Spindle was hesitating, his blood-tipped goad still raised to Longtusk.
At last Bedrock gestured to Spindle. With a snort of disgust the keeper threw his goad in the dirt and stalked away.
Now Crocus stood before Longtusk, gazing up at him. She was growing taller, just as he was, and an elaborate cap of ivory beads adorned her long blonde hair, replacing the simple tooth necklace circle she had worn when younger. She seemed afraid, he saw, but she was evidently determined to master her fear.
And Longtusk, the warm blood still welling from his face, obeyed.
She stepped onto his trunk, reached forward, and grabbed hold of his ears.
He raised his trunk, gingerly, carefully.
Thunder was very quiet and still, as if he scarcely dared breathe. 'Right. Lower her onto your back. Gently! Recall how fragile she is… imagine she’s a flower blossom, and you don’t want to disturb a single petal.'
Rumbling, working by feel, Longtusk did his best. He felt the cub’s skinny legs slide around his neck.
'How’s that?'
Walks With Thunder surveyed him critically. 'Not bad. Except she’s the wrong way around. She’s facing your backside, Longtusk. Try again. Let her off.'
Longtusk lowered his hind legs. Crocus skidded down his back, landing with a squeal in the dirt.
'By Kilukpuk’s hairy navel,' Walks With Thunder groaned, and Bedrock stepped forward, anxious.
But Crocus, though a little dusty, was unharmed. She trotted around to Longtusk’s head once more. She pulled her face in the gesture he was coming to recognize as a
Again he lowered his trunk for her.
This time he got her the right way around. Her legs wrapped around his neck, and he felt her little paws grasping at the long hairs on top of his head. She was a small warm bundle, delicate, so light he could scarcely feel her.
Rumbling, constrained by his hobbles, Longtusk took a cautious step forward. He felt the cub’s fingers digging deeper into his fur, and she squealed with alarm. He stopped, but she kicked at his flanks with her tiny feet, and called out,
'It’s all right,' Walks With Thunder said. 'She’s safe up there. Go forward. Just take it easy, Longtusk.'
So he stepped forward again.
Crocus laughed with pleasure. Keepers ran alongside him — as did Bedrock, still wary, but grinning. The watching mastodonts raised their trunks and trumpeted in salute.
But the Shaman, ignored by the Fireheads and their leader, was glaring, quietly furious.
It was all a question of practice, of course.
By the end of that first day Longtusk could lift the little Firehead onto his back, delivering her the right way around, almost without effort. And by the end of the second day he was starting to learn what Crocus wanted. A gentle kick to the left ear — maybe accompanied by a thin cry of
By the end of the third day, Longtusk was starting to learn subtler commands, transmitted to him through the cub’s body movements. If Crocus stiffened her limbs and leaned back he knew he was supposed to stop. If she leaned forward and pushed his head downward he should kneel or stoop.
Crocus never used a goad on him.
It wasn’t all easy. Once he spied an exceptionally rich clump of herbs, glimpsed through the branches of a tree. He forgot what he was doing and went that way, regardless of the little creature on his back — who yelped as the branches swept her to the ground. Alternatively if Longtusk thought the path he was being told to select was uncomfortable or even dangerous — for instance, if it was littered with sharp scree that might cut his footpads — he simply wouldn’t go that way, regardless of the protests of the cub.
After many days of this the keeper, Spindle, came to him, early in the morning.
Spindle raised his goad.
Longtusk simply glared at him, chewing his feed, refusing to comply.
The beating started then, as intense as before, and Longtusk felt old wounds opening on his cheek. But still he would not bow to Spindle.
Nobody else, he thought. Only the girl-cub Crocus.
At last Crocus came running with the other keepers. With sharp words she dismissed Spindle. Then, with Lemming’s help, she applied a thick, soothing salve to the cuts Spindle had inflicted on Longtusk’s cheek and thighs.
Without waiting for the command, Longtusk lowered his trunk and allowed her to climb onto his back once more.
Although Longtusk’s workload didn’t change, he became accustomed to meeting Crocus at the beginning or end of each day. She would ride him around the mastodont stockade, and Longtusk learned to ignore the mocking, somewhat envious jeers of the mastodonts. As she approached he would coil and uncoil his trunk with pleasure. Sometimes she brought him tidbits of food, which he chewed as she talked to him steadily in her incomprehensible, complex tongue.
She seemed fascinated by his fur. Longtusk had a dense underfur of fine woolly hair that covered almost all his skin. His rump, belly, flanks, throat and trunk were covered as well by a dense layer of long, coarse guard hair that dangled to the ground, skirt-like. The guard hair melded across his shoulders with a layer of thick but less coarse hairs that came up over his shoulders from low on the neck.
Crocus spent a great deal of time examining all this, lifting his guard hairs and teasing apart its layers. As for Longtusk, he would touch Crocus’s sweet face with the wet tip of his trunk, and then rest against her warmth, eyes closed.
Eventually Crocus’s visits became a highlight of his day — almost as welcome as, and rather less baffling than, his occasional meetings with the young mastodont Cow, Neck Like Spruce.
Once he took Crocus for a long ride across the bare steppe. They found a rock pool, and Longtusk wallowed there while Crocus played and swam. The sun was still high and warm, and he stretched out on the ground. She climbed onto his hairy belly and lay on top of him, soothed by the rumble of his stomach, plucking his hair and singing.
Even though he knew he remained a captive — even though her affection was that of an owner to the owned — and even though the growing affection between them was only a more subtle kind of trap, harder to break than any hobbles — still, he felt as content as he had been since he had been separated from his Family.
But he was aware of the jealous glares of Spindle and Smokehat.
Longtusk grew impatient with all these obscure mental games, the strange obsessions of the Fireheads. But Thunder counseled caution.
'Be wary,' he would say, as the mastodonts gathered after a day’s work. 'You have a friend now. She recalls you once saved her life. And that’s good. But you’re also acquiring enemies. The Shaman is jealous. It is only the power of her father, Bedrock, which is protecting you. Life is more complicated than you think, little grazer. Only death is simple…'
3
The Settlement
The Fireheads’ numbers were growing, with many young being born, and they worked hard to feed themselves.
As spring wore into summer, Firehead hunters began making journeys into the surrounding steppe. The hunters looked for tracks and droppings. What they sought, Longtusk was told, was the spoor of wolves, for that told them that there was a migrant herd somewhere nearby, tracked by the carnivores.
And at last the first of the migrants returned: deer, some of them giants, their heads bowed under the weight of their immense spreads of antlers.
The deer trekked enormous distances between their winter range in the far south, on the fringe of the lands where trees grew thickly, and their calving grounds on the northern steppe. The calving grounds were often dismal places of fog and marshy land and bare rock. But they had the great advantage that most predators, seeking places to den themselves, would fall away long before the calving grounds were reached. And when the calves were born the deer would form into vast herds in preparation for the migration back to the south: enormous numbers of them, so many a single herd might stretch from horizon to horizon, blackening the land.
To Longtusk these great migrations, of animals and birds, seemed like breathing, a great inhalation of life.
And the Fireheads waited for the migrant animals to pass, movements as predictable as the seasons themselves, and prepared to hunt.
One day, late in the summer, Crocus walked with her father and the Shaman to the bone stockpile, a short distance from the mastodont stockade.
Longtusk, still not fully trusted, wasn’t allowed anywhere near this grisly heap of flensed bones, gleaming in the low afternoon sun.
Crocus walked around the pile, one finger in her small mouth. She ran her paws over clutches of vertebrae, and huge shoulder blades, and bare leg bones almost as tall as she was. At last she stopped before a great skull with sweeping tusks. As the skull’s long-vacant eye sockets gaped at her, the cub rubbed the flat surfaces of the mammoth’s worn yellow teeth.
Longtusk wondered absently what that long-dead tusker would have made of this.
Crocus looked up at her father and the Shaman, talking rapidly and jumping up and down with excitement. This skull was evidently her choice. Bedrock and Smokehat reached down and, hauling together, dragged the skull from the heap. It was too heavy for them to lift.
Then, his absurd headdress smoking, the Shaman sang and danced around the ancient bones, sprinkling them with water and dust. Longtusk had seen this kind of behavior before. It seemed that the Shaman was making the skull special, as if it was a living thing he could train to protect the little cub who had chosen it.
When the Shaman was done, Bedrock gestured to the mastodont trainers. Lemming and the others walked through the stockade and selected Jaw Like Rock and another strong Bull. Evidently they were to carry the skull off.
But Crocus seemed angry. She ran into the stockade herself, shouting,
Longtusk lowered his trunk to the ground and bent his head. With the confidence of long practice she wriggled past his tusks, grabbed his ears and in a moment was sitting in her comfortable place at his neck. Then, with a sharp slap on his scalp, she urged him forward.
She was, he realized, driving him directly toward the pile of bones.
As he neared the pile an instinctive dread of those grisly remains built up in him. The other Fireheads seemed to sense his tension.
He kept walking, crossing the muddy, trampled ground, one broad step at a time.
He reached the great gaping skull where it lay on the ground. There was a lingering smell of dead mammoth about it, and it seemed to glare at him in disapproval.
Crocus tapped his head.
I can’t, he thought.
