Longtusk

mammoth dung. Without mammoths, the steppe would not have persisted.

Longtusk stomped through his world, still angry, obsessed. But he thought over the Matriarchs’ conversation: Fireheads and Lost and huge global changes…

He had never seen the Fireheads himself, but he’d met adults who claimed they had. The Fireheads — said to be ferocious predators, creatures of sweeping, incomprehensible danger — seemed real enough, and every young mammoth was taught at a very early age that the only response to a Firehead was to flee.

But the Lost were something else: figures of legend, a deep terror embedded at the heart of the Cycle — the nemesis of the mammoths.

It all seemed unlikely to Longtusk. The mammoths were spread in enormous herds right around the world, and even the great cats feared them. What could possibly destroy them?

And besides, his curiosity was pricked.

Why were all these changes happening now? How quickly would they happen? And why did the world have to become a harder place when he was alive? Why couldn’t he have lived long ago, in a time of calm and plenty?

And, most important of all, why didn’t anybody take him seriously?

Oh, he knew that there came a time when every Bull became restless with his Family; sooner or later all Bulls leave to seek out the company of other males in the bachelor herds, to learn to fight and strut and compete. But it didn’t do him any good, here and now, to know that; and it drove him crazy when all this was patiently explained to him by some smug, pitying aunt or cousin.

After an unmeasured time he paused and looked back. Preoccupied, he hadn’t been paying much attention where he walked; now he found he’d come so far he couldn’t see the mammoths any more.

He heard a thin howl, perhaps of a wolf. He suffered a heartbeat of panic, which he sternly suppressed.

So he had left them behind. What of it? He was a full-grown Bull — nearly — and he could look out for himself. Perhaps this was his time to leave his Family — to begin the serious business of life.

Anyhow — he told himself — he was pretty sure he could find his way back if he needed to.

With a renewed sense of purpose — and with those twinges of fear firmly pushed to the back of his mind — he set off once more.

He came to a river bank.

Mammoths had been here recently. The muddy ground close to the river’s edge was bare of life, pitted by footprint craters, and the trees were sparse and uniformly damaged, branches smashed, trunks splintered and pushed over.

The water was cold. This was probably a run-off stream, coming from a melting glacier to the north. He sucked up a trunkful of water and held it long enough to take off its first chill. Then he raised his trunk and let the water trickle into his mouth.

He pushed farther along the cold mud of the bank. It wasn’t easy going. The river had cut itself a shallow valley which offered some protection from the incessant steppe winds. As a result spruce trees grew unusually dense and tall here, and their branches clutched at him as he passed, so that he left behind clumps of ginger hair.

Then, through the trees, he glimpsed a gleam of tusks, a curling trunk, an unmistakable profile.

It was another mammoth: a massive Bull, come here to drink as he had.

Longtusk worked his way farther along the bank.

The Bull, unfamiliar to Longtusk, eyed him with a vague, languid curiosity. He would have towered over any human observer, as much as three meters tall at his shoulder.

And he towered over Longtusk.

'My name,' the Bull rumbled, 'is Rockheart.'

'I’m Longtusk,' he replied nervously. 'And I—'

But the Bull had already turned away, his trunk hosing up prodigious volumes of water.

The Bull’s high, domed head was large, a lever for his powerful jaw and a support for the great trunk that snaked down before him. He had a short but distinct neck, a cylinder of muscle supporting that massive head. His shoulders were humped by a mound of fat, and his back sloped sharply down toward the pelvis at the base of his spine. His tusks curled before him, great spirals of ivory chipped and scuffed from a lifetime of digging and fighting.

And his body, muscular, stocky, round, was coated by hair: great lengths of it, dark orange and brown, that hung like a skirt from his belly, down over his legs to the horny nails on his swollen pads of feet, and even in long beard-like fringes from his chin and trunk. His tail, raised slightly, was short, but more hair made it a long, supple insect whisk. His ears were small, tucked back close to his head, all but lost in the great mass of hair there.

Suddenly the ground shuddered under Longtusk’s feet, and the river water trembled.

More mammoths, a crowd of them, came spilling down the bank, pushing and jostling, clumsy giants. They were all about the same size, Longtusk saw: no Cows, no infants here.

It was a bachelor herd.

Longtusk was thrilled. He had rarely been this close to full-grown Bulls. The Bulls kept to their own herds, away from the Cow-dominated Families of mothers and sisters and calves; Longtusk had seen them only in the distance, sweeping by, powerful, independent, and he had longed to run with them.

And now, perhaps, he would.

The Bulls spread out along the river bank. Before passing on toward the water, one or two regarded Longtusk: with mild curiosity over his outside tusks, or blank indifference, or amused contempt.

Longtusk followed, avid.

For half a day, as the sun climbed into the sky, the Bulls moved on along the river bank, jostling, jousting, drinking and eating.

Their walk, heavy and liquid, was oddly graceful. Their feet were pads that rested easily on the ground, swelling visibly with each step. Their trunks, heavy ropes dangling from the front of their faces, pulled the mammoths’ heads from side to side as they swayed. Even as they drank they fed, almost continuously. They pulled at branches of the surrounding trees with their trunks, hauling off great leaf-coated stems with hissing rustles, and crammed the foliage into their small mouths.

The soughing of their footsteps was punctuated by deep breaths, the gurgle of immense stomachs, and subterranean rumbles from the sound organs of their heads. A human observer would have made little of these deep, angry noises. But Longtusk found it very easy to make out what these Bulls were saying to each other.

'…You are in my way. Move aside.'

'I was here in this place first. You move aside.'

'…This water is too cold. It lies heavy in my belly.'

'That is because you are old and weak. I, however, am young and strong, and I find the water pleasantly cool.'

'My tusks are not yet so old and feeble they could not crack your skull like a skua egg, calf.'

'Perhaps you should demonstrate how that could be done, old one…'

Longtusk, following the great Bull Rockheart, was tolerated — as long as he didn’t get in anybody’s way — for he was, for now, too small to be a serious competitor. His tusks were, despite his youth, larger than many of the adults — but they only made him feel self-conscious, as if somehow he wasn’t entitled to such magnificent weapons. He walked along with his head dipped, his tusks close to the ground.

Being with the Bulls was not like being with his Family.

Even the language was different. The Cows in the Families used more than twenty different kinds of rumble, a basic vocabulary from which they constructed their extremely complex communications. The Bulls only had four rumbles! — and those were to do with mockery, challenge and boasting.

His Family had been protective, nurturing — a safe place to be. But the bachelor herds were looser coalitions of Bulls, more interested in contest: verbal challenges, head butts, tusk clashes. The Bulls were constantly testing each other, exploring each other’s strength and weight and determination, establishing a hierarchy of dominance.

This mattered, for it was the dominant Bulls who mated the Cows in oestrus.

Right now, Longtusk was at the very bottom of this hierarchy. But one day he would, of course, climb higher — why, to the very top…

'You have stepped on the hair of my feet.'

Longtusk looked up at a wall of flesh, eyes like tar pits, tusks that swept over his head.

He had offended Rockheart.

The great Bull’s guard hairs — dangling from his belly and trunk, long and lustrous — rippled like water, trapping the light. But loose underfur, working its way out through the layers of his guard hair in tatters around his flanks, made him look primordial, wild and unfinished.

Longtusk found himself trembling. He knew he should back down. But some of the other males nearby were watching with a lofty curiosity, and he was reminded sharply of how the Matriarch had watched his humiliation by his infant sister earlier.

If he had no place in the Family, he must find a place here. His Family had taught him how to live as a mammoth; now he must learn to be a Bull. And this was where it would begin.

So he stood his ground.

'Perhaps you have trouble understanding,' Rockheart said with an ominous mildness. 'You see, this is where I take my water.'

'It is not your river alone,' Longtusk said at last. He raised his head, and his tusks, long and proud, waved in the face of the great Bull.

Unfortunately one curling tusk caught in a tree root. Longtusk’s head was pulled sideways, making him stagger.

There was a subterranean murmur of amusement.

Rockheart simply stood his ground, unmoving, unblinking, like something which had grown out of this river bank. He said coldly, 'I admire your tusks. But you are a calf. You lack prowess in their use.'

Longtusk gathered his courage. He raised his tusks again. They were indeed long, but they were like saplings against Rockheart’s stained pillars of ivory. 'Perhaps you would care to join me in combat, so that you may show me exactly where my deficiencies lie.'

And he dragged his head sideways so that his tusks clattered against Rockheart’s. He felt a painful jar work its way up to his skull and neck, and the base of his tusks, where they were embedded in his face, ached violently.

Rockheart had not so much as flinched.

Longtusk raised his tusks for another strike.

With a speed that belied his bulk Rockheart stepped sideways, lowered his head and rammed it into Longtusk’s midriff.

Longtusk staggered into icy mud, slipped and fell sprawling into the water.

He struggled to his feet. The hairs of his belly and trunk dangled under him in cold clinging masses.

The Bulls on the river bank were watching him, tusks raised, sniggering.