Silverhair

The Plain of Bones

Arctic summer: the sun arced around the sky’s north pole, somehow aimlessly, and at midnight it rolled lazily along the horizon. It was a single day, long and crystalline, that would last for two months, an endless day of feeding and breeding and dying.

At midnight Silverhair, walking slowly with her Family across the thawing plain, saw that she cast a shadow, ice-sharp, that stretched to the horizon. She felt oddly weighed down by the shadow, as if it were some immense tail she must drag around with her. But the light turned everything to gold, and made the bedraggled mammoths, with their clouds of loose molting fur, glow as if on fire.

They reached an area of tundra new to Silverhair. The mammoths, exhausted by their adventures, spread slowly over the landscape. As the thaw arrived, they found enough to drink in the melt pools that gathered over the permafrost. On days that were excessively hot — because mammoths do not sweat — they would reduce heat by panting, or they would find patches of soft snow to stand in, sometimes eating mouthfuls of it.

The changes in the land were dramatic now. After a month of continuous daylight, the sun was high, and hot enough to melt ice. Rock began to protrude through the thawing hillsides, and blue meltwater glimmered on the frozen lakes. As snowbanks melted, drips became trickles, and gullies became streams, and rivers, marshes, and ponds reformed. In sheltered valleys there were already patches of sedge and grass, green and meadow-like. After months of frozen whiteness the land was becoming an intricate pattern of black and white. This emerging panorama — shimmering with moist light, draped in mist and fog — was still wreathed in silence. But already the haunting calls of Arctic loons echoed to the sky from the melt pools.

The mammoths slept and fed in comparative comfort, and time wore away, slowly and unmarked.

Croptail tried to play with his sister, Sunfire, and his antics pleased the slower-moving adults, who would reach down trunk or tusk to allow the Bull calf to wrestle. But despite her mother’s attention, Sunfire was feeding badly and did not seem to be putting on weight, and her coat remained shabby and tangled. She spent most of her time tucked under her mother’s belly hair, with her face clamped to one dug or other, while Foxeye whispered verses from the Cycle.

Still, it was, all things considered, a happy time. But Silverhair’s spirits did not rise. She took to keeping her distance from the others — even from Lop-ear. She sought out patches of higher ground, her trunk raised.

For something was carried to her by the wind off the sea — something that troubled her to the depths of her soul.

Wolfnose joined her. The old Cow stood alongside Silverhair, feeling with her trunk for rich patches of grass, then trapping tufts between her trunk and tusks and pulling it out.

Silverhair waited patiently. Wolfnose seemed to be moving more slowly than ever, and her rheumy eyes, constantly watering, must be almost blind. So worn were Wolfnose’s teeth, it took her a long time to consume her daily meals. And when she passed dung, Silverhair saw that it was thin and sour-smelling, and contained much unchewed grass and twigs, and even some indigestible soil that Wolfnose, in her gathering blindness, had scooped into her mouth.

But even as her body failed, Wolfnose seemed to be settling into a new contentment.

'This is a good time of year,' Wolfnose rumbled at last. She quoted the Cycle: 'When the day becomes endless, we shed our cares with our winter coats.' She ground her grass contentedly, her great jaw moving back and forth. 'But you are not happy, child. Even my old eyes can see that much. What troubles you? Is it Sunfire?'

'I know Foxeye is looking after her well.'

'Sunfire was born in a difficult spring, a little too early. Now that summer is approaching, she will flourish like the tundra flowers—'

Silverhair blurted, 'Wolfnose — what do you smell here?'

For answer, Wolfnose patiently finished her mouthful of grass. Then she raised her trunk and turned it this way and that.

She said at last, 'There is the salt of the sea, to the west. There is the crisp fur of wolves, the sour droppings of lemmings, the stink of the guano of the gulls at the rocky coast…'

'But no mammoths.' Silverhair meant the complex of smells that characterized mammoths to each other: the smells of moist hair, dung, mothers’ milk.

Wolfnose said, 'No. But there is—'

Silverhair trembled. 'There is the stink of death — of dead mammoths.'

Wolfnose lowered her trunk and turned calmly to Silverhair. 'It isn’t what you think.'

Silverhair snapped, 'I’ll tell you what I do think. I think that what I can smell is the stench of some other Family’s rotting corpses.' She was trembling. She felt an unreasonable anger at Wolfnose’s calm patience.

'I’ll tell you the truth,' Wolfnose said. 'I can’t say what’s become of the other Families. It’s certainly a long time — too long — since any of us met a mammoth from another Family, and you know my fears about that. But the scent you detect has another meaning. Something wonderful.'

'Wonderful? Can death be wonderful?'

'Yes. Come on.'

With that, ripping another mouthful of grass from the clumps at her feet, Wolfnose began to walk toward the west.

Silverhair, startled, came to herself and hurried to catch up with Wolfnose. It did not take long, for Wolfnose’s arthritic gait was so forced and slow that Silverhair thought even a glacier could outrun her.

She called, 'Where are we going?'

'You’ll find out when we get there.'

The thawing ground was moist and fragile under Silverhair’s feet, and every footstep left a scar. In fact, the plain was crisscrossed by the trails of mammoths, wolves, foxes, and other animals, left from last summer and the years before. It could take ten years for the fragile tundra to grow over a single footstep.

Overhead, the snow geese were winging to their breeding grounds to the north, skein after skein of them passing across the blue sky. Occasionally, over the lakes, the geese plummeted from the sky to reach water through thin ice.

The tundra was wet, almost boggy, peppered by rivers, lakes, pools, bogs, and peaty hummocks. Although it had so little rainfall it was actually a desert, the tundra was one of the most waterlogged lands on the planet. There was little evaporation into the cold air and virtually no absorption into the soil; for, just a short trunk’s reach down through the carpet of plants, the ground was always frozen. That was the permafrost: nearly a mile deep, a layer of frozen soil that had failed to melt since the Ice Age.

It was a harsh place. Few plants could survive the combination of the summer’s shallow thawed-out soil and the intensely bitter winds of winter. But now, on the ground, from under the melting snow, the frozen world was coming to life.

Dead-looking stems bore tiny leaves and flowers, and the land was dotted with green and white and yellow. The first insects were stirring too. There were flies in the air, and some spiders and mites toiling on the ground. Silverhair saw a caterpillar cocoon fixed to a dwarf willow. The cocoon twitched as if its occupant were impatient to begin life’s brief adventure.

The edges of the receding snow patches were busy places. New arrivals — migrant birds like buntings, sanderling, turnstone, and horned larks — rushed to and fro as if in desperation, as the sun revealed fresh land with its cargo of roots and insects, ripe for the eating. The noise of the birds was startling after the long silence of the winter.

The lemmings seemed plentiful this year. Their heads popped up everywhere from their holes in the snow, and in some places their busy teeth had already denuded the land, leaving the characteristic 'lemming carpet' of shorn grass and hard black droppings.

The lemming hunters were here too. As soon as any lemming left its ball-shaped nest, a long-tailed skua would take off after it, yelping display calls from its hooked beak.

Usually the hapless rodents became nothing more than gifts in a skua’s courtship display. But Silverhair saw one enterprising animal, attacked by a skua, rear up on its hind legs and flash its long teeth. The skua, alarmed, flew away, and Silverhair felt obscurely cheered. She could hear the clattering heartbeat of the little creature as it nibbled in peace at a blade of grass.

But it was probably only a brief respite. The lemmings were hunted ruthlessly, not just by the skuas, but by snowy owls, gulls, and buzzards, and even Arctic foxes and polar bears. Silverhair knew that this lemming’s life, compared to her own, would be fast, vivid, but — even if by some miracle the predators spared it — tragically short.

The sun completed many rounds in the sky as the two mammoths walked on.

Wolfnose even brought Silverhair to some richer pastures, urging her to remember them for the future. 'And,' she said, 'you must understand why the grass grows so well here.'

'Why?'

'Once there were many mammoths here — many Families, many Clans. And they had favorite pastures, where their dung would be piled thick. The Clans are gone now — all save ours — but even after so long, their dung enriches the earth…'

Silverhair stared with awe at the thick-growing grass, a vibrant memorial to the great mammoth herds of long ago.

They came at last to the western coast.

The sea was still largely frozen. Sanderling and bunting searched for seeds in the snow, ducks dived through narrow leads in the thin ice, and skuas stood expectantly on prominent rocks. On the cliff below, barnacle geese were already incubating their clutches of eggs, still surrounded by the brilliant white of snow.

The smells of saltwater and guano were all but overpowering. But it was here that the stink of rotten mammoth flesh was strongest of all, and Silverhair was filled with a powerful dread.

At last they came to a shallow, rounded hill. Silverhair could see that it had been badly eroded by recent rainstorms; deep gullies ran down its side, as if scored by giant tusks.

Wolfnose edged forward and poked at the ground with her trunk. 'This is called a yedoma,' she said. 'It is a hill mostly made of ice. Come now.'

She led Silverhair around the flank of the hill. The death stink grew steadily stronger, until Silverhair could hardly bear to take another step. But Wolfnose marched stolidly on, her trunk raised, and Silverhair had no option but to follow.

And they came to a place where the yedoma’s collapsing flank had exposed a corpse: the corpse of a mammoth.

Wolfnose stood back, her trunk raised. 'Tell me what you see, little Silverhair,' she said gently.

Silverhair, shocked and distressed, stepped forward slowly, nosing at the ground with her trunk. 'I think it was a Bull…'

The dead mammoth was lying on his side. Silverhair could see that the flesh and skin on which he lay were mostly intact: she could make out his ear on that side, his flank, the skin on his legs, the long dark hair of winter tangled in frozen mud.

But the upper side of the Bull had been stripped of its flesh by the sharp teeth of scavengers. The meat was almost completely removed from the skull, and the rib cage, and even the legs. There was no sign of the Bull’s trunk. The pelvis, shoulder blade, and several of the ribs were broken and scattered. Inside the rib cage nestled a dark, lumpy mass, still frozen hard; perhaps it was the heart and stomach of this dead mammoth.

The Bull, she found, still had traces of food in the ruin of his mouth: grass and sedge, just as she had eaten today. He must have died rapidly, then: too rapidly even to swallow his last meal.

The flensed skull gleamed white in the pale sunlight. Its empty eye socket seemed to stare at her accusingly.

She heard a soft growl. She turned, trumpeting.

A wolf stood there, its fur white as snow. It was a bitch; Silverhair could see swollen dugs dangling beneath her chest.

Silverhair lowered her head, trumpeted, and lunged at the wolf. 'Get away, cub of Aglu, or I will drive my tusks into you!'

The wolf lowered her ears and ran off.