Silverhair

They battled through a storm.

The snow and fog swirled around them, matting their hair with freezing moisture, at times making it impossible for them to see more than a few paces ahead. But Silverhair knew the storm was the last defiant bellow of the dying winter, and she kept her head down and used her bulk to drive herself forward across a tundra that was like a frozen ocean.

They walked by night, when the only light came from the Moon, which cast a glittering purple glow on the fields of ice and snow. At such times the world was utterly still and silent, save for their own breathing.

To a watching human, Silverhair would have looked something like an Asian elephant — but coated with the long, dark brown hair of a musk ox — round and solid and dark and massive, looking as if she had sprouted from the unforgiving Earth itself.

From the ground under her tree-trunk legs to the top of her broad shoulders — as a human would have measured her — Silverhair was seven feet tall. She was fifteen years old. She could expect to continue growing until she was twenty-five or thirty, until she reached the height of eight or nine feet attained by Owlheart, the Matriarch of the Family. But at that, she would be dwarfed by the biggest of the Bulls — like crusty old Eggtusk, who stood all of eleven feet tall at the shoulder.

Her head was large, with a high dome on her crown. Her face, with its long jaw, was surprisingly graceful. Her shoulders had a high, distinctive hump, behind which her back sloped markedly from front to rear — unlike the horizontal line of an elephant’s back.

Her body was a machine designed to combat the cold.

The layer of fat under her skin — thick as a human forearm — kept her warm through the lightless depths of the Arctic winter. Her ears and tail were small, otherwise those thin, exposed organs would be at risk from frostbite — but the long hairs that extended from her fleshy tail would let it serve as an effective fly-swat in the mosquito-ridden months of the short summer. There was even a small flap of skin beneath her tail, to seal her anus from the cold.

Her ears had an oddly human shape. Her eyes, too, were small like a human’s, and buried deep in a nest of wrinkled skin, shielded from the worst of the weather by thick lashes.

Her tusks were six feet long. Sprouting from their deep sockets at the front of her face, the tusks twisted before her in a loose spiral, their tips almost touching before her. The undersides of both her tusks were worn, for she used them to strip bark and dig up plants — and, in the depths of winter, her tusks served as a snowplow to dig out vegetation for feeding, or even as an icebreaker to expose water to drink in frozen ponds. The bluish ivory of the tusks was finely textured, with growth rings that mapped her age.

Her trunk, six feet long, served her as her nose, hand, and arm, and was her main feeding apparatus. It was a tube of flesh packed with tiny muscles, capable of movement in any direction, even contraction and extension like a telescope. It had two finger-like extensions at its tip for manipulating grass and other small objects. As it worked, the trunk’s surface folded and wrinkled, betraying the complexity of its structure.

A heavy coat of fur covered her body. Over a fine, downy underwool, her guard hairs were long, coarse, and thick, springy and transparent — more like lengths of fishing line than human hair. The hair on her head was just a few inches long. But it hung down in a longer fringe under her chin and neck, and at the sides of her trunk. From her flanks and belly hung a skirt of guard hair almost three feet long, giving her something of the look of a Tibetan yak.

Her coat was dark orange-brown, like a musk ox’s. And in a broad cap between her eyes lay the patch of snow-white fur that had given Silverhair her name.

Silverhair was Mammuthus primigenius: a woolly mammoth.

Ten thousand years before, creatures like Silverhair had populated the fringe of the retreating northern ice caps — right around the planet, through Asia from the Baltic to the Pacific, across North America from Alaska to Labrador. But those days were gone.

The isolation of this remote island, off the northern coast of Siberia, had saved Silverhair and her ancestors from the extinction that had washed over the mainland, claiming her Cousins and many other large animals.

But now the mammoths were trapped here, on the Island.

And Silverhair and her Family were the last of their kind, the last in all the world.

The short days and long nights wore away.

Silverhair and Lop-ear took time to care for their skin. They scratched against an outcropping of rock, luxuriantly dislodging the grasses and dirt that had lodged in the crevices of their skin and under their hair. They used a patch of dusty, dried-out soil to powder their skin and force out parasites.

Under her thick hair, Silverhair’s skin would have looked rough and callused. But it was very sensitive. Under a tough, horny outer layer were receptors so acute, she could pinpoint an annoying insect and brush it off with a precise flick of her trunk, or swish of her tail — or even crush it with one focused ripple of her skin.

Nevertheless, Silverhair looked forward to the summer, when open puddles of water would be available, and she would be able to wallow comfortably in mud, cooling and washing out ticks and fleas and lice.

'…I wonder if Owlheart guessed where we were going,' Lop-ear was saying as he scratched. 'Did you see her talking to Eggtusk?'

'No. But after that lecture I’m surprised she’s letting me out of the sight of the calf.'

Lop-ear raised his trunk to sniff at the frosty air. 'She was right. Raising the young is the most important thing of all. But she’s obviously making an exception for you.'

'Why?'

'Perhaps because — to Owlheart — this may be more important than anything else you can do — even more important than learning about calves.' Lop-ear rested his trunk on his tusks. 'Owlheart is wise,' he said. 'She listens with more than ears. She listens with her heart and mind. That’s why she’s Matriarch.'

'And why,' said Silverhair miserably, 'I could never be Matriarch, if I live until the Earth spins itself to dust.' She told Lop-ear what Owlheart had said: that it was her destiny to be Matriarch.

'She’s probably right,' he said. 'There aren’t too many candidates.'

'Foxeye—'

'Your sister is a fine mother. But she’s weak, Silverhair. You know that. Other than that, there is only Snagtooth.'

Silverhair’s fur bristled. 'I would leave the Family if she were ever Matriarch. She’s mean-spirited, vindictive…'

'Then who else is there?'

When she thought it through like that, he was, of course, right. His logic was relentless. But it was all utterly depressing.

'I don’t want to be a Matriarch,' she said miserably. 'I don’t want all that responsibility.'

'Perhaps you really do have the spirit of Longtusk inside you.'

'That’s ridiculous,' she said. But she was pleased to hear him say it.

Lop-ear lifted his trunk and rubbed her snow-white scalp with affection, a gentle touch that thrilled her. 'Like Longtusk, you’re a wanderer,' said Lop-ear. 'Perhaps you too could lead us to places no one else could even dream of. And, like Longtusk, you’re perverse. After all, Longtusk had to fight to win the command of his Family, didn’t he? The story goes, the other Bulls all but killed him, rather than accept his orders.'

'But I don’t want to fight anybody.'

'Maybe not. But you fight yourself, Silverhair. How typical it is of you that you should choose to model yourself on the one Cycle hero who you could never be, Longtusk the Bull!'

He was right.

In all the great tundra of time reflected in the Cycle, there is only one Bull hero: Longtusk.

When the world warmed, and the ice fell back into the north, the Lost — the mammoths’ only true enemy — had come pushing into the mammoth tundra from the south, butchering and murdering. All over the planet, mammoths had died, Families and Clans falling together.

All, that is, save the Family of Longtusk: for Longtusk had somehow brought his people across the cold sea waters here, to the Island. Nobody knew how he had done this. Some said he had flown like a bird, carrying his Family on his mighty back; some said he stamped his mighty foot and caused the sea to roar from the ground. At any rate, the Lost had never followed, and the mammoths had been safe.

But Longtusk had given his life…

They found a deep puddle with only a thin layer of ice on top. Lop-ear broke through this easily with his tusk, and they plunged their trunks into the water. When Lop-ear had taken a trunkful he closed the trunk by clenching its fingers, lifted the end, and curled it into his mouth. Then he tilted his head back, opened his trunk, and let the water gush into his mouth, a delicious and cooling stream.

They soon drained the puddle. It was a rare treat: standing water had been scarce this winter, and the Family was counting on an early spring thaw. Mammoths need much fresh water each day. They can eat snow, but have to sacrifice precious body heat to melt it.

'Of course,' said Lop-ear, 'even if you were to become Matriarch, I’m not at all sure where you could lead us.'

'What do you mean?'

He led her to a patch of frost overlying harder, older ice. Lop-ear picked up a twig with his trunk and began to scrape at the frost.

'Here is the Island,' he said. It was a rough oval. 'It is surrounded by sea, which we can’t cross. To the north, there are the Mountains at the End of the World. And to the south, there is the spruce forest.' More scratchings.

Silverhair watched him, baffled. 'What are you doing?'

He looked up. 'I’m…' He had no word for it. 'Imagine you’re a bird,' he said at last. 'A guillemot, flying high over the Island.'

'But I’m not a bird.'

'In Kilukpuk’s name, Silverhair, if you can imagine yourself as Longtusk you can surely stretch your mind that far!'

She stretched out her ears and spun, pretending to wheel like a bird. 'Look at me! Caw! Caw!'

'All right, Silverhair the gull. Now, you’re looking down at the Island. You see it sitting in the middle of the sea, like a lump of dung in a pond. Yes?'

'Yes…'

'Look — now!' With his trunk, he pointed to the frost scrapings he had made.

And — looking down as if she were a mammoth-gull, concentrating hard — for a heartbeat, yes, she could see the Island, see it through his scrapings, just as if she really were a gull, balanced on the winds high above.

To Silverhair, the simple drawing was a kind of magic; she had never seen anything like it.

'Every time the Earth spins around the sun, the summer is a little longer, the winter a little less harsh. And the forest encroaches a little more on the tundra.' Absently Lop-ear dug in the soil with his tusks, burrowed with his trunk, and produced a scraping of grass. 'You know, Wolfnose remembers a time — when she was only a calf herself — when the spruce forest was just a few straggling saplings clinging to the coast. And now look how far it has spread.' With his twig, he pointed to the middle of the Island. 'You see? We are contained in this strip of the Island, between forest and mountains, like a calf that has fallen in a mudhole. And the strip is narrowing.'