Silverhair

He hesitated. 'Now?'

'Yes. Now.'

'Shouldn’t we tell the others?'

'What for? They would only stop us.'

She began to walk. Resolutely she did not look back.

After a few heartbeats she heard his heavy footfalls as he lumbered after her. She hid her grim satisfaction.

10 The Time of Musth and Estrus

Once more, their walk took them many days.

They passed through a valley flanked by eroded mountains.

It was a valley of water and light. Gently undulating meadows fell away to a central river, which was slow-moving, wide and deep, meandering through a sandy floodplain. To the west the river’s numerous tangled channels shimmered in the low sun. Above them the valley sides rose up to become dramatic peaks, the white light blazing off the ice that crowned them. The basalt walls, their sheer rock faces shattered by centuries of frost, had eroded into narrow pinnacles that stood against the sky. Every ledge was coated with orange lichen, nourished by the droppings of geese, whose cackling calls echoed down to the mammoths.

There was little snow left on the valley floor now, and trickles of water, cool and fresh, ran from the remaining snowbanks. But the ground was still bare, shaded rust-red, ochre, and russet; of the lush vegetation that would soon cover the valley there was still little sign.

The first bumblebees and butterflies were appearing in the air.

Silverhair suffered her first mosquito bite of the year. She snapped at the troublesome insect with her tail, but she knew that even if she reached it her effort was futile; millions of its relatives would soon be emerging from the silt at the bottom of ice-covered ponds, where they had spent the winter as larvae.

The beauty of the valley, the return of life, the calmness of their situation: all of this, as the long day wore on, was having a profound effect on Silverhair. She could feel the flesh and fat gathering comfortably on her bones, her winter coat falling away. Her body responded deeply to the season, surging with oceanic warmth.

Somewhere within her, seeds were ripening, as if in response to the death she had witnessed. It was estrus; she was thrilled.

She knew that Lop-ear, too, was ready. As he walked he kept his head held high, his trunk curled. He seethed with irritability and urgency. He dribbled musth from the temporal gland at the top of his head, and he left a trail of strong-smelling urine wherever he walked. He was even making a deep rumble, a sound she had heard before only from much older Bulls. But he seemed consumed by his own inner turmoil and ill-defined longing, and when he spoke to her it was only of their greater concerns: the strange encounter with the Lost that may await them in the south, the possibility of bringing the Family to these richer lands, the disturbing, nagging fact that they were finding no recent signs of other mammoth Families anywhere.

He spoke of everything but them.

He was in musth.

Yet he couldn’t see it himself.

Patiently she kept her counsel and waited for him to understand.

After many days of walking they came to a ridge that overlooked the southern coast of the Island.

The world to the south lay displayed before Silverhair, divided into broad stripes, dazzling in her poor vision. Below the blue-gray line of sky was the misty bulk of the Mainland, still obscured by storm clouds. Then came the Channel, a blue-black strip of water bounded by cracked, gleaming pack ice. Below the ridge they were standing on was the shore, a shingle beach fringed by dirty landfast ice.

The all-pervasive sound rising from the coast was of broken pack ice lifting on and off the shore rocks. Farther away in the open Channel, icebergs drifted: a procession of them, mysterious and awe-inspiring, like clouds brought down to Earth. As the light shifted their contours would suddenly glow iridescent blue. Silverhair’s heart was lifted by the stately beauty and strangeness of the bergs; they were the mammoths of the sea, she thought, effortlessly dominating their surroundings, giant and dignified.

The wind was strong, and its cold penetrated Silverhair’s newly exposed underwool. She huddled close to Lop-ear, the wind whipping across her eyes. 'There are times when I wish I could keep my winter fur all year around—'

'Hush,' he said, staring. 'Look…'

And there, resting on the shore, was something she had never seen before.

At first she thought it was the splayed-open body of some giant animal. It had one end coming to a point, the other rounded. Its long, sleek flanks were encrusted with sea plants and streaks of brownish discoloration. And those flanks were torn open, she saw, perhaps ripped by the sea ice. The top of the monster was like a complex, shattered forest, with posts like tree trunks sprouting from each other at all angles.

The thing was huge: so big, she could have walked around inside its belly.

Lop-ear was silent, staring at the hulk, his trunk raised in the air.

She said, 'Do you think it’s dead?'

'I don’t think it was ever alive,' he said bluntly.

'What, then?'

'I think you must ask the Lost that,' he said. 'For something as ugly and unfitting as that could only come from their tortured souls. Perhaps it brought them here.'

'But it’s damaged. Perhaps that’s why they can’t leave.' Suddenly she raised her trunk. 'I smell something.'

'Yes.' He turned, scanning along the coast.

It was smoke.

They saw a small fire, confined to a spot on the beach below, close to the foot of the ridge. There was, Silverhair saw, a shape above it: like a tree, bent all the way over to touch the ground. Objects dangled from the tree-thing over the fire.

Now she could smell something else, carried on the wind. The stink of burning flesh.

And that bent-over object wasn’t a tree, she realized with mounting horror.

It was a tusk.

'By Kilukpuk’s mercy…'

Lop-ear was becoming agitated. 'That smell of flesh—' His voice was tight and indistinct. 'It is all I can do to keep from fleeing.'

'Lop-ear, listen to me.' She told him about the body in the yedoma. The way the tusks of the ancient Bull had been hacked away. 'Well, now I know what became of those tusks,' she said grimly.

They saw movement on the beach. Two creatures — something like wolves, perhaps, but walking upright, on their hind legs — approached the fire. One of them reached out with its foreleg and prodded at the dangling scraps of flesh. It was using its paw as Silverhair would her trunk, to manipulate the burned flesh.

To rip a piece off it.

To lift it to its mouth, and bite into it. Another of the creatures grabbed at the meat, and they fought over it, clumsily.

She felt bile rise in her throat.

Without speaking, the two mammoths turned and fled from the ridge, toward the sanctity and calmness of the north.

The sun rolled along the mist-shrouded horizon. The Moon rose, a gaunt old crescent, clearly visible in the mysterious, subdued sky of the summer midnight.

The two mammoths huddled together.

'They were Lost,' Silverhair whispered. 'Weren’t they? How can I have ever imagined I could deal with them?' Every instinct, every nerve shrieked for her to fly from this place, from the Lost and their scentless, unnatural activities, their slavering like wolves over burned scraps of flesh.

But Lop-ear didn’t reply.

By the wan light she could see him, apparently unconsciously, reaching into his mouth with his trunk, and tasting her musk. Tasting it for estrus.

Suddenly it was not a time for talking. And her fear, in this strange, remote place, her residual sadness at Wolfnose’s death — all of it transmuted into a powerful longing.

She rumbled, deeper and lower than ever in her life. Then her tone rose gently, becoming stronger and higher in pitch, then sinking down to silence at the end.

This was the Song of Estrus. The call would carry many days’ walk from here, and was a signal to any Bull who heard it that she was a Cow ready to mate.

But there was only one Bull she wanted to hear.

She pulled away from Lop-ear, her head held high. Then she whirled around, backing into him.

She ran across the shadow-strewn plain, the frosty grass crushing beneath her feet, her breath steaming before her face. She could feel him pursuing her, his own giant footfalls like an echo of her own — but much more than an echo, for as he neared her it was as if the other half of her own soul was joining her.

She let him catch her.

He laid his trunk over her shoulder, pulling her back. Still singing, she turned to face him. He was silhouetted in the low light, his body, newly fattened by the spring grass, broad and strong. She stepped from side to side, slowly, and every step she took was mirrored by him. She could see the musth liquid that oozed thickly from the gland on top of his head.

Then, facing her, he gently laid his trunk on her head and body. She twined her trunk around his, and their mouths met.

Thus, since the time of Probos, have the mammoths and their Cousins expressed their readiness to mate.

Now, at last, she let him move behind her.

He placed his tusks and forelegs on her back, and raised himself up. She knew he was taking most of his weight on his own back legs, but even so his mass was solid, heavy, warm on her back.

And she felt him enter her.

When it was over, and his warmth was captured inside her, she entered the mating pandemonium. She rumbled, screamed, trumpeted, defecated, secreted from her musth gland, whirled in a dance that made the ground shake. If other Cows had been present they would have joined in Silverhair’s pandemonium, celebrating the deep ancient joy of the mating. It was as if all her experiences — of death and birth and renewed life, of the immense mammoth history that lay behind her — channeled through this moment. The blood surged in her, remaking her like a larva in its cocoon, and she knew she had never been so alive, so joyous, so tied to the Earth.