Rockheart said, "What's it doing?"
Longtusk replied, "It — he — is looking for long, straight bits of wood. I expect he wants to make a spear, maybe even a fire. He might catch a lemming or a vole."
Rockheart snorted in disgust, indifferent.
Rockheart and Splayfoot soon stopped eating, evidently having taken their fill.
Longtusk had barely scratched the surface of his hunger. He had been used to much more fodder than this at the Firehead settlement, and if he didn't take more he would soon be as scrawny and ragged as the others — and ill-prepared for the winter to come, when the mammoths would have to live off their stores of fat.
But to gorge himself was hardly a way to gain trust. So he took care to eat no more than Rockheart's shrunken stomach could manage.
Having fed as best they could, they moved on.
The sun was already sinking in the sky when they reached the trail.
It was just a strip of trampled land that cut across the gravel-littered rock barrens, passing roughly east to west. Longtusk, instincts dulled by captivity, might not have seen it at all. But Rockheart turned confidently onto the trail and began to head east.
Longtusk — supporting his sister, and occasionally allowing Willow to ride on his back — followed his lead.
They passed a stand of forest. The trees were firs, still young but already tall, growing fast and dense in a green swathe that stretched to the south. The forest had grown so thickly, in fact, that it had already overrun the old trail, and the mammoths had to divert north until the forest was behind them and they were cutting across open land once more.
Longtusk said, "It's a long time since I was here. But I don't recall the land being like this."
"Things have changed here, Longtusk — within the lifetime of calves a lot younger than you or me. I recall when this was all steppe, with grass, herbs, shrubs. Now look around: to the south you have the spreading forest, and to the north the bare rock. No place left for the steppe, eh?
"And even where there is steppe — though you might not think it — the climate is wetter than it used to be. There is more rain, more thick snow in the winter. Sometimes the land is waterlogged and boggy. In the summer nothing can grow but grass and lichens, and in the winter we struggle to keep out of snowdrifts so thick they cover our bellies. The land isn't right for us any more. Deer and moose can chew the trees, and reindeer and musk oxen browse on lichen and moss, dull cloddish brutes... but not us.
"But there are still a few places where the old steppe lingers, pockets of it here and there."
"And that's where you're taking us."
"That's where the mammoths live, yes — if we're lucky, friendly ones. That was the way we were heading, when we reached the mud seep. But we were weak, and...
"There are fewer of us now, and I suppose in the future there will be fewer still. But we persist. We have before."
"What do you mean?"
Rockheart eyed him. "You've been away too long. Have you forgotten so much of your Cycle?"
AS WINTER FOLLOWED SUMMER, so the Earth had greater seasons, spanning the Great-Years. In the long winters the ice would spread, freezing the land and the air, and the mammoths could fill the expanding Steppe. Now it seemed the Earth's unwelcome spring was returning, and the steppe was overrun by forests and grass — and the mammoths had to retreat, waiting out the return of the cold, as they had many times before.
It was a time of hardship. But it would pass. That was the teaching of the Cycle. The ice had come and gone for more than two million years, and the mammoths had survived all the intervals of warmth in that immense stretch of time.
...But now Longtusk thought of the Fireheads: clustered around the mud seep, waiting for mammoths to die.
There were no Fireheads in the Cycle. There had been no Fireheads in the world when last the ice had retreated and advanced.
He had been away from his kind a long time, and he didn't presume to doubt Rockheart's ancient wisdom. But his experience, he was realizing slowly, was wider than the old tusker's. He had seen more of the world and its ways — and he had seen the Fireheads.
And he did not feel so confident that the future could be the same as the past.
He kept these thoughts to himself as they pushed on.
AS NIGHT CLOSED IN the clouds thickened, and the wind from the icecap was harsh. Longtusk and Rockheart huddled close around Splayfoot, trying to shelter her and give her a little of their own sparse body heat; and Longtusk allowed the Dreamer to curl up under his belly fur.
Every so often Longtusk would rouse Splayfoot and force her to walk around. He knew that there was a core of heat inside the body of each mammoth, a flicker of life and mind that must be fed like the hearths of the Fireheads. If the cold penetrated too deep, if that flame of life was extinguished, it could never be ignited again.
Splayfoot responded passively, barely conscious.
In the morning they resumed their dogged walking, following Rockheart's trail.
But soon the light changed.
Longtusk raised his trunk, sniffing the air. He could smell moisture, rain or maybe snow, and the wind was veering, coming now strongly from the east. Looking that way he saw black clouds bubbling frothily.
There was a thin honking, a soft flap of wings far above him. Birds, he saw dimly, perhaps geese, fleeing from the east, away from the coming storm. He recalled what Walks With Thunder had told him of the eastern lands, where the icecap pushed far to the south. And he recalled Thunder's obscure, half-forgotten legends of a land embedded in the ice — a place that stayed warm enough to keep off the snow, even in the depths of winter. The nunatak.
He wondered how far those birds had flown — all the way from the nunatak itself? But how could such a place exist?
The storm was rising, and he put the speculation from his mind. But he memorized the way those geese had flown, adding their track to the dynamic map of the landscape that he, like all mammoths, carried in his head.
By mid-morning the storm had hit.
The sky became a sheet of scudding gray-black clouds, utterly hiding the sun. The wind blew from the east with relentless ferocity, and carried before it a mix of snow, hail and rain, battering their flesh hard enough to sting. Soon they were all soaked through, bedraggled, weary, their fur plastered flat, lifting their feet from one deep muddy footprint into another.
Longtusk let Rockheart lead the way, and Willow followed Rockheart, clinging to his belly fur, his small round face hidden from the wind and rain. Longtusk plodded steadily after Rockheart, being careful never to let the big tusker out of his sight, even though it meant he walked so close he was treading in Rockheart's thin, foul-smelling dung. And behind Longtusk came Splayfoot, still weak, barely able to see, clinging onto Longtusk's tail with her trunk like a calf following its mother, as sheltered as he could manage.
But when the eye of the storm approached, the wind started to swirl around. Soon Longtusk, disoriented, couldn't tell east from west, north from south — and couldn't even see the trail. But Rockheart led them confidently, probing at the muddy ground with his trunk, seeking bits of old dung and the remnants of footprints, traces that marked the trail.
And it was while the storm was still raging that they came upon the mammoths.
THEY LOOKED LIKE A CLUMP of boulders, round and solid, plastered with soaked hair. Longtusk saw those great heads rise, tusks dripping with water, and trunks lifted into the air, sniffing out the approach of these strangers. There were a few greeting rumbles for Rockheart and Splayfoot, nothing but suspicious glares for Longtusk.
There were perhaps fifteen of them — probably just a single Family, adult Cows and older calves. The Cows were clustered around a tall, gaunt old female, presumably the Matriarch, and the calves were sheltered under their belly hair and legs.
Longtusk could see no infants. Perhaps they were at the center of the group, out of his sight.
Rockheart lurched off the trail and
led them toward the mammoths. Longtusk hadn't even been aware of the changes in the land around the trail. But now he saw grass, what looked like saxifrage, even a stand of dwarf willow clinging to the rock. It was an island of steppe in this cold desert of rock and glacial debris, just as Rockheart had described.
Willow found a shallow water hole, some distance from the mammoths, and went that way. Some of the mammoths watched him lethargically, too weak or weary to be concerned.
Rockheart and Splayfoot lumbered forward and were welcomed into the huddle with strokes of trunk and deeper, contented rumbles. Longtusk hesitated, left outside — outside, as he had been as a mammoth among mastodonts, as he had been as a mammoth at the cave of the Dreamers, and now outside even in this community of mammoths.
Longtusk dredged up memories of his life with his Family, before that terrible separation. He recalled how the adults seemed so tall, their strength so huge, their command imposing, even their stink powerful. Now these wretched, bedraggled creatures seemed diminished; none of them, not even the old Matriarch at the center, was taller than he was.
Light flared, noise roared. There was a sudden blaze to Longtusk's right, and the mammoths, startled, trumpeted, clustered, tried to run.
It was lightning, he realized, a big blue bolt. It had struck out of the low clouds and set fire to an isolated spruce tree. The tree was burning, and the stink of smoke carried to his trunk — but there was no danger; already the fire was being doused by the continuing rain.
The other mammoths had raised their trunks suspiciously at Longtusk.
He hadn't reacted. It was only lightning, an isolated blaze; in his years with the Fireheads he'd learned that fire, if contained, was nothing to fear. But he realized now that the others — even the powerful Bull Rockheart — had shown their instinctive fear.
"...He did not run from the fire. He didn't even flinch."
"Look how fat he is, how tall. None of us grows fat these days."
"See the burn on his flank. The shape of a Firehead paw..."
"He came with that little Dreamer."
"He stinks of fire. And of Fireheads. That is why he wasn't afraid."
"He isn't natural..."
But now the gaunt older Cow he had tagged as the Matriarch broke out of the group. Cautiously, ears spread and trunk raised, she approached him. Her hair was slicked down and blackened by the rain.
It had been so long, so very long. But still, there was something in the set of her head, her carriage—
Something that tugged at his heart.
Hesitantly, she reached out with her trunk and probed his face, eyes, mouth, and dug into his hair.
He knew that touch; the years fell away.
"I thought you were gone to the aurora," she said softly.
"Do I smell of fire?"
"Whatever has become of you, the rain has washed it away. All I can smell is you, Longtusk." She stepped forward and twined her trunk around his.
Through the rain, he could taste the sweet, milky scent of her breath.
"Come." Milkbreath pulled him back to the group, where the huddle was reforming. The other mammoths grumbled and snorted, but Milkbreath trumpeted her anger. "He is my son, and he is returned. Gather around him."
Slowly, they complied. And as the day descended into night and the storm continued to rage, slow, inquisitive trunks nuzzled at his mouth and face.
He felt a surge of warm exhilaration. After all his travels and troubles he was home, home again.
But, even in this moment of warmth, he noticed that there were no small calves at his feet, here at the center of the huddle — no infants at all, in fact.
Even as he greeted his mother, that stark fact dug deep into his mind, infecting it with worry.
2
The Decision
THE STORM BLEW ITSELF OUT.
The next day was clear and cold, the sky blue and tall. The water that had poured so enthusiastically from the sky soaked into the ground, quickly, cruelly. But the grassy turf was still waterlogged, and drinking water was easy to find. The mammoths wandered apart, feeding and defecating, shaking the moisture out of their fur.
The spruce that had been struck by lightning was blackened and broken, its ruin still smoking.
Longtusk stayed close to his sister, and, with his mother's help, encouraged her to eat and drink. Slowly her eyes grew less cloudy.
His mother's attentiveness, as if he was still a calf, filled a need in him he hadn't recognized for a long time. He answered as fully as he could all the questions he was asked about his life since he had been split from the Family, and slowly the suspicion of the others wore away. And when he told of the loss of his calf and mate, the suspicion started to turn at last to sympathy.
But there were few here who knew him.
Skyhump, the Matriarch of the Family when he had been born, was long dead now — in fact there had been another Matriarch since, his mother's elder sister, killed by a fall into a kettle hole, and his mother had succeeded her.
And there was a whole new generation, born since he had left.
There was a Bull calf, for instance, called Threetusk — for the third, spindly ivory spiral that jutted out of his right tusk socket — who seemed fascinated by Longtusk. He would follow Longtusk around, asking him endless questions about the warrior mastodonts like Jaw Like Rock, and he would raise his tusks to Longtusk's in halfhearted challenge.
Longtusk realized that Threetusk was just how he had been at that age: restless, unhappy with the company of his mother and the other Cows of the Family — not yet ready to join a bachelor herd, but eager to try.
But things were different now. There was no sign of a bachelor herd anywhere nearby for Threetusk to join. Perhaps there was a herd somewhere in this huge land, in another island of nourishing steppe. But how was a juvenile like Threetusk, lacking knowledge of the land, to find his way there in one piece? And if he could not find a herd, what would become of him?...
The Family moved slowly over their patch of steppe, eating sparingly, drinking what they could find. After the first couple of days it was obvious their movements were restricted, and Longtusk took to wandering away from the rest, trying to understand the changed landscape.
He struck out south and east and west.
Each direction he traveled, the complex steppe vegetation soon dwindled out to be replaced by cold desert, or dense coniferous forests, or bland plains of grass. And to the north, of course, there was only the protesting shriek of the ice as it continued its millennial retreat.
And, hard as he listened, he heard no signs of other mammoths.
His Family was isolated in this island of steppe. Other mammoths, Families and bachelor herds, must also be restricted to steppe patches and water holes and other places where they could survive. And the nearest of those islands might be many days' walk from the others.
This isolation mattered. It made the mammoths fragile, exposed. An illness, a bad winter, even a single fall of heavy snow could take them all, with no place to run.
As they munched at their herbs and grass the others didn't seem aware of their isolation, the danger it posed for them.
And they didn't seem aware of the strangest thing of all: there were no young calves here — no squirming bundles of orange fur, wrestling each other or searching for their mothers' milk and tripping over their trunks.
Longtusk felt a profound sense of unease. And, when he spotted a new skein of geese flapping out of the east, it was an unease that coalesced into a new determination.
He plucked up the courage to speak to his mother.
"There was a Gathering," he said. "When I was a calf. Just before I got lost."
"Yes. The whole Clan was there."
"I saw Pinkface, the Matriarch of Matriarchs. Is she still alive?"
Milkbreath's trunk tugged at a resistant clump of grass. "There have been several Gatherings since you were lost."
Longtusk said slowly, "That isn't an answer."
Milkbreath turned to face him, and he was aware of a stiffening among the other Cows close by, his aunts and great-aunts.
He persisted. "When was the last Gathering?"
"Many years ago. It isn't so easy to travel any more, Longtusk. Especially for the calves and—"
"At the Gathering, the last one. Were there more mammoths — or less?"
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."
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