Longtusk

Longtusk and the Truth

There are many stories about Longtusk (said Silverhair).

There is a story that Longtusk flew over the ice, carrying his Clan to safety in a place called a nunatak.

There is a story that Longtusk dug his huge tusks into the ground, as we do when we search for water, only to find — not water — but warmth, coming out of bare rock, sufficient to drive back the ice and keep his Clan alive.

There is a story that he stamped his mighty feet and made his refuge of rock and heat fly off into the sky, carrying the mammoths with it, and the rock became the Sky Steppe, the last refuge of all. But Longtusk had to stay behind, here on Earth, to face his death…

Or perhaps Longtusk never died. Some say he returns, from out of the north, a hero come to save us when we face great danger. Perhaps it was he who brought our Family to the Island, before the sea rose and trapped us there. (But perhaps that was somebody else, another hero whose name we have lost, somebody inspired by Longtusk’s legend…)

How can all the stories be true?

Can any of them be true?

Oh, Icebones, I understand. You want to know. And, more than that, you want the stories to be true. I was just like you as a calf!

Longtusk is a wonderful hero. But we’ll never know for sure. You understand that, don’t you?

…What do I think?

Well, stories don’t come out of thin air. Perhaps there’s a grain of truth. Perhaps there really was a Longtusk, and something like the stories really did happen, long ago.

Perhaps. We’ll never know.

If I could know one thing about Longtusk, though, it would be this.

How he died.

1 The Family

Under a gray sunless sky, without shadows, every direction looked the same. Even the land was contorted, confusing, the rock bare, littered here and there by gravel and loess, lifeless save for scattered tussocks of grass.

Longtusk, trunk raised, studied the vast, empty landscape around them. There were no Fireheads, he realized: no storage pits, no hearths, no huts, not even a mastodont, none of it in his vision for the first time for half his lifetime.

The Fireheads had filled and defined his world for so long. Their projects — predictable or baffling, rewarding or distressing — had provided a structure to every waking moment, even when he had defied them. Now the future seemed as blank and directionless as the land that stretched around him.

He felt disoriented, like a calf who had been spun around until he was dizzy.

"I don’t think they are coming after us." He almost wished the Fireheads would follow him. At least that was a threat he could understand.

But it seemed he would not be given that much help. And, for the first time since his capture as a calf, he had to learn to think for himself.

"Of course not," Rockheart was saying. "They have no need to — save revenge, perhaps. And those dwarfish pals of yours were making trouble."

"They aren’t dwarfs," said Longtusk. "They are mastodonts."

"It doesn’t matter," growled Rockheart. "You won’t be seeing them again."

…Could that be true?

"You’re the leader of this strange little herd of ours, Longtusk," Rockheart said sourly. "But I strongly suggest we head north and east."

"Why?"

"Because we might find something to eat and drink. Although we may have to fight for it." He eyed Longtusk. "You aren’t in your Firehead camp now, being fed hay and water by your masters…"

Perhaps. But Longtusk didn’t want to think about a future in which he became like the mammoths he had seen at the mud seep, fighting over dribbles of brackish mud, pushing away the weak and old and young.

"North and east," he said.

"North and east."

So they moved on.

After a time they found a place where grass grew a little more thickly. Longtusk pulled tufts of the coarse grass into his own mouth, and helped Splayfoot to feed. Her eyes half closed, Splayfoot ground up the grass with slow, feeble movements of her jaw, but he could see her tongue was spotted with black, and she was sucking at the grass as much as eating it.

He said, "She’s very weak. She needs drink as much as food."

Rockheart growled, "There’s no drink to be had here."

It struck Longtusk that Rockheart himself was barely in better condition than Splayfoot. But where Splayfoot was subsiding toward death, Rockheart was still functioning, working. At the mud seep he had even been prepared to challenge Longtusk — and now here he was playing his part in this unexpected journey, which looked as if it would prove long and difficult.

His respect grew for this indomitable, arrogant Bull.

Willow, too, was hungry and thirsty. There was no water here, and the little Dreamer couldn’t eat grass, like the mammoths. He prowled around the area until he found a stunted dwarf willow, clinging to the ground. He prized up its twisted branches and studied them, eventually dropping them with scorn.

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."

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 Longtusk 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 cold, 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."

"What do you mean?"

"The water has some way to rise before it tops that ice dam."

"You’re right. We’ll be long gone by then." Good for Rockheart, Longtusk thought: practical as always, focusing on the most important issue — the mammoths’ safety.

They left the lake, calling to the others.

A few more days and he could sense the broadening of the land to north and south, and he knew they had passed the narrowest point of this neck of Earth that stretched between the continents.

Thus, the mammoths walked from Asia to America.

Soon after that he could see the icecap.

It was a line of light, straight and pure white, all along the eastern horizon, as if etched there by the ingenious paw of a Firehead. He could hear the growl and scrape as the ice flowed over the rocky land, gouging and destroying, the mighty cracks as the ice itself split and crumbled, and the steady roar of the blunt katabatic winds which spilled from its chill domed heart.

It was a frozen sheet that covered half a continent, pushing far to the south, much farther south than in the land they had fled, on the far side of the land bridge. And it was this monster of ice that they must challenge before they reached safety.

He tried to maintain the pace and enthusiasm of his little group. But as they drew closer he could feel his own footsteps drag, as if the icecap itself was drawing out his strength, just as it sucked the moisture from the air.

They reached land that had clearly been uncovered only recently by the ice.

The rock was scoured clean, laced here and there with low dunes of glacial till and sand. Only lichen grew here: patches of yellow and green, bordered by black, slowly eroding the surfaces of the rock. The lichen might be extremely ancient; it took ten years for a new colony to become visible to the eye. He wondered what slow encrusting dreams these vegetable colonists shared, what slow cold memories of the surging ice they stored.

The land became steadily more treacherous. They worked their way past moraines, heaps of rubble left by the retreating ice. The rubble was of all sizes, from gritty sand to boulders larger than a mammoth. The moraines were cut through by meltwater rivers that varied unpredictably from trickles to mighty, surging flows, and the rubble heaps were unstable, liable to slump and collapse at any time.

As they pressed farther, a great wind rose, katabatic, pouring directly off the ice sheet and into their faces. It was a hard time. There was little to eat or drink and every step required a major effort, but they persisted. And Longtusk was careful to encourage his charges to gather as much strength as possible, for he knew that only harder days, if anything, lay ahead of them all.

At last they encountered the ice itself.

They reached the nose of a glacier. It was a wall of ice, cracked and dirty and forbidding. Blocks of broken ice, calved off the glacier like miniature icebergs, lay unmelting on rock that was rust-red, brown and black. Tornado-like columns of ice crystals spun across the barren rock in the wind, whipping up small lumps of sandstone that flew through the air, peppering the mammoths’ hides.

This was the terminus of a huge river of ice that poured, invisibly slowly, from the vast cap that still lay to the east.

The mammoths paused to gather breath, hunted without success for food, and then began the ascent.

Longtusk picked his way onto the great ice river, stepping cautiously over a shattered, chaotic plain of deeply crevassed blue ice. The glacier was a river of raw white, its glare hurting his eyes, shining under the sky’s clean blue. He could see the glacier’s source, high above him, at the lip of the ice sheet itself. Where he could he chose paths free of crevasses and broken surfaces, but he could usually find easier ground near the glacier’s edges, hugging the orange rock of the valley down which the glacier poured.

It was difficult going. Sometimes loose snow was whipped up by the wind and driven over the surface, obscuring everything around him up to shoulder height. But, above the snow, the sky was a deep blue.

At last the ice beneath his feet leveled out, and he realized he had reached a plateau.

It was the lip of the ice sheet.

He was standing on a sea of gleaming ice, which shone in every direction he looked, white, blue and green. The ice receded to infinity, flat white under blue sky — but perhaps his poor eyes could make out a shallow dome shape as the ice rose, sweeping away from him toward the east.

It was utterly silent and still, without life of any kind, the only sound the snort of his trunk, the only motion the fog of his breath.

He turned, ponderously, and looked back the way he had come.

This edge of the ice was marked by mountains, heavily eroded and all but buried, and he could see how the glacier spilled between the peaks toward the lower ground. Though locked into the slow passage of time, the glacier was very obviously a dynamic river of ice. Huge parallel bands flowed neatly down the valley’s contours. The bands marked the merging of tributaries, smaller ice rivers that flowed into the main stream, each of them keeping their characteristic color given them by the rock particles they had ground up and carried. Where the glacier reached the lower land it spread out, cracking, making the jumbled surface of crevasses he had struggled to cross.

Everything flowed down from here, down to the west and the lower ground, as if he had climbed to the roof of the world. He was cold, exhausted, hungry, and thirsty; and he was still not confident of surviving this immense venture. But, standing here, looking down on the great frozen majesty of the icecap and its rivers, he felt exhilarated, privileged.

He turned to face the east, ready to go on.

He stepped forward experimentally. The ice was unforgivingly cold, seeming to suck his body heat out through the thick callused pads on his feet. It was harder than any rock he had encountered — but it was not smooth. It was choppy, rippled, like the surface of a lake under the wind. But the ripples were frozen in place, and the footing was, surprisingly, quite secure, thanks to those scalloped ripples.

There is nothing to eat here, he thought dryly. There is no shelter, and if I stay too long I will surely freeze to death. But at least I won’t slip and fall.

He began to walk, and the others followed him. He could feel the ice’s flow in his belly, a deep disturbing subsonic murmur as it poured with immense slowness toward the lip.

The cap was one of a string of great domes of ice that littered the northern hemisphere of the planet. As its center the icecap was kilometers thick, as humans would have measured it, and the bedrock beneath — ground free of life and locked in darkness — was crushed downward through many meters.

The dome was fed by fresh falls of snow on its upper surface. The new snow crushed the softer layers beneath, forcing out the air and turning them into hard blue ice. The collapsing center forced ice at the rim to flow down to lower altitudes, in the form of glaciers that gouged their way through river valleys and, where the ice met open water, they floated off to form immense shelves.

The ice was like a huge, subsiding mass of soft white dung, flattening and flowing, continually replenished from above.

The glaciers’ flow was enormously slow — perhaps advancing by a mere mammoth footstep every year. But the icecap was nevertheless shrinking. Less snow was falling on the icecap than it was losing to its glaciers and ice shelves. The cap was inevitably disintegrating, though it would take an immense time to disappear.

At first, under blue skies, it was exhilarating to be here. But even from the start the icecap was not without its dangers.

Once, Longtusk walked over a place were the ice had frozen into a thin crust that seemed to lie on deeper snow. When he took a step the surface settled abruptly. He fell — not far, just enough to startle him. And then the crust around him continued to collapse, the cracks spreading for many paces as the surface settled. The crunching, crackling noise of the ice seemed to circle him. It was eerie, like the actions of a living thing in this place where nothing could live, and he was glad to pass onto firmer ice.

…Even the light was strange.

Sometimes, when the sun was low in the sky, there were rings and arcs surrounding it, glimmering in the sky, and even false images of the sun to either side of it, or nestling on the horizon. It was like the blurred multiple images Longtusk would sometimes see when his eyes were wind-battered and filled with tears, so that he had to peer at the world through a lens of water.

When the nights were clear they were blue, as the moonlight was reflected from the ice. Even when there was no Moon, and only stars shone, the nights would still be bright and blue, so powerfully did the ice capture and reflect even the stars’ trickle of light.

On the third day the sky clouded over, and a white mist descended.

The light grew bright but soft, the details of the sky and even the ice under his feet hazing. Soon the horizon was invisible and the sky was joined seamlessly to the ground, as if he was walking inside some huge hollowed-out gull’s egg. The light was very bright, enough to hurt his eyes, and gray-white floaters drifted like birds across his vision. There was no shadow, no relief, no texture. He could make out the line of mammoths behind him, robust stocky forms laboring across the ice, their heads wreathed in steam. They were the only objects he could see in the whole world, as if they were all floating in clouds, disengaged from the Earth.

But the mist thickened further still. In this sourceless, shadowless light, even footprints were nothing but thin tracings of blue-white against the greater white of the washed-out world, all but impossible to see with his sore and watering eyes.

They endured a day and a night in the mist: a night they spent in utter darkness, huddled together against the wind, trying to ignore their own mounting hunger and thirst and the cold of the huge thickness of ice beneath their feet, which threatened to suck every scrap of warmth from their bodies.

Doubts assailed Longtusk, suspended here in this harsh fog of ice crystals and mist. How could he have imagined that he could lead a party on such an impossible undertaking? He had only a fragment of legend to inspire him — only his memory of the flight of the birds to guide him. And in this white-out fog, even his acute mammoth senses were baffled by the clamor of wind and the creak of ice under his feet.

They were all in distress, Longtusk realized, for mammoths were not built to endure such long treks over such inhospitable terrain without food and water. It was obvious that the journey was taking a heavy toll on poor Splayfoot; she was sinking once more into that ominous half-consciousness from which he feared, one day, she might not have the strength to climb out.

And Rockheart too was suffering. He was more gaunt and bony than ever, his eyes milky and sore, his tusks protruding from the planes of his face like icicles. He had never looked older. But he wasn’t feeble yet, as he proved as he propelled Splayfoot forward with a mighty shove of his forehead at her rump.

They continued. They had, after all, no choice.

At last, after another half day, the mist cleared as suddenly as it had descended. The world emerged again, reduced to elementals: a flat white surface under a blue dome, nothing but white and blue and flatness, an empty, stripped-bare land across which the mammoths toiled.

…But the landscape was not quite empty.

The Dreamer Willow walked a little way away from the mammoths, blinking in the sudden glare. He peered into the east, and he pulled a strip of rabbit skin around his eyes to protect them from the sun’s glare.

Then he came running to Longtusk, jabbering in his guttural, incomprehensible language, and pointed to the eastern horizon.

Longtusk squinted that way. He could see nothing but a blur where the ice merged with the sky. But that meant little; Willow’s eyes, like a Firehead’s, were those of a predator, much sharper than any mammoth’s.

Nevertheless he felt encouraged, and they pulled forward with increased enthusiasm.

They smelled it before they saw it.

"…Water," said Splayfoot, wondering. "It smells almost warm."

Rockheart, wheezing, walking stiffly, had raised his great scarred trunk. "Growing things. And something else, something sour. Sulfur, perhaps."

Willow was growing increasingly agitated. His bow legs working, he ran ahead of the mammoths and then back, urging them forward.

And then Longtusk saw it.

The mountains, protruding from the ice, seemed to float between blue sky and white ice. Gray-black scree, shattered by frost, tumbled over pure white glaciers — and, etched sharply against the black mountains, he saw pale green stripes that could only be vegetation.

It was the nunatak.

Heartened, trumpeting with excitement, he hurried forward.

Under his feet, rock began to push out of the ice and its thin covering of snow. The exposed rock was rust brown, the color of a calf’s hair. It was littered with loose snow, which was blown by the prevailing wind into white streaks.

For a time walking became a little easier. But the long, steady climb up the shallow rise added to their efforts, and soon they were all breathing hard, the young Cows trumpeting their dismay.

After a time the land began to descend once more. Longtusk found himself walking down a broad, widening valley that curved between rounded, icebound hills. The smooth curving profiles of the hills were barely visible, the blue-white of the ice against the duller white of the sky. But here and there the land was sprinkled with fragments of black rock. The rock made it easier to see the shape of the land around him: the sweep of the valley floor, the tight rounded profiles of the hills.

He came to a piece of the black rock, lying in his path. He nudged it cautiously with his foot. It was frothy, jet black, and sharp-edged — surely sharp enough to cut through the skin of an incautious mammoth’s foot or trunk. He trumpeted a warning.

Now they left the hills behind and the valley flattened out into a wide plain. There was more rock here, he saw: dark fragments scattered across the plain, half buried by the ice. Here and there the fragments were piled up in low unstable heaps. It was as if some giant creature had burst from the land itself, scattering these lumps of rock far and wide.

Now the plain of broken rocks gave way to a broader area, smooth flat ice largely free of the rock lumps. Longtusk guessed they were approaching a frozen lake; rock lumps that fell here must have sunk to the bottom of the water and were now hidden beneath the ice layers.

Cautiously they skirted the lake, sticking to the shore.

But the land here was no longer flat. It was broken by vast bowls, like immense footprints — not of ice, Longtusk realized, but carved out of the rock itself, and coated by thin layers of ice and snow. The mammoths were forced to wend their way carefully between these craters, calling to each other when they were out of sight of one another.

Longtusk wondered what savage force had managed to punch these great wounds in the ground. This was, he thought, a strange place indeed, shaped by forces he couldn’t even guess at.

At last he came to a place where the ground was bare of snow and ice. He walked forward warily.

The ground was warm.

He walked over a gummy brown-gray mud that clung to his footpads; here and there it was streaked orange, yellow, black. The mud was littered with shallow pools of water and rivulets which ran over sticky layers of gray scum. Where snow lay on the ground, he could see how it was melting into the hot pools and streams, folding over in huge complex swathes.

In places the water was so hot it actually boiled, the steam stained a muddy gray by particles of dirt, and there was a sour, claustrophobic stink of sulfur. The steam, curling into the air, formed towers of billows and swirls, pointlessly beautiful. In fact it rose so high it blocked out the sun, like a cloud that reached from the ground to the air, and Longtusk shivered in the cold, reduced light.

He found a place some way from the steaming, active areas. He tasted the water. It was hot — not unpleasantly so — and it tasted sour, acidic. He spat it out.

Nearby was a place where it wasn’t water that boiled but mud, gray-brown and thick. The mud had built itself a chimney, thick-walled, that rose halfway to his belly like some monstrous trunk. The steam here was laced with dark gray dust that plastered itself over the walls of the fumarole. The water had bubbled with a high rushing noise, but the slurping mud made a deeper growling sound, like the agitated rumbling of old Bull mammoths arguing over some obscure point of pride.

…And there was life here.

Lichen and moss clung to the bare rock, and grass, brown and flattened, struggled to survive in swathes over ground streaked yellow by sulfur. The plants were coated with layers of ice — frosted out of the steaming, moisture-laden air — as if the plants themselves were made of ice crystals.

Curiously he reached down and plucked some of the frozen scrub. The ice crumbled away, revealing thin, brittle plant material within; he crushed it with his trunk until it was soft enough to cram into his mouth. It was thin on his tongue, but nourishing.

His heart pulsed with hope and vindication. It was a harsh, unnatural place, he thought, a place of steamy claustrophobic heat and rushing noise in the middle of the stillness of this perpetual winter — but this was the nunatak, just as Thunder’s legend had promised. He trumpeted in triumph -

But somebody was calling.

Rockheart had fallen. The Cows had clustered around him, while Threetusk and Willow stood to one side, awkward, distressed.

Longtusk hurried down the slope.

Rockheart had slumped to his knees, and his trunk drooped on the muddy ground. His breath was a rattle.

"Rockheart! What happened? Why did you fall?"

His rumbled reply was as soft as a calf’s mewling. "We made it, milk-tusk, didn’t we? By Kilukpuk’s dugs, you were right…"

And Longtusk saw it. Rockheart — understanding that Longtusk would need his experience, knowing he was too weak for the trip — had come anyway, burning up the last of his energy. He had driven the others on until they had reached this island of rocky safety.

And now he could rest at last.

Convulsed by guilt, Longtusk picked up Rockheart’s trunk. "Rockheart! You mustn’t — not now—"

But it was too late. Rockheart’s last breath bubbled out of his lungs, and he slumped to the warm rock, lifeless.

Longtusk trumpeted his grief, and his voice echoed from the rocky walls of the nunatak.

4 The Nunatak

It was a fine bright spring morning, one of the first after the long winter. The nunatak was a bowl of black rock and green life under a blue-white sky.

Everywhere mammoths grazed.

Longtusk was working on his favorite patch of willow, which grew in the lee of a pile of sharp-edged volcanic boulders. The adults knew he favored this spot, and left the miniature forest for him.

But the calves were another matter.

The calf called Saxifrage was playing with her mother, Horsetail, Longtusk’s niece. Horsetail lay on her side, her trunk flopping, while Saxifrage tried to clamber onto her flank, pulling herself up by grasping the long furs of her mother’s belly.

When she spotted Longtusk, Saxifrage gave up her game, jumped off and approached the old tusker.

But her attention was distracted by a length of broken tusk, snapped off by some young male in an over-vigorous fight. Perhaps she had never come across such a thing before. She picked it up and began to inspect it. She grabbed it with her trunk, turned it over, and rubbed it against the underside of her trunk, making a rasping sound against the rough skin there. She put it in her mouth, chewed it carefully, and turned it over with her tongue. Then she threw it in the air and let it fall to the ground several times, listening intently to the way it rattled on the ground. At last she walked over it and touched it delicately with the tender soles of her hind feet.

Longtusk was entranced.

He couldn’t help contrast the calf’s deep physical exploration of the unfamiliar object with the way a Firehead cub would study something new — just looking at it. For a mammoth calf, the look of something was only the most superficial aspect of it: the beginning of getting to know the object, not the end.

Longtusk rumbled softly. Even after so long in the nunatak, such behaviors still charmed and fascinated him. He’d spent too much of his life away from his own kind, he thought sadly, and that had left scars on his soul that would never, surely, be healed. He wondered if there was anything more important in the world than to watch a new-born calf with her mother, lapping at a stream with her tongue, too young even to know how to use her trunk to suck up water…

Now Saxifrage recalled he was there. She abandoned the tusk fragment and ran to him, dashing under his belly.

He tried to turn, but his legs were stiff as tree-trunks nowadays, his great tusks so heavy they made his head droop if he wasn’t careful; and in his rheumy vision the calf was just a blur of orange-brown fur, running around his feet and under his grizzled belly hair.

As the calf made another pass he looped down his trunk, grabbed her around the waist and lifted her high in the air, ignoring the protests from his neck muscles. She trumpeted her delight, a thin noise just at the edge of his hearing.

He set her down before him once more, and she stepped through the forest of his curling tusks. Her calf fur was orange, bright against his own guard hairs, blackened and gray with age.

She said, "Longtusk, I’m going to be your mate."

He snorted. "I’d be impressed if I hadn’t heard you say the same thing to that old buffer Threetusk yesterday."

"I didn’t! Anyway I didn’t mean it. Why do they call him Threetusk? He only has two tusks, a big one and that spindly little one."

"Well, that’s a long story," said Longtusk. "You see, long ago — long before you were born, even before Threetusk became the leader of the bachelor herd, in fact — he got in an argument with one of his sons, called Barktrunk—"

"Why was he called that?"

"It doesn’t matter."

"Where is Barktrunk? I never met him."

"Well, he died. That was before you were born too. But that’s another story. You see, the first time Barktrunk came into musth—"

"What does musth mean?"

Longtusk growled. "Ask your mother. Now, where was I? Barktrunk. Now Barktrunk did some digging — just over there, where those rocks are piled up — and he found a new spring of water, and he said we should all drink it at once. He wanted to show us how important and clever he was, you see. Especially the Cows."

"Why the Cows?"

"Ask your mother! Anyway — what was I saying? — yes, the water. But Threetusk, his father, came over and tasted a little of the water, just on the tip of his trunk, and he said no, this water has too much sulfur. He said so to everybody, right in front of Barktrunk."

"I bet Barktrunk didn’t like that."

"He didn’t. And they got into a fight. Now in those days Threetusk was big and strong, not the broken-down grass-sucking old wreck he is now, and you can tell him I said so. It should have been easy for Threetusk to win. But there was an accident. Barktrunk came at him like this" — he feinted stiffly—"but Threetusk dodged, and knocked his head like this" — a deft sideways swipe, but slower than a glacier, he thought sourly—"and that was when it happened. Threetusk got one of his tusks stuck in a cleft in the rock. Just over there. When he was trying to get free the tusk broke off. Maybe that was one of the bits of it you were playing with just now. And then—"

But Saxifrage was running around in circles, trying to catch her own tail. Longtusk rumbled softly; he had lost his audience again.

"You listen to Longtusk," said Horsetail, Saxifrage’s mother, who had come lumbering up. Named for the long graceful hairs that streamed across her rump, this daughter of Splayfoot was the Matriarch now — she had been since Splayfoot’s death, some years ago, when his sister’s proud heart, strained by her dismal experiences, had at last failed her. Horsetail pulled her calf under her belly fur, where Saxifrage began to hunt for a nipple. "I’m sorry, Patriarch," she said respectfully. "Everybody knows you need time to work on those willow leaves these days."

"Not that much time," he growled. "And I do wish—"

"Try not to bite, Saxifrage!"

I do wish you’d listen to me, he thought.

But, thinking back, he was sure he had ignored almost all of what everybody had had to say to him, back when he was a calf — even Walks With Thunder, probably.

Remarkable to think that the last time he saw him, Thunder had actually been younger than Longtusk was now. How on Earth had he got so old? Where had the years gone? And…

And he was maundering again, and now the calf was nipping at his toes.

Saxifrage said, "Longtusk is going to mate with me when I’m old enough."

Horsetail rumbled her embarrassment, flapping her small ears.

Longtusk said, "I’m flattered, Saxifrage. But you’ll have to find someone closer to your own age, that’s all."

"Why? Mother says you’re a great hero and will go on forever, like the rocks of the nunatak."

Again Horsetail harrumphed her embarrassment.

"Your mother’s right about most of that," said Longtusk wryly. "But — not forever. Look." He kneeled down before the calf, ignoring warning stabs of pain from his knees, and opened his mouth. "What’s in here?"

Saxifrage probed with her trunk at his teeth and huge black tongue. "Grass. A bit of old twig stick under your tongue—"

"My teeth, calf," he growled. "Feel my teeth."

She reached in, and he felt the soft tip of her trunk run over the upper surfaces of his long lower teeth.

He said, "Can you feel how worn they are? That’s because of all the grass and herbs and twigs I’ve eaten."

"Everybody’s teeth get worn down," said Saxifrage, wrinkling her trunk. "You just grow more. My mother says—"

"But," said Longtusk heavily, "I’ve gotten so old I don’t have more teeth to grow. This is my last set. Soon they will be too worn to eat with. And then…"

The calf looked confused and distressed. He reached out and stroked the topknot of her scalp with his trunk.

She said, "Will you at least try to keep from dying until I’m big enough? I wouldn’t have thought that was too much to ask."

Longtusk eyed Horsetail; that was one of her favorite admonitions, he knew. "All right," he said. "I’ll try. Just for you."

"Now come on," said Horsetail, tugging at her calf’s trunk. "Time for a drink. And you really mustn’t bother the Patriarch so much."

"I told you," he said. "She wasn’t bothering me. And don’t call me Patriarch. I’m just an old fool of a Bull. That Patriarch business was long ago…"

But Horsetail was leading her calf to a stream which bubbled from the rocks; a group of mammoths was already clustered there, their loosening winter coats rising in a cloud around them. "Whatever you say, Patriarch."

Longtusk growled.

Now there was a tug at his belly furs. He turned, wondering which calf was troubling his repose now.

It was the old Dreamer, Willow. Standing there in his much-patched skins, with grass crudely stuffed into his coat and hat, Willow was aged, bent almost double, his small face a mass of wrinkles. But, with a gnarled paw, he still stroked Longtusk’s trunk, just as he had when they’d first met as calf and cub.

And Longtusk knew what he wanted.

Longtusk turned slowly, sniffing the air. After all these years he had learned to disregard the pervading stink of sulfur which polluted the air around this nunatak. There was little wind, and though there was a frosty sharpness to the air, there was no sign that the weather was set to change.

All in all, it was a fine day for their annual trek.

Rumbling softly, with Willow limping at his side, Longtusk set off.

Longtusk climbed a shallow rise, away from the glen where the mammoths fed. At first he walked on soil or rock, but soon his feet were pressing down on ice and loose snow.

The going got harder, the slope steepening.

At first Willow was able to keep up, limping alongside the mammoth with one paw wrapped in Longtusk’s belly hair. But soon his wheezing exhaustion was obvious.

They paused for breath. Longtusk turned, looking back over the nunatak and the life sheltered there.

From afar, the mammoths were a slow drift of dark points over a field of tan grasses. Occasionally the long guard hairs of a mature Bull would catch the light, glimmering brightly. Their movements were slow, calm, dense, their attitudes full of attention. They were massive, contemplative, wise: beautiful, he thought, wonderful beautiful animals.

The nunatak was everything he could have hoped for, that fateful day when he took his leave of his own Family. But still -

But still, how brief life had been. Like a dream, or the blossoming of a spring flower on the steppe — a splash of color, a burst of hope, and then…

Willow stroked his trunk absently, bringing him back.

He’d been maundering again. Morbid old fool.

With considerable effort on both their parts, Willow managed to clamber onto his back. Longtusk couldn’t help but recall the liquid grace with which Crocus, the Firehead cub, had once flowed onto his back, how they had run and pranced together.

With a deep rumble he turned away and headed up the cold, forbidding slope. His breath steamed, and his aging limbs tired quickly.

The old Dreamer was already snoring gently.

Soon Longtusk neared the crest of a ridge. The snow thinned out, and he found himself walking on rock that was bare or covered only by a scattering of snow. The land flattened out, and he stood atop the ridge, breathing hard.

He was standing on the rim of a crater.

He stepped forward cautiously. It was a great bowl, cut into the Earth, like the imprint of an immense foot. The rim curved around the huge dip in the land to close on itself, a neat circle.

The crater wall, coated with snow and ice, was sculpted to smoothness by the wind, like the sweep of a giant sand dune. The shadows were subtle and soft, white shading to blue-gray — save at the rim itself, where a layer of bare brown rock was exposed. The winds off the ice sheet kept this curving ridge swept clear of new snow falls, so that ice could not form. He let his eye be drawn to the crater’s far side, where there had been an avalanche, and the smooth snow surface was marked by great ripples descending toward the crater’s base.

The floor of the crater was surprisingly flat. He knew there was a lake down there. In the brief summer it would melt, turning into a placid pond of blue-gray water, cupped by the crater, visited by birds — in fact, the geese who had guided him here to the nunatak. If a mammoth were down there now, walking across that frozen surface, she would look no larger than a grain of sand, dwarfed by this immense structure of rock and ice.

Longtusk raised his trunk and trumpeted, high and thin. His voice echoed from the iced-over walls of the crater, and pealed out over the frozen lands around the nunatak.

Willow stirred on his back, grumbling, and subsided back to sleep, clinging to Longtusk’s fur instinctively.

Longtusk walked a little farther around the crater’s rim. He came to a broad ridge in the icebound land, leading away from the crater. He walked this way now, feeling for the firm places in the piled-up snow.

Soon he saw what he was looking for. It was a splash of coal-black darkness, vivid against the snow that surrounded it. This was another crater, but little more than ten or fifteen paces wide. And further craters lay beyond, dark splashes on the snow, as if some wounded, rocky giant had limped this way.

He let himself slide over crunching rubble into the small crater. The rock was warm under his thick footpads. Where snow fell from his coat it melted quickly, and steam wisped up around him. The rock here was fragmented, crumbled. It was jet black, sharp-edged, and the fragments he picked up had tiny bubbles blown into them, like the bones of a mammoth’s skull.

This crater did not have a neat rounded form, no cupped lake in its base. The walls here were just crude piles of frothy black rock. In places he could see flat plates of rock which lay over drained hollows, like the remnants of broken eggs. Everything was sharp-edged, new. This small crater was obviously much younger than its giant cousin nearby. Perhaps these small frothy rocks, frozen fragments of the Earth’s chthonic blood, were the youngest rocks in the world.

And yet even in this new raw place, there was life.

He picked up a loose rock. He tasted moss and green lichen, struggling to inhabit this unpromising lump: sparse, nothing but dark green flecks that clung to the porous stuff — but it was here. And these first colonists would break up the hard cooling rock, making a sand in which plants could grow. Perhaps one day this would be a bowl of greenery within which mammoths and other animals could survive.

He came up here once a year — but always with Willow as his sole companion. Mammoths are creatures of the plains, and the members of his little Clan were suspicious of this place of hills and ice. And there wasn’t a great deal to eat up here. But Longtusk embraced the stark, silent beauty of this place.

For he knew that these craters were a sign of Earth’s bounty — the gift that had created this island of life and safety, here at the heart of the forbidding icecap.

One night — many years ago — the mammoths had seen, on the fringe of their nunatak, a great gush of smoke and fire which had towered up to the clouds. The mammoths had been terrified — all but Longtusk, who had been fascinated. For at last he understood.

Over most of the world, the heat which drove life came from the sun. But here, far to the planet’s north, that heat was insufficient. Even water froze here, making the icecaps that stifled the land.

Instead, here in the nunatak, the heat came from the Earth itself.

In some places it dribbled slowly from the ground, in boiling springs and mud pools. And in some places the heat gathered until it burst through the Earth’s skin like a gorged parasite.

That was the meaning of the great eruption of fire and smoke they had seen. That was why the land was littered by enormous blocks of black rock, hurled there by explosions.

And the craters — even the biggest of them — were surely the wounds left in the Earth by those giant explosions, like scars left by burst blisters. In this small crater he could actually see where smaller bubbles had formed and partially collapsed, leaving a hard skin over voids drained of rock that had been so hot it had flowed like water.

It was the Earth’s heat which had shaped this strange landscape, and it was the Earth’s heat which cradled and sustained the nunatak.

He left the small craters behind and began a short climb to another summit.

Soon he was breathing hard. But he’d been climbing up here every spring since they’d first arrived, and he was determined that this would not be the year he was finally defeated.

He reached the summit. This rocky height, windswept bare of ice like the crater rim, was one of the highest points in the nunatak, so high it seemed he could see the curve of the Earth itself.

All around the nunatak was ice.

The icecap was a broad, vast dome of blue-white, blanketing the land. The ice was smooth and empty, as if inviting a footstep. Nothing moved there, no animals or plants lived, and he was suspended in utter silence, broken not even by the cry of a bird.

Mountains protruded from the ice sheet like buried creatures straining to emerge, their profiles softened by the overlying snow. The mountains — a chain of which this nunatak was a member — were brown and black, startling and stark against the white of the ice. Their shadows, pooled at their bases, glowed blue-white.

Over the years Longtusk had come to know the ice and its changing moods. He had learned that it was not without texture; it was rich with a chill, minimal beauty. There were low dunes and ridges, carved criss-cross by the wind, so that the ice was a complex carpet of blue-white traceries, full of irrelevant beauty. In places it had slumped into dips in the crushed land beneath, and there were ridges, long and straight, that caught the low light so that they shone a bright yellow, vivid against ice. Here and there he could see spindrift, clouds of ice crystals whipped up by the wind and hovering above the ground, enchantingly beautiful.

The ice was a calm flat sea of light, white and blue and yellow, that led his gaze to the horizon. The ice had a beauty and softness that belied its lethal nature, he knew; for nothing lived there, nothing outside the favored nunatak.

But much had changed in the years — by Kilukpuk’s dugs, it had been forty years or more — that he had been climbing this peak.

To the west he looked back the way they had come on their epic trek, so long ago: back across the fragile neck of land that connected the two landmasses. On the land bridge’s northern side there was a vast, glimmering expanse of water, dark against the ice. It was where he recalled the ice-dammed lake had been.

But that lake had grown immeasurably — it was so large now it must have become an inlet of the great northern ocean itself.

Ice was melting into the oceans and the sea level was rising, as if the whole ocean were no more than a steppe pond, brimming with spring water. And the ocean was, little by little, flooding the land.

Meanwhile, on the southern horizon, there was brown and green against the ice white: a tide of warmth and life that had approached relentlessly, year by year. The exposed land formed a broad dark corridor that led off to the south — and into the new land, the huge, unknown continent that lay there — a passageway between two giant, shrinking ice sheets.

The world was remaking itself — the land reborn from the ice, the sea covering the land — all in his lifetime. It was a huge, remarkable process, stunning in scale.

And he knew that the changes he saw around him would one day have great significance for his little Clan.

He had long stepped back from his role as Patriarch. There had never before been a Patriarch in all the Cycle’s long history, and he had never believed there should be one for longer than strictly necessary.

So he was no longer a leader of the Clan. Still, he had traveled farther and seen more than any of the mammoths here on the nunatak.

And he knew that this nunatak would not always remain a refuge.

Sometimes he wished he had someone to discuss all this with. Somebody like Rockheart, or Walks With Thunder — even Jaw Like Rock.

But they were all gone, long gone. And Longtusk, always the outsider, now isolated by age, was forced to rely on nothing but his own experience and wisdom.

…Willow, on his back, was growing agitated. He was muttering something in his incomprehensible, guttural tongue. He leaned forward, over Longtusk’s scalp, and pointed far to the west.

Longtusk raised his trunk, but could smell nothing on the dry air but the cold prickle of ice. He squinted, feeling the wrinkles gather around his eye sockets.

On the far horizon, he saw something new.

It was a line scratched across the ice. It ended in a complex knot, dark and massive yet dwarfed by the icecap. And a thin thread rose up from that knot of activity, straight and true.

It was too far away to smell. But it was unmistakable. It was smoke: smoke from a fire. And the line that cut across the ice was a trail, arrowing directly toward the nunatak.

On his back, Willow was whimpering his alarm — as well he might, Longtusk thought.

For the signs were unmistakable. After all these years, the Fireheads were coming.

As the sun sank deeper in the sky, the light on the ice grew softer, low and diffuse. Blue-gray shadows pooled in hollows, like a liquid gathering. It was stunning, beautiful. But Longtusk knew that this year he could not stay to see the sunset.

The nunatak’s long dream of peace was, so quickly, coming to an end.

He turned and, with elaborate care, began his descent from the summit.

"We have no choice but to abandon the nunatak." He looked down at the Family — the fat, complacent Cows, their playful calves, all gazing up at him, trunks raised to sniff his mood. "We have been safe here. The nunatak has served us well. But now it is a refuge no more. And we must go."

"You’re being ridiculous," Horsetail said severely. "You’re frightening the calves."

"They should be frightened," he said. "They are in danger. Mortal danger. The Fireheads are on the western horizon. I could see their trail, and their fire. They will overrun this place, enslave you, ultimately kill you. And your calves." He eyed them. "Do you understand? Do you understand any of this?"

The Cows rumbled questions. "Where should we go?" "There is nowhere else!" "Who is he to say what Cows should do? He is a Bull. And he’s old. Why, if I—"

He had expected arguments, and he got them. It was just as it had been when he had argued with Milkbreath, his own mother, trying to convince her that the flight in search of the nunatak was necessary.

He was too old for this.

One more effort, Longtusk. Then you can rest. Think of Rockheart. He had kept going, despite the failure of his huge body. He pulled his shoulders square and lifted his tusks, still large and sweeping, so heavy they made his neck muscles pull.

Horsetail, the Matriarch, said sadly, "I’m trying to understand, Longtusk. I truly am. But you must help me. How can they come here? We are protected by the ice."

"But the ice is receding."

"Where would we flee?"

"You must go south and east. At first you will cross the ice" — a rumbling of fear and discontent—"just as your grandmothers did. Just as I did. But then you will reach a corridor. A passage through the ice sheets, to the warmer lands beyond, that has opened up in the years we have lived here. It won’t be easy—"

"But Longtusk, why? Why would the Fireheads come here? On this rock, we are few. Even if these Fireheads are the savage predators you describe, why would they go to such efforts, risk their own lives, just to reach us?"

Now Threetusk, dominant Bull of the bachelor herd, loped toward Longtusk. He said grimly, "Perhaps the Fireheads come because there is no room for them in the old lands. Perhaps they are seeking mammoths here because there are none left where they come from."

There was a general bray of horror.

"Or perhaps," Longtusk said sadly, "it is me."

Horsetail rumbled, "What do you mean?"

"I defied her," he said, unwelcome old memories swimming to the surface of his mind.

"Who?"

"The most powerful Firehead of them all. She thought I was hers, you see. And yet I defied her…"

He knew it was hard for them to understand. All this was ancient history to the other mammoths, an exotic legend of times and places and creatures they had never known — maybe just another of Longtusk’s tall stories, like his tales of she-cats and rhinos and Fireheads with caps of mammoth-ivory beads…

It was not their fault. He had wanted to bring his Clan to a safe place, and these generations of fat, complacent mammoths were what he had dreamed of seeing. It wasn’t their fault that he had succeeded too well — that their lives of comfort and security had prepared them so badly for the ordeal ahead.

But he recalled Crocus.

He recalled how she had hunted down the Firehead who had killed her father. He knew she would not have forgotten, or forgiven.

As long as he was alive, nobody was safe here.

Horsetail and Threetusk approached him and spoke quietly so the others couldn’t hear.

Horsetail said, "You aren’t the only one who has seen the corridor to the south. But it is harsh, and we don’t know how long it is, or what lies at its end. Perhaps it is cold and barren all the way to the South Pole."

"When we set off for the nunatak," he said evenly, "we didn’t know how far that was either. We went anyway. You know, Threetusk — you’re the only one left who does. You will have to show them how to survive."

Horsetail said severely, "We have old, and sickly, and calves. Many of us will not survive such a trek."

"Nevertheless it must be made."

"And you?" asked the Matriarch. "Do you believe you could walk through the corridor?"

"Of course not." He brayed his amusement. "I probably wouldn’t last a day. But I’m not going."

Threetusk said, "What?"

Briefly, briskly, he stroked their trunks. "I know the Fireheads. You don’t. And I have thought deeply on their nature. And this is what I have concluded. Listen closely, now…"

Saxifrage watched this, fascinated, the rumbling phrases washing over her.

Later, boldly, she stepped forward from under her mother’s belly and tugged her trunk. "What did he say? What did he say?"

But Horsetail, grave and silent, would not reply.

They filed past him, down the sloping rock face and onto the ice, bundles of confusion, fear and resentment — much of it directed at him, for even though the smoke columns from the Fireheads’ hearths were now visible for all to see, they still found it impossible to believe they represented the danger he insisted.

Nonetheless, they were his Clan. He wanted to grab them all, taste each one with his trunk. For he knew he would not see them again, not a single one of them.

But he held himself back. It was best they did not think of him, for the ice and the dismal corridor to the south would give them more than enough to occupy their minds.

And besides, he still had company: the little Dreamer, Willow. He had tried to push the Dreamer, gently, off the rock and after the column of mammoths. But Willow had slapped his trunk and dug his old, bent fingers in Longtusk’s fur, his intentions clear.

Company, then. And a job to complete.

Longtusk waited until the long column of mammoths had shrunk to a fine scratch against the huge white expanse of the ice.

And then he turned away: toward the west, and the Fireheads.

5 The Corridor

It was, Threetusk decided later, an epic to match any in the long history of the mammoths.

But it was a story he could never bear to tell: a story of suffering and loss and endless endurance, a blurred time he recalled only with pain.

It was difficult even from the beginning. Away from the warmth of the nunatak, the hard, ridged ice was cold and unyielding under their feet — crueler even than he recalled from the original trek so long ago. Where snow drifted the going was even harder.

The land itself was unsettling. The mammoths could hear the deep groaning of the ice as it flowed down from its highest points to the low land and the sea. A human would have heard only the occasional crack and grind, perhaps felt a deep shudder. To the mammoths, the agonized roar of the ice was loud and continuous, a constant reminder that this was an unstable land, a place of change and danger.

And — of course — there was nothing to eat or drink, here on the ice. They had barely traveled half a day before they had used up the reserves of water they carried in their throats, and the calves were crying for the warm rocks they had left behind.

But they kept on.

After a day and a night, they came to a high point, and they were able to see the way south.

To the left the ice was a shallow dome, its surface bright and seductively smooth. To the right, the ice lay thick over a mountain range. Black jagged peaks thrust out of the white, defiant, and glaciers striped with dirt reached down to the ice sheet like the trunks of immense embedded animals.

And the two great ice sheets were separated by a narrow band of land — colorless, barren, a stripe of lifeless gray cutting through blue-white.

It was the corridor.

They found a glacier, a tongue of ice that led them down from the icecap to the barren strip of land. The climb down the glacier was more difficult than Threetusk had imagined — especially when they got to the lower slopes, and the glacier, spilling onto the rock, spread out and cracked, forming immense crevasses that blocked their path.

Nevertheless they persisted, until they reached the land itself.

Horsetail stood by Threetusk, frost on her face, her breath billowing in a cloud around her. They gazed south at the corridor that faced them.

They stood on bare rock, sprinkled with a little loose stone, gravel and rock. There were deep furrows gouged into the land, as if by huge claws. Here and there, against the ice cliffs that bounded the corridor, there were pools of trapped meltwater, glimmering. Little grew here: only scattered clumps of yellow grass, a single low willow, clutching the ground.

A wind blew in their faces, raising dust devils that whirled and spat hard gray sand into their eyes. Saxifrage, the calf, plucked at a spindly grass blade without enthusiasm, bleating her discomfort.

Threetusk said, "It’s as if the land has been scraped bare of everything — even the soil — down to the bedrock. There may be water, but little to eat."

"The calves are probably too fat, as Longtusk always says," Horsetail said briskly. "We’ll let them rest a night. There is some shelter, here in the lee of the glacier. Then, in the morning—"

"We go on."

"Yes."

Longtusk had a single intention: not to allow the Fireheads to complete their journey, in pursuit of his mammoths, across the land bridge. And he believed he knew how to do it, where he must go to achieve it.

With Willow on his back snoring softly, Longtusk, with stiff arthritic limbs, picked his cautious way down off the nunatak rocks. He took a final, regretful step off the warmth of the black rock, and let his footpads settle on hard ice.

It would begin as a retracing of the great trek which had brought him here.

…But everything was different now.

The ice was, in places, slick with a thin layer of liquid water, making it slippery and treacherous, so that he had to choose his steps with care. And there seemed to have been a fresh frost overnight; ice crystals sparkled like tiny eyes on the blue surface of the hard older ice.

The nunatak receded behind him, becoming a hard black cone of rock, diminishing. It was as if he was leaving behind his life: his ambiguous position in the small society of the Clan, his prickly relationships with Threetusk, Horsetail and the others, the endless complexity of love and birth and death. Not for much longer would he have to carry around his heavy load of pain and loss and memory.

His life had reduced, at last, to its essence.

Soon — much sooner than he had expected — he found himself clambering down a snub of ice and onto bare rock.

He walked cautiously over rock that had been chiseled and scoured by the retreating ice. Beyond the edge of the cap itself the ice still clung in patches. But it was obvious that the ice’s shrinking had proceeded apace.

He found a run-off stream. It bubbled over shallow mud, cloudy with rock flour. He walked into the brook. It barely lapped over his toes. He drank trunkfuls of the chill, sterile meltwater; it filled his belly and throat.

The water had cut miniature valleys in the flat surface of the mud. The gouges cut across each other, their muddy walls eroded away, so that the incised mud was braided with shallow clefts. Here and there a patch of ground stuck out of the stream, perhaps sheltered by a lump of rock. These tiny islands were shaped like teardrops, their walls eroded by the continuing flow, and grasses, thin and yellow, clung to their surfaces. Longtusk found himself intrigued by the unexpected complexity of this scrap of landscape. Like so much of the world, it was intricate, beautiful — but meaningless, for there were no eyes but his to see it.

He moved on. His feet left shallow craters in the mud; downstream of where he had stood the water, bubbling, began to carve a new pattern of channels.

Soon he reached a new kind of landscape. It was an open forest, with evergreen trees growing in isolated clumps, and swathes of grass in between.

He let down Willow. With brisk efficiency, the Dreamer built and set simple traps of sharpened sticks and sinew.

One of the traps quickly yielded a small rabbit. The Dreamer skinned it, cooked it over a small fire, ate it with every expression of enjoyment — and then, in the warmth of the afternoon, he lay down and began to snore loudly.

Longtusk explored.

The trees were spruce, fir and pines, growing healthy, straight and tall. Farther to the south he saw hardwoods, oak and elm and ash. There was sagebrush abundant in the grassy patches between the trees. The air was too warm for Longtusk and he sought out snow and loose ice to chew and swallow and rub into his fur; the melting snow in his belly cooled him, and bits of ice trapped in his fur evaporated slowly, acting like sweat.

It was not long before he detected the thin scent of water: a great body of it, not much farther to the west. Birds wheeled overhead, some of them gulls. And that water smell was tinged with the sharpness of salt.

It was the meltwater lake he had seen from the nunatak’s summit: still dammed by its plug of ice, now joined to the ocean, grown immeasurably since he had passed by on his original trek to the nunatak. And it was his destination.

He walked back into the forest, through the shade of the young, proud trees. He saw spoor, of horses and bison and other animals. Perhaps the warmth, and the abundance of life here, had something to do with the nearness of that body of water.

But it was no place for mammoths, and the other creatures of the steppe. He felt a huge sadness, for a world was evaporating.

After a night’s rest, they moved on.

The Clan walked between divergent walls of ice.

The twin icecaps were lines of white on the horizon. Sometimes they were too far away to see — but they could always be heard, groaning as if in pain at their endless collapse and crumbling.

The wind gathered strength, always coming from the south, howling in their faces, as if daring them to progress. Even if it was the ice that had made this place barren, it was the wind that kept it so; any soil which formed was whipped away in a cloud of dust, and only the hardiest plants could find root and cling to the rock.

The ground changed constantly. Where soil and dirt collected in hollows, protected from the wind, the surface was boggy and clinging. At times they had to cross islands of ice, left behind by the retreating icecaps and yet to melt. Worse, there were stretches of stagnant ice covered over by a thin crust of detritus, a crust which could conceal pits and crevasses where the underlying ice had melted and drained away.

The going became harder still.

Now they seemed to be descending a shallow slope, as if the whole land inclined to the south. The rock was cut through by valleys — some no more than narrow gullies, and some respectably large channels. Sometimes there were torrents of water, gushing down one valley or another, often carving a new course altogether. Threetusk didn’t understand where these sudden floods came from; perhaps some dam of ice had burst, or a river valley’s wall had been breached.

Where they could, the mammoths followed the broader valleys. But more often than not the valleys cut across their path, and they were forced to spend energy climbing over sharp-crested ridges.

Soon all the mammoths were exhausted, and several were weakening. They had plenty to drink now, but never enough to eat. Still the wind blew, harsh and fierce.

And then the first calf died.

He was a Bull, small and playful, younger than Saxifrage. He simply fell one day, his papery flesh showing the bones beneath, his eyes round and terrified.

"I have no milk!" his mother wailed. "It’s my fault. I have no milk to give him…"

"We have to leave him," Threetusk said grimly to the Matriarch.

"I know," said Horsetail. "But after this it will be harder to keep them together. Already the Cows with small calves want to strike out alone, to find pasture they don’t need to share with the others."

"That’s natural. It’s what mothers do."

"We must wait until the calf dies," she said. "His mother needs to Remember him. And then we go on."

"Yes."

After that, more deaths followed: calves, the old, and one mature Bull whose leg was crushed in a fall.

Each day the sun climbed lower in the sky. Threetusk knew the summer was ending, and if they couldn’t feed and water in preparation for the cold to come, winter would kill them all as surely as any Firehead would.

And still the mammoths walked on into the teeth of the unrelenting wind, leaving a trail of their dead on the unmarked land.

The land began to rise — gently at first, then more steeply. The grass-covered soil grew thin, until at last a shoulder of rock protruded, bare and forbidding. Still Longtusk climbed, the air growing colder. He stepped with caution up the steepening slopes, avoiding heaps of sharp, frost-shattered scree.

He recalled this place from the trek. He had reached the range of low, glacier-eroded hills which marked the southern border of the ice-melt lake. And as he climbed, the land opened up around him, and he saw the great ice dam before him, lodged in its cleft in the hillside — still containing its mass of meltwater, after all these years.

To his right, to the north, he saw the lake itself — much bigger than he recalled, a shining sheet of gray-blue water stretching to a perfectly sharp horizon. There was ice scattered on it, floes and slushy melt and even a few eroded-smooth icebergs. But the icecap which had first created this lake was much receded now.

The water lapped at a shallow shore of gravel and bare rock, and he saw birds, coons and ducks, swimming among reeds. There were gulls nesting in the steeper cliffs below him. And he could smell the tang of salt, much more strongly now. The northern ocean, which ran all the way to the pole itself, must have broken in on this lake, turning it into an immense pool of brine, an inlet of the ocean itself.

To his left — to the south of the hills — the land swept away. It was a rough plain, marked here and there by the sky-blue glimmer of pools and the glaring bone-white of old ice. Far away he could see a flowing dark patch, clouded by dust, that might be horses or bison. If he listened closely he could hear the thunder of hooves, feel the heavy stamp of that moving ocean of meat.

But this blanket of life — grown much thicker since the last time he passed here — did not conceal the deeper rocky truth of this landscape. He could see how the land was folded, wrinkled, cut deeply by channels and gorges. Most of these channels were dry, though thin ribbons of water gleamed in some of them. They flowed south, away from the lake-ocean behind him, and in places they cut across each other, braided like tangled hair.

It was a land shaped by running water — just like the muddy rivulet where he had drunk. But no rivulet had made this land, not even a great river; only the mightiest of floods could have shaped this immense panorama.

He turned back and forth, trunk raised, sniffing the air, understanding the land.

He knew what he must do here. And he knew, at last, how he would die.

He set off for the ice dam itself.

"…Threetusk."

He paused, lifting bleary, wind-scarred eyes. The wind had eased, for the first time in — how long?

He raised his trunk and looked back at the column of mammoths, wearily trudging in his footsteps. They had been walking over a rocky plateau that had been even more barren and unforgiving than the rest of the corridor. Had they lost anyone else since he last counted? But he couldn’t even recall the names of those who had fallen…

Horsetail was pulling at his trunk. He saw how thin she had become, the bones of her skull pushing through tangled fur.

But she was saying, "Threetusk — smell."

Wearily he raised his trunk and sniffed the air.

There was water, and grass, and the dung of many animals.

They blundered forward.

They came to a ridge. He stepped forward cautiously.

The land fell away before him, a steep wall of tumbled rocks. To his left, a waterfall thundered. It was glacier melt: the ghost of snows that might have fallen a Great-Year ago, now surging into the land below.

And that land, he saw, was green.

Pools glimmered in the light of the low sun. He saw clouds of birds over some of the pools, so far away they might have been insects. The land around the pools, laced by gleaming streams, was steppe: coarse grass, herbs, lichen, moss, stunted trees.

And there were animals here, he saw dimly: horses, what looked like camels — and, stalking a stray camel, a pack of what appeared to be giant wolves.

"We made it," he said, wondering. "The end of the corridor. We had to battle through the breath of Kilukpuk herself. But we made it. We have to tell Longtusk — tell him he was right."

Horsetail looked at him sadly. "Where Longtusk has gone, I don’t think even a contact rumble would reach him." She sniffed at the ground, probing with her trunk. "We need to find a way down from here…"

Threetusk looked back, troubled. The journey had been so hard that it had been some time since he had thought of the defiant old tusker they had left behind.

What had become of Longtusk?

6 The Tears of Kilukpuk

Cautiously, Longtusk walked forward onto the ice dam. In places the ice, melting, had formed shallow pools; some of these were crusted over, and more than once a careless step plunged his foot into cold, gritty water.

He reached the center of this wall of ice, where it was thinnest — and weakest.

The ice dam was old.

On its dry southern side its upper surface was gritty and dirty, in places worn to a grayish sheen by years of rain. Its northern side had been hollowed out by lapping water, so that a great lip of ice hung over a long, concave wall. The ice under the lip gleamed white and blue, and more ice, half-melted and refrozen, gushed over the lip to dangle in the air, caught in mid-flow, elaborate icicles glistening.

He could feel the groan of this thinning dam under the weight of the water — a weight that must be rising, inexorably, as the sea level rose, spilling into the lake. The ice dam settled, seeking comfort, like a working mastodont laboring under some bone-cracking load. But there was little comfort to be had.

Instability — yes, he thought; that was the key.

A memory drifted into his mind: how Jaw Like Rock had taken that foolish keeper — what was his name? Spindle? — riding on his back standing up. Jaw had stopped dead, and stood square on the broken ground. Spindle had tried to keep his balance, but without Jaw’s assistance he was helpless, and he had fallen.

It had been funny, comical, cruel — and relevant. For the water of the lake was poised high above the lower land, contained only by this fragile dam, just as the keeper’s weight had been suspended over Jaw.

Strange, he hadn’t thought of old Jaw for years…

"…Baitho! Baitho!"

Fireheads were approaching Longtusk, stepping onto the narrow rim of this worn ice dam. And one was calling to him in a thin, high voice.

On his back Willow hissed, full of hatred and fear.

Longtusk could see them now. There was a knot of Firehead hunters with their thick, well-worked clothing thrown open, exposing naked skin to the warmth of the air. Most of them had held back on the rocky ridge. But two Fireheads were coming forward to meet him, treading carefully over the ice dam, holding each others’ paws.

And beyond the Fireheads, snaking back to the west, there was a column of mastodonts. Longtusk could hear the low rumbles of their squat, boulder-like bodies, feel the soft pound of their big broad feet on bare rock.

Ignoring the Fireheads, he sent out a deep contact rumble. "Mastodonts. I am Longtusk."

Replies came as slow pulses of deep sound, washing through the air.

"Longtusk. None here knows you."

"That is true. We are young and strong, and you must be old and weak."

"But we know of you."

The voices were colored by the rich, peculiar accent of the mastodonts, brought with them all the way from the thick forests of their own deep past.

"Walks With Thunder," Longtusk called. "Is he with you?"

"Walks With Thunder has gone to the aurora."

"It was a magnificent Remembering."

"He died well…"

He growled, and a little more sadness crowded into his weary heart. But perhaps that was all he could have hoped for, after so long.

"Longtusk. There are legends of your courage and strength, of your mighty tusks. My name is Shoulder Of Bedrock. Perhaps you have heard of my prowess as a warrior. I would welcome sharpening my tusks on yours…"

He rumbled, "I regret I have not heard of you, Shoulder of Bedrock, though I have no doubt your fame has spread far. I would welcome a contest with you. But I fear it must wait until we meet in the aurora."

The mastodonts rumbled their disappointment.

"Until the aurora," they called.

"Until the aurora…"

The two Fireheads approached him. One wore a coat of thick mammoth hide, to which much black-brown fur still clung, and it — no, he — wore a hat of bone from which smoke curled into the air. And the other, smaller, slighter, wore a coat that gleamed with the blue-white of mammoth ivory.

The male was Smokehat, of course. The Shaman’s face was a weather-beaten, wizened mask, etched deep by resentment and hatred. The Shaman’s tunic was made of an oddly shaped, almost hairless piece of hide. It had two broad holes, a flap of skin sewn over what looked like the root of a trunk, and its hair had been burned away in patches, exposing skin that was pink and scarred…

It was a face, Longtusk realized — the face of a mammoth, pulled off the skull, the trunk cut away and stretched out so that empty eye holes gaped. And not just any face: that swathe of purple-pink hairless scarring was unmistakable. This was a remnant of Pinkface, the Matriarch of Matriarchs.

This one brutal trophy, brandished by Smokehat, told him all he needed to know about the fate of the mammoths in the old land to the west.

And with the Shaman was Crocus, Matriarch of the Fireheads, the only Firehead in all history to ride a woolly mammoth. Her hair blew free in the slight wind — once fiery yellow, now a mass of stringy gray, dry and broken. Longtusk felt a touch of sadness.

There was a sharp pain at his cheek, a gush of warm blood. He looked down in disbelief.

Smokehat’s goad, long and bone-tipped, was splashed with Longtusk’s blood. The Shaman had slapped him as if he were an unruly calf.

"Baitho!" On your knees…

Longtusk reached down with his trunk, plucked the goad from the Shaman’s paw, and hurled it far into the dammed lake.

The Shaman was furious. He waved a bony fist in Longtusk’s face with impotent anger.

But now a stream of golden fluid arced from over Longtusk’s head and neatly landed on the Shaman’s bone hat. Smokehat, startled, stood stock still. The burning embers in his hat started to hiss, and thick yellow fluid trickled down his face.

There was a bellow of guttural triumph from Longtusk’s back. It was Willow, of course. With surprising skill, he was urinating into the Shaman’s hat.

The Shaman, howling with rage, dragged the hat from his head and threw it to the ground. He jumped up and down on it, smashing the bones and scattering the embers. But then he yelped in pain — perhaps he had trodden on a burning coal or a shard of bone — and he fled, limping and yelling, acrid urine trickling over his bare scalp.

Crocus covered her face with her paws, her shoulders shaking. Longtusk recalled this strange behavior. She was laughing.

Now she looked up at him, blue eyes made only a little rheumy by age, startlingly familiar. She reached out and buried her fingers in the long fur dangling from his trunk. She made cooing noises, like a mother bird, and he rumbled his contentment. The years evaporated, and he was a growing calf, she a cub freezing to death in the snow, a vibrant young female riding his back with unprecedented skill.

But her face was a mask of wrinkles, and he saw bitterness etched there: bitterness and disappointment and anger. Her life — the demands of leadership, the hard choices she had had to make — all of it had soured her.

And her coat was grotesque.

He recalled the simple tooth necklace she had worn when he first found her. But now, as if it had grown out of that necklace like some monstrous fungus, her coat, draped down to the ground, was sewn with many thousands of beads. There were strings of them across her forehead and in a great sheet that followed her hair down her back; there were rows and whorls sewn into the panels at front and back; there were more strings that dangled from her forelegs and belly to the ground, like the long hairs of a mammoth.

And every one of the beads was of mammoth ivory.

Within her suit she shone, blue-white like the ice. But Longtusk felt sure that not all the mammoths who had sacrificed their tusks for this monstrosity had gone to the aurora Great-Years before, abandoning their bones to the silt of a river bank. If the Fireheads had ever respected the mammoths, it was long ago. This coat was a thing of excess, not beauty: a symbol of power, not respect.

The Crocus he had known would never have worn such a monstrosity. Perhaps the girl he had known had died at the moment her father fell to the Whiteskins’ arrow, all those years ago. Perhaps what had lived on was another creature: the body alive, the spirit flown to the aurora.

Now she dug beneath her coat and pulled out a double loop of thick plaited rope. She held it toward him, cooing.

It was a hobble.

It was a hated thing, a symbol of his long submission, and he realized he had been right: she had pursued the mammoths over such immense distances so that she could regain her dominance over him.

He lifted his tusks and roared, and his voice echoed from the curving dam of ice.

Crocus looked up at him, her eyes hardening. Perhaps she intended to call her hunters to put him down, to end once and for all the life of this unruly mammoth.

But it didn’t matter. For she didn’t know, couldn’t know, that his life was already over.

He stamped his foot. The ice cracked.

The surface of the ice immediately crumbled, cracking in great sheets around them. He felt himself fall, his legs sinking into deeper loose material beneath.

Willow tumbled off his back and landed in the soft ice. Crocus fell to her knees, her heavy bead suit weighing her down, old and bewildered.

Longtusk shook himself free of the loose ice and continued to stamp, here at the dam’s narrowest and weakest point.

Compared to the forces here — the weight of water, the power of this huge ice dam — even the strength of a powerful Bull mammoth was as nothing, of course. But what was important was how he applied that strength — for, like Spindle riding the back of Jaw Like Rock, the ice dam was unstable, overloaded by the brimming lake.

And he heard the dam groan.

Worn thin by years of erosion, already under immense pressure from the weight of the water it contained, stress cracks began to spread through its weakening structure, and Longtusk, in the deep senses of his bones, felt the rhythm of those cracks, and changed his stamping to speed their propagation.

There were ripples on the lake. Birds were taking to the air, alarmed.

And on the other side, water began to gush out of the dam’s dirty, eroded face — just a fine spray at first, noisy rather than voluminous; but soon the cracks from which it emerged were widening, the water flow increasing.

Willow got to his feet, and he reached out with a hairy paw to help Crocus. Crocus hesitated, then took it in her own paw. Then the two of them grabbed onto Longtusk’s belly fur.

And so the three of them were locked together, Longtusk realized — Longtusk, Willow and Crocus; mammoth, Dreamer and Firehead — locked together at the end of their lives, just as had once been foreseen by a Dreamer female, long, long ago.

He wondered if they understood what he had done.

The center of the dam collapsed.

Huge slabs and boulders of ice arced into the air, followed by a powerful torrent of water. Suddenly the air was filled with noise: the roar of the water, the shriek of tortured ice. The dam was high, and the first blocks took a long time to fall to the green land below, fanning out amid a spray of rumbling, frothing, gray-blue water. Longtusk thought he saw a deer there, immense antlers protruding proudly from his head, looking up in utter bewilderment at the strange rain descending on him.

The first ice blocks hit the ground, exploding into fragments and gouging out deep earth-brown craters. But the craters lasted only a heartbeat, for when the waters splashed over the earth the land turned to shapeless mud and washed away.

The deer had vanished. He had been the first to die today. He would not be the last, Longtusk knew.

The dam, once broken, was crumbling quickly. Gray-brown water cut down through the unresisting ice like a stone knife slicing through the flesh of a mammoth. And as the breach widened, so the gush of water extended, deepening and broadening. But its violence did not diminish, for the great mass of water pressed against the dam with an eagerness born of centuries of containment. It shot through the breach horizontally, darkening the land before falling in a shattering rain.

Willow was tugging at Longtusk’s fur and pointing back the way they had come, toward the rocky hillside.

The Dreamer was right. It would be safer if they returned there, away from the collapsing ice dam itself.

Longtusk turned and began to make his cautious way back along the shuddering dam. The whole ice surface was cracking and unstable now. Crocus was whimpering with fear, and the Dreamer put his strong arm around her, in this last extreme helping this distant cousin to safety. Low and squat, Willow seemed to find it easier to stand on the dam’s shaking surface than the taller, more elegant Firehead.

Above the rush of water, the scream of the cracking ice, Longtusk heard a remote, thin trumpet. It was a mastodont. He looked back, and saw that the mastodonts and their Firehead keepers had fled to the safety of the land, and were fanning out over the hillside there. He couldn’t see if the Shaman was among them. He didn’t suppose it mattered; with Crocus gone, so was his grisly power.

He hoped the mastodonts would survive, and find freedom.

At last the three of them scrambled onto the rocky hillside. It felt scarcely less unsteady than the ice, so powerfully did the gushing water shake it.

He looked over the flooding land to the south. New rivers surged along the dry old valleys, like blood surging through a mammoth’s veins. Already the ridges of soil and gravel, slowly and painfully colonized by the plants, were being overwhelmed and swept away.

But now the ice dam collapsed further. Immense blocks, blocks the size of icebergs, calved off the eroded walls and fell grandly to the battered land — and the flooding reached a new intensity.

A wall of gray water surged from the huge breach, a river trying to empty a sea. This new mighty flow simply overwhelmed the puny canyons and valleys hit by the first flooding, drowning them as if they had never been. A great bank of mist and fog rolled outward from the breached dam, looming up to the sky as swirling clouds.

Beyond the advancing wave front, bizarrely, the sun still shone, and the land was a placid blanket of folded earth peppered with trees. Longtusk saw a herd of bison, a black lake of muscle and fur. They looked up from their feeding at the wall of water that advanced on them, towering higher than the tallest trees.

The herd was gone in an instant, thousands of lives snuffed out as their world turned from placid green to crushing black.

And still the water came, that front of gray advancing without pity over the green, spreading out over the land in a great fan from the breached dam, as if trying to emulate the sea from which it had emerged.

…Now, though, the flow began to diminish, and the water surging over the land began to drain away. Longtusk saw that the breached dam had, if briefly, reformed; slabs of ice and boulders, presumably torn from the basin of the trapped lake, had jammed themselves into the breach, stemming the flow, which bubbled and roared its frustration at this blockage.

As the flood waters subsided, draining into shallow pools and river valleys, the drowned land emerged, glistening.

It was unrecognizable.

Where before there had been green, now there was only the red-brown and black of the bedrock. Under the dam, where the water had fallen to the ground, a great pit had been dug out, gouged as if by some immense mammoth tusk, already flooded with water and littered with ice blocks. It was not that the surface of the land had been washed away, a few trees uprooted — all of it, all the animals and trees and grass and the soil that had sustained them had been scoured clean off, down to the bony bedrock, and then the bedrock itself broken and blasted away. Even the hills had been reshaped, he saw, their flanks eroded and cut away. It was as if a face had been flensed, scraped clean of hair and skin and flesh down to the skull.

Mighty rivers flowed through the new channels, and in folds of the land lakes glimmered — huge expanses, lakes that would have taken days to walk around. It was a new landscape, a new world that hadn’t existed heartbeats before. But he knew there was no life in those rivers and lakes, no plants or fish, not even insects hovering over their surfaces. This was a world of water and rock.

And now there was a new explosion of shattered rock and crushed ice. The temporary dam had failed. The water leaped through and engulfed the land anew, immediately overcoming the lakes and rivers that had formed and gleamed so briefly, a world made and unmade as he watched.

Surely this mighty flood would not rest until it had gouged its way across this narrow neck of land to reach the brother ocean to the south, sundering the continents, cutting off the new lands from the old.

And with the Fireheads trapped in the old world, the mammoths would be safe in the new.

But such small calculations scarcely seemed important. Longtusk felt the shuddering of the planet in his bones, a deep, wild disturbance. The Earth was reshaping itself around him, the sea asserting its mighty fluid dominance over the land. Before such mighty forces his life was a flicker, no more significant than droplet of spume thrown up as the water surged through the broken dam.

…And yet he lived, he realized, wondering. They still stood here — the three of them, Willow, Crocus and himself, the Firehead and the Dreamer still clutching his soaked fur.

For a heartbeat he wondered if they might, after all, live through this.

But now Crocus cried out, pointing.

The hillside they stood on was crumbling. Its surface was cracking, falling away into the gray-brown torrent that gushed below. And the exposed gray-black rock was crumbling too, exploding outward, great shards of it being hurled horizontally by the power of the water. Its lower slopes must have been undercut by the flood.

The land itself was disappearing out from under him, faster than any of them could run.

So it is time, he thought.

Willow plucked at his ears. He bent his head, and the Dreamer slid proudly onto his back. Another story was ending here, thought Longtusk: this squat, aged Dreamer was probably the last of his kind, the last in all the world, and with his death his ancestors’ long, patient Dreams would end forever.

Crocus was weeping. She was frightened, like the cub he had once found in the snow, lost and freezing and bewildered. She looked up at Longtusk, seeking comfort.

He wrapped his trunk around her. She curled up in the shelter of his powerful muscles, pulling his long thick fur around her. She closed her eyes, as if sleeping.

…The land disappeared with a soft implosion, startlingly quickly, and there was nothing under his feet.

He was falling, the Dreamer’s legs locked around his neck, Crocus cradled in his trunk. The air gushed around him, laden with noise and moisture.

He could hear the rush of water beneath him, smell its triumphant brine stink as the sea burst across this narrow neck of land, sundering continent from continent.

Is this how it feels to die? Is this how it feels to be born?

Defiantly he lifted his mighty tusks. Milkbreath! Thunder! Spruce!

And then -

7 The Cousins

It was later — much later — before Threetusk truly understood what had happened. And, as he grew older yet, the strange events of those days plagued his mind more and more.

He found her cropping grass with the painful, slow care of the old.

"You look terrible," said Saxifrage, as she always did.

"And, Matriarch or not, you’re just as uppity as when you were a calf and I could lift you in the air with my trunk."

She snorted with contempt. "Like to see you try it now." But she reached up and nuzzled her trunk tip into his mouth.

Her flavor was thin, stale, old — yet deliciously familiar to Threetusk. They had sired four calves together. Threetusk had known other mates, of course — and so, he knew, had Saxifrage — but none of his couplings had given him such warm joy as those with her. And (he knew, though she would never say so) she felt the same way about him.

But Saxifrage was a Matriarch now, and her Family stood close by her: daughters and granddaughters and nieces, calves playing at the feet of their mothers, happy, well-fed and innocent.

Even in this huge and empty new land, birth and life and death had followed their usual round for the mammoths, and Threetusk found the world increasingly crowded by unfamiliar faces. Sometimes he was startled to discover just how old he was: when he tried to kneel in the water of a spring, for instance, and his knees lanced with arthritic pain; or when he grumbled about the smoothness of his teeth — and then recalled they were the last he would ever grow.

He settled in beside her, and pulled at the grass. "I’ve been thinking," he said. "We’re the only ones who recall it all. The crossing. The only ones who were there. To these youngsters, all of it — Longtusk, the refuge, the corridor — is as remote as a story in the Cycle."

"It already is in the Cycle."

"Yes," he said. "And if I knew Longtusk he’d bury his head in a mud seep rather than hear some of the legends that are growing up around him."

"But he was a hero… You know, you never told me the last thing Longtusk said to you. That day when he announced we had to leave the nunatak, and he took aside you and my mother, Horsetail."

"I’ve been thinking," he said again.

She rumbled, irritated at his evasion. "Bad habit for your age."

"About ice and land bridges and corridors… You see, it isn’t so easy to reach this new land of ours. First you have to cross the land bridge, and you have to get through the ice corridor. You have to time it just right; most of the time one or other of them will be closed, by sea or ice—"

"So what?"

"So it’s difficult, but not impossible, for others to make the crossing. Although for now we’re protected by the ocean, there might come a time in the future when the land bridge opens again, and they come pouring across…"

Saxifrage shivered, evidently as disturbed as he was by the notion that the Fireheads might come scouring down this innocent country, burning and hunting and building and changing.

"It won’t happen in our time," Saxifrage said. "And—"

But they were interrupted by a thin trumpeting on the fringe of the gathering. It sounded like a calf — a badly frightened calf.

"Circle!"

Saxifrage’s Family immediately formed a defensive ring around their Matriarch.

Impatiently Saxifrage pushed her way out of the ring, determined to see what was going on. Threetusk followed in her wake.

A calf stood in the protection of her mother’s legs, agitated, still squealing with fright. It was immediately obvious why she was distressed.

The Family was standing at the edge of an open, grassy flood plain. A forest bounded the southern side of the plain. And something had emerged from the fringe of trees on the far side of the clearing.

It might have been a mammoth — it was about the size of a healthy adult Bull, Threetusk supposed — but it was almost hairless. Its skin was dark brown and heavily wrinkled, and it sprouted patches of wiry black hair. Its head was strangely small, and its trunk was short and inflexible.

And it had four short, straight tusks, one pair in the upper jaw, one in the lower.

It was staring at the herd of mammoths, clearly as surprised and alarmed as they were.

"It’s a calf of Probos," said Saxifrage, wondering. "A cousin of the mammoths — like Longtusk’s mastodonts. There have been rumors of creatures like us here: distant sightings, contact rumbles dimly heard. But…"

A young Bull mammoth had gone to challenge the strange animal.

Threetusk struggled to hear their encounter. "His language is strange. I can barely understand him. Gomphothere. His kind are called gomphotheres. We are cousins. But we have been apart a long, long time—"

Saxifrage grabbed his trunk. "Threetusk, don’t you see? This is proof. Your ideas about the bridge and the corridor opening and closing must be right. The way must have opened in the past and let through that gomphothere thing — or his ancestors anyhow. And if the way opened in the past, it will surely open again in the future. Oh, Threetusk, you were right. It won’t happen in our lifetimes. But the Fireheads are coming." She shuddered. "And then what will become of us?"

"…We shouldn’t call them Fireheads," he said slowly.

"What?"

"That’s what Longtusk said to Horsetail and me. On that last day." He closed his eyes and thought of Longtusk. It was as if the years peeled away like winter fur.

We know their true name. They are already in the Cycle. Driven by emptiness inside, they will never stop until they have covered the Earth, and no animal is left alive but them — heap upon heap of them, with their painted faces and their tools and their weapons. They are the demons we use to scare our calves; they are the nemesis of the mammoths. They are the Lost…

Saxifrage said, "Some day in the future the ice will return, and the steppe will spread across the planet once more. It will be a world made for mammoths. But will there be any mammoths left alive to see it?"

The young mammoth’s tusks clashed with the gomphothere’s, a sharp, precise ivory sound. The gomphothere trumpeted and disappeared into the forest.