Who was Longtusk?
I’ll tell you who Longtusk was (Silverhair said to her daughter, Icebones). He was the greatest hero of the Cycle — and the only Bull hero in all the Cycle’s long history.
My Matriarch used to say I had a little of Longtusk’s spirit in me too. And I don’t know why you think that’s so funny, Icebones. I wasn’t always so old and frail as this…
Tell you a story? Another?
Very well. I’ll tell you how Longtusk defeated Teeth-of-Death, the she-cat.
This is a story of long ago, when the world was new and rich and cold, and there were no Lost, anywhere. The mammoths were the strongest and wisest of all the animals, so much so that the others grew to rely on their strength, and the way they remade the landscape, everywhere they went.
The mammoths were the Matriarchs of the world. Everybody agreed.
Well, almost everybody.
Teeth-of-Death was a she-cat. In fact she was the ruler of the saber-tooth cats, for she was the strongest and most agile, her teeth and claws the longest and sharpest, her mind the most inventive, her cruelty the most relentless.
Every animal feared the saber-tooth cats. Every animal feared Teeth-of-Death. Every animal save the mammoths.
The mammoths were too big, too powerful. Oh, the cats could bring down a mammoth from time to time, but only the very young or the very old or the very sick. It was not an honorable business. In fact, as they glided back and forth on their great migrations, the mammoths barely noticed the cats even existed.
This, of course, drove Teeth-of-Death insane with jealousy and hurt pride.
Now, as you know, when he was a young Bull Longtusk left his Clan and traveled far and wide: from north to south, even across the seas and the lakes and the ice. Everywhere he went he gained in wisdom and stature; everybody he met was impressed by his bearing and grace; and he had adventures which have never been forgotten.
And it was this Longtusk, Longtusk the nomad, who happened upon Teeth-of-Death.
The great cat confronted Longtusk. She said, "This cannot go on."
Longtusk had been feeding on a rich stand of willow. He looked down his trunk to see what was making so much noise, and there was the spitting, agitated cat. He asked reasonably, "What can’t go on?"
"Either you rule the Earth, or I do. Not both."
"Don’t you think there are more important things to worry about than that?"
"No," Teeth-of-Death snapped. "Ruling is the most important thing. More important than life."
"Nonsense," said Longtusk. "If it makes you happy, I hereby pronounce you the world’s most fearsome animal. There. Now we don’t have to argue, do we?" And he turned to walk away. For, you see, he was wise as well as brave, and he knew that an unnecessary fight should not be fought.
But that would not do for the she-cat.
With an agile bound she ran before Longtusk and confronted him. "No," she said. "I cannot live while I know in my heart that you do not respect me."
She was surely an intimidating sight: an immense cat with jaws spread wide, sharp teeth gaping, claws that with a single swipe could disembowel even an adult Bull mammoth — if she ever got the chance.
"You are very foolish," said Longtusk. But he faced her warily, for he knew he must meet her challenge.
And so it began. When news of the contest spread, all the animals of the world gathered around, pushing and staring.
Teeth-of-Death attacked Longtusk three times.
The first time she leaped at his face, reaching for his eyes and trunk. But Longtusk simply raised his tusks and pushed her away.
For her second attack Teeth-of-Death clambered up a spruce tree. She leaped down onto Longtusk’s back and tried to use her great saber teeth to gouge into his flesh. He could not reach her with his trunk to dislodge her. But she could not bite through his fur and skin. After a time he simply walked beneath a low tree and let its branches scrape the cat from his back, and that was that.
For her third attack Teeth-of-Death hid in a bank of snow. She had decided that when Longtusk came close enough she would leap at him again, trying to reach the soft flesh of his belly or trunk. It was a clever strategy and might have succeeded, even against a hero so strong as Longtusk, for cats are adept at such deception. But, obsessed with her ambition, Teeth-of-Death forced herself to lie still in her snowdrift for several days, waiting for her opportunity.
And when Longtusk at last came by Teeth-of-Death was cold, half-starved, exhausted.
She sprang too early, made too much noise. To fend her off, Longtusk simply swept his great tusks and let their tips gouge furrows in Teeth-of-Death’s beautiful golden coat.
They faced each other, Longtusk barely scratched, Teeth-of-Death bleeding and exhausted.
Longtusk said, "Let us reach an agreement."
Teeth-of-Death said warily, licking her wounds, "No agreement is possible."
For answer, he went to the snowdrift where she had been hiding. He scraped away the snow and the hard ice that lay beneath, revealing bare earth. Then he dug deeper, and he exposed another layer of ice, hidden beneath the dirt.
"The ice comes and goes in great waves," he said. "This old ice was covered with dirt before it had time to melt. Now the ice has come again and covered over the land. So here we have two layers of ice in the same place, one on top of each other."
The cat hissed, "What relevance has this?"
"Here is my suggestion," he said. "We will share the world, just as these ice layers share the same patch of ground. But, just like these ice layers, we will not touch each other.
"You cats eat the meat of animals. We mammoths do not hunt; we do not covet your prey—"
"Ah," said the cat. "And you eat the plants and grass and trees, which we do not desire. Very well. We will share the world, as you suggest." But her eyes narrowed.
And so it was concluded.
But when Longtusk was turning to go, the cat mocked him. "I have tricked you," she said. "I will eat the finest meat. You, however, must eat dirt and scrub. What kind of bargain is that? You are a fool, Longtusk."
And Longtusk reflected.
The she-cat thought she had won: and in a way she had. She would become the steppe’s ruling animal, its top predator. But Longtusk knew that though its food may be richer, a predator needs many prey to survive. Even a mighty herd of deer could support only a few cats, and the numbers of the she-cat’s cubs would always be limited.
But the steppe was full of dirt and scrub, as she had called it. And Longtusk knew that thanks to his bargain it was his calves, the mammoths, who would grow in number until they filled the steppe, even to the point where they shaped it for their needs.
"Yes," he said gently. "I am a fool." And he turned and walked away.
…I know what you are thinking, Icebones. Is the story true? Are any of the stories of Longtusk true? It seems impossible that one mammoth could cram so many acts of impossible heroism and matchless wisdom into one brief lifetime.
Well, perhaps some of the stories have become a little embellished with time. They are after all stories.
But I know this. Longtusk was real. Longtusk encountered great danger — and in the end, Longtusk sacrificed his life to save his Clan.
He was the greatest hero of them all.
The greatest hero of them all was twelve years old, and he was in trouble with his mother. Again.
Yellow plain, blue sky; it was a fine autumn afternoon, here on the great steppe of Beringia. The landscape was huge, flat, elemental, an ocean of pale grass mirrored by an empty sky, crossed by immense herds of herbivores and the carnivores that preyed on them. Longtusk heard the hiss of the endless winds through the grass and sedge, the murmur of a river some way to the west — and, under it all, the unending grind and crack of the great ice sheets that spanned the continent to the north.
And mammoths swept over the land like clouds.
Loose wool hung around them, catching the low sunlight. He heard the trumpeting and clash of tusks of bristling, arguing bachelors, and the rumbles of the great Matriarchs — complex songs with deep harmonic structure, much of it inaudible to human ears — as they solemnly debated the state of the world.
This was the season’s last gathering of the Clan, this great assemblage of Families, before the mammoths dispersed to the winter pastures of the north.
And Longtusk was angry, aggrieved, ignored. He worked the ground as he walked, tearing up grass, herbs and sedge with his trunk and pushing them into his mouth between the flat grinding surfaces of his teeth.
He’d gotten into a fight with his sister, Splayfoot, over a particularly juicy dwarf willow he’d found. Just as he had prized the branches from the ground and had begun to strip them of their succulent leaves, the calf had come bustling over to him and had tried to push him away so she could get at the willow herself. His willow.
In response to Splayfoot’s pitiful trumpeting, his mother had come across: Milkbreath, her belly already swollen with next year’s calf. And of course she’d taken Splayfoot’s side.
"Don’t be so greedy, Longtusk! She’s a growing calf. Go find your own willow. You ought to help her, not bully her…"
And so on. It had done Longtusk no good at all to point out, perfectly reasonably, that as he had found the little tree it was in fact his willow and the one in the wrong here was Splayfoot, not him. His mother had just pushed him away with a brush of her mighty flank.
The rest of the Family had been there, watching: even Skyhump the Matriarch, his own great-grandmother, head of the Family, surrounded by her daughters and granddaughters with their calves squirming for milk and warmth and comfort. Skyhump had looked stately and magnificent, great curtains of black-brown hair sweeping down from the pronounced hump on her back that had given the Matriarch her name. She had rumbled something to the Cows around her, and they had raised their trunks in amusement.
They had been mocking him. Him, Longtusk!
At twelve years old, though he still had much growing to do, Longtusk was already as tall as all but the oldest of the Cows in his Family. And his tusks were the envy of many an adult Bull — well, they would be if he ever got to meet any — great sweeping spirals of ivory that curved around before him until they almost met, a massive, tangible weight that pulled at his head.
He was Longtusk. He would live forever, and he was destined to become a hero as great as any in the Cycle, the greatest hero of them all. He was sure of it. Look at his mighty tusks, the tusks of a warrior! And he raised them now in mock challenge, even though there was no one here to see.
Couldn’t those foolish Cows understand? It was just unendurable.
But now he heard his mother calling for him. Grumbling, growling, he made his way back to her.
The Cows had clustered around Skyhump, their Matriarch, and were walking northward in a loose, slow cluster. They grazed steppe grass as they walked, for mammoths must feed for most of the day, and they left behind compact trails of dung.
The Clan stretched around him as far as the eye could see, right across the landscape to east and west, a wave of muscle and fat and deep brown hair patiently washing northward. Skyhump’s small Family of little more than twenty individuals — Cows with their calves and a few young males — was linked to the greater Clan by the kinship of sisters and daughters and female cousins. Where they passed, the mammoths cut swathes through the tall green-gold grass, and the ground shuddered with their footsteps.
Longtusk felt a brief surge of pride and affection. This was his Clan, and it was, after all, a magnificent thing to be part of it — to be a mammoth.
But now here was his mother, shadowed by that pest Splayfoot, and his sense of belonging dissipated.
Milkbreath slapped his rump with her trunk, as if he were still a calf himself. "Where have you been?… Never mind. Can’t you see we’re getting separated from the Family? We have to hear what she has to say."
"Who? Skyhump?"
Milkbreath snorted. "No. Pinkface. The Matriarch of Matriarchs. Don’t you know anything?… Never mind. Come on!"
So Longtusk hurried after his mother.
They joined a cluster of Cows, tall and old: Matriarchs all, slow and stately in their years and wisdom. He was much too short to see past them.
But his mother was entranced. "Look," she said softly. "There she is. They say she is a direct descendant of the great Kilukpuk. They say she was burned in a great blaze made by the Fireheads, and she was the only one of her Family to survive…"
He could still see nothing. But when he shut out the noise — the squeal of calves, the constant background thunder of mammoths walking, eating, defecating — he could hear the Matriarchs rumbling and stamping at the ground, debating, sharing information that might sustain a few more lives through the coming winter.
Longtusk spoke quietly, with soft pipings of his trunk. "What are they saying?"
"They’re talking about the changes." His mother’s small ears stuck out of her hair as she strained to listen.
"What changes?"
"You’re too young to understand," she snapped irritably.
"Tell me."
She growled, "To the north the ice is shrinking back. And to the south the forests are spreading, more trees every year."
He had heard this before. "We can’t live in the forests—"
"Not only that, there’s talk that the Fireheads aren’t too far to the south. And where the Fireheads go the Lost can’t be far behind…"
Fireheads and Lost. Monsters of legend. Longtusk felt cold, as if he had drunk too much ice water.
…But now, without warning, the Matriarchs shifted their positions, like clouds exposing the sun. And he saw the Matriarch of Matriarchs.
She was short, her tusks long and smooth. And her face was a grotesque mask: pink and naked like a baby bird’s wing, free of all but a few wisps of hair.
Longtusk burst out, "She’s too young!"
The Matriarchs stirred, like icebergs touched by wind.
Milkbreath grabbed his trunk, angry and embarrassed. "Wisdom comes to all of us with age. But some are born wise. Wouldn’t you expect that the Matriarch of Matriarchs, the wisest of all, would be special? Wouldn’t you?"
"I don’t know…"
"You’re so much trouble to me, Longtusk! Always wandering off or getting under my feet or fighting with your sister or embarrassing me — sometimes I wish you were still in my belly, like this little one." She stroked the heavy bulge under her belly fur.
Longtusk fumed silently.
Splayfoot came galloping up to him. His sister was a knot of fat and orange fur, with a trunk like a worm and tusks like lemming bones, and her face was rounded and smoothed-out, as if unfinished. This was her first summer, and her new-born coat of coarse underfur and light brown overfur was being replaced by thicker and longer fur — though it would be her second year before her coarse guard hairs began to appear. "You’re so much trouble, Longtusk," she squeaked up at him gleefully. She started butting his legs with her little domed forehead. "I’ll be Matriarch and you won’t. Then I’ll tell you what to do!"
He rumbled and raised his huge tusks over her head, meaning to frighten her.
The calf squealed and ran to her mother, who tucked Splayfoot under her belly. "Will you leave this little one alone?"
"It wasn’t my fault!" Longtusk protested. "She started it…"
But Milkbreath had turned away. Splayfoot burrowed at her mother’s chest, seeking her dugs. But Milkbreath had little milk. So, with a deep belch, she regurgitated grass and with gentle kisses fed the warm, pulped stuff to her daughter.
As she fed, Splayfoot peered out from under a fringe of fur, mocking him silently.
It wasn’t so long since Milkbreath had fed him that way, murmuring about how important it was for him to eat the food that had been inside his mother’s belly, for it contained marvelous substances that would help him digest. It hardly seemed any time at all.
And now look at him: pushed away, snapped at, ignored.
He stomped away, not looking back, not caring which way he went.
He came to a track.
It was a strip of bare brown ground a little wider than his own body. Where the muddy ground was firm he could see the round print left by the tough, cracked skin of a mammoth’s sole, a spidery, distinctive map.
He turned and followed the trail, curious to find where it might lead.
To human eyes the mammoth steppe would have looked featureless. It was an immense plain that swept over the north of Eurasia, across the land bridge of Beringia and into North America. But to a mammoth it was as crowded with landmarks as any human city: rubbing trees, wallows, rich feeding areas, salt licks, water holes. And these key sites were linked by trails worn by centuries of mammoth footsteps, trails embedded deep in the mind of every adult Bull and Cow, patiently taught to the calves of each new generation.
Indeed, the land itself was shaped by the mammoths, who tore out trees and trampled the ground where they passed. Other creatures lived in the shadow of the mammoths: depending on the trails they made, using the water sources they opened up with their intelligence and strength. Even the plants, in their mindless way, relied on the scattering of their seeds over great ranges in mammoth dung. Without mammoths, the steppe would not have persisted.
Longtusk stomped through his world, still angry, obsessed. But he thought over the Matriarchs’ conversation: Fireheads and Lost and huge global changes…
He had never seen the Fireheads himself, but he’d met adults who claimed they had. The Fireheads — said to be ferocious predators, creatures of sweeping, incomprehensible danger — seemed real enough, and every young mammoth was taught at a very early age that the only response to a Firehead was to flee.
But the Lost were something else: figures of legend, a deep terror embedded at the heart of the Cycle — the nemesis of the mammoths.
It all seemed unlikely to Longtusk. The mammoths were spread in enormous herds right around the world, and even the great cats feared them. What could possibly destroy them?
And besides, his curiosity was pricked.
Why were all these changes happening now? How quickly would they happen? And why did the world have to become a harder place when he was alive? Why couldn’t he have lived long ago, in a time of calm and plenty?
And, most important of all, why didn’t anybody take him seriously?
Oh, he knew that there came a time when every Bull became restless with his Family; sooner or later all Bulls leave to seek out the company of other males in the bachelor herds, to learn to fight and strut and compete. But it didn’t do him any good, here and now, to know that; and it drove him crazy when all this was patiently explained to him by some smug, pitying aunt or cousin.
After an unmeasured time he paused and looked back. Preoccupied, he hadn’t been paying much attention where he walked; now he found he’d come so far he couldn’t see the mammoths any more.
He heard a thin howl, perhaps of a wolf. He suffered a heartbeat of panic, which he sternly suppressed.
So he had left them behind. What of it? He was a full-grown Bull — nearly — and he could look out for himself. Perhaps this was his time to leave his Family — to begin the serious business of life.
Anyhow — he told himself — he was pretty sure he could find his way back if he needed to.
With a renewed sense of purpose — and with those twinges of fear firmly pushed to the back of his mind — he set off once more.
He came to a river bank.
Mammoths had been here recently. The muddy ground close to the river’s edge was bare of life, pitted by footprint craters, and the trees were sparse and uniformly damaged, branches smashed, trunks splintered and pushed over.
The water was cold. This was probably a run-off stream, coming from a melting glacier to the north. He sucked up a trunkful of water and held it long enough to take off its first chill. Then he raised his trunk and let the water trickle into his mouth.
He pushed farther along the cold mud of the bank. It wasn’t easy going. The river had cut itself a shallow valley which offered some protection from the incessant steppe winds. As a result spruce trees grew unusually dense and tall here, and their branches clutched at him as he passed, so that he left behind clumps of ginger hair.
Then, through the trees, he glimpsed a gleam of tusks, a curling trunk, an unmistakable profile.
It was another mammoth: a massive Bull, come here to drink as he had.
Longtusk worked his way farther along the bank.
The Bull, unfamiliar to Longtusk, eyed him with a vague, languid curiosity. He would have towered over any human observer, as much as three meters tall at his shoulder.
And he towered over Longtusk.
"My name," the Bull rumbled, "is Rockheart."
"I’m Longtusk," he replied nervously. "And I—"
But the Bull had already turned away, his trunk hosing up prodigious volumes of water.
The Bull’s high, domed head was large, a lever for his powerful jaw and a support for the great trunk that snaked down before him. He had a short but distinct neck, a cylinder of muscle supporting that massive head. His shoulders were humped by a mound of fat, and his back sloped sharply down toward the pelvis at the base of his spine. His tusks curled before him, great spirals of ivory chipped and scuffed from a lifetime of digging and fighting.
And his body, muscular, stocky, round, was coated by hair: great lengths of it, dark orange and brown, that hung like a skirt from his belly, down over his legs to the horny nails on his swollen pads of feet, and even in long beard-like fringes from his chin and trunk. His tail, raised slightly, was short, but more hair made it a long, supple insect whisk. His ears were small, tucked back close to his head, all but lost in the great mass of hair there.
Suddenly the ground shuddered under Longtusk’s feet, and the river water trembled.
More mammoths, a crowd of them, came spilling down the bank, pushing and jostling, clumsy giants. They were all about the same size, Longtusk saw: no Cows, no infants here.
It was a bachelor herd.
Longtusk was thrilled. He had rarely been this close to full-grown Bulls. The Bulls kept to their own herds, away from the Cow-dominated Families of mothers and sisters and calves; Longtusk had seen them only in the distance, sweeping by, powerful, independent, and he had longed to run with them.
And now, perhaps, he would.
The Bulls spread out along the river bank. Before passing on toward the water, one or two regarded Longtusk: with mild curiosity over his outside tusks, or blank indifference, or amused contempt.
Longtusk followed, avid.
For half a day, as the sun climbed into the sky, the Bulls moved on along the river bank, jostling, jousting, drinking and eating.
Their walk, heavy and liquid, was oddly graceful. Their feet were pads that rested easily on the ground, swelling visibly with each step. Their trunks, heavy ropes dangling from the front of their faces, pulled the mammoths’ heads from side to side as they swayed. Even as they drank they fed, almost continuously. They pulled at branches of the surrounding trees with their trunks, hauling off great leaf-coated stems with hissing rustles, and crammed the foliage into their small mouths.
The soughing of their footsteps was punctuated by deep breaths, the gurgle of immense stomachs, and subterranean rumbles from the sound organs of their heads. A human observer would have made little of these deep, angry noises. But Longtusk found it very easy to make out what these Bulls were saying to each other.
"…You are in my way. Move aside."
"I was here in this place first. You move aside."
"…This water is too cold. It lies heavy in my belly."
"That is because you are old and weak. I, however, am young and strong, and I find the water pleasantly cool."
"My tusks are not yet so old and feeble they could not crack your skull like a skua egg, calf."
"Perhaps you should demonstrate how that could be done, old one…"
Longtusk, following the great Bull Rockheart, was tolerated — as long as he didn’t get in anybody’s way — for he was, for now, too small to be a serious competitor. His tusks were, despite his youth, larger than many of the adults — but they only made him feel self-conscious, as if somehow he wasn’t entitled to such magnificent weapons. He walked along with his head dipped, his tusks close to the ground.
Being with the Bulls was not like being with his Family.
Even the language was different. The Cows in the Families used more than twenty different kinds of rumble, a basic vocabulary from which they constructed their extremely complex communications. The Bulls only had four rumbles! — and those were to do with mockery, challenge and boasting.
His Family had been protective, nurturing — a safe place to be. But the bachelor herds were looser coalitions of Bulls, more interested in contest: verbal challenges, head butts, tusk clashes. The Bulls were constantly testing each other, exploring each other’s strength and weight and determination, establishing a hierarchy of dominance.
This mattered, for it was the dominant Bulls who mated the Cows in oestrus.
Right now, Longtusk was at the very bottom of this hierarchy. But one day he would, of course, climb higher — why, to the very top…
"You have stepped on the hair of my feet."
Longtusk looked up at a wall of flesh, eyes like tar pits, tusks that swept over his head.
He had offended Rockheart.
The great Bull’s guard hairs — dangling from his belly and trunk, long and lustrous — rippled like water, trapping the light. But loose underfur, working its way out through the layers of his guard hair in tatters around his flanks, made him look primordial, wild and unfinished.
Longtusk found himself trembling. He knew he should back down. But some of the other males nearby were watching with a lofty curiosity, and he was reminded sharply of how the Matriarch had watched his humiliation by his infant sister earlier.
If he had no place in the Family, he must find a place here. His Family had taught him how to live as a mammoth; now he must learn to be a Bull. And this was where it would begin.
So he stood his ground.
"Perhaps you have trouble understanding," Rockheart said with an ominous mildness. "You see, this is where I take my water."
"It is not your river alone," Longtusk said at last. He raised his head, and his tusks, long and proud, waved in the face of the great Bull.
Unfortunately one curling tusk caught in a tree root. Longtusk’s head was pulled sideways, making him stagger.
There was a subterranean murmur of amusement.
Rockheart simply stood his ground, unmoving, unblinking, like something which had grown out of this river bank. He said coldly, "I admire your tusks. But you are a calf. You lack prowess in their use."
Longtusk gathered his courage. He raised his tusks again. They were indeed long, but they were like saplings against Rockheart’s stained pillars of ivory. "Perhaps you would care to join me in combat, so that you may show me exactly where my deficiencies lie."
And he dragged his head sideways so that his tusks clattered against Rockheart’s. He felt a painful jar work its way up to his skull and neck, and the base of his tusks, where they were embedded in his face, ached violently.
Rockheart had not so much as flinched.
Longtusk raised his tusks for another strike.
With a speed that belied his bulk Rockheart stepped sideways, lowered his head and rammed it into Longtusk’s midriff.
Longtusk staggered into icy mud, slipped and fell sprawling into the water.
He struggled to his feet. The hairs of his belly and trunk dangled under him in cold clinging masses.
The Bulls on the river bank were watching him, tusks raised, sniggering.
Rockheart took a last trunkful of water, sprayed it languidly over his back, and turned away. His massive feet left giant craters in the sticky mud as he walked off, utterly ignoring Longtusk and his struggles.
And now Longtusk heard a familiar, remote trumpeting… "Longtusk! Longtusk! Come here right now!…"
"There’s your mother calling you," brayed a young Bull. "Go back to her teat, little one. This is no place for you."
Longtusk, head averted, humiliated, stomped out of the river and through the stand of trees. Where he walked he left a trail of mud and drips of water.
That was the end of Longtusk’s first encounter with a bachelor herd.
He could not know it, but it would be a long time before he would see one of his own kind again.
Not caring which way he went, Longtusk lumbered alone over the steppe, head down, ripping at the grass and herbs and grinding their roots with angry twists of his jaw.
He couldn’t go back to the herd. And he wasn’t going back to his Family. Not after all that had happened today. Not after this.
He didn’t need his Family — or the Bulls who had taunted him. He was Longtusk! The greatest hero in the world!
Why couldn’t anybody see that?
He walked on, faster and farther, so wrapped up in his troubles he didn’t even notice the smoke until his eyes began to hurt.
Startled, he looked up, blinking. Water was streaking down the hairs of his face.
Smoke billowed, acrid and dark; somewhere nearby the dry grass was burning.
Every instinct told him to flee, to get away from the blaze. But which way?
If she were with him, his mother would know what to do. Even a brutal Bull like Rockheart would guide him, for it was the way of mammoths to train and protect their young.
But they weren’t here.
Now, through the smoke, he saw running creatures, silhouetted against the glow: thin, lithe, upright. They looked a little like cats. But they ran upright, as no cat did. And they seemed to carry things in their front paws. They darted back and forth, mysterious, purposeful.
Perhaps they weren’t real. Perhaps they were signs of his fear.
He felt panic rise in his chest, threatening to choke him.
He turned and faced into the smoke. He thought he could see a glow there, yellow and crimson. It was the fire itself, following the bank of smoke it created, both of them driven by the wind from the south.
Then he should run to the north, away from the fire. That must be the way the other mammoths were fleeing.
But fire — sparked by lightning strikes and driven by the incessant winds — could race across the dry land. Steppe plants grew only shallowly, and were easily and quickly consumed. Mammoths were strong, stocky, round as boulders: built for endurance, not for speed. He knew he could never outrun a steppe firestorm.
What, then?
Through his fear, he felt a pang of indignation. Was he doomed to die here, alone, in a world turned to gray and black by smoke? — he, Longtusk, the center of the universe, the most important mammoth who ever lived?
Well, if he wanted to live, he couldn’t wait around for somebody else to tell him what to do. Think, Longtusk!
The smoke seemed to clear a little. Above him, between scudding billows of smoke, the sun showed a spectral, attenuated disc.
He looked down at his feet and found he was standing in a patch of muddy ground, bare of grass and other vegetation. It was a drying river bed, the mud cut by twisted, braided channels. There was nothing to burn here; that must be why the smoke was sparse.
He looked along the line of the river. It ran almost directly south. No grass grew on this sticky, clinging mud — and where the dry driver snaked off into the smoke, the glow of the fire seemed reduced, for there was nothing to burn on this mud.
If he walked that way, southward into the face of the smoke, he would be walking toward the fire — but along a channel where the fire could not reach. Soon, surely, he would get through the smoke and the fire, and reach the cleaner air beyond.
He quailed from the idea. It went against every instinct he had — to walk into a blazing fire! But if it was the right thing to do, he must overcome his fear.
He raised his trunk at the fire and trumpeted his defiance. And, dropping his head, he began to march stolidly south.
The smoke billowed directly into his face, laced with steppe dust: hot grit that peppered his eyes and scraped in his chest. And now the fire’s crackling, rushing noise rose to a roar. He felt he would go mad with fear. But he bent his head and, doggedly, one step at a time, he continued, into the teeth of the blaze.
At last the fire roared around him, and the flames leaped, dazzling white, as they consumed the thin steppe vegetation. Only a few paces away from him grass and low trees were crackling, blackening. Tufts of burning grass and bark scraps fluttered through the air. Some of them stuck to his fur, making it smolder, and he batted them away with his trunk or his tail.
But he had been right. The fire could not reach across the mud of this river bed, and so it could not reach him.
And now there was a change. The sound of the fire seemed diminished, and he found he was breathing a little easier. Blinking, he forced open his eyes and looked down.
He was still standing in his river bed. Its surface had been dried out and cracked by the ferocious heat. To either side the ground was lifeless, marked by the smoldering stumps of ground-covering trees and the blackened remnants of grass and sedge. Near one tree he saw the scorched corpse of some small animal, perhaps a lemming, its small white bones protruding.
The stink of smoke and ash was overwhelming. The steppe, as far as he could see, had turned to a plain of scorched cinders. Smoke still curled overhead… but it was a thinning gray layer which no longer covered the sinking sun.
And there was no fire.
He felt a surge of elation. He had done it! Alone, he had worked out how to survive, and had stuck to his resolve in the face of overwhelming danger. Let Rockheart see him now! — for he, Longtusk, alone, had today faced down and beaten a much more savage and ruthless enemy than any Bull mammoth.
…Alone. The word came back to haunt him, like the distant cry of a ptarmigan, and his elation evaporated.
He turned and faced northward. The fire was a wall across the steppe, from the eastern horizon to the west. Smoke billowed up before it in huge towering heaps, shaped by the wind. It was an awesome sight, and it cut the world in two.
He hammered at the ground with his feet, his stamps calling to the mammoths, his Family. But there was no reply, no rocky echo through the Earth. Of course not; the noise of the fire would overwhelm everything else, and before it all the mammoths must be fleeing — even the greatest of them all, the Matriarch of Matriarchs, fleeing north, even farther from Longtusk.
He would have no chance to gloat of his bravery to Rockheart, or his mother, or anyone else. For everything he knew — the Family, the Clan, the bachelor herd, everything — lay on the other side of that wall of fire.
He cried out, a mournful trumpet of desolation and loneliness.
He looked down at himself. He was a sorry sight, his fur laden with mud and heavily charred. And he was hungry and thirsty — in fact he had no clear memory of the last time he’d eaten.
The sun was dipping, reddening. Night would soon be here.
The last of his elation disappeared. He had thought he had won his battle by defeating the fire. But it seemed the battle was only just begun.
There was only one way for him to go: south, away from the fire. He lowered his head and began to walk.
As he marched into deepening darkness, he tried to feed, as mammoths must. But the scorched grass and sage crumbled at his touch.
His thirst was stronger than his hunger, in fact, but he found no free-standing water. He scraped hopefully at the ground with his tusks and feet. But only a little way down, the ground grew hard and cold. This was the permafrost, the deep layer of frozen soil which never thawed, even at the height of summer. He dug his trunk into the soil and sucked hopefully, but there were only drops of moisture to be had, trapped above the ice layer.
He came across a willow. It hugged the ground, low and flat, not rising higher than his knees. He prized it up with his tusks, stripped off its bark and munched the thin, dry stuff, seeking to assuage his thirst.
He knew there were places scattered around the steppe where free-standing water lay close to the surface, even in the depths of winter, and the mammoths could crack through snow and ice to reach it. The adults knew where to find such wells of life, using a deep knowledge of the land passed on from the generations before them — but Longtusk had only begun learning about the land. Now, scraping at the mud, adrift in this blackened landscape where even the trails had been scorched out of existence, he was learning how truly helpless he was.
He walked farther. The trees grew more thickly, short, ancient willows and birches. Soon there were so many of them they covered the ground with a thick matting of branches. He was walking, in fact, on top of a forest. This dry, cold, wind-blasted land was not a place where trees could grow tall.
…He heard a hiss, deep and sibilant, somewhere behind him.
Mammoths’ necks are short and inflexible, and Longtusk had to turn all the way around — slowly, clumsily, heart hammering.
The cat gazed at him, utterly still, silent.
For an instant he felt overwhelmed, his mind reeling, his courage fragmenting. He was almost irritated. The bachelor herd, the smoke, the fire — wasn’t that enough? Must he face this new peril as well?
But he knew he was in deadly danger, and he forced himself to alertness.
The cat was a female, he saw. She seemed huge to Longtusk: not much less than half his own height, rippling muscle under a smooth sheen of brown fur. Her ears were small and forward-pointed, her nose small and black.
And her two saber teeth swept down from her mouth, stained by something dark and crusted. Blood, perhaps. She must already have made a kill, of some prey animal disoriented by the fire. He could smell rotten meat on her breath.
Perhaps she had a family to feed, a brood of brawling sharp-toothed cubs. Cubs hungry for mammoth meat.
The sun, reddened by the smoky air, touched the horizon. Shadows fled across the scorched plains, and ruddy light gleamed deep in the carnivore’s eye sockets.
And those eyes were fixed on Longtusk.
He raised his trunk and trumpeted. The sound rolled across the anechoic plains, purposeless.
The cat spread her claws, long and bright, and they sunk into the ground. Her muscles tensed in great sheets.
Fear clamored in his mind, threatening to drown out thought.
He tried to recall fragments of mammoth lore: that few mammoths are targeted by predators; that Bulls, not yet fully grown and yet driven to depart the Family — Bulls like himself — are the most vulnerable to predators like this cat; that the female cat, driven to provide for her family, is deadlier than the male.
But through all this one stark thought rattled around his awareness: that it is at sunset that the predators hunt.
She sprang. It was very sudden. Spitting, she soared through the air, a blur of muscle heading straight for his face, claws extended.
Blindly he raised his tusks.
She was knocked sideways, spitting and scratching.
…He was bleeding, he realized. There was a series of raked gashes across the front of his trunk, where a paw-swipe had caught him.
Trumpeting, he turned again.
She was crouched low, eyes on him once more, taking step after deliberate step toward him.
The mammoths evolved on open plains, where there is little cover. Under threat from a predator they adopt a ring formation, with the calves and the weak huddled at the center.
But now Longtusk was on his own, with nobody to cover his back, utterly exposed.
He broke away and fled. He couldn’t help it.
She will try to slash your trunk. Avoid this. It will cause you agonizing pain and a great loss of blood. Use your tusks. Bring them down on her head to stun her, or stab her with the sharp tips. If she gets in closer, wrap your trunk around her and squeeze until her back breaks. If she gets beneath you, step on her and crush her skull. Never forget she is afraid too: you are bigger and stronger than her, and she knows it…
It was a comforting theory, and he recalled how he had played with other calves, mimicking attacks and defenses, swiping miniature tusks back and forth. But the reality, of this spitting, stinking, single-minded cat, was very different.
And now he felt a new sharp warmth on his right hind leg. She had gouged him again. The damage was superficial, but he could feel the blood pumping out of him, weakening him. He kept running, but now he was limping.
It had been a deliberate cut. The cat was trying to shorten the chase.
He ran toward a stand of tall trees, sheltered by an outcrop of rock, their branches green-black in the fading light. Perhaps there would be cover here. He ducked into the shadow of the trees, turned -
Suddenly there was a weight on his back, a mass of spitting, squalling fur, utterly unexpected, and then stabs of sharp pain all across his back: long claws digging through his fur and into his flesh.
He trumpeted in panic. He raised his trunk and tusks, but his neck was short and he could never reach so far. The trees, he realized. Their black branches loomed above him. She must have climbed into the branches and dropped down onto him.
On the steppe most trees hugged the ground. Longtusk wasn’t used to trees looming over him. He hadn’t even considered the possibility that the cat might do such a thing.
He felt, through sharpening stabs of pain, that she was digging her claws deeper into him, and her weight shifted. He knew what she was intending; he had seen the cats at work. She was opening her gaping mouth and raising her down-pointing saber teeth. In a moment she would use them to stab down into his helpless flesh, laying open his spine, or even his skull.
Then the pain would start.
She would not kill him quickly, he knew, for that was not the way of the cats; he would lie in blood and black agony, longing for a release to the aurora, while this cat and her foul cubs tore at his flesh -
He raised his trunk and bellowed defiance. No! He had beaten the fire. He would not be destroyed, in this dismal place, by a carrion-breathed cub of Aglu!
He charged straight at the trees. One branch, black and thick, cut across the sky, only a little above his head height.
As the branch struck her the cat yowled. The pain in his back deepened — her claws raked through his flesh as she tried to cling to him — but suddenly the pain’s sharpness eased, and the weight of the cat was gone from his shoulders. Breathing hard, the wounds on his back cold, he whirled around, tusks raised, trunk tucked under his chin for protection.
The cat had vanished.
He trumpeted. His eyes, never strong, helped him little in this fading light. And he could smell nothing — nothing but the metallic stink of his own crusting blood. Probably she had gone downwind of him.
How could she have moved so quickly, so silently? She was, he realized ruefully, much more expert at hunting than he was at being hunted.
The dark was deepening quickly. His thirst seemed to burn at his throat, a discomfort deeper even than the ache of his wounds. And he longed for shelter.
He recalled the outcrop of rock which had provided cover for these trees to grow. Clumsily, his torn leg and back aching, he lumbered around the trees. He came to a sheer wall of sandstone, perhaps twice as tall as he was, smoothly eroded, its base littered by frost-shattered scree, fallen branches and dead leaves. He moved as close to the rock face as he could, and turned to face the plains beyond.
Perhaps he could last through the night here. He might hear the cat approach if she came across the scree or the leaves. And in the morning -
There was liquid movement to his right. She had been hiding in the mound of broken wood and leaves. Now, gazing at him, she prepared to spring again.
He felt trapped in this dark, glacial moment.
He seemed to have time to study the cat’s every detail: the sinuous beauty of her curved, taut muscles, the gaping, bloody maw of her mouth. Blood was crusted on her head, he noticed, a mark of his one minor victory, where he had managed to hurt her by driving her against the tree branch. But her eyes were on him, small and hard, and he could see that she knew she had won. In less than a heartbeat she would reach his soft belly with her claws, and his life would spill out on this lonely rock, far from those who had loved him.
…But the cat was hurled sideways and slammed into the rock face.
She fell, limp.
Time flooded over him again, and his heart hammered.
Cautiously, unable to believe he was still breathing, Longtusk crept closer. The cat lay where she had fallen, slumped in the leaves and the scree.
Blood welled from a huge wound in her temple, dark and thick, as if seeking to water the trees that grew here. The stillness of the cat was sudden, startling; this creature of motion and purpose and deadly beauty had become, in a heartbeat, a thing of the rock and the earth, her beautiful muscles slack and useless forever.
He felt no triumph, no relief: only numbness.
Something protruded from her skull.
It was wood, a long, straight branch. It had been stripped of bark, and one end narrowed to a sharp tip. The tip looked blackened, as if it had been in a fire; but it was evidently hard, hard as a tusk — for it had pierced the cat’s skull, passing through a neat puncture in her temple and out the other side. The flying stick had knocked her out of her spring; she had probably been dead, he realized, even before she collided with the rock.
There was a rustle a few paces away.
Startled, he reared up and trumpeted.
There was something out there on the darkling plain. Something small, purposeful.
He was surprised to find he still had some fear left inside him, a small bubble of it that rose to the surface of his mind, despite his exhaustion.
But this was no cat. It walked upright, on its hind legs.
It was shorter than Longtusk, but it looked strong, with muscled legs and a broad chest. Its head was large with a wide fleshy nose, and a low brow made of caves of bone from which brown eyes peered suspiciously at Longtusk. Short black hair was matted on the creature’s head, and it had fur over its body — not its own fur, Longtusk realized with a shock, but scraps of skin from animals, deer and bison and even fox, somehow joined together.
The two of them stared at each other.
Fragments of lore drifted through Longtusk’s mind. They walk upright. They wear the skin of other creatures. There is no fighting them; only flight is possible…
This creature walked upright, like a Firehead. Was it possible?…
But Longtusk felt no fear now. He seemed exhausted, done with fear.
The strange beast, cautiously, walked forward on its hind legs toward the cat. Longtusk wondered how it kept from toppling over. It wrapped its big front paws around the pointed stick, stepped on the cat’s inert head, and pulled hard. With some reluctance, the stick slid out of the cat’s skull.
Then, watching Longtusk, the creature jabbed with the stick at the cat’s head.
Showing him what it had done.
Slowly Longtusk understood. This creature had thrown the stick through the air, driven it by sheer strength and accuracy into the head of the cat — and thereby saved Longtusk’s life.
If this was a Firehead, it meant Longtusk no harm. Perhaps it was not a Firehead, but something else, something like a Firehead, a lesser threat.
Longtusk seemed unable to think it through, to pick through bits of half-remembered lore.
The creature walked closer to Longtusk. Its head moved back and forth, side to side, and its eyes were bright and curious, even though it was obviously nervous of the mammoth’s great tusks. It worked its mouth and a strange complex growl emerged.
Then it reached out with one of its bare front paws, and, leaning within the radius of the tusks, stroked the long furs on Longtusk’s trunk. Longtusk flinched, but he was beyond fear now, and he submitted to the contact. The creature passed its fingers down through Longtusk’s matted hair, the motion oddly soothing.
But the paw came away sticky with blood, and the creature looked at Longtusk with renewed concern.
It took its stick and began to walk away. A few paces from Longtusk, it paused and looked back.
Longtusk looked down at the shadowy form of the dead cat. Though the rock would provide him with shelter, he had no desire to stay here. This sinuous corpse, still leaking blood, would surely soon attract more predators, hyenas and foxes and maybe even other cats, before the condors descended on what was left of the carcass.
The light was all but gone, and the wind was rising.
He looked up. The upright creature was still waiting, looking back. And Longtusk had no real choice.
Slowly they walked into the night, the woolly mammoth following the Neanderthal boy.
They came to a shallow river valley, where running water — perhaps a tributary of the dried-out stream that had saved Longtusk from the fire — had cut its way into the hard black rock of the ground.
The upright creature scrambled down a heap of frost-shattered scree. It reached a hole of deeper darkness cut into the hillside. It was a cave, Longtusk realized.
And a glimmer of ruddy light came from within it.
Longtusk was baffled. How could there be light inside a cave, a place of shadows?
…And now Longtusk’s sharp sense of smell detected the tang of smoke, carried on the light evening breeze, and he understood the source of that strange inner glow.
Fire. His upright friend had walked into fire — maybe a nest of true Fireheads!
Longtusk stood there on the river bank, torn by conflicting impulses. Should he flee, or should he rush down the bank and pull out his friend, saving the squat little creature as it had saved him from the she-cat?
But his friend had gone into the cave willingly, with no sign of fear.
The sun had not yet risen since Longtusk had been separated from his Family. And yet already he had endured a blizzard of new experiences. Perhaps this new vision, of fire within a cave, was simply one more strangeness he must strive to understand.
But none of that mattered. It was almost completely dark now. He was hungry, tired, thirsty — and alone once more.
Using his trunk to feel his way, he worked through the rocks to the edge of the river. He walked farther, following the stream. The river bed shallowed, and he sensed a lake opening out before him: a scent of cold fresh water, a soft sweep of wind across an expansive surface. At the edge of the lake, lying along the shallow beach, he found great linear heaps of feathers left by molting ducks and geese.
When he waded into the water its icy cold struck through the layers of fur on his legs, and he almost cried out from the pain of the wounds inflicted by the cat. But as the water lifted off the caked blood and dirt, the sharp pain turned to a wider ache, and he sensed the start of healing.
He took a trunkful of water and lifted it to his mouth; it was cool and delicious, and he drank again and again, assuaging a thirst he had nursed since the terrible moments of the fire.
He retreated to the tumbled rocks of the shore. He found a gap between two tall rock faces. He nestled there and, trying to ignore the continuing cold ache of his back and legs, waited for sleep to claim him.
In the morning, with the low sun glowing red through the last of yesterday’s smoke, he made his way out of his rock cleft and down to the water. Near the lake, the water and air and land were full of birds: many species of geese, ducks, even swans on the water, blackbirds and sparrows on the marshy land, and occasional hunters — hawks, kestrels. The short summer was ending, a time when the birds swarmed to breeding grounds like this.
A flock of geese floated on the water, a huge raft of them. They had shed all their flight feathers at once, a great catastrophic molt that had left them temporarily unable to fly, as they put all their energy into breeding and raising young and storing fat for the return journey to their winter lands in the south. All of this had to be completed in just forty or fifty days, before the snow and ice clamped down on the land again.
The rocks were covered by a fine hoar frost, so slippery that even the heavy, wrinkled pads of his feet could not find a firm footing. There was no food to be had here. Nothing grew on these rocks and pebbles and scree, all of it regularly inundated by the flooding lake, save lichen and weed. He knew, gloomily, he would have to travel far today to find the fodder he needed.
But yesterday had depleted him. The wounds on his back ached badly, and he wondered if they were festering. He felt dizzy, oddly hollow, and his eyes were gritty and sore.
Something startled the birds. Ducks and swans rose from the water, a racket of rattling, snapping wings, leaving behind the barking, flightless geese. The birds caught the light, and they seemed to glow against the dull gray of the sky, as if burning from within. There were actually many flocks, he realized, passing to and fro in a great lattice above him, as if he were standing at the bottom of an ocean through which these birds swam.
And he was still utterly, desolately, alone. He wished his Family were here.
…There was a splashing sound, a little way out from the lake shore. He turned slowly. He saw motion, a ripple on the water, but his eyes were too poor to make out anything more clearly.
The splashing creature stood up in the water on its two hind legs: upright, ungainly, brushing drops from the hair on its head. It was his friend of yesterday. It had discarded its furs; they lay in a neat pile on the shore. And now Longtusk could clearly see that it — he — was a male. His body was coated by a fine light brown hair; wet, it lay flat against the contours of his body. There was an odd patch of discoloration on his face, a jagged line across his cheek like the aurora’s subtle curtain. Perhaps it was a birthmark, Longtusk speculated.
He was pushing a twig of some kind — Longtusk thought it was willow — into his mouth and expertly swiveling it around with his paw. Perhaps he was cleaning out his teeth.
Willow, he thought. That’s what I will call this odd little creature. Willow.
Longtusk didn’t like to admit to himself how pleased he was to see a familiar creature.
Willow let the water drain from his eyes — and he saw Longtusk clearly, standing placidly on the shore only a few paces away.
He yelped in shock, and glanced over at his pile of furs. There was a pointed stick resting there — perhaps the one he had used yesterday against the cat — but it was much too far away to reach.
But of course Longtusk meant him no harm. And when he realized this, after long heartbeats, Willow seemed to relax.
With much splashing, Willow made his way through the water to Longtusk. He reached out to scratch the mammoth’s trunk hair as he had the day before. His mouth issued a stream of incomprehensible grunts; his row of teeth shone white in the morning sun.
Willow’s face was round, all but bare of the light hair that coated the rest of his muscular body. His skull was long, and black hair dangled from it as from the belly of a mammoth. His nose was broad and deep, and his face seemed to protrude, almost as if it had been pulled forward by his great nostrils. His eyes gleamed like lumps of amber beneath huge bony forehead ridges.
He lifted his willow stick and offered it to Longtusk. For an instant the stubby fingers at the end of Longtusk’s trunk touched Willow’s palm, and Willow snatched back his paw with a frightened yelp. But then he held the stick forward again, and let Longtusk take it.
Longtusk had never seen Willow’s kind before, but now, in the light of day, his mind more clear, he knew what this creature was.
These were not Fireheads, but the cousins of Fireheads. The mammoths called them Dreamers.
Dreamers could be found in little pockets of habitation around the landscape, rarely traveling far from their homes. They would sometimes scavenge dead mammoths, but unlike other predators they were little threat.
And there were very few of them. Once — it was said in the Cycle — the Dreamers had covered the world. Now they were rarely encountered.
Willow ran his little paws through the long hairs on Longtusk’s flank and back. When he probed at the broken flesh there, Longtusk couldn’t help but flinch and growl. Willow stumbled back, his paws coated with blood and dirt.
The Dreamer cupped his paws and began to ladle water over Longtusk’s back. As blood and dirt was washed away, the pain was clear and sharp, but Longtusk made himself stand stock still.
Then Willow bent over and dug. He straightened up with his paws full of black, sticky lake-bottom mud. He began to cake this liberally over Longtusk’s wounds. Again this hurt — especially as the little Dreamer couldn’t see what he was doing, and frequently poked a finger into a raw wound. But already Longtusk could feel how the thick mud was soothing the ache of his injuries.
There was a guttural shout from the shore. Both Longtusk and Willow turned.
It was another Dreamer, like Willow. But this one was much taller — presumably an adult, probably a male — and it, he, was dressed in thick heavy furs. There was no hair on the top of his long boulder-shaped head, which was marked with strange stripes of red and yellow.
Stripeskull, Longtusk thought.
Stripeskull had a pointed stick in his paw. This was no skinny sapling as Willow had carried, but a thick wooden shaft, its tip cruelly sharp and blackened by fire — and even Willow’s little stick had been enough to bring down a cat, Longtusk recalled. Stripeskull’s muscles bulged, and Longtusk had no doubt he would be able to hurl that stick hard enough to slice right through Longtusk’s thick skin.
But Willow ran out of the lake, dripping glistening water, waving his forelegs in the air. Stripeskull was obviously angry and frightened — but he was hesitating, Longtusk saw.
The huge adult grabbed Willow’s arm in one mighty paw and pulled him away from the lake. Again he raised his stick at Longtusk and jabbered something complex and angry. Then he turned and retreated toward the fire cave, dragging Willow with him.
Willow looked back once. Longtusk wondered if he could read regret, even longing, in the little one’s manner.
It didn’t matter. For Longtusk, of course, had no place here. Sadly he started to work his way out through the boulders and scree to the higher ground, seeking food.
In the days that followed, Longtusk walked far and wide.
It wasn’t particularly surprising that this land was so unfamiliar to him. It was an unpromising, ugly place, all but barren — not a place for mammoths. There seemed to be a sheet of hard black rock that underlay much of the land; here and there the rock broke to the surface, and in those places nothing grew save a few hardy lichen. Even where the rock was buried it had pushed the permafrost closer to the surface, and little could grow in the thin layer of moist soil on top.
Longtusk was a big animal, and he needed to find a great deal of fodder every day. Soon he had to walk far to find a place beyond his own trample marks and decaying spoor.
Still he saw no sign of any other mammoth: no trails, no spoor save his own. He tried trumpeting, rumbling and stamping. His sensitive ears picked up only the distant howl of wolves, the slow grind of the ice sheet to the north, the moan of chill air spilling down from the North Pole.
And winter was drawing in rapidly, the days shriveling and the nights turning into long, cold, star-frosted deserts of darkness. It was a winter Longtusk knew he would be lucky to survive, alone.
Though he roamed far, he was drawn back to the lake and the cave. After all the only being in his world who had shown him any kindness was the Dreamer cub, Willow. It was hard to leave that behind.
There was more than one cave, in fact. There was a whole string of them, right along the river bank and lake shore, gaping mouths in the rock from which the Dreamers would emerge, daily, to do their chores.
Longtusk watched them.
The males would seek out meat. With their long blackened sticks they hunted smaller animals like reindeer and red deer. They generally ignored the larger animals, like horses and aurochs. But they would often scavenge meat from an animal brought down by some more fierce predator, chasing away the hyenas and condors, slicing at the carcass with pieces of stone they held in their paws.
The males ate their meat out in the field, taking little back to the caves. Longtusk realized that like mammoth Bulls they did not provide food or protection for their cubs. That was the job of the females. Slowed by their young, often laden with infants clamped to their breasts, the females did not travel as far as the males, and so did not eat so well. They would hunt with small sticks, seeking out game like rabbits or birds. But their principal foodstuff, plucked from the lake, was aquatic plants like cattails.
The females were as strong and stocky as the males, for they worked even harder in their relentless drive to sustain and protect themselves and their cubs.
As wide as he traveled, Longtusk saw no other groups of Dreamers. This small Clan in their caves seemed utterly isolated, cut off from the rest of their kind. And yet that seemed unimportant to them. They were immersed in their small world, in themselves, in each other; they had no need for a wider web of social contacts like the mammoths’ Clans.
All this Longtusk saw in glimpses, as the Moon cycled in the sky. But as a growing mammoth he was not exactly inconspicuous; and whenever the Dreamers saw him they would shout and jab sticks and hurl rocks until he went away. They were not mammoth hunters by habit, but Longtusk knew they could easily kill him if they chose, or if he seemed threatening enough. He recoiled from their weapons, and their hostility — a hostility that seemed shared by all except Willow.
Willow remained with the females and their brood. But he seemed somehow distanced, older than the rest of the infants, often the subject of an irritable cuff from one female or another. Perhaps that was why Willow’s behavior was different from the others, why he had been moved to risk his own life to save a mammoth’s. Longtusk wondered if Willow, like Longtusk himself, was reaching a cusp, preparing to leave his mother and her sisters and seek out the male hunter groups.
The strange idea that he and Willow might have something in common was obscurely comforting.
As winter drew in, the nights grew long and deep, the days brief.
There was a spate of early snow storms. The air here was sucked dry by the icecap, and there was little fresh snow. But ground blizzards, with old snow picked up by heavy winds, frequently occurred. So, when it snowed, it was usually in the midst of a ferocious wind storm that might persist for days.
Longtusk endured the blizzards. He felt the snow’s weight gather on his back, but he knew he was protected. His body generated its own heat by slowly burning the fat reserves he had stored up during the summer. That heat was trapped with remarkable efficiency by his shell of fur and guard hairs — so well, in fact, that snow that fell on his back did not melt.
Still, in the worst of the weather, he could do nothing but stand in his shell of snow and endure. Any movement would have burned up the fat reserves whose primary use was keeping him alive. But even so, despite his hoarding of his reserves, he felt himself being depleted, bit by bit, as the winter drew in.
When the weather relented, Longtusk traveled even farther than before in search of food.
In some places the wind kept patches of sun-cured summer grass free of heavy snow. When he uncovered the ground to feed, he was followed by Arctic hares or ptarmigan, seeking willow buds and insects.
But the land had emptied. The migrant animals like the deer had gone far south to warmer climes, and the Arctic foxes had retreated to sea ice, living exclusively from the remnants of polar bear kills. Some life persisted, nevertheless. There were lemmings that burrowed beneath the snow, ptarmigans that dove into drifts for insulation, even plants that managed to flourish in pockets of warm air beneath the ice.
In these days of darkness and cold and windblown snow, everything was slowed. To extend a trunk tip or open an eye, unprotected by fur, could lead to agonizing pain. Any bit of moisture would turn to crystals, creating an ice fog; when he walked a cloud hung over him, shining with light.
Once he saw a snowy owl gliding silently past, and its breath trailed after it in the air.
One fiercely cold day he walked along the river valley near the Dreamers’ caves, seeking water. But he found the river here had run dry.
The river had iced over. But the ice crust had broken and fallen in, and the valley floor beneath was dry. The river had first frozen over, but then the watershed farther upstream had frozen, and the water beneath the ice crust had stopped flowing. The river had drained away, leaving the unsupported crust above.
Longtusk climbed down to the river bed, the bones of fish crunching beneath his feet, grubbing for water in the cold mud.
He followed the dry bed until he reached the lake, and there, at last, he drank deeply.
But a few days later, the lake froze over.
Longtusk bent to the water’s edge and tried to crack the ice with his tusks. The ice splintered and starred as he scraped. But close to the bank, where the ice clung to the muddy bottom, there was too little water beneath to satisfy his thirst. And he knew that if he ventured farther out the ice could crack under him, and he could become trapped in the mud, even drown.
He walked along the shore, seeking a place he knew where the water ran over big chunks of black rock. But even this waterfall had frozen over; great lumps and streamers of white ice clung to the rocks.
He could survive on little food — but he needed water.
He lacked a detailed knowledge of this landscape. He had no idea where he might find frozen-over ponds whose crusts might be thin enough to break with his tusks; nor did he have the skills to discover new water sources for himself.
He was cut off from the wisdom of the Clan. He knew he had much to learn about the land and how to survive — and nobody was here to teach him.
For days, lacking any better idea, he survived on nothing but dribbles of muddy, half-frozen lake bed ooze, and his strength dwindled further.
But then, when he returned hopefully to the lake, he found a wide area of it had been cleared of ice. Without hesitation Longtusk splashed out into the water, ignoring its sharp cold as it soaked into the hair of his legs. He dipped his trunk into the clear liquid and sucked it up gratefully.
The break in the ice was suspiciously neat, a half-disc like a waning Moon. Its inner rim looked chipped and scarred — as if by the paw of a Dreamer.
This cleared pool was not natural; it must be the work of his only friend, the Dreamer cub Willow, who must have seen his distress and decided to help him. Despite the chill of the brief winter day, Longtusk felt warmed.
But soon the winter’s cold bit harder.
A savage wind from the north, spilling off the flanks of the ice sheet itself, howled across the battered, exposed land. Dust closed around him, shutting out the brief slivers of daylight. This storm brought little snow, but it drove great billows of dust and sand from the pulverized lands uncovered by the retreating ice.
This was an age of savage weather, dominated by the huge masses of cold air that lingered over the immense polar ice sheets, driven to instability by the accelerating warming of the climate. This hard, dry storm, Longtusk knew, might last for months.
He saw no sign of the Dreamers. They must have been sheltering in their caves.
As for himself, he could only push his body against the rocks of the river bank and try to endure.
The days of the storm wore on. He had nothing to drink but scraps of ice and snow, which anyhow chilled him as much as nourished him; and he couldn’t even recall when he had last found anything to eat.
Frost gathered around his mouth and trunk tip and gummed up his eyes. A deep shivering worked its way into his bones.
It was the wind that did the damage. Still air wouldn’t have been so bad, for a thin layer of warm air would have gathered around his body. But the wind, impatient and snatching, stole each scrap of heat his body produced, casting it into the south, gone, useless.
If he was with his Family they would have huddled now, gathered in a group, the youngest calves at the center of the huddle, the adults taking their turns on the outside of the group, facing into the wind. Thanks to the Family, few mammoths would perish in such a storm.
But here, alone, Longtusk had no others to help him and protect him: only these mute, uncaring rocks.
And he knew it wasn’t enough.
The shivering went away, and the cold started to penetrate deep into the core of his body. When it got there, he would quietly slide into a final sleep, not to wake again until he reached the aurora.
But perhaps that wouldn’t be so bad. Perhaps there he would find his mother and his sister and even that bullying oaf Rockheart, whom he would now never get a chance to best.
As the cold gathered around his heart, he felt almost peaceful.
…There was something warm and soft at the tip of his trunk. It was tugging at him. He tried to open his eyes, but they were shut by ice. He shook his head, rumbling, and forced his eyelids to open with a soft crackle.
Sand and grit immediately dug into his opened eyes. The storm still raged all around him.
Something stood before him, a bundle of fur, upright. Brown eyes peered.
It was Willow. And, with one fur-wrapped paw, the Dreamer cub was tugging at Longtusk’s trunk, urging him to follow.
Longtusk had almost reached the blank numbness of death, and it had been comfortable. If he returned to the land of life, he would face all its complexities: choices, hardship, pain. If only Willow let him alone… Just a little longer…
But you are Longtusk. Surely the greatest hero of them all is destined for a better death than this: alone, ignored, frozen by the mindless wind. Take your chance, Longtusk!
His trunk-fingers slipped into Willow’s palm.
It was difficult to walk. His joints had become stiff, so deeply had the cold penetrated them. And when he moved out of the shelter of the rocks, the wind battered him unhindered.
But it wasn’t easy for the Dreamer cub either. He felt Willow stagger, but the cub pulled himself upright against Longtusk.
They seemed to walk for a very long time.
At last they reached a place where the wind was diminished. And Longtusk felt a deep warmth radiating over his face and chest.
He was in the mouth of one of the caves. Willow was standing beside him, pulling off his furs in great frosty grit-laden bundles.
The cave was a well of red light and warmth. Flaps of animal skin had been fixed over this cave mouth. Perhaps they were supposed to drape over the entrance, keeping its warmth inside, like the flap of skin over a mammoth’s anus.
The warmth came from fire, he realized suddenly: a fire that burned, smokily, in a circle of stones.
He recoiled, instinctive fear rising anew in him. But behind him, the Beringian night howled its fury.
There was no place for him out there. Despite the fire, he forced himself to stay still.
There were many Dreamers here: females, males, infants. They lay on the floor of the cave, fat and sleepy, all of them slabs of muscle. The females clustered together with their infants away from the males, who lay on their backs snoring. Some were naked; others wore light skins around their shoulders and waists. Their bare skin looked greasy, as if it had been coated by the fat of some dead animal — perhaps to keep in their bodies’ warmth.
One of the dozing males stirred, perhaps disturbed by the wind that leaked in through the open skins. It was Stripeskull, his red and yellow scalp unmistakable.
His eyes grew large as he saw a mammoth standing in the cave entrance, immense tusk shadows striped over the walls.
With surprising grace Stripeskull rolled to his feet and barked out guttural noises. Other males woke up, blinking and rubbing their eyes; when they saw Longtusk they quickly got to their hind legs, grabbing sticks of wood and sharp stones.
…Then the males fell back, making retching noises and waving their paws before their faces.
Longtusk realized that he had just defecated, as mammoths do many times a day, barely conscious of it. He looked back. His dung was a pile of tubular bricks, acrid, immense. He tried to push it outside the cave. But he succeeded only in smearing the hot, sticky stuff over the cave floor.
Willow was going forward to meet Stripeskull. They jabbered at each other in a fast, complex flow; they made gestures too with their heads and paws. It was obviously a language, Longtusk realized, like the mammoths’ language of trumpets, growls, stomps and postures. But he had absolutely no idea what they were saying to each other. Perhaps even the frequent cuffs about the head which Stripeskull delivered to Willow were like the mammoths’ subtle code of touch and rubbing. But from the way Willow was rubbing his head it was obvious the blows were also meant to hurt.
Lacking any alternative, exhausted, Longtusk stood in the cave mouth and awaited his fate.
At last Willow came to him. He reached out to Longtusk’s trunk, and pushed.
Longtusk understood. He let himself be moved back out of the cave. He wasn’t welcome here; it had only been a childish impulse of Willow’s to bring him here in the first place.
So he must suffer the wind’s bony embrace once more. He felt a stab of resentment at the pain he would have to endure before he regained that numb acceptance…
But Willow was pulling at his trunk. He looked down. The Dreamer cub was hauling as hard as he could, his feet scraping along the ground, trying to halt the retreating mammoth.
Longtusk stopped. He was out of the cave itself, beyond the curtain of skins, but still inside its mouth. It was enough to shelter him from the wind, and the heat that leaked out of the cave seeped into his bones.
Willow held up a twig of dried wood. Longtusk had time to grab it before the cub was snatched out of sight by a glaring Stripeskull, who pulled closed the skins, shutting Longtusk out in the dark.
Longtusk munched on the twig, and — standing in the mouth of the cave, on ground imprinted by splayed Dreamer feet, bathed by stray fire warmth — he slipped easily into a deep and dreamless sleep.
The storm persisted.
Willow brought him water in a sack of skin. Longtusk drank greedily, despite a lingering stink of bison. But a mammoth is a large animal and the load of water — almost too much for Willow to carry — was downed in a couple of heartbeats.
Willow tried bringing him food. At first he produced scraps of meat, dried and salted. The stench was horrifying, and Longtusk shied back.
After that Willow brought him dried grass. There was a lot of grass in the cave; the Dreamers scattered it over the cave floor and pulled it into rough pallets to sleep on. The grass was stale and stank of the Dreamers and their fire, but it rapidly filled up his belly.
After a few days he noticed the Dreamers going out, wrapped in their furs, bringing back loads of his dung. During his brief glimpses through the parted skins, Longtusk saw that they burned the dried dung in their wide, flat hearth — along with grass, wood, bone and even bat guano, scraped from great dry heaps at the back of the cave.
The hearth — a disk of blackened earth, lined with flat stones — was the centerpiece of the cave. The adults took turns to check on the burning embers, piling on more fuel, or blowing on the glowing lumps of dung and wood and bone. The low fire kept the Dreamers alive, and maintaining it was their single most important activity.
The cave walls were pale rock, and the fire’s ruddy light would glimmer from the fleshy stone, casting strange and colorful shadows.
Generally the Dreamers lived as mammoths do, Longtusk observed. The adult males kept to their own society away from the females. The males seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time belching, farting and scratching their testicles. The females grunted at each other continually and watched over their cubs with a sort of irritable affection.
Once a female came into oestrus. She walked provocatively past the indolent males, who rose from their slumbers with growls of interest. A brief contest of shouting and wrestling resolved itself in favor of Stripeskull, and he took the female by the paw and led her to the back of the cave.
The coupling of these two muscle-bound creatures was noisy and spectacular. Afterward the pair of them returned to the hearth, sweating and exhilarated.
Most of the males carried pointed sticks, Longtusk saw. The biggest, strongest males — like Stripeskull — had the proudest sticks. Youngsters like Willow and old, bent, toothless adults had to make do with shorter sticks, some of them broken discards. But even the infants would toddle back and forth waving tiny sharpened branches and yelling.
The sticks were like the tusks of mammoth Bulls, Longtusk realized: not just useful tools, but weapons to be cherished and displayed.
One day Longtusk saw where the sticks came from.
At the back of the cave had been stacked some saplings, slim and straight. Stripeskull took one of these, stripped it of its branches and bark with stone scrapers, and then whittled down one end to a point with more chips of stone. Then he laid the sharpened end into the fire until it charred, and scraped it some more until it was fine and sharp.
He tested it by ramming it into animal carcasses hanging at the back of the cave. The exposure to fire, far from destroying the stick as Longtusk would have expected, had made it harder and more able to penetrate.
He realized now that he owed his life to this strange ingenuity — that and the courage of the cub, Willow.
But the Dreamers were capable of much stranger miracles than merely sharpening sticks.
Longtusk watched as Stripeskull took a nodule of creamy flint. He had gathered it from the river bank, where it had been washed down from chalk deposits upstream. Stripeskull sat near the hearth and laid around him other blocks of stone and bits of bone. Using one of the heavy stones, wrapped in his paw, Stripeskull began to chip at the flint block. Soon he was surrounded by a scattering of fine flakes — but he had turned his rough block of flint into a core shaped like a fat lemming, Longtusk thought, flat on the bottom and rounded on the top. Then he rubbed and ground the rim of the core, flattening it.
What came next seemed to demand great care. He turned the core over, finally selecting a spot. Then he cupped it in one paw, raised the leg bone of a deer in the other, and gave the core a single sharp whack.
When he lifted the flint out of his paw, he left behind a round flake, very fine, its exposed surface smooth as new ice. He inspected it critically, tapped a few flakes off its edge, and tested its sharpness by rubbing it over his leg, shaving off a small patch of fur.
Then he put it to one side, returned to his core, and continued work. When he was done, he had turned a lump of unpromising flint into half a dozen fine stone blades.
He was evidently trying to teach the cub, Willow, how to work the flint. Like a mammoth calf trying to dig out his first waterhole, Willow tried to ape Stripeskull’s actions. But his flint nodules just smashed and chipped, and Willow, frustrated, threw away the debris in disgust. The next day Stripeskull would sit with him, patiently, to try again.
After watching all this, Longtusk found a flint nodule just outside the cave mouth. Nearby he saw a scattering of broken flint flakes. He picked up the nodule in his trunk-fingers and turned it over and over. He tried to recall what he had seen, how these objects had been shaped by the ingenuity of Stripeskull. But already the memory of that mysterious magic was slipping from his mind.
Mammoths too could change the world: destroying trees, digging for water, clearing snow. But they would never learn to shape the things around them with the command of these strange, clumsy, upright Dreamers.
The Dreamers put the stones to use in every corner of their cave.
At the back of the cave hung the butchered carcasses of many animals — deer, reindeer, horse and bison — and their skins were stretched out to dry with stones and sticks. Sometimes one of the adults would scrape a skin with a slice of rock, over and over, working the skin to a supple smoothness. Longtusk marveled at the way the Dreamers’ powerful muscles worked, and the stone responded to their huge, dextrous fingers.
And there were even finer uses for the stones. All of the Dreamers used stone flakes to cut the hair that dangled from their heads, or to scrape their faces. Every few days Stripeskull himself would use one of his flint slices to scrape smooth the hair on his head. Then he would splash the raw skin with cold water, and draw lumps of ochre, bits of red and yellow rock, across his scalp to renew his gaudy coloring.
It was obvious from the powerful physique of all the Dreamers, males, females and cubs, that everybody here was expected to work hard throughout their lives. Many of them showed signs of old injury. But the old, the very young, the sick and the frail were cared for.
One small cub, though, was very sickly, much skinnier than others of its height. Longtusk saw how she had trouble feeding herself, despite her mother’s increasingly frantic assistance.
There came a day when the cub would not stir from her pallet of grass. Her mother struggled to wake her, and she even tried to suckle the cub, though her breasts were flaccid and empty of milk.
At last the mother gave up. She came to the mouth of the cave. She tipped back her great head on its low, thick neck and raised the limp body of her cub to a stormy sky.
The other females gathered close to the distressed one, comforting her with strokes and caresses. The younger cubs pulled away to the corners of the cave, wide-eyed. The adult males, awkwardly, kept away from the females — all save two of them, who began to dig a deep hole in the ground.
When the hole was done, deep and straight-edged, Stripeskull clambered into the pit with the body of the female cub. The little one had been washed, her hair shaved and tidied. The grieving mother dropped dried flowers over the body, and Stripeskull sprinkled powdered ochre, a red mist that floated gently down into the pit.
Then the Dreamers began to sing — all of them, adults and all but the smallest cubs — a strange, deep ululation that rolled endlessly like a river, smooth and sad.
Longtusk understood. These Dreamers, in their own way, were Remembering the cub, just as mammoths have always Remembered their own dead.
Longtusk saw that the walls of the grave pit, deep and sheer, were made up of complex layers of debris: rock, flint flakes, blackened ashy dust, bone splinters. Such detritus could only have been laid down by the Dreamers themselves. The Dreamers must have inhabited this cave — on this undistinguished river bank, making their unchanging hearths and tools — for generation upon generation upon generation: an unimaginably long time, reaching into their deepest past. Perhaps there were more bones buried deep here — bones a hundred thousand years deep, likewise scattered with flowers and ochre flakes — here in this trampled ground, where these strange creatures had dreamed away the unchanging millennia.
And still they sang.
Did they sing of a time when their kind had covered the world? Did they sing of their loss, their diminution to dwindling, isolated groups like this?
Did they sing of their future — and their fear?
Longtusk slipped away from the cave mouth and walked off, ignoring the driving dust, until he could hear the Dreamers’ song no more.
The dust storm passed, and the cold began to ease its grip.
Heavy rain pounded the land, and glacial run-off poured along the river valley, threatening floods. The ground in front of the cave turned into a sink of oozing mud, and the adult Dreamers, slipping and sliding in the mess, complained profusely.
Longtusk knew the time was approaching when he must leave the relative security of this place. Perhaps when the weather was better he could even strike out north, and seek his Family.
So, his winter fur beginning to blow loose in a cloud around him, he took to traveling increasing distances from the cave. He was half-starved, his fat depleted, severely weakened by the harshest winter of his life.
But he still breathed. And, despite the rain and the continuing cold, life was returning to the land. The low, wind-battered trees were sprinkled with buds, full of the optimism of the new season, and the first crocuses and jonquils were showing, bright yellow and purple. Day by day, as he fed on the new growth, his strength returned.
In fact, he found he himself had grown during the bleak cold of winter. His tusks were longer still, heavier, thicker. He flashed them in the air, parrying imaginary opponents, even though there was nobody to see.
One day he found a place where a carpet of new grass, thin green shoots, was pushing through the matted remains of last year’s growth. Contentedly he began to graze.
He heard a soft mewling, like a wounded cat, coming from behind a low outcrop of hard black rock.
Pricked by curiosity, he walked over to see.
At first sight he thought it was a Dreamer cub. It was a female, wearing the ragged remains of cut and shaped skins. She was smaller in height than Willow, so presumably younger. She seemed in distress; she was huddled over on herself, clutching her spindly forelegs to her chest, and she was crying.
He ran his trunk tip over her limbs.
She was like a Dreamer, yes. But she was much thinner, her limbs weaker but more graceful. Even her head was a different shape, with a flat face, a prominent chin, a protruding forehead — no heavy eye ridges — and a compact skull. Her body seemed bare of hair: all except her head, where there was a tangled, dirty mane of fine yellow hair.
She wore something around her neck. He bent to see. Little white objects had been punctured with holes, and then strung together on what looked like a strip of sinew.
They were teeth: tiny mammoth teeth, drawn from a very new calf, perhaps even an unborn.
He rumbled in dismay.
At the noise, the cub’s eyes flickered open. They were a startling blue, like steppe melt-pools. When she saw the mountain of muscle and fat and hair over her, tusk shadows looming, she yelped and tried to pull away. But she was weak, and she was trapped by the cleft of rock.
Now he could see quite how ill she was. The fingers on her paws were dead white, and her lips looked blue. But she was not shivering: the cold had penetrated deep into her body, and without help this mite would soon surely die.
He reached down with his trunk, meaning to stroke her, but she wailed feebly, unable to move.
He moved back a few paces. There was a small stand of crocuses glowing in the lee of the rock. With his delicate trunk-fingers, he plucked out a single fat yellow bloom. He carried it to the female, and dropped it on her chest.
She seemed a little less frightened. She tried to close her paw over the flower.
Gently he wrapped his trunk under the cub and lifted her up. She was light as a feather, and her limbs dangled, unresisting. But she had managed to keep hold of her flower. He began to walk, slowly and steadily, toward the cave of the Dreamers.
After a time the cub seemed to lose her fear. She gathered pawfuls of his long trunk hairs and burrowed into them. Soon she was asleep, wrapped in the warm strength of the mammoth’s trunk.
The Dreamers reacted with confusion.
This was a stranger — not one of their Clan — not even one of their kind. At first the adults seemed to have difficulty even seeing the limp cub, as if she was a thing a shadows, only half-glimpsed, too strange to comprehend. But the young were fascinated, and they clustered around, lifting aside his trunk fur to see the sleeping cub.
Some of the males came at Longtusk with their pointed, blackened sticks, as they hadn’t for some months, as if he had brought them threat in the form of this helpless cub. The females were solicitous. As soon as they realized what distress this strange cub was in, they lifted her away from Longtusk and took her toward the hearth. There they stripped away her ragged skins, rubbed grease into her skin, and huddled around her, sandwiching the cub between their own great bodies.
Willow came up to Longtusk. He rubbed Longtusk’s trunk fur affectionately, and Longtusk realized that Willow, at least, thought he had done the right thing -
Somebody screamed.
It was one of the female Dreamers, an old woman, her face twisted by an ancient burn. She was pointing at the three of them: the strange female cub, Willow and Longtusk, over and over, jabbering and growling, frightened.
She sees something, Longtusk realized, chilled. Something about the three of us.
Suddenly the cave walls, solid rock, seemed to melt away, the Dreamers dispersing like smoke, until there was only the three of them, alone, locked together. She sees the end of my life. She thinks we will die together, we three: the yellow-haired cub, Willow, and me.
But how can anybody know the future? And what strange fate could make such a thing happen?…
The old female stumbled away, scared, shouting.
And there was a howl of outrage.
Blood was pouring down Stripeskull’s foreleg, where a stick protruded from his flesh. With a yell of anger and pain he dragged the stick out of his body, ripping the wound wider.
This was no simple stick of sharpened wood, Longtusk realized immediately. It had feathers attached to its base — and it was tipped, not by fire-hardened wood, but by a flake of flint, sharpened to a point much finer than any the Dreamers could manufacture.
And now shadows flitted past the cave, urgent, menacing. Stripeskull threw down the bloody stick and, with a growl of anger, marched to the mouth of the cave.
Longtusk scarcely noticed. He raised his trunk and tested the air, turning it this way and that, questing.
Longtusk was electrified. He could smell mammoth.
He stumbled out of the cave mouth to the open air.
Behind him, from the caves, he heard shouting, raised Dreamer voices. But the noises were small and far away and nothing to do with him. All that mattered was that profound and alluring smell of his own kind: musty fur and dung and even the sharp tang of musth — and, in pulses of deep sound, he thought he could hear huge, heavy strides: many of them, a Family or a bachelor herd, close by.
It was too much to hope that this was his Family; he knew he was far from their normal pastures. But these strangers would surely help him find his way back to his own. It was as if he had suddenly recalled who he was. How could he have spent so long, an entire winter, huddled in a mouth of eroded rock?
But the wind was swirling, and it was impossible to tell where the scents were coming from. He crashed deeper into the brush, trunk raised eagerly.
Before long, at the edge of the river, he came to a place where the stink of mammoths was very strong. He searched until he found a small, compact pile of dung.
Mammoth dung… perhaps.
He poked at it with his trunk, raised a fragment to his tongue to taste. It was warm and soft, obviously very recent, and its smell was strong and pungent. But its texture was strange — thicker and more fibrous than the dung of his Family — and he could taste a heavy concentration of wood and bark.
Mammoths’ diets differ, according to individual taste, and what they eat affects the quality of their dung. But Longtusk knew no mammoth whose diet was quite so skewed as to produce waste like this.
He pushed on.
He found a place where the trees were broken, the branches stripped of their bark and leaf buds, the ground trampled. Another unmistakable sign: mammoths had fed here — more than one, judging by the scale of the damage.
…But, like the dung, the pattern of tree damage was odd. Many of the younger saplings’ trunks had been pushed aside, as if by animals who were shorter and squatter than he was. And he saw that bark and leaf buds had been taken extensively, even from above head height. Woolly mammoths will take a little bark and foliage in their diet, but they prefer the grasses and herbs of the open steppe.
Still he saw no mammoths: not so much as a silhouette glimpsed through the trees, the swish of a tail, or the curve of a trunk. He rumbled, but there was no reply.
If they were here, whoever they were, why did they not greet him?
He decided to return to the mouth of the Dreamers’ cave. From there he would follow the trail that would take him back up to the steppe. Surely there, on the open plain, he would be able to find the strange mammoths.
He reached the edge of the trees, close to the Dreamers’ cave — and, still in the shelter of the trees, he slowed to a halt.
Several of the Dreamers had emerged from their caves. But they were not alone.
Confronting them was a new group of creatures: standing upright like the Dreamers, but spindly, taller, much less robust.
The legs of these others were thin and taut — like those of a horse, meant for running and walking long distances. The newcomers had flat, delicate faces and high bulging skulls. They were covered in skins, like the Dreamers, but Longtusk could see that these garments were much more finely worked than the rough creations of the Dreamers. Their paws were delicate and they held things — pointed sticks and flakes of stone — and other, incomprehensible items, like a length of wood tied up with deer sinew so that it was bent over in an arc.
And they stalked among the Dreamers with arrogance and hostility.
Longtusk spotted Stripeskull. Blood still stained his shoulder where the strange stick had punctured it. But now the big Dreamer was crouching in the dirt. He was roaring defiance, trying to stand using one of his fire-hardened sticks as a prop — but one hind leg was dragging behind him. And Longtusk saw blood pulsing from a broad gash. He was surrounded by five or six of the newcomers, and they held sticks out toward Stripeskull, threatening him.
The Dreamer females and cubs had been brought out of the cave, driven like recalcitrant calves by prods with sticks and stones. The females huddled together in a group, surrounded by the newcomers, with their cubs at the center. They seemed bewildered as much as frightened, and their gaze slid over the newcomers that stalked amongst them — as if they were too strange even to be properly visible, as if the Clan was being overwhelmed by a party of ghosts.
Apart from Stripeskull, Longtusk could see no other Dreamer adult males. Perhaps they were off on one of their scavenging trips — or perhaps they had been driven away, by these cold, calculating others.
Longtusk watched, fascinated, repelled. He knew what he was seeing.
He had never before encountered these creatures, these distorted, hostile cousins of the Dreamers. But many of his kind had — and an understanding of the danger they posed was drummed into every young mammoth.
These were the most ferocious predators of all — more to be feared, despite their frail appearance, than even the great cats — and the only response to encountering them was flight.
For they had mastered fire itself.
And they were not content to let embers burn in shallow hearths, like the Dreamers; instead they used fire to drive their way across the land. Perhaps they had even been responsible for the fire which had separated him from his Family. Hadn’t he glimpsed slender running forms during his dreadful flight through the smoke?
He had been wrong before, when he had first encountered Willow. About these newcomers there could be no doubt, and black dread settled on his heart.
For these were Fireheads.
One of the newcomers turned and looked directly toward him.
This one was shorter than the others, with a broad, plump belly that glistened with grease. He sniffed loudly, his small, straight nose twitching. He was, thought Longtusk, like a fat, overgrown lemming, walking comically upright on two hind legs.
He knows I’m here, Longtusk thought, hidden as I am among these trees. Or he suspects so, anyhow. He is smarter than the rest.
Now Willow spotted Longtusk too. He called out and lunged forward.
A Firehead tripped him with a stick. Willow sprawled, howling.
One of the females pushed her way out of the group and ran to Willow. Perhaps it was his mother. A Firehead confronted her. She dodged his stick and swung one mighty fist at his long, delicate face. Longtusk heard the unmistakable crack of shattering bone, and the other fell back with a gurgling cry, clutching his face.
But more of the others joined the fray. They wrestled the female to the ground and pinned her there, a male’s weight pressing down on each of her mighty limbs.
Now, from the mouth of the cave, another emerged. He was dressed in skins, like the rest, but he wore a crown of what looked like bone — from which smoke streamed, as if he carried burning embers cupped in scrapings in the bone. Smoke rose even from his paws, and Longtusk realized he had taken ashes from the precious hearth which the Dreamers had preserved all winter long.
Seemingly oblivious to pain, this grotesque creature raised his paws to the air and howled a cry of thin triumph. He cast the ashes to the ground, scattered them with his feet, and extinguished them in the trampled mud. The others whooped and danced, jabbing their sticks into the air.
The Dreamers looked away, bewildered and defeated.
Burning-head stalked over to the Dreamer female, who was still pinned to the ground. His teeth showing white, he leaned over her. She bellowed and tried to twist her head away. But he came closer, as if to press his lips against hers.
She hawked and spat at him. He wiped his face and threw strings of greenish phlegm back at her.
Longtusk was baffled. Was this like a fight among mammoth Bulls for access to females? But it made no sense. Even Longtusk could see that the Dreamer female was not in oestrus. Perhaps the other did not want the female, but only to demonstrate his power and dominance.
But now the ugly tableau was disturbed. Another was emerging from the Dreamer cavern: taller even than Burning-head, his head adorned by a cap of yellow-white beads — beads of mammoth ivory, Longtusk realized queasily. This one looked oddly frail, his hair a grizzled white, his skin wrinkled and weather-beaten. But he carried the limp form of the yellow-haired cub in his arms.
The rest, even Burning-head, cringed away from this new one, deferring.
Burning-head was evidently a powerful figure. But it was obvious that this new male was the true power, like the strongest Bull in a bachelor herd.
"…What fine tusks you have, cousin. And yet they do you little good if you stand facing into the wind."
The voice had come from directly behind Longtusk. He whirled, trumpeting in alarm.
Now the Fireheads knew he was there; they reacted, shouting. But none of that mattered, compared to the massive looming presence suddenly here behind him.
For it was a mammoth… and yet it was not.
It, he, was a male. He wasn’t as tall as a full-grown mammoth Bull, yet he loomed over Longtusk. He was coated with wiry black-brown hair, shorter and darker than Longtusk’s, some of it stained by the gray of age. His back was flat, lacking the fleshy hump of a true mammoth, and he was heavy-set, his chest deep, his limbs and feet broad. And he had broad stubby tusks, heavily chipped and scarred.
Four of them: four tusks.
And, strangest of all, Longtusk made out a scar burned into his muscled flank: a strange five-pronged form, burned through the layers of hair and into his flesh, exactly like the outstretched paw of a Dreamer — or a Firehead.
The other opened his great mouth and roared. A gush of warm, fetid air billowed out over Longtusk, stinking of crushed wood and sap. The not-mammoth’s teeth were cones of enamel — not flat grinding surfaces like Longtusk’s, but sharp, almost like a cat’s cruel fangs.
Longtusk staggered back. He crashed out of the trees and into the clearing before the caves, in full view of Fireheads and Dreamers.
There were cries of shock. Panicking, he whirled around.
All but two of the Fireheads had fallen to the ground before him. The two who remained standing — staring at him open-mouthed — were the strong leader and the grotesque Burning-head. The leader put down his cub and picked up an abandoned stick. This was fitted with a blade of something that glittered like ice. He held the stick up, pointing it at Longtusk.
In the Fireheads’ distraction, the Dreamers seemed to see their chance. Even the female who had been pinned to the ground was free now. Under her lead, the females gathered their cubs and, quickly, silently, began to slip away up the trail that led to the steppe. Willow pulled Stripeskull to his feet, then let Stripeskull lean on him so that he hopped forward on his one good hind leg.
Willow cast a single regretful glance back at Longtusk, and then was gone.
But there was no time to reflect.
A powerful trumpet and a slam of broad feet into the ground told Longtusk that the strange not-mammoth was right behind him. Terrified, bewildered, overwhelmed by strangeness, Longtusk turned, trumpeting. The Fireheads cringed anew.
The other’s eyes were like pools of tar, embedded in wrinkled sockets of flesh.
"Do you know what that blade is, cousin? It is quartz. A kind of rock that’s harder and sharper than almost any other. The old fellow may not look so strong, but he could throw that spear so hard that quartz tip will nestle in your heart." The not-mammoth’s accent was strange — somehow guttural, primitive — but his language, of rumbles, trumpets, growls, stamps and posture, was clear to Longtusk.
Longtusk said, "You are not mammoth."
"No. But I am your cousin. Don’t you know your Cycle? We are all Calves of Probos. I am better than mammoth. I am mastodont."
The two great proboscideans faced each other, challenging, calculating, rumbling: members of hugely ancient species, separated by evolutionary paths that had diverged twenty-five million years before.
The three Fireheads were engaged in a complex three-way argument.
"We call the leader Bedrock," growled the mastodont. "For he is strong and silent as the rock on which the world is built. His cub is called Crocus, for the color of her hair. And the Shaman is Smokehat—"
"What is a Shaman?"
Bedrock had the quartz-tipped spear raised to shoulder height, and it was still pointing at Longtusk’s heart. But Crocus was pulling at Bedrock’s free foreleg and was jabbering excitedly, pointing at Longtusk.
Meanwhile Smokehat, with his grotesque garb of bone and smoke, was all but dancing with impatience and rage.
"That Shaman wants you killed. Bedrock is prepared to do it. But his cub seems to think you saved her life."
"You can understand them?"
"You pick up a little," the mastodont said wistfully, "if you spend long enough with them. My name is Walks With Thunder."
Longtusk growled. "And mine is Longtusk. Learn it for my Remembering, mastodont, for I am ready to die."
"Oh, that isn’t the idea at all."
"What?"
The mastodont reared up, looming over Longtusk and pawing at the air.
Startled, angry, bewildered, Longtusk backed away from this terrifying opponent and plunged into the stand of trees.
He found the trail that led to the open steppe.
He turned back the way he had come and raised his trunk, sniffing the air. There was no sign of pursuit.
But there was a smell of mammoth — no, it was the sharp, wood-ask stink of the animals he must call mastodont — and, he realized with mounting alarm, it came from all around him.
He turned again. And there was a mastodont ahead of him.
Like Walks With Thunder, this was a squat, powerfully built male with four stubby tusks. But he sported a broad scar that ran the length of his face, a scar that all but obliterated the socket of one eye. "Hello, little grazer," he rumbled. "Welcome to the herd."
As Longtusk turned once more, trunk raised, he saw and smelled more mastodonts to his left and right, like a line of stocky, hairy boulders: a row of them, all powerful adult males.
Now, with a drumming of mighty footsteps, the mastodonts marched intently toward him, converging. Every one of them bore the strange scar sported by Walks With Thunder, a Firehead paw burned into hairless flesh. The way they moved together, as if driven by a single mind, was unnerving.
And, strangest of all, there were Fireheads with them. They carried sticks tipped with curved pieces of bone, which they used to tap the mastodonts on the head or ears or flanks. Some of the mastodonts actually had Fireheads sitting astride their backs, with their long, thin hind legs draped over their necks, feet applying sharp kicks to the mastodonts’ small ears.
Soon the mastodonts were close enough for him to make out what they were saying in their heavy, strange accent.
"…Well, well. What have we here? Don’t tell me it’s a grazer."
"I haven’t seen one of those grass-chewers for a long time. I thought they had all died out."
"It must be a Cow. Look at those pretty-pretty tusks. Any self-respecting Bull would be too embarrassed to wear skinny monstrosities like that."
"Hey, little grazer! Can I borrow your tusks? I need a pick to clean out my musth gland, and those spindly things are just the right size…"
He saw that the mastodonts had closed the circle around him.
The big scarred Bull facing him was being whipped, severely, by the Firehead with him. The Firehead was shouting, a simple, repetitive sound: "Agit! Agit!" It was obvious he was trying to drive the big Bull forward. This Firehead was sapling-thin with a cruel, pinched face.
The scarred Bull, seeming unaware of the multiple wounds being inflicted on him, swiveling his huge, filth-crusted rump and let out a fart of thunderous intensity. A foul brown spray knocked the skinny Firehead backward, and the line of mastodonts reacted with stomps and growls of amusement.
The Bull walked forward nonchalantly out of his dispersing brown cloud, muscles moving under his fat brown-black coat of hair. "Sorry about that. These Fireheads are an irritation at times."
Longtusk stood his ground and raised his tusks. "Come any closer and I’ll rip out your other eye."
The mastodont grunted. He reached a stand of low, twisted spruce trees. His trunk flicked out, its pink tip running over one sapling after another. Finally he settled on the biggest, strongest tree of the grove. He wrapped his trunk around its girth and, with a single flick of his huge, low-slung head, ripped the tree out of the ground, roots and all. His mouth gaped, revealing a purple tongue and teeth like miniature mountains, chipped and worn. With a crackling splinter, he bit the tree clean in half, his long jaw bones moving in a powerful up-down motion quite different from the back-and-forth grinding of a mammoth’s jaw. Then he stamped on the tree, breaking it up further.
Within a few heartbeats, a healthy tree had been reduced to a few shards.
"My name is Jaw Like Rock," said the mastodont. He opened his huge mouth and belched; a fine spray of spittle and wood chips peppered Longtusk. "I enjoyed that. But you grazers prefer to munch on a few blades of grass, don’t you? I suppose if that’s all you’re strong enough to manage—"
"I’m strong enough to best you," Longtusk said.
Jaw Like Rock looked puzzled. "Oh, yes. It’s time for me to get my eye ripped out, isn’t it? We’d better get it over with."
Unexpectedly, something barged into Longtusk’s backside. Trumpeting, he tried to turn.
Here was Walks With Thunder, his broad brow dipped. "You let me creep up on you downwind again, little grazer. You’ve a lot to learn."
"I’ve nothing to learn from you wood-nibblers."
Walks With Thunder’s broad head once again rammed his backside, hard. Longtusk stumbled and took two or three steps forward.
Now something wrenched backward on Longtusk’s left hind leg. There was a hoop of hide rope knotted around his ankle, over his foot. The rope’s other end was tied tightly around the roots of a tree.
He heard a yelp of triumph from his feet.
He looked down. It was the little fat Firehead, the one who had detected his presence before anybody else. He had been crawling on the ground close to Longtusk’s feet, and his flabby skin was coated with something dark and pungent.
"Dung," Longtusk said. "Mammoth dung."
"Your dung," said Walks With Thunder easily. "That’s how Lemming crept up on you. You couldn’t smell him. Oldest trick there is, little grazer. And now you’re caught."
Longtusk trumpeted his alarm. "Why are you doing this to me? Let me go! In the name of Probos—"
Walks With Thunder exchanged a glance with Jaw Like Rock, and Longtusk thought he detected a brief sadness there.
Walks With Thunder said, "Grazer, this has nothing to do with Probos."
"Don’t worry, lad," Jaw said. "We’ve all been through it."
"Been through what? Let me go." Frustrated, frightened, angry, humiliated, Longtusk tugged with all his strength at the rope. It wouldn’t give. Rumbling, enraged, he fell back.
The Fireheads stood around him in a loose circle, letting the drama play itself out.
Jaw Like Rock took a heavy step forward, "Come on then, little grazer. Let’s get this over. Give me your best shot."
Longtusk eyed Jaw Like Rock. "There is a stink of Firehead on you," he said. "You have no honor."
Jaw Like Rock stiffened.
Walks With Thunder murmured, "I wouldn’t get him angry."
Longtusk cried, "For Probos!" And he roared and lunged with his tusks.
The mastodont sidestepped — but not fast enough; the tip of one mammoth tusk scraped down his flank. "Well done, little grazer," he said, his trunk investigating the wound. "You were too fast for me."
Longtusk looked down, and saw a smear of bright crimson at the sharp tip of one curling spiral tusk. He felt a surge of pride. If only Rockheart could see him now!…
"Get it over, Jaw," growled Walks With Thunder. "Don’t try to make him feel better about it."
Longtusk, straining at the sinew on his leg, said, "What does he mean?"
"Nothing," said Jaw Like Rock, wiping blood off the tip of his trunk on the sparse grass. "He’s an old fool. Do your worst, mighty mammoth, calf of Primus!" And he trumpeted and raised his stubby tusks.
Again Longtusk lunged.
But the mastodont was standing at his side. He had moved in a blur of speed, too fast for Longtusk to see. "Forgive me, brave grazer." And he brought his tusks crashing down on Longtusk’s head.
It was as if thunder had clapped inside his head. The light was suddenly strange, with everything suffused by a bright golden tinge. To his surprise he found he was kneeling, his trunk dangling on the grass like the discarded skin of a snake.
He tried to lift his tusks, but, oddly, they were scraping on the thin soil of the ground. With every breath he took, the golden light around him intensified.
"…don’t understand it. It’s never taken more than a single blow before. That would have felled Kilukpuk herself."
"You aren’t used to these woolly grazers, Jaw."
"No. Perhaps all that fur—"
"More likely that wretched dome of bone on the top of his skull. Try it again, Jaw. Just make sure you don’t kill him."
A huge face loomed, a gaping jaw, the teeth surrounded by four short, squat tusks. "Try not to move, grazer."
Longtusk felt a wash of fetid breath, a rush of air — and again there was an explosion inside his head.
This time the world fell away, through deepening gold, into darkness.
The sun was high.
He was standing. He was conscious of hunger, an even more powerful thirst. There was a strong scent of mammoth around him… but not quite mammoth.
"…Milkbreath? Matriarch?"
"They aren’t here, lad."
The voice came from directly before him. It was a mammoth — no, a mastodont — short and squat, with a long narrow face and an extra pair of tusks. The mastodont seemed to swim into focus, as if ice water were draining out of his eyes.
The mastodont was a Bull, grizzled with age, and his waist and head and legs and tusks were wrapped around with lengths of rope, knotted tight and tied to the stumps of trees. Only his trunk roamed free, its pink tip questing toward Longtusk.
"Walks With Thunder," Longtusk said slowly.
"I’m glad you know me. That oaf Jaw Like Rock is none too gentle; I feared he might have scrambled your brains for good… Who’s Milkbreath? Your mother?"
Longtusk growled and tried to back away. But he couldn’t move. He could feel ropes wrapped around his legs and torso and head.
"The ropes will tighten if you struggle. They will cut your flesh."
Longtusk pushed hard with one leg. With a creak, the loops tightened just as Walks With Thunder had warned.
He gave up, panting, longing for water. "Who did this?"
"Our keepers. The Fireheads."
"I am mammoth. I have no keeper."
"You do now, little grazer."
"They have tied me up so I will not run away?"
"That’s right."
"…But why you?"
Walks With Thunder emitted a deep snort from his trunk. "To show you it isn’t so bad."
Now a Firehead was coming toward them. It was the little fat one Longtusk had called Lemming — the one who had, with stealth, slipped that first loop of rope around Longtusk’s leg. He was carrying a skin bag, some dry grass.
Longtusk rumbled and lunged at the little Firehead. All over his body, the ropes creaked and tightened cruelly.
Lemming yelped and staggered backward. He dropped his skin bag, which landed with a thick gurgle.
"Let him feed you," Walks With Thunder urged.
"I feed myself."
"Not any more. Watch…"
Lemming retrieved his dropped bag, opened it up and held it out to Walks With Thunder. With a noisy slurp the mastodont sucked up a trunkful of water, draining the bag.
The smell of the water filled Longtusk’s head.
Now the little Firehead started stuffing hay into Walks With Thunder’s accepting mouth. The mastodont rumbled, "It isn’t so bad, Longtusk. Just accept it. You’re lucky. Lemming likes you. He’s one of the better ones. He goes easy with the goads. Some of the others take it too far. Like Spindle — the one Jaw farted over—"
"I won’t give in."
"You’re special, are you? Different from us, smarter, stronger?"
"Yes."
"Sniff the air, little grazer."
Longtusk did so — and found he was surrounded by mastodonts: ten, eleven, twelve of them, all males, presumably the same herd who had circled him earlier. Some were pulling branches from the low trees here; but most were feeding on heaps of smashed wood left for them by the Fireheads. One mastodont was wallowing in the mud of a shallow water hole, its fringe crusted with late-winter ice. He was rolling on his side and lifting his squat feet, letting a Firehead scrape mud off his delicate soles with a piece of sharpened stone.
And now a mastodont walked past with a heavy gait. He had a passenger, a skinny Firehead who sat astride the mastodont’s neck. His bare feet kicked at the animal’s ears, and he struck the mastodont’s broad scalp with a stick tipped with sharpened bone.
The mastodont had a broad, ugly scar across his face, eclipsing one eye.
It was Jaw Like Rock. And his rider was the keeper who had beaten him before, Spindle.
"Why does he accept that? He could throw off that creature and crush him in a moment."
"You don’t understand. Jaw has no choice. I have no choice. You have no choice, but to submit."
"No."
Walks With Thunder’s trunk drooped. "I was like you, once. Make it easy on yourself."
"I won’t listen to you."
And Longtusk began to push against his ropes once more. They tightened around his neck and legs and belly, but still he struggled, until he was exhausted.
The Firehead keeper came to him again, with water and food; again Longtusk ignored him.
And so it went on, as the sun worked its path around the sky.
Night fell. But it was not dark, not even quiet.
The Fireheads set up huge fires in improvised hearths all around the steppe. Longtusk could feel their uncomfortable heat. The fires sent sparks up into the echoing night, and the Fireheads sat close, their faces shining in the red light, eating and drinking and laughing.
Longtusk — hungry, thirsty, exhausted, his muscles cramped from immobility — now longed for sleep. But sleep was impossible. The Fireheads would come to him and shout in his ears, or whirl pieces of bone on ropes around their heads, making a noise like a howling wind.
Walks With Thunder was still with him. "Give in," he urged. "They won’t stop until you do."
"No," mumbled Longtusk.
"Let me tell you a story," Walks With Thunder said. "A story from the Cycle. This is of a time deep in the past — oh, thousands of Great-Years ago, long before the ice came to the earth. In those days there were no mammoths and mastodonts; we were a single kind, and we lived in a land of lush forests, far to the south of here.
"But the Earth cooled. The forests follow the weather, as every mastodont knows. Year by year the land became cooler and drier, and great waves of trees moved north across the Earth—"
"Why are you telling me this?"
"Just listen. Now our Matriarch, the Matriarch of all mastodonts, was called Mammut. She was a descendant of Probos, of course, but she lived long before the mother of the mammoths."
"Ganesha."
"Yes. Now Mammut was wise—"
"They always are in Cycle stories."
Walks With Thunder barked his amusement at that. "Yes. It’s always easy after the fact, isn’t it?… Mammut could see the way the forests were migrating to the north. And she said, ‘Just as the forests must follow the weather, so my calves must follow the forests.’ And so, under her leadership, her Clan followed the slow march of the forests, seeking out the marshy places beneath the great trees, for that is what mastodonts prefer. And her calves prospered and multiplied, filling the land.
"Now, much later, long after Mammut had gone to the aurora, another forest came marching across the land. A different kind of forest."
"I don’t know what you’re talking about," Longtusk mumbled.
"It was a forest of Fireheads, little grazer. And the mastodonts fled in panic."
"That is because they were cowards."
Walks With Thunder ignored that. "So the mastodonts called up to the aurora, ‘What should we do, great Matriarch?’
"Mammut was wise. She understood.
"As the weather washes over the land, the trees must follow. As the trees wash over the land, the mastodonts must follow. And now, as the Fireheads wash over the land, the mastodonts must follow again. That is what Mammut said. And that is what we accept."
"It isn’t much of a story."
"Well, I’m sorry. I was trying to make a point. I left out the fights and the sex scenes."
"Anyway the Fireheads are not trees."
Thunder growled irritably. "The point is that the Fireheads feed us, as the trees do. They even care for us — when they choose. And we cannot be rid of them, little grazer. Any more than the land can rid itself of the trees. Accept them. Accept their food."
Once again, Longtusk saw blearily, the Firehead, Lemming, was before him. He held up a paw, full of grasses and herbs, fragrant, freshly gathered. But Longtusk turned his head away.
It lasted three more days, three more nights.
Walks With Thunder and Jaw Like Rock were both with him.
"Your courage is astonishing, little grazer. Nobody else has ever lasted so long before."
Longtusk, beaten down by hunger and thirst and sleeplessness, could barely see through milky, crusted eyes. "Leave me alone."
Jaw reached out and, with the pink tip of his trunk, smoothed the filth-matted fur of Longtusk’s face. "Don’t let them kill you," he said softly. "That way they will have won."
Longtusk closed his eyes.
After a time he felt a pressure at the side of his mouth. It was the paw of Lemming, the keeper, once more holding out sweet grasses.
"Take it, grazer. It’s no defeat."
"My name is Longtusk."
Walks With Thunder and Jaw Like Rock thumped the ground with their trunks. "Longtusk," they said.
Lemming was staring at him, his eyes round, as if he understood.
Longtusk opened his mouth and took the food.
More days passed. Gradually his strength returned.
His ropes loosened. They had burned and cut him painfully. Lemming treated the wounds with salves of fat and butter, and with water heated in the hearths. He squeezed droplets of milk from an aurochs cow into Longtusk’s eyes, soothing their itching.
Five days after he had first accepted the food, more Fireheads came to see him: Bedrock the leader, the Shaman Smokehat with his grotesque headpiece of smoking bone, and the cub, Crocus.
Though Bedrock was cautious and kept hold of her paw, Crocus approached Longtusk. Her necklace of mammoth teeth gleamed in the watery spring sun. She reached past the ropes and ruffled the long hair that dangled from his trunk.
He closed his eyes, recalling how Willow, the male Dreamer cub, used to do the same thing.
He wondered where the Dreamers were now, Stripeskull and Willow and the others. Scattered, he supposed, turned out of the caves they had inhabited for uncounted generations, in the face of the advance of these Fireheads -
Pain lanced into his flank. He trumpeted and reared up, but he was contained by the ropes. There was a stink of burning flesh and hair.
The Shaman, Smokehat, held a piece of stone fixed to the end of a stick. The stone had been chipped and shaped to look like the outspread paw of a Firehead. It glowed red hot.
The mark of the Firehead, the outstretched paw, had been burned into Longtusk’s flank.
Like all these others he belonged to the Fireheads, and was forever marked.
He trumpeted his anger and despair.