Silverhair

by Stephen Baxter

  Silverhair tenderly reached forward and tucked the grass back into Wolfnose's mouth.

  Wolfnose was so old now that the two great molars in her jaw — her last set — were wearing down, and soon they would no longer be able to perform the job of grinding her food for her. Then, no matter what the Family did for her, Wolfnose's ribs and backbone would become even more visible through her sagging flesh and clumps of hair. And, if the wolves spared her, her rheumy eyes would close for the last time.

  It would be a time of sadness. But it was as it had been since the days of Kilukpuk.

  Wolfnose was mumbling even as her great jaw scraped ineffectually at the grass. "Too long," she said. "Too long."

  "Too long since what?" Silverhair asked, puzzled.

  "Since the last birth. That whining Bull-calf who's always under my feet—"

  "Croptail."

  "Too long..."

  Mammoths do not have clocks, or wristwatches, or calendars; they do not count out the time in arbitrary packages of seconds and days and years, as humans do. Nevertheless, the mammoths know time on a deep level within themselves. They can measure the slow migration of shadows across the land, the turning faces of Arctic poppies, the strength of air currents. So massive are mammoths that they can feel the turn of the Earth on its axis, the slow pulse of the seasons as the Earth spins in its stately annual dance, making the sun arc across the sky. And so deep and long are their memories, they are even aware of the greater cycles of the planet. There is the Great-Year, the twenty-thousand-year nod of the precessing axis of the spinning planet. And the mammoths know even the million-year cycle of the great ice sheets, which lap against the mountains like huge frozen waves.

  So Silverhair knew time. She knew how she was embedded in the great hierarchy of Earth's rhythms.

  And she knew that Wolfnose was right.

  Wolfnose said, "One infant, and one half-starved calf. It's not enough to keep the Family going, Grassfoot."

  Grassfoot had been the name of Silverhair's mother — Wolfnose's granddaughter — who, when Silverhair was herself still an infant younger than Croptail was now, had died. Calling Silverhair "Grassfoot" was a mistake Wolfnose had made before.

  "I know," said Silverhair sadly. "I know, Great-Grandmother." And, tenderly, she tucked more grass into the old Cow's trembling mouth.

  After a time Owlheart came forward. Her huge head loomed over Silverhair, so close that the Matriarch's wiry hair brushed Silverhair's brow. She pulled Silverhair away from Wolfnose.

  "I know you're no fool, child," rumbled Owlheart. "Sometimes I think you're the smartest, the best of us all."

  Silverhair was startled; she'd never been spoken to like that before.

  "But," the Matriarch went on, "I want you to understand that there is nowhere so important for you to be, right now, as here, at the time of this, our first new birth for many seasons. Never mind headlands. Never mind plausible young Bulls, even. Do you know why you must be here?"

  "To help my sister."

  The Matriarch shook her great head. "More than that. You must learn. Soon you will be ready for estrus, ready for a calf of your own. And that calf will depend on you — for its whole life, at first — and later, for the lore and wisdom you can teach it. We don't come into the world fully made, like the birds and the mice. We have to learn how to live. And it will be up to you to teach your calf. There is no greater responsibility. But you cannot teach if you do not learn yourself." Owlheart stepped back. "And if you do not learn, you will never become the great Matriarch I think you could be."

  At that, Silverhair's mouth dropped open, and her pink tongue rolled out with surprise. "Me? A Matriarch?"

  It was the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard.

  But Owlheart held her gaze. "It is your destiny, child," she said sadly. "Don't you know that yet?"

  3

  The Walk South

  MAMMOTHS SLEEP FOR ONLY a few hours at a time. During the long nights of winter — and during the Arctic summer, when the sun never sets — they sleep not to a fixed pattern but whenever they feel the need.

  So when Silverhair woke, the Moon was still high in the sky, bathing the frozen land in blue light. But soon the short spring day would return. She heard a snow bunting call — a herald of spring — and a raven croaked by overhead.

  Silverhair remembered the great mystery she had confronted, and — despite the new calf, despite Owlheart's rumblings — her curiosity was like a pull on her tail, dragging her south again.

  Lop-ear was a little way away from the Family, digging in a patch of snow for frozen grass. Silverhair shook frost from her outer guard hair and went to him.

  For fear of disturbing the others she silently wrapped her trunk around his and tugged. At first he was reluctant to move; Bull or not, he didn't have quite the powerful streak of curiosity that motivated Silverhair. But after a few heartbeats he let Silverhair lead him away.

  Lop-ear spoke with high-pitched chirrups of his trunk that he knew would not carry back to the Family. "Look at Owlheart."

  Silverhair turned to look back at the Family. She could see the massive dark forms of Owlheart and Wolfnose looming protectively over Foxeye and her new calf. And she could see Owlheart's eyes, like chips of ice in that huge brown head: an unblinking gaze, fixed on her.

  "They don't call her Owlheart for nothing," Lop-ear murmured.

  Silverhair shivered. She remembered Owlheart's admonitions: she should stay and spend time with her sister and the calf. But the pull of curiosity in her was too strong. She knew she had to go and explore what she had found on that remote coast.

  So she turned away, and the two of them walked on, heading south.

  THERE WAS ICE EVERYWHERE, beneath the starry sky. The ridged ice and snowdrifts seemed to flow smoothly under their feet.

  Silverhair walked steadily and evenly. Her bulk was dark and huge, herself and Lop-ear the only moving things in all this world of white and blue and black. She walked with liquid grace, her head nodding with each step, her trunk swaying before her, its great weight obvious. When she ran, her footsteps were firm, her powerful legs remaining stiff beneath her great weight, her feet swelling slightly as they absorbed her bulk.

  They battled through a storm.

  The snow and fog swirled around them, matting their hair with freezing moisture, at times making it impossible for them to see more than a few paces ahead. But Silverhair knew the storm was the last defiant bellow of the dying winter, and she kept her head down and used her bulk to drive herself forward across a tundra that was like a frozen ocean.

  They walked by night, when the only light came from the Moon, which cast a glittering purple glow on the fields of ice and snow. At such times the world was utterly still and silent, save for their own breathing.

  To a watching human, Silverhair would have looked something like an Asian elephant — but coated with the long, dark brown hair of a musk ox — round and solid and dark and massive, looking as if she had sprouted from the unforgiving Earth itself.

  From the ground under her tree-trunk legs to the top of her broad shoulders — as a human would have measured her — Silverhair was seven feet tall. She was fifteen years old. She could expect to continue growing until she was twenty-five or thirty, until she reached the height of eight or nine feet attained by Owlheart, the Matriarch of the Family. But at that, she would be dwarfed by the biggest of the Bulls — like crusty old Eggtusk, who stood all of eleven feet tall at the shoulder.

  Her head was large, with a high dome on her crown. Her face, with its long jaw, was surprisingly graceful. Her shoulders had a high, distinctive hump, behind which her back sloped markedly from front to rear — unlike the horizontal line of an elephant's back.

  Her body was a machine designed to combat the cold.

  The layer of fat under her skin — thick as a human forearm — kept her warm through the lightless depths of the Arctic winter. Her ears and tail were small, otherwise those thin, exposed or
gans would be at risk from frostbite — but the long hairs that extended from her fleshy tail would let it serve as an effective fly-swat in the mosquito-ridden months of the short summer. There was even a small flap of skin beneath her tail, to seal her anus from the cold.

  Her ears had an oddly human shape. Her eyes, too, were small like a human's, and buried deep in a nest of wrinkled skin, shielded from the worst of the weather by thick lashes.

  Her tusks were six feet long. Sprouting from their deep sockets at the front of her face, the tusks twisted before her in a loose spiral, their tips almost touching before her. The undersides of both her tusks were worn, for she used them to strip bark and dig up plants — and, in the depths of winter, her tusks served as a snowplow to dig out vegetation for feeding, or even as an icebreaker to expose water to drink in frozen ponds. The bluish ivory of the tusks was finely textured, with growth rings that mapped her age.

  Her trunk, six feet long, served her as her nose, hand, and arm, and was her main feeding apparatus. It was a tube of flesh packed with tiny muscles, capable of movement in any direction, even contraction and extension like a telescope. It had two finger-like extensions at its tip for manipulating grass and other small objects. As it worked, the trunk's surface folded and wrinkled, betraying the complexity of its structure.

  A heavy coat of fur covered her body. Over a fine, downy underwool, her guard hairs were long, coarse, and thick, springy and transparent — more like lengths of fishing line than human hair. The hair on her head was just a few inches long. But it hung down in a longer fringe under her chin and neck, and at the sides of her trunk. From her flanks and belly hung a skirt of guard hair almost three feet long, giving her something of the look of a Tibetan yak.

  Her coat was dark orange-brown, like a musk ox's. And in a broad cap between her eyes lay the patch of snow-white fur that had given Silverhair her name.

  Silverhair was Mammuthus primigenius: a woolly mammoth.

  Ten thousand years before, creatures like Silverhair had populated the fringe of the retreating northern ice caps — right around the planet, through Asia from the Baltic to the Pacific, across North America from Alaska to Labrador. But those days were gone.

  The isolation of this remote island, off the northern coast of Siberia, had saved Silverhair and her ancestors from the extinction that had washed over the mainland, claiming her Cousins and many other large animals.

  But now the mammoths were trapped here, on the Island.

  And Silverhair and her Family were the last of their kind, the last in all the world.

  THE SHORT DAYS and long nights wore away.

  Silverhair and Lop-ear took time to care for their skin. They scratched against an outcropping of rock, luxuriantly dislodging the grasses and dirt that had lodged in the crevices of their skin and under their hair. They used a patch of dusty, dried-out soil to powder their skin and force out parasites.

  Under her thick hair, Silverhair's skin would have looked rough and callused. But it was very sensitive. Under a tough, horny outer layer were receptors so acute, she could pinpoint an annoying insect and brush it off with a precise flick of her trunk, or swish of her tail — or even crush it with one focused ripple of her skin.

  Nevertheless, Silverhair looked forward to the summer, when open puddles of water would be available, and she would be able to wallow comfortably in mud, cooling and washing out ticks and fleas and lice.

  "...I wonder if Owlheart guessed where we were going," Lop-ear was saying as he scratched. "Did you see her talking to Eggtusk?"

  "No. But after that lecture I'm surprised she's letting me out of the sight of the calf."

  Lop-ear raised his trunk to sniff at the frosty air. "She was right. Raising the young is the most important thing of all. But she's obviously making an exception for you."

  "Why?"

  "Perhaps because — to Owlheart — this may be more important than anything else you can do — even more important than learning about calves." Lop-ear rested his trunk on his tusks. "Owlheart is wise," he said. "She listens with more than ears. She listens with her heart and mind. That's why she's Matriarch."

  "And why," said Silverhair miserably, "I could never be Matriarch, if I live until the Earth spins itself to dust." She told Lop-ear what Owlheart had said: that it was her destiny to be Matriarch.

  "She's probably right," he said. "There aren't too many candidates."

  "Foxeye—"

  "Your sister is a fine mother. But she's weak, Silverhair. You know that. Other than that, there is only Snagtooth."

  Silverhair's fur bristled. "I would leave the Family if she were ever Matriarch. She's mean-spirited, vindictive..."

  "Then who else is there?"

  When she thought it through like that, he was, of course, right. His logic was relentless. But it was all utterly depressing.

  "I don't want to be a Matriarch," she said miserably. "I don't want all that responsibility."

  "Perhaps you really do have the spirit of Longtusk inside you."

  "That's ridiculous," she said. But she was pleased to hear him say it.

  Lop-ear lifted his trunk and rubbed her snow-white scalp with affection, a gentle touch that thrilled her. "Like Longtusk, you're a wanderer," said Lop-ear. "Perhaps you too could lead us to places no one else could even dream of. And, like Longtusk, you're perverse. After all, Longtusk had to fight to win the command of his Family, didn't he? The story goes, the other Bulls all but killed him, rather than accept his orders."

  "But I don't want to fight anybody."

  "Maybe not. But you fight yourself, Silverhair. How typical it is of you that you should choose to model yourself on the one Cycle hero who you could never be, Longtusk the Bull!"

  HE WAS RIGHT.

  In all the great tundra of time reflected in the Cycle, there is only one Bull hero: Longtusk.

  When the world warmed, and the ice fell back into the north, the Lost — the mammoths' only true enemy — had come pushing into the mammoth tundra from the south, butchering and murdering. All over the planet, mammoths had died, Families and Clans falling together.

  All, that is, save the Family of Longtusk: for Longtusk had somehow brought his people across the cold sea waters here, to the Island. Nobody knew how he had done this. Some said he had flown like a bird, carrying his Family on his mighty back; some said he stamped his mighty foot and caused the sea to roar from the ground. At any rate, the Lost had never followed, and the mammoths had been safe.

  But Longtusk had given his life...

  THEY FOUND A DEEP PUDDLE with only a thin layer of ice on top. Lop-ear broke through this easily with his tusk, and they plunged their trunks into the water. When Lop-ear had taken a trunkful he closed the trunk by clenching its fingers, lifted the end, and curled it into his mouth. Then he tilted his head back, opened his trunk, and let the water gush into his mouth, a delicious and cooling stream.

  They soon drained the puddle. It was a rare treat: standing water had been scarce this winter, and the Family was counting on an early spring thaw. Mammoths need much fresh water each day. They can eat snow, but have to sacrifice precious body heat to melt it.

  "Of course," said Lop-ear, "even if you were to become Matriarch, I'm not at all sure where you could lead us."

  "What do you mean?"

  He led her to a patch of frost overlying harder, older ice. Lop-ear picked up a twig with his trunk and began to scrape at the frost.

  "Here is the Island," he said. It was a rough oval. "It is surrounded by sea, which we can't cross. To the north, there are the Mountains at the End of the World. And to the south, there is the spruce forest." More scratchings.

  Silverhair watched him, baffled. "What are you doing?"

  He looked up. "I'm..." He had no word for it. "Imagine you're a bird," he said at last. "A guillemot, flying high over the Island."

  "But I'm not a bird."

  "In Kilukpuk's name, Silverhair, if you can imagine yourself as Longtusk you can surely str
etch your mind that far!"

  She stretched out her ears and spun, pretending to wheel like a bird. "Look at me! Caw! Caw!"

  "All right, Silverhair the gull. Now, you're looking down at the Island. You see it sitting in the middle of the sea, like a lump of dung in a pond. Yes?"

  "Yes..."

  "Look — now!" With his trunk, he pointed to the frost scrapings he had made.

  And — looking down as if she were a mammoth-gull, concentrating hard — for a heartbeat, yes, she could see the Island, see it through his scrapings, just as if she really were a gull, balanced on the winds high above.

  To Silverhair, the simple drawing was a kind of magic; she had never seen anything like it.

  "Every time the Earth spins around the sun, the summer is a little longer, the winter a little less harsh. And the forest encroaches a little more on the tundra." Absently Lop-ear dug in the soil with his tusks, burrowed with his trunk, and produced a scraping of grass. "You know, Wolfnose remembers a time — when she was only a calf herself — when the spruce forest was just a few straggling saplings clinging to the coast. And now look how far it has spread." With his twig, he pointed to the middle of the Island. "You see? We are contained in this strip of the Island, between forest and mountains, like a calf that has fallen in a mudhole. And the strip is narrowing."

  "So what do we do?"

  "I don't know. This Island is all we have. We have absolutely nowhere else to go."

  She admired Lop-ear's unusual mind, the clarity and depth of thinking he was capable of. But his logic was chilling. "It can't be true," she said. "What about the Sky Steppe?"

  Lop-ear said, "Do you really believe that?"