who made her pregnant lead to further tensions that keep her always divided from her group. These tensions and conflicts eventually contribute to her death, for she chooses in winter to give birth away from the lodge, virtually unassisted.

The story of Yanan’s physical life is a Stone Age soap opera, but the passions and conflicts represented illuminate the strategies of survival such small hunting and gathering groups must have developed to deal with the harsh conditions of their lives in a northerly climate. Two main forces are at the center of conflicts within the various groups that form during Yanan’s life. The older people carefully plan marriages of alliance to bring skillful hunters and gatherers, powerful shamans, and strong mothers together. Their goal is the continuing survival and well-being of their offspring. Working against this communal interest are the tangled desires, passions, and jealousies of individuals, especially the young.

The goals of binding skillful and fertile adults to the group and enlarging it are a fundamental response to the forces of nature. Group size and strength are their main tools of survival in the absence of certain crucial technologies. Though food is plentiful, the technology for obtaining and preserving it is minimal. A large group can trap and kill a mammoth that could feed the group for months, but much of the meat spoils before it can be used. If their knowledge about pregnancy and childbirth were greater, mothers would live longer and bear more healthy young. If they could spend less time on the trail, fewer children would die. Though certain advances in technology, such as the beginnings of domesticating wolves as dogs, appear in the story, such progress is neither fast nor easy.

The soap-opera events of Yanan’s personal life gain part of their interest from their illumination of the probable social and psychological conditions of Stone Age life. Thomas details the roots of these conditions in the physical circumstances of their life and in a probable human response to those conditions. Part of that response adds a second level of interest to Yanan’s story, the accounts of her life as a spirit servant to her group.

During the three years after her death, Yanan remains nearby with two other “captive” spirits of dead relatives. When the shamans, Teal and Swift, enter trances under the influence of the singing and dancing community, they can speak with these spirits. They request help in killing game. Yanan usually becomes an animal in order to do what the shamans request, but once she has taken another form, she really becomes the animal and forgets who she is until she accomplishes her mission or is recalled by the shaman.

The passages in which Yanan takes the form of various animals are the most vivid and imaginative in the novel. Thomas’ professional background forms the basis for her precise descriptions of animal behavior, and she convincingly imagines the sensations and “feelings” that go with these actions.

These spirit episodes correspond to events in Yanan’s material life. She recounts several episodes in which she is a wolf. After describing her father’s death, she tells how she returned as a wolf to visit his bones. After she and Meri are adopted by a wolf, she tells how being a wolf later helped her understand the wolf’s adoption of human children as a recognition of interdependence and as a cooperative strategy for survival. The children helped protect the wolf’s cub when she hunted, so she fed them from her hunt. Later, Yanan helps the wolf to hunt. She learns similar lessons from mammoths and lions. The ultimate concern of living things is to preserve their species, and mammals do this best by cooperating.

When she is released from her spiritual servitude and comes to the camp of her lineage, she learn that her ancestors actively influence the lives of their offspring and that their purpose is the same, to preserve their lineage through cooperation. Though she has done many rash things in her short life that could anger her ancestors, they seem concerned mainly about one lapse. She failed, through pride, to bring her pregnancy to a successful issue, to deliver the twins alive and to survive herself. Her mother points out that at least she has come out even, leaving one living child to fill the vacancy she left. From her ancestors, she also learns that her people have progressed, that their material security has improved over time.

Thomas has written two nonfiction studies of technologically primitive peoples. The Harmless People (1959) concerns the Bushmen of the Kalahari, among whom she lived with her parents, who studied them in the 1950’s. Warrior Herdsmen (1965) describes the lives of the Dodoths of Uganda. She says that she based the physical and social culture of her Stone Age people on the Bushmen, but that she imagined their personalities and spiritual culture. She also indicates that her interest in and research on the domestication of wolves led to a fictional exploration of the psychological relations between Paleolithic humans and animals.

Reindeer Moon shares with Jean M. Auel’s Earth’s Children series the choice of a feminine point of view, as well as certain features of plot and a similar setting. Thomas focuses on an adolescent girl, showing the difficulties of achieving self-control and discovering the meaning of adult aims. It is a heavy burden for a girl to reach puberty, marry, and begin to bear children, just as she achieves her physical growth, and at the same time to have to begin understanding the reasons behind her group’s actions. From the perspective of this difficult period, combined with her more mature perspective as a spirit person, Yanan is able to survey the lives of women as they might have been.

While their lives are hard, they are also rich and full. Though men tend to dominate, gender roles are not rigid and women command several forms of power. The central emphasis on cooperation for survival helps women who honor bloodlines and kinship ties to exercise significant power and to find fulfillment.

Thomas’ novel lacks the epic scope and the romantic adventure of Auel’s novels. Though Yanan gains experience with wolves that plants the idea of hunting with animals in Swift’s mind, she brings no breakthrough in technology or social arrangements, as when Auel’s Ayla tames a horse or reforms Cro-Magnon attitudes toward the Neanderthals. Though she goes through a period of isolation like Ayla’s in The Valley of Horses (1982), Yanan does not learn, as Ayla does, that she can be self-sufficient, though in her adolescent inexperience, she believes that she has learned this. One result is that the lives of Thomas’ Paleolithic people are more prosaic and more desperate. Thomas’ more naturalistic approach gives the power of authenticity rather than romance to her novel.

Less obvious but equally interesting comparisons can be made between Reindeer Moon and Ursula K. Le Guin’s recent fiction, especially Always Coming Home (1985). Thomas imagines a society based on physical evidence and similar contemporary examples. Le Guin creates a possible future society to see how it might work. Both strategies develop understandings of how human beings can choose to live. Discussing her reasons for writing Reindeer Moon, Thomas recalls purposes embodied in Le Guin’s novel:I was trying to write about a people as only one of the species of animals who live on this earth. I was trying to point out how similar our human condition is to those of many other mammals. . . . I wrote this book for people who like animals, and who appreciate the natural world. I wrote it in the hope of interesting people in conservation. I like to think that if you can save the large animals, you can save the small.