Milkbreath snorted her disapproval. "You don’t need to feed me my grass a blade at a time, Longtusk. I can see the drift of your questions."
Rockheart was at his side. "You shouldn’t question the Matriarch. It isn’t the way things are done. Not here."
Milkbreath rumbled, "It’s all right, Rockheart. His education was never finished. Times are hard, Longtusk. The Matriarch of Matriarchs gave us our instructions at the last Gathering. She could foresee the coming changes in the world, the worsening of the weather."
"The collapse of the steppe into these little islands?"
"Yes. Even that. She knew that Gatherings would be difficult or impossible for a long time. She knew there would be fewer of us next year, and fewer still the next after that. But we have endured such changes before, many times, as the ice has come and gone. And we have always survived. It will be hard, but our bodies know the way. That’s the teaching of the Cycle."
"And what about the Fireheads? Did she speak of them?"
"Of course she spoke of the Fireheads, Longtusk. Fireheads come when we are weak and dying. They cut our corpses open for our bones and hearts…"
"But," he said, "there are no Fireheads in the Cycle. Maybe the Fireheads weren’t here when the ice last retreated."
"What does it matter?"
"What I’m saying is that things are different now. The Fireheads are a new threat we haven’t faced before…"
But the Matriarch continued to quote the Cycle. "When I die, I belong to the wolves — or the Fireheads. We must accept the Fireheads, as we accept the warming, and simply endure. In the future, all will be as it was, and there will be great Gatherings again."
Longtusk tried another approach. "When was the last time you heard from the Matriarch of Matriarchs?"
Rockheart growled, "Longtusk—"
"The last Gathering?"
"…Yes."
"Then she is probably dead."
Some of the Cows rumbled and trumpeted in dismay.
"And she was wrong," said Longtusk grimly.
Rockheart tusked the ground, rumbling his challenge. "Do I have to fight you to shut you up?"
Longtusk ignored him. "I have seen the Fireheads. I have seen what they do. They wait for mammoths to die. If the mammoths take too long, they finish them off with their spears… The Matriarch of Matriarchs was right that the mammoths have endured warming before, and recovered. But this is not the past. The Fireheads make everything different—"
Rockheart’s blow was a mere swipe at his tusks, a loud ivory clatter that echoed over the steppe. He said grimly, "You have forgotten your Cycle. The Matriarch has given her orders, and we will follow."
Longtusk eyed Rockheart. He recalled how easily he had defeated this old tusker before — and yet here he was again, prepared to confront him, and Longtusk knew he could beat Rockheart down again, just as easily.
But that wasn’t the way to succeed. Not today.
And he couldn’t keep his peace, either, even though he longed to. He didn’t want to be different! He only wanted to be one of the Family… All he had to do was stay silent.
But that wasn’t the right path, either.
He summoned up the inner strength he had found during those long dark months in the Firehead camp, after the death of Neck Like Spruce and his calf.
He said, "We cannot survive here, Matriarch. This little patch of steppe is too small. Look around. You are thin, half-starved. A simple accident could kill us all — a flash flood, a lightning strike like the one which struck down that spruce.
"And some day the Fireheads will come here. They will — I know them! And—"
This time, Rockheart’s blow was to his temple, and pain rang through his skull. He staggered sideways. He felt warm blood trickle down his flesh.
The Matriarch faced him, shifting from one foot to the other, distressed. "End this, Longtusk."
"Mother — Matriarch — where are your calves?"
Rockheart’s tusks came crashing down on his. His ivory splintered, agonizingly, as if a tooth had broken, and the tip of his right tusk cracked off and fell to the ground.
"By Kilukpuk’s black heart, fight," Rockheart rumbled.
"What makes you so wise?" Milkbreath said, upset, angry. "What makes you different? How do you see what others don’t? How do you know what we must do?"
Longtusk, bleeding, aching, could see Rockheart prepare for another blow, but he knew he must not respond — not even brace himself.
"…The calves are dead." It was Splayfoot, his sister.
Rockheart hesitated.
Gaunt, weakened, Splayfoot came limping toward Longtusk. "The youngest died last winter, when there was no water to be had. That’s your answer, Longtusk. He is different, Matriarch. He has seen things none of us can imagine. And we must listen. I would have died with the others at that drying mud seep — as would you, Rockheart — if not for Longtusk."
The Matriarch rumbled sadly, "Even when we have met Bulls, even when we have mated, our bodies have not borne calves. It is the wisdom of the body. If there is too little food and water the body knows that calves should not come."
"For how long?" Longtusk asked. "Look around you. How long before you all grow too old to conceive?" He glared at them wildly, and trumpeted his challenge. "Which of you will be the last to die here, alone?"
Rockheart, growling, prepared another lunge at Longtusk, but the Matriarch stopped him. Anguished, angry, she rumbled, "What would you have me do?"
Longtusk said, "There may be a way. A place to go. Beyond the reach of the ice — and even of the Fireheads." Shuddering, trying to ignore the pain of his temple and broken tusk, he looked to the east, thinking of the geese.
Rockheart roared his disgust. "And must we follow you, Firehead monster? Shall we call you Patriarch? There has never been such an animal. Not in all the long years of the Cycle—"
"He is right," Splayfoot insisted. "The spring blizzards kill our calves. The ice storms of the autumn kill those who are heavy with next year’s calves. None of us can bear the heat of summer. And when the seeps and water holes ice over in the winter, too thickly for us to break through, we fight each other for the water, to the death… We can’t stay here. He is right."
Threetusk came pushing between them, his spindly extra tusk coated with mud. He looked up at Longtusk with trunk raised. "Take me! Oh, take me!"
The arguments continued, for the rest of that day and into the night, and even beyond that.
The day was bright and clear and cold. The sun was surrounded by a great halo of light that arced above the horizon, bright yellow against a muddy purple sky. It was a sign of the icecap, Longtusk knew.
It was an invitation — and a challenge.
He drew a deep breath through his trunk, and the cleanness of the air filled him with exhilaration.
"It is time," he rumbled, loud enough for all to hear.
And the mammoths began to prepare for the separation.
The Family was to be split in two by Longtusk’s project: calf separated from parent, sibling from sibling. And, though it was never stated, a deep truth was understood by all here — that the sundered Family would never be reunited, for those who walked with Longtusk into the cold mists of the east would never come back this way.
Willow pulled on all his clothing, stuffed his jacket and hat and boots with grass for insulation against the cold, and collected together his tools and strips of dried meat. Once he had understood that Longtusk was planning to move on, the Dreamer had been making his own preparations. He had made himself simple tools, spears and stone axes, and he disappeared for days at a time, returning with the fruits of his hunting: small mammals, rabbits and voles. He ate the flesh or dried it, stored the bones as raw material for tools, and used the skin, dried and scraped, to make himself new clothing.
Soon he had become as healthy and equipped as Longtusk could recall — much better than during his time as a creature of the Fireheads. It dismayed Longtus
k to think that he, and the mastodonts, had received so much better treatment at the paws of the Fireheads than Willow, their close cousin.
He sought out his mother, the Matriarch.
She wrapped her trunk in his and reached out to ruffle the topknot of fur on his head, just as she had when he was a calf — even though he had grown so tall she now had to reach high up to do so. "Such a short time," she said. "I’ve only just found you, and now we are to be parted again. And this time—"
"I know."
"Maybe we’ll both be right," she said. "Perhaps there really is a warm island of steppe floating in the icecap. And maybe the Fireheads and the weather will spare those who stay here, and we will flourish again. That way there will be plenty of mammoths in the future to argue about who was right and wrong. Won’t it be wonderful?"
"Mother—"
She slipped her trunk into his mouth. "No more talking. Go."
Go, little grazer. Was he destined always to flee, to move on from those who cared for him?
This time, he promised himself grimly, this time is the last, whatever the outcome. Wherever I finish up will be my home — and my grave.
They gathered together: Longtusk, Rockheart, Splayfoot, the bold Bull calf Threetusk, and two young Cows. Just six of them, three Bulls and three Cows, to challenge the icecap — six mammoths, and Willow, the Dreamer.
As they stood in a dismal huddle at the fringe of the Family, the whole venture seemed impossible to Longtusk, absurd.
But here was Rockheart, the last to pledge his commitment to the trek: "You won’t get through a day without me to show you the way, you overfed milk-tusk." Longtusk’s spirit rose as he looked at the huge tusker — gaunt and bony, but a great slab of strength and determination and wisdom.
Now Rockheart raised his trunk. "You taste that?"
"Salt water. Blown from the sea…"
"Yes," said Rockheart. "But it comes from both north and south."
The mammoths would cross the land bridge between Asia and America much too close to its central line for Longtusk to be able to see the encroaching oceans to north and south. But sight is the least of a mammoth’s senses, and, on this bright clear day, Longtusk could taste the traces of salt spray in the air, hear the rush of wind over the ocean, sense the crash of breakers on the twin shorelines.
The neck of land they had to cross seemed fragile to him, easily sundered, and he wondered again about the wisdom of what they were attempting.
But this was no time for doubt.
"From the old land to the new," he said boldly.
"From old to new," Rockheart rumbled.
Longtusk began to march to the east. He could feel the powerful footsteps of the others as they followed him.
It had begun.
3
The Trek
To show his own determination he chose to lead, that first day.
But at the start of the second day, without a word, he quietly deferred to Rockheart, letting the old tusker, with his superior instincts and understanding of the country, go first. That decision paid off many times — especially after the mammoth trails petered out, and the land became increasingly broken and unpredictable.
Willow preferred to walk during the day; it kept him strong and alert. But the mammoths, needing little sleep, would walk through much of the night, and then Willow would ride on Longtusk’s back, muttering his strange dreams. The other mammoths watched in suspicious amazement, unable to understand how a mammoth could allow such a squat little creature onto his back.
There were animals here: musk oxen, horses, bison, even camels, passing in great herds on the horizon. They glimpsed some carnivores — wolves, lions, a saber-tooth cat that sent a shudder of recognition through Longtusk, and a short-faced bear, fat and ugly, which came lumbering from a limestone cave. The predators watched them pass, silently speculating after the manner of their kind, seeking weakness among potential prey.
They saw no other mammoths, no Fireheads, no Dreamers.
They paused to rest and feed in an isolated island of steppe vegetation: a mosaic of grass with flowering plants and herbs like marsh marigolds, harebells and golden saxifrage, and sparse trees like ground willow, few reaching higher than a mammoth’s belly hair.
At Longtusk’s feet, a small face peered out of a burrow. It was a collared lemming. The little rodent, seeing that the mammoths meant him no harm, crawled out of his burrow and began to nibble at the base of an Arctic lupine.
Longtusk realized sadly that, like the mammoths, the vanishing steppe was the lemmings’ only true home. But the lemming’s mind, though sharp, was too small for him to discuss the issue.
Mammoth and lemming briefly regarded each other. Then the lemming ducked beneath the ground once more.
A few more days’ walking brought them to a more mountainous region. To the north there was the sharp tang of ice in the air, and when he looked that way Longtusk saw a small, isolated icecap, a gleaming dome that nestled among the mountains. It was shrinking as the world warmed; it might once have been part of a much more extensive formation.
Then they came to a place where the traveling became much more difficult. Longtusk, as the strongest, took the lead.
The land here was cut through by deep channels. These gouges ran from north to south, and so across their eastward path. Longtusk found himself having to climb down crumbling slopes into the beds of the channels, and then up ridges on the far side, over and over. The channels seemed to have been cut right down to the rock, and there was only thin soil and scanty vegetation, broken by dunes of coarse sand and ridges of gravel. There was little water to be had, for the soil was shallow. But there was thicker growth on the top of the ridges — some of which, surrounded by the deep valleys, had smooth outlines, like the bodies of fish.
Standing on top of such a ridge, cropping the sparse grass wearily, Longtusk looked about at the strange pattern of the land. It was like a dried-up river bed, he thought, a tracery of runnels and ridges in mud, cutting across each other so they were braided like hair, gouged out and worn smooth by running water.
But this was broader than any river valley he had ever seen. And most of the top soil and loose rock had been torn away, right down to the bedrock. If a river had ever run here it must have been wider and far more powerful than any he had encountered before.
To the north the bedrock rose, great shoulders of hard volcanic rock pushing up to either side of this channeled plain. He saw that the rocky shoulders came together in a narrow cleft. Ice gleamed white there, blocking the cleft. But it was from that cleft that these strange deep channels seemed to run.
When he raised his trunk that way he could smell water: fresh water, a vast body of it, beyond that cleft in the rock.
The mammoths discussed this briefly. The ice wedge was less than a day’s walk away, and if there was water to be had the detour was surely worth the investment of their time. And besides, Longtusk admitted to himself, he was piqued by curiosity; he would like to know the story of this distorted, damaged land.
They followed one of the wider channels toward the ice plug, their muscles working steadily as the land rose.
At last Longtusk topped a ridge of rock, and he was able to look beyond the cleft and its plug of ice.
There was a lake here. It was broad and placid, and it lay in a natural hollow in the land. The water was fringed by rock and ice: the plug of ice that barred it from the damaged lands to the south, and by the shrinking icecap which lay at its northern end.
The mammoths walked cautiously down to the lake’s gravel-strewn fringe. The water was ice cold, but they sucked it into their trunks gratefully. Threetusk and the young Cows splashed out into the water, playfully blowing trunkfuls of it over each other. After a time they loped clumsily out of the water, their breath steaming, their outer fur crackling with frost.
Willow, too, made the best of the water. He threw off his furs and scampered, squat and naked, into the lake. He cried out at the co
ld, but immersed himself and scrubbed at the thick hair on his belly and head with bits of soft stone, getting rid of the insects that liked to make their homes there.
There seemed to be little vegetation in this placid pool. But there were signs of life by the shore, holes dug by rabbits and voles and lemmings in the long grass that fringed the water’s edge. And birds wheeled overhead, ducks and gulls.
"…But there are no fish here," said Rockheart. "Strange."
"But no fish could reach this place," Longtusk said thoughtfully.
At the lake’s northern shore, the ice gave directly onto the lake, making a cliff that gleamed white. There was a constant scrape and groan from all across the ice cliff, and Longtusk could see icebergs, small islands of blue-white ice, drifting away from the cliff. The lake water looked black beside the blinding white of the ice.
It was obvious that the ice was flowing from its mountain fastness, with hideous slowness, down toward the lake. And where the ice met the water the icebergs were calving off, great fragments of the disintegrating ice sheet.
In fact, Longtusk saw, the lake had been created by the melting of the ice sheet as it crumbled into this hollow in the rock.
"This lake is just a huge meltwater pond," Longtusk said, realizing. "It is fed by melting ice. There are no fish here, because there is no way for a fish to get here. And the water is kept from draining away by that—" The plug of ice in the rocky cleft on the lake’s southern side. "Fed by meltwater from the north, trapped by the ice plug to the south, this bowl in the land will gradually fill up—"
"Until," Rockheart growled, "that chunk of ice gives way."
"Yes. And then the lake will empty itself across the land, all at once — and wash away the soil and vegetation, scouring down to the bedrock."
Rockheart rumbled. "Like Kilukpuk’s mighty tears."
"Yes. No wonder the land is so damaged. But then the ice plug forms again, and the lake begins to fill once more."
Rockheart grunted. "If that’s true, we’re lucky. We’re in no danger here."
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