Eggtusk grunted and staggered. Silverhair saw a new splash of blood on his fleshy thigh. 'Get behind me,' Eggtusk ordered.
'But—'
'Do as he says,' snapped Snagtooth. Her eyes were wide, her smashed tusk dribbling fresh pulp.
Silverhair tucked herself, with Snagtooth, behind Eggtusk’s mighty buttocks.
And now Eggtusk began to walk toward the Lost, his pace measured and deliberate. 'So you think you can kill me, do you, little maggots? We’ll see about that. Do you know what I’m going to do with you? I’m going to pick you up with my trunk and drown you in the pus that oozes from Kilukpuk’s suppurating mouth-ulcers. And then—'
But still the thunder-sticks barked, and the strange, invisible, deadly insects slammed into Eggtusk’s giant body. One of them tore away a piece of his shoulder, and Silverhair’s face was splashed by a horrific spray of hair, skin, and pulped flesh.
With each impact Eggtusk staggered. But he did not fall, and he kept the Lost washed in a stream of obscene threats.
Gull-Caw was agitated. The fat one’s thunder-stick no longer barked; he scrabbled at it, frightened, frustrated.
When Skin-of-Ice saw this, he turned and ran.
Gull-Caw roared out his anger at this betrayal. Then, seeing Eggtusk remorselessly approaching, he yowled like a fox cub. He dropped his useless thunder-stick and turned to run, but he stumbled and fell on the ground.
And now Eggtusk was over him.
The great Bull reared up, raising his huge tree-trunk legs high in the air. His deformed tusk glistened, dripping with his own blood; he raised his trunk and trumpeted so loud his voice echoed off the icebergs of the distant ocean.
Silverhair reared back, terrified of him herself.
Eggtusk reached down and wrapped his trunk around the wriggling Lost. He lifted the fat body effortlessly. Eggtusk squeezed, the immense muscles of his trunk wrapped tightly around the Lost’s greasy torso. Silverhair could see the Lost’s eyes bulge, his short pink tongue protrude.
Then Eggtusk threw Gull-Caw into the air. The Lost briefly flew, yelling, his fat limbs writhing, his smooth, ugly skin smeared with Eggtusk’s blood.
The Lost landed heavily on his belly; Silverhair heard the crack of bone.
But still Gull-Caw tried to raise himself, to crawl away, to reach with a bloodied forelimb for his thunder-stick.
Eggtusk leaned forward and knelt on the Lost’s back.
The Lost screamed as that great weight bore down. Silverhair heard the crunch of ribs and vertebrae. The Lost’s scream turned to a liquid gurgle, and blood gushed from his mouth.
Then Eggtusk drove a tusk through his neck, pinning him to the ground.
The Lost twitched once, twice more. Then he was still.
12
The Kettle Hole
Eggtusk pulled his tusk from the body, shaking it to free it of the limp remnant flesh of the Lost. He rooted for the thunder-stick. He curled his trunk-fingers around the black, spindly thing, and lifted it high in the air. 'It feels cold.'
'It’s a thing of death,' said Silverhair.
Eggtusk raised the thunder-stick and smashed it against a rock outcrop until it was bent in two, and small parts tumbled from it. He hurled the wreckage far into the grass. Then he wiped his tusk against the outcrop, to free it of blood and scraps of flesh.
'Now come,' said Eggtusk. 'We will honor the body of this Lost I have killed.' He bent down, wincing slightly, and ripped yellow tundra flowers from the ground. He lumbered over to the corpse and sprinkled the flowers there. He was a fearsome sight with his face masked in blood, one of his eyes concealed by blood-matted hair, and thunder-stick punctures over his legs and chest. Even his trunk had a bite taken out of it.
After a few heartbeats Silverhair and Snagtooth joined in. Soon the carcass of the Lost was buried in grass and flowers. They stood over the corpse as the sun wheeled through the icy sky, Remembering the fat, ugly creature as best they could.
'Let that be an end of it,' growled Eggtusk. 'Once I destroyed a wolf that had come stalking the Family. We never saw that pack again. The Cycle teaches that mammoths should kill only when we have to. We have frightened the Lost so badly they’ll respect us, and never come near us again…'
Silverhair wanted to believe that was true. But she was unsure. She had watched the way the Lost had carved slices out of that fox. There had been a
She couldn’t help but feel that a world free of Skin-of-Ice would be a better place. And, she feared, the killing wasn’t done yet.
Silverhair tried to treat Eggtusk’s many wounds. They found a stream, and she bathed him with trunkfuls of cold, clear water, washing away the matted blood and dirt in his fur, and she plastered mud over the worst wounds in his flesh. But the pain of the wounds was very great. And she could see that some of the wounds were becoming infected, despite her best ministrations with mud and leaves.
But Eggtusk was impatient to move on. 'I don’t think that other worm will pose any threat to us. He can’t have got far. Come on. We’ll follow him.'
Silverhair was startled. 'We aren’t wolves to track prey, Eggtusk.'
'And he still has the thunder-stick,' Snagtooth said, her voice without expression.
'That Lost was wounded,' Eggtusk said firmly. 'If he’s died in some hole, we’ll honor him. Maybe, if he’s alive, we’ll be able to help him.'
That seemed extremely unlikely to Silverhair. Besides, there were the other Lost to think about; what had become of them while the mammoths had chased Gull-Caw? Perhaps Eggtusk’s thinking was muddled by pain…
But there was no more time to debate the issue, for already Eggtusk was limping off to the south, the direction Skin-of-Ice had fled.
As browsing grass-eaters, mammoths are poor trackers. As the Cycle says,
Eggtusk charged ahead over the plain. 'Here is grass he crushed,' he said. 'Here is a splash of his blood, on this rock. You see? And here is a dribble of urine… I can still smell it…'
Silverhair and Snagtooth followed, more uncertainly. All Silverhair could smell right now was the stink of Eggtusk’s decaying wounds.
'Of course,' said Snagtooth softly to Silverhair, 'it may be that this Lost
Silverhair was startled. 'But Eggtusk nearly killed him.'
'I know,' said Snagtooth. 'But who knows what goes on in the mind of a Lost?'
Silverhair kept her counsel. Perhaps Eggtusk was launching himself into this quest to take his mind off his wounds. Maybe, when Eggtusk’s injuries had healed sufficiently for him to start thinking more clearly, she could persuade him to return to the Family, and then…
Suddenly Eggtusk trumpeted in triumph.
Silverhair slowed and stood beside him.
The Lost, Skin-of-Ice, was lying on the ground, face down, still some distance away. He wasn’t moving. There was no sign of his thunder-stick. The ground between the Lost and the mammoths was hummocky, broken, tufted with grass and sprinkled with residual ice scraps.
There was no sound, no scent, and she could see the Lost only indistinctly.
The gray cap of hair on Silverhair’s scalp prickled. 'I wish I knew where his thunder-stick is,' she murmured. 'We ought to be careful…'
But Eggtusk was already lumbering ahead, his trunk raised in greeting to the Lost he intended to help.
He approached a patch of ground strewn with grass and broken bushes — even a few broken spruce branches. Silverhair stared at the patch of ground, wondering what could have made such a mess. Wolves? Birds? But there was no scent; no scent at all.
Suddenly she was alarmed. 'Eggtusk! Take care—'
Eggtusk, his massive feet pounding at the ground, reached the debris-strewn patch.
With a cracking of twigs and branches, the ground opened up beneath his forefeet. He fell into a pit, amid an explosion of shattered branches and clumps of grass.
Silverhair charged forward. 'Eggtusk! Eggtusk!' She could see the dome of his head and the hair of his broad back protruding from the hole. His trumpeting turned to a roar of anguish.
But Snagtooth was tugging at her tail. 'Keep back! It’s a kettle hole…'
Silverhair, despite her impatience and fear, knew that Snagtooth was right. It would help no one if she got trapped herself.
She slowed, and took measured steps toward the hole in the ground, testing each footfall. Soon she was walking over the leaves and twigs and grass that had concealed the hole.
Eggtusk was embedded in the hole, a few blades of muddy grass scattered over his back. His trunk lay on the ground, and his great tusks, stained by mud and blood, protruded uselessly before him. He was out of her reach.
As she approached he tried to lift and turn his head. He said, 'Don’t come any closer.'
'Are you stuck?'
Eggtusk growled wearily. 'By Kilukpuk’s snot-crusted nostril hair, what a stupid question. Of course I’m stuck. My legs are wedged in under me. I can’t even move them.'
A kettle hole was a hazard of their warming times, Silverhair knew. It formed when a large block of ice was left by a retreating glacier. Sediment would settle over the ice, burying it. Then, as the ice melted, the resulting water would seep away and the sinking sediment, turning to mud, would subside to form a sticky hole in the ground.
Deadly, for any mammoth foolish enough to stray into one. But -
'Eggtusk, kettle holes are easy to spot. Only a calf would blunder into one.'
'Thank you for that,' he snorted. 'Don’t you see? It’s your friend, Skin-of-Ice. Snagtooth was right. That wretched worm did want us to follow him. While we honored his fallen comrade, Skin- of-Ice was preparing this trap for us. And I was fool enough to charge right in…'
He subsided. His breath was a rattle, and he seemed to be weakening. He tried to raise his trunk, then let it flop back feebly to the ground.
Silverhair tried to step forward, but her feet sank deeper into the mud that surrounded the hole. She felt an agitated anger; she had seen too much death this blighted summer. 'You aren’t going to do this to me,' she cried. 'Not yet, you old fool!'
She scrambled back to firm ground and forced herself to think.
