“Come here,” he said. “This is Topaz. She’ll be your mount today. Stand still and let her smell you.”
Kanut stiffened as trunks sniffed and poked at him, not just his mount but the other mammoths as well. Nosy old things, he thought. In all meanings of the word.
Cortez busied himself with the loading: tightening harnesses and strapping saddlebags into place, all the while talking and making noises to the animals. He tied the rifle bundle and Kanut’s backpack to Topaz’s harness, right behind a pad with dangling stirrups.
There seemed to be even more elephants—mammoths—than before, but with all the shifting and moving, it was hard to keep count. Three had harnesses: two with the flimsy saddles and one loaded with the baggage. At least one other adult and the little one flitted about. “How many mammoths you got in all?” he asked.
“There’s a couple more,” Cortez said. “All right, we’re ready to mount. If you need a piss, do it now. Once we get going, we’re not stopping for a while.”
Kanut eyed the stirrups on his mammoth—they sat at the height of Kanut’s chin. “How am I supposed to climb up there? You got a stepladder somewhere?”
“Topaz, kneel.”
The beast lowered itself onto back knees, then went chest down so its front legs were bent.
Cortez slapped the animal’s knee. “Foot here. Now up and swing over.” He grabbed Kanut’s belt and threw him onto the animal’s shoulders.
As soon as Kanut’s foot left the ground, the mammoth rose. He felt like he was on the tilt-a-whirl.
“Feet in stirrups!” Cortez shouted.
While Kanut fumbled with fitting his feet into place, Cortez mounted his own mammoth, much quicker and more gracefully than Kanut had managed. Immediately, Cortez’s mammoth began a quick walk through the brush, rumbling ominously, directly toward the stream.
Kanut grabbed the only thing available—hair. Long, coarse ash-clogged strands covering a soft fuzz of undercoat. “Where are the reins?” he shouted.
“No handlebars,” Cortez called over his shoulder. “And no reins. Just sit relaxed. Topaz will follow Ruby.”
Relax? How? It was like trying to straddle the hood of a car, except the animal’s backbone was inconveniently placed for a man’s anatomy. The saddle’s thin padding did little to cushion Kanut’s backside. The swaying made him queasy as the big animal’s strides carried him at a jogger’s pace.
They plunged down into the stream. The water ran gray, too heavy with ash to see the bottom.
Apparently, the mammoths didn’t find it tempting to drink. They waded straight to the other side and up the bank. With barely a pause, they powered through the saplings and bushes, oblivious to the twigs and branches scratching their—and Kanut’s—sides.
He’s doing it deliberately, Kanut thought. Taking us through the undergrowth to see if I’ll squawk. Well, he underestimates my determination to get to those women.
All around Kanut, the other animals milled, often close enough to rub flanks or touch his mammoth—or him—with their trunks. Deep sounds seem to come more from their bellies than their throats—he could feel the vibrations even through the saddle.
I’m in the middle of a herd, he realized. Any attempt to dismount and he’d risk being trampled—or left behind.
Ahead of him, Cortez half turned. “You still there, Officer?”
“Don’t worry about me,” Kanut answered with more bravado than he felt.
“I’m going to head them uphill, away from the river, before turning southeast—less chance of meeting anybody. Hang on.”
Cortez must have had some way to steer, because his beast swerved left to climb a steep rise. The rest followed, their long legs picking their way easily upward between rocks and trees. As the way became steeper, Kanut had to lean forward and grasp the long dirty hair on his animal’s neck.
At the crest of the ridge, the herd turned right, following the ridgeline, more or less in single file. Kanut was getting more comfortable with balancing on the mammoth’s back, letting his pelvis shift with the animal’s sway. This isn’t so bad, he thought. But he wondered what his back would feel like in the morning.
Then they plunged downhill—he was practically standing on the stirrups, leaning backward to try to stay on board.
Don’t fall off. Don’t fall off.
When they came to more level ground, they turned southeast. The terrain in this part of the woods was still gray with ash, but maybe not quite as heavy a coating as where they’d camped.
He hoped they’d take a break soon, maybe have some lunch.
He glanced at his watch and his heart sank. It was only seven in the morning.
CHAPTER 26
Slipping away
Sera jumped right into the plan to make a sled. She used the tie-down ropes woven through the suitcase handles to string the suitcases together. Estelle roped the emergency supplies box on to the end like a tail.
With Estelle’s help, Annie lay on her stomach on the improvised sled like a six-year-old on a toboggan. Estelle zipped the precious satphone into her jacket pocket. Taking the ends of the ropes, Estelle and Sera began to pull.
Sled dogs loved that sort of thing. Estelle didn’t.
The glacier was a river of ice, but in most ways not like a river at all. Rivers moved, changing all the time, rising in wet times, shrinking in dry spells, undercutting banks here, depositing mud there. Glaciers did all that too, but on a time scale almost incomprehensible to humans. Most of all, the surface of a river was level: the glacier was a frozen avalanche, sloping down the mountainside on its slow way to the ocean.
“This isn’t exactly like ice skating,” Sera puffed. Jagged spines, gullies, and ice boulders made the hike as challenging as a mountain trail.
Estelle aimed to take the shortest line to dry land, but the glacier’s
