Silverhair

by Stephen Baxter

  She felt distracted, restless, disturbed. Where was everybody?

  They passed a family of wolves.

  The wolves were lying on the ground, huddled against the cold, their white-furred backs turned to the teeth of the wind, their heads tucked into their bellies for warmth. An adult — perhaps a bitch — stood up and glared as Silverhair rumbled past.

  "Once," rumbled Wolfnose, eyeing the wolf, "I saw a mammoth brought down by a wolf pack. Long before any of you were born. He was a calf — a Bull, called Willowleg, for his legs were spindly and weak. The wolves pursued him, despite the efforts of the rest of the Family to keep them off. The wolves are smart. They took it in turns to pick up the running, so they did not tire as Willowleg did.

  "At last they cornered him in a crevasse, where the rest of us could not follow. Willowleg got his back to the rock wall and fought. But there were many wolves. First they cut him down, with bites to his legs and hindquarters, and then, at last, they got in a killing bite to the throat. And then they pulled him apart.

  "Wolves have Family too," she said, her old eyes sunk in folds of skin. "The lead male eats first, then his senior bitches, and any female who is feeding cubs." She regarded the wide-eyed calves. "It is the way of things. But be wary of the wolves."

  Silverhair could see the wolf's moist eyes, the gleam of her teeth in the sunlight, and imagined the calculation going on in her sharp-edged mind, the dark legacy of Aglu, brother of Kilukpuk.

  Wolfnose's story was a timely warning. Of all of them, for all his greater size and strength compared to Sunfire, Croptail was probably the most vulnerable to predators like the wolves. Croptail could no longer rely on the close protection of Foxeye — she was preoccupied with the new infant, and her instincts were in any event to push the growing Bull away — but he had not yet learned to forage effectively for himself, or to defend himself from the wolves. So Silverhair made sure she always knew where Croptail had got to, and she stopped periodically and raised her trunk, listening and sniffing for signs of danger on the wind.

  The days were still cruelly short, but nevertheless lengthening, with the sun's brief arc above the horizon extending with each day that passed. The weather remained clear and bitterly cold. Wind whipped across the empty ground, blowing up particles of ice so small and hard and dry they felt like grit when they got into Silverhair's eyes.

  One day, when the sun was at its height and bathing the frosty ground with a spurious gold, Owlheart called a halt. The mammoths dispersed to scrape grass from the hard ground and drop dung.

  The calves found the energy to play. Sunfire pestered her older brother, placing her trunk in his mouth to test the grass he was eating, rubbing against him and even collapsing in a heap beside him. At times they chased each other, mounting mock charges and wrestling with their trunks.

  Foxeye wearily admonished Croptail to be careful with his sister, but Silverhair knew such play was important in teaching the calves to develop their own abilities — and most important, to learn about each other, for it was the bond between Family members that was the most important weapon of all in their continued survival. Anyhow, the calves' cheerful play warmed the dispirited adults.

  Poor Wolfnose stood stiffly, away from the others, her great legs visibly trembling.

  Owlheart called Silverhair, Lop-ear, and Snagtooth to her.

  Owlheart began digging at the ground. She broke the crusted surface with her tusks and forefeet, scooping the debris out of the way with her trunk. Owlheart's left tusk was much more worn than the right, a good deal shorter, and its tip was rounded and grooved. Most mammoths favor their right tusk as their master tusk, but Owlheart, unusually, preferred the left, and that showed in the unevenness of the wear.

  "The winter has been dry," said Owlheart as she dug. "Perhaps the thaw will come soon, but we are thirsty now. But here, in this place, there is water to be found — liquid, for most of the year. This is a place where the inner warmth of the Earth reaches to the surface and keeps the water beneath from freezing, even when the world is as cold as a corpse's belly..."

  Now, looking around more carefully, Silverhair saw the ground was pitted by a series of shallow craters: pits dug in the ground by mammoths of the past.

  "Remember this place," Owlheart said. "For it is a place of Earth's generous warmth, and water; and it may save your life."

  Silverhair turned, scanning the horizon. She raised her trunk and let the hairs there dangle in the prevailing wind. She studied the sky, and scraped with her tusks at the ground. She let the scents and subtle sounds of the landscape sink into her mind.

  She was remembering. Even as Owlheart spoke, she was adding a new detail, exquisite but perhaps vitally important, to the map of scents and breezes and textures that each mammoth carried in her head.

  "Now, help me dig," said Owlheart.

  Silverhair, Lop-ear, and Snagtooth stepped forward, took their places around the preliminary hole dug by their Matriarch, and began to work at the ground.

  The ground was hard: even to the stone-hard tusks of mammoths, it offered stiff resistance. Save for the occasional peevish complaint by Snagtooth, there was no talking as they worked: only the scrape of tusk and stamp of foot, the hissing of breath through upraised trunks.

  They worked through the night, taking breaks in turns.

  As the night wore on —and as there was little sign of water, and they became steadily more exhausted — Silverhair had a growing sense of unease.

  Owlheart was not a Matriarch who welcomed debate about her decisions. Nevertheless, as Owlheart took a break — standing to pass her dung a little way away from the others — Silverhair summoned up the courage to speak to her.

  Owlheart was evidently weary already from her work, and her pink tongue protruded from her mouth.

  "You're thirsty," said Silverhair.

  "Yes. A paradox, isn't it? — that the work to find water is making me thirstier than ever."

  "Matriarch, Foxeye is still weak, Croptail is weaning and vulnerable to the wolves, Wolfnose can barely walk. The digging is exhausting all of us..."

  The Matriarch's great jaw ceased its fore-and-back motion. "You're right," she said.

  "...What?"

  "We're in no fit state to have set off on an expedition like this. That's what you're leading up to, isn't it? But I wonder if you realize what peril we are in, little Silverhair. Where water vanishes, sanity soon follows. That's what the Cycle teaches. Thirst maddens us. Soon, without water, we would turn on each other... I have to avoid that at all costs, for we would be destroyed.

  "Perhaps if we had stayed where we were, the thaw might have come to us before we all died of thirst. But that was not my judgment," Owlheart growled. "And that is the essence of being Matriarch, Silverhair. Sometimes there are no good choices: only a series of bad ones."

  "And so we are forced to stake all our lives on the bounty of a seephole," Silverhair protested.

  "The art of traveling is to pick the least dangerous path." That was another line from the Cycle, a teaching of the great Matriarch, Ganesha the Wise.

  Owlheart turned away, evidently intent on resuming her interrupted feeding.

  But still Silverhair wasn't done. She blurted, "Maybe the old ways aren't the right ways anymore."

  Owlheart snorted. "Have you been talking to Lop-ear again?"

  Silverhair was indignant. "I don't need Lop-ear to tell me how to think."

  "The defiant one, aren't you? Tell me what has brought on this sudden doubt."

  Silverhair spoke to the Matriarch again of the monster she had encountered on the ice floe. "So you see, if there is such a strange creature in the world, who knows what else there is to find? The world is changing. Anyone can see that. It's why the winters are warmer, why the good grass and shrubs are harder to find. But maybe there's some good for us in all this. If we only go searching — listen with open ears — we might discover—"

  Owlheart cut her off with a slap of her trunk, hard eno
ugh to sting. "Listen to me carefully. There is nothing for us in what you saw at the coast— nothing but misery and pain and death. Do you understand?"

  "Won't you even tell me what it means?"

  "We won't talk of this again, Silverhair," said Owlheart, and she turned her massive back.

  There was a commotion at Silverhair's feet. Gloomy, frustrated, she looked down. She saw a little animated bundle of orange hair, smelled the warm cloying aroma of milk. It was Sunfire. The calf trotted over to the Matriarch's fresh dung and began to poke into the warm, salty goodies with her trunk. Soon she was totally absorbed. Silverhair, watching fondly, wished she could be like that again, trotting after her own concerns, in a state of blissful, unmarked innocence.

  Eggtusk came up. His giant, inward-curving tusks loomed over her, silhouetted against the sky. For a while he walked with her.

  She saw that they had become isolated from the rest of the Family. And with a flash of intuition, she saw why he had approached her. "Eggtusk—"

  "What?"

  "The thing I saw on the ice floe, in the south. You know what it is, don't you?"

  He regarded her. His words, coming deep from the hollow of his chest, were coupled with the unnatural stillness of his great head. It made her feel small and weak.

  "Listen to me very carefully," he said. "Owlheart is right. You must not go there again. And pray to Kilukpuk that your monster did not recognize you, that it does not track you here."

  "Why? It looked weaker than a wolf cub."

  "Perhaps it did," said Eggtusk sadly. "But that little beast was stronger than you, stronger than me — than all of us put together. It was the beast which the Cycle tells us can never be fought."

  "You mean—"

  "It was a Lost, little one. It was a Lost, on our Island. Now do you see?" Eggtusk seemed to be trembling, and that struck a deep dread into Silverhair's heart, for she had never seen the great Eggtusk afraid of anything before...

  Snagtooth screamed.

  "CIRCLE!" SNAPPED THE MATRIARCH.

  Almost without thinking, Silverhair found herself joining the others in a tight circle around Snagtooth, with the calves cowering inside and the adults arrayed on the outside, their tusks and trunks pointing outward, huge and intimidating, ready to beat off any predator or threat.

  But Silverhair knew there were no predators here — nobody, in fact, but Snagtooth herself.

  Snagtooth raised her head from the scraped-out hole. Her right tusk was snapped off, almost at the root where it was embedded in her face. Instead of the smooth spiral of ivory she had carried before, there was now only a broken stump, its edge rimmed by jagged, bone-like fragments. A dark fluid dripped from the tusk's hollow core; it was pulp, the living core of the tusk. The skin around the tusk root was ripped and bleeding heavily.

  Each of the mammoths felt the pain of the break as if it were their own. Sunfire, the infant, squealed in horror and burrowed under her mother's skirt of hair.

  Eggtusk lowered his trunk and reached into the hole in the ground. With some effort, he pulled out the rest of the broken tusk. "She trapped it under a boulder that was frozen in the ground," he said. "Simple as that. By Kilukpuk's hairy anus, what a terrible thing. You always were too impatient, Snagtooth—"

  Snagtooth howled. With tears coursing down the hair on her face, she made to charge him, like a Bull in musth, with her one remaining tusk.

  Eggtusk, startled, held his ground and, with a twist of his own mighty tusks, deflected her easily, without harming her.

  Owlheart stepped between them angrily. "Enough. Leave her be, Eggtusk."

  Eggtusk withdrew, growling.

  Owlheart laid her trunk over Snagtooth's neck, and stroked her mouth and eyes. "He was right, you know. Your teeth are brittle — why do you think you are called Snagtooth in the first place? — and a tusk is nothing but a giant tooth... The best thing to do is to freeze that stump, or otherwise the pulp will grow infected, and we will cake it with clay to stop the bleeding. You two," she said to Lop-ear and Silverhair. "Get on with your digging. It's all the more important now."

  She led Snagtooth away from the others.

  With Lop-ear, Silverhair resumed her work, trying to ignore the splashes of tusk pulp and splinters of ivory that disfigured the ground.

  AT LAST — after hacking at such cost through a trunk's length of permafrost — they broke through to seepwater. But the water was low and brackish, so thin it took long heartbeats for Silverhair to suck up as much as a trunkful.

  The hole was too deep for the infants' short trunks to reach the water, so Foxeye and Silverhair let water from their own trunks trickle into the mouths of the young ones. Sunfire was still learning to drink; she spilled more water than she swallowed.

  Wolfnose could not bend so easily, and she too had difficulty reaching the water. But she refused any help, proudly; she insisted she had drunk enough by her own efforts, and walked stiffly away.

  The mammoths drank as much as the seephole would offer them. But it wasn't enough, and there was still no sign of the spring thaw.

  "We have to go on," said Owlheart solemnly. "Farther west, to the land beneath the glaciers. There, at this time of year, meltwater will be found running over the land. That's where we must go."

  That was a land unknown to Silverhair — and a dangerous place, for sometimes the meltwater would come from the glaciers in great deluges that could carve out a new landscape, stranding or trapping unwary wanderers. That the Matriarch was prepared to take such a risk was a measure of the seriousness of the situation; nevertheless, Silverhair felt a prick of interest that she would be going somewhere new.

  They slept before going on.

  The short day was soon over. A hard Moon sailed into the sky, lighting up high clouds of ice. The silence of the Arctic night settled on the Family, a huge emptiness broken only by the mewling of Sunfire at her mother's breast, and Snagtooth's growled complaints at the pain of her shattered tusk.

  Silverhair could feel the cold penetrate her guard hair and underwool, through her flesh to her bones. Perhaps, she thought, this is how it will feel to grow old.

  The Moon was still rising when Owlheart roused them and told them it was time to proceed.

  6

  The Mountains at the End of the World

  COLD, DRY NIGHTS, lengthening days. Sometimes a dense gray fog would descend on the mammoths, wrapping them in obscurity. Nevertheless, the full summer was approaching. Each night the sun dipped to the horizon, becoming lost in the mist, but the sky grew no darker than a rich blue, speckled with stars.

  There came a night when the sun did not set. By day it rolled along the horizon, distorted by refraction and mist; but even at midnight slivers of ruddy light were visible, casting shadows that crossed the land from horizon to horizon, and the sky was filled with a wan glow that lacked warmth but was sufficient to banish the stars. Silverhair knew that the axis of the planet had reached that point in its annual round where it was tipped toward the sun, and there would be no true darkness for a hundred days.

  The land, here in the Island's northern plain, rolled to the horizon with a sense of immensity. There was little snow or ice here; the wind blew too strongly and steadily for that. And it was a flat place. The sparse plants that clung to life — tough grasses resistant to both frost and drought, small shrubs like sagebrush, wormwood, even rhododendron — all grew low, with short branches and strong root systems to resist the scouring effects of the wind. Even the dwarf willows cowered against the ground, their branches sprawled over the rock, dug in.

  When the wind picked up, it moaned through the sparse grass with an eerie intensity.

  At last the Mountains at the End of the World hove into Silverhair's view. In the low sunlight the upper slopes of the Mountains were bathed in a vibrant pink glow, which reflected down onto the slopes beneath where blue shadows pooled, the colors mixing to indigo and mauve.

  As the land rose toward the Mountains, gathering like a
great rocky wave, it became steadily more stony and barren. Here nothing grew save sickly colored lichen, useless for the mammoths to eat.

  And the land showed the battle scars left by huge warring forces of the past: giant scratches in the rock, boulders and shattered scree thrown as if at random over the landscape, smooth-sided gouges cut into what soil remained. It was, rumbled Wolfnose, the mark of the ancient ice sheets that had once lain a mile thick over this land.

  They approached a dark wall of spruce trees, unexpected so far north. Silverhair wondered if some outcropping of the Earth's inner warmth was working here to sustain these trees. The Family was forced to push farther north, to skirt the trees and the barren land that surrounded them.

  The light changed. It became strange: almost greenish in its unnaturally pale tinge. Looking up, Silverhair saw ice clouds scudding hard across the sky. A flock of ptarmigan in brilliant white plumage took off like a snow flurry and flew toward the Mountains. Their display calls echoed eerily from the rocky walls.

  "Storm coming."

  She turned, and found the bulk of Eggtusk alongside her.

  "And that's new," he growled, indicating the neck of forest ahead of them. "New since the last time the Family came this way."

  "When was that?"

  "Before you were born. Every year the forest pushes farther north, like pond scum on the great backside of Kilukpuk. Except that, unlike Kilukpuk, we can't scrape the land clean on a rock! Bah."

  Overhead, the greenish light was obscured by a layer of black, scudding clouds.

  As the storm gathered they continued to skirt the forest, heading northeast, until they came to the fringe of the Mountains at the End of the World.

  They walked past the eroded foothills of a mountain, which loomed above Silverhair. It was a severe black-brown cone, and glaciers were white ribbons wrapped around it. Yellow sunlight gleamed through the mountain's deep, ice-cut valleys.