beasts live in even closer intimacy with nature than humans can...
