Longtusk

by Stephen Baxter

  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 turnin
g 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.