Silverhair

Silverhair, breathing hard, returned to Wolfnose. 'If she returns I will kill her.'

Wolfnose said, 'No. She has her place, as we all do. She probably has cubs to feed.'

'She has been chewing on the corpse of this Bull!'

Wolfnose trumpeted mockingly. 'And what difference does that make to him now? He has belonged to the wolves for a long time; in fact, longer than you think, little Silverhair…'

Silverhair returned to her inspection of the ravaged corpse. 'I don’t recognize him. He must be from a Family I never met.'

'You don’t understand yet,' Wolfnose said gently. 'Perhaps he was grazing at the soft edge of a gully or a river bluff. Perhaps he lost his footing, became trapped. The wolves would work at him, and in time he would die. But then, at last, he would be enveloped by the soil, saturated by water, frozen by winter’s return.

'But the river mud that destroyed him also preserved him.

'For you see, if your body happens to be sealed inside ice, it can be saved. The ice, freezing, draws out the moisture that would otherwise rot your flesh… If you were sealed here, Silverhair, although your spirit would long have flown to the aurora, your body would live on — as long as it remained inside the ice, it would be as well preserved as this.'

'How long?'

Wolfnose said. 'I don’t know. How can I know? Perhaps Great-Years. Perhaps longer…'

Silverhair was stunned.

She could reach down with her trunk and touch the hair of this Bull’s face. The Bull might have been dead only a few days. Yet — could it be true? — he was separated from her by Great- Years.

'Now,' said Wolfnose. 'Look with new eyes; lift your trunk and smell…'

Silverhair, a little bewildered, obeyed.

And now that her eyes and nostrils were accustomed to the stink of the ancient corpse beside her, she saw that this landscape was not as it had seemed.

It was littered with bones.

Here was a femur, a leg bone, thrusting defiantly from the ground. Here was a set of ribs, broken and scattered, split as if some scavenger had been working to extract the marrow from their cores. And there a skull protruded from the ground, as if some great beast were burrowing upward from within the Earth.

Wolfnose said, 'The bones and bodies are stored in the ground. But when the ice melts and they are exposed — after Great-Years of stillness and dark — there is a moment of daylight, a flash of activity. The wolves and birds soon come to take away the flesh, and the bones are scattered by the wind and the rain. And then it is done. The ancient bodies evaporate like a grain of snow on the tongue. So you see, you are fortunate to have witnessed this rare moment of surfacing, Silverhair.'

'We should Remember the one in the yedoma,' Silverhair said.

'Of course we should,' said Wolfnose. 'For he has no one left to do it for him.'

And so the two mammoths touched the vacant skull with their trunks, and lifted and sorted the bones. Then they gathered twigs and soil and cast them on the ancient corpse, and touched it with the sensitive pads of their back feet, and they stood over it as the sun wheeled around the sky. They were trying to Remember the spirit that had once occupied this body, this Bull with no name who might have been the ancestor of them both, just as they would have done had they come upon the body of one of their own Family.

Silverhair imagined the days of long ago — perhaps when the crushed corpse she had seen had been proud and full of life — days different from now, days when the Clan had covered the Island, days when Families had merged and mingled in the great migrations like rivers flowing together. Days when mammoths had been more numerous, on the Island and beyond, than pebbles on a beach.

She was standing on a ground filled with the bodies of mammoths, generations of them stretching back Great-Years and more, bodies that were raised to the surface, to glimmer in the sun and evaporate like dew. For the first time in her life she could see the great depth of mammoth history behind her: forty million years of it, stretching back to Kilukpuk herself in her Swamp, a great sweep of time and space of which she was just a part.

Like the bones of this long-dead Bull, her soul was merely the fragment of all that mystery that happened to have surfaced in the here and now. And like the Bull, her soul would be worn away and vanished in an instant.

Silverhair felt the world shift and flow around her, as if she herself was caught up by some great river of time.

And she was proud, fiercely proud, to be mammoth.

When they were done the two mammoths turned away from the setting sun, side by side, and prepared for the long walk back to their Family.

At the last moment, Wolfnose stopped and turned back. 'Silverhair — what of the tusks?'

Somehow Silverhair had not noticed the Bull’s tusks, one way or another. She trotted back to the yedoma.

The tusks were missing; there was no sign of them, not so much as a splinter. But the tusks had not been snapped away by whatever accident had befallen this Bull, for the stumps in the skull were sharply terminated in clean, flat edges.

She returned to Wolfnose and told her this.

For the first time, she detected fear in the voice of the old one. 'Then the Lost have been here.'

'…What?'

'I know what you saw on the ice floe in the south, Silverhair,' Wolfnose said gravely. 'Perhaps they came in search of flesh, like the wolf…'

'What do the Lost want with tusks?'

'There is no understanding the Lost,' said Wolfnose bluntly. 'There is only fleeing. Come. Let us return to Owlheart and the others.'

Their shadows stretching ahead of them, the two mammoths walked together.

9 The Hole Gouged Out of the Sky

Silverhair was impatient during the long journey back to the Family.

It struck her as a paradox that visiting a place of death and desolation like the Plain of Bones should leave her feeling so invigorated. But that was how she felt — as Wolfnose had surely intended.

And — besides all the philosophy — she was young, and the days of spring were bright and warming, and the tundra flowers were already starting to bloom bright yellow amid the last scraps of snow and the first green shoots of new grass. Just as the Cycle promised, she felt she was shedding her cares with the worn-out layers of her winter coat.

Perhaps this would be the year that she would, for the first time, sing the Song of Estrus: when her body would produce the eggs that could form a calf. She remembered the ache in her empty dugs as she had watched Foxeye suckle Sunfire for the first time. Now she could feel the blood surge in her veins, as if drawn by the sun.

She wanted to become pregnant: to bear her own calf, to shelter and feed and raise it, to teach it all she knew of the world, to add her own new thread to the Cycle’s great and unending coat.

And her thoughts were full of Lop-ear. She longed to tell him what she had seen on the Plain of Bones, what it had meant to her…

She longed, bluntly, just to be with him once more.

She trotted across the thawing plains, her head full of warm, blood-red dreams of the young Bull.

Wolfnose had more difficulty.

Even at the best of times her pace was no match for Silverhair’s. The pain in her legs and back was obvious. It took her much longer than Silverhair to feed and to pass dung, and her lengthening stops left Silverhair fretting with impatience.

Thus they proceeded, Wolfnose warring with her own failing body, Silverhair torn between eagerness for the future and responsibility for the past.

At last they came in sight of the Family.

It was a bright morning, and at the center of a greening plain, the Family looked like a series of round, hairy boulders dotted over the landscape. The smell of their dung and their moist coats was already strong, and Silverhair could feel the rumble of their voices as they called to each other. The mammoths were not beautiful — never had the ambiguous gift of the great Matriarch Ganesha to her daughter Prima been more evident to Silverhair — but it was, in her eyes, the finest sight she could have seen.

She raised her trunk and trumpeted her joyous greeting and — quite forgetting Wolfnose — she charged across the tundra toward the Family.

Here came Lop-ear, that damaged ear dangling unmistakably by his head, running to meet her.

Their meeting was so vigorous, she was almost knocked over. They bumped their foreheads, ran in circles, defecated together, and spun around. He was like a reflection in a melt pond, a reflection of her own resurgent youth and vigor.

This is our time, she thought as she spun and danced. This is our summer, our day.

And it seemed perfectly natural that he should run behind her, rear up on his hind legs, place his forelegs on her back, and rest his great weight against her.

But she was not in estrus, and he was not in musth, and — for now — the mounting was only a playful celebration.

They faced each other; Silverhair touched his scalp and tusks and mouth.

'I missed you,' he said.

'And I you. You won’t believe what Wolfnose showed me…' She began to recount all she had seen in the Plain of Bones, the ancient carcasses of mammoths just like themselves, swimming out of the ice after a Great-Year’s sleep.

But though he listened intently, and continued to stroke her trunk with his, she could see that his eyes were empty.

After a time she drew back from him. He reached for her again, but she pushed him gently away.

'Something’s wrong. Is it what Owlheart said, about having something of the Lost in you?'

'No. Or at least, not just that. I’m confused, Silverhair. I’m happy to see you, glad the spring has come again. Part of me wants to jump about like a calf. But inside, I feel as if a giant black winter cloud is hanging over me.'

She scuffed at the ground, trying to retain that sense of wondrous optimism with which she had returned home. 'I don’t understand…'

'Silverhair, if you were singing the Song of Estrus now — who would mount you?'

And with that question she saw his concern. For there were only two Bulls here who might come into musth: Eggtusk and Lop-ear. They’d fought once already; they might easily kill each other fighting over her.

Or over Owlheart, or Foxeye, or even Snagtooth, if their turn came.