of warmth in that immense stretch of time.
…But now Longtusk thought of the Fireheads: clustered around the mud seep, waiting for mammoths to die.
There were no Fireheads in the Cycle. There had been no Fireheads in the world when last the ice had retreated and advanced.
He had been away from his kind a long time, and he didn’t presume to doubt Rockheart’s ancient wisdom. But his experience, he was realizing slowly, was wider than the old tusker’s. He had seen more of the world and its ways — and he had seen the Fireheads.
And
He kept these thoughts to himself as they pushed on.
As night closed in the clouds thickened, and the wind from the icecap was harsh. Longtusk and Rockheart huddled close around Splayfoot, trying to shelter her and give her a little of their own sparse body heat; and Longtusk allowed the Dreamer to curl up under his belly fur.
Every so often Longtusk would rouse Splayfoot and force her to walk around. He knew that there was a core of heat inside the body of each mammoth, a flicker of life and mind that must be fed like the hearths of the Fireheads. If the cold penetrated too deep, if that flame of life was extinguished, it could never be ignited again.
Splayfoot responded passively, barely conscious.
In the morning they resumed their dogged walking, following Rockheart’s trail.
But soon the light changed.
Longtusk raised his trunk, sniffing the air. He could smell moisture, rain or maybe snow, and the wind was veering, coming now strongly from the east. Looking that way he saw black clouds bubbling frothily.
There was a thin honking, a soft flap of wings far above him. Birds, he saw dimly, perhaps geese, fleeing from the east, away from the coming storm. He recalled what Walks With Thunder had told him of the eastern lands, where the icecap pushed far to the south. And he recalled Thunder’s obscure, half-forgotten legends of a land embedded in the ice — a place that stayed warm enough to keep off the snow, even in the depths of winter. The nunatak.
He wondered how far those birds had flown — all the way from the nunatak itself? But how could such a place exist?
The storm was rising, and he put the speculation from his mind. But he memorized the way those geese had flown, adding their track to the dynamic map of the landscape that he, like all mammoths, carried in his head.
By mid-morning the storm had hit.
The sky became a sheet of scudding gray-black clouds, utterly hiding the sun. The wind blew from the east with relentless ferocity, and carried before it a mix of snow, hail and rain, battering their flesh hard enough to sting. Soon they were all soaked through, bedraggled, weary, their fur plastered flat, lifting their feet from one deep muddy footprint into another.
Longtusk let Rockheart lead the way, and Willow followed Rockheart, clinging to his belly fur, his small round face hidden from the wind and rain. Longtusk plodded steadily after Rockheart, being careful never to let the big tusker out of his sight, even though it meant he walked so close he was treading in Rockheart’s thin, foul-smelling dung. And behind Longtusk came Splayfoot, still weak, barely able to see, clinging onto Longtusk’s tail with her trunk like a calf following its mother, as sheltered as he could manage.
But when the eye of the storm approached, the wind started to swirl around. Soon Longtusk, disoriented, couldn’t tell east from west, north from south — and couldn’t even see the trail. But Rockheart led them confidently, probing at the muddy ground with his trunk, seeking bits of old dung and the remnants of footprints, traces that marked the trail.
And it was while the storm was still raging that they came upon the mammoths.
They looked like a clump of boulders, round and solid, plastered with soaked hair. Longtusk saw those great heads rise, tusks dripping with water, and trunks lifted into the air, sniffing out the approach of these strangers. There were a few greeting rumbles for Rockheart and Splayfoot, nothing but suspicious glares for Longtusk.
There were perhaps fifteen of them — probably just a single Family, adult Cows and older calves. The Cows were clustered around a tall, gaunt old female, presumably the Matriarch, and the calves were sheltered under their belly hair and legs.
Longtusk could see no infants. Perhaps they were at the center of the group, out of his sight.
Rockheart lurched off the trail and led them toward the mammoths. Longtusk hadn’t even been aware of the changes in the land around the trail. But now he saw grass, what looked like saxifrage, even a stand of dwarf willow clinging to the rock. It was an island of steppe in this cold desert of rock and glacial debris, just as Rockheart had described.
Willow found a shallow water hole, some distance from the mammoths, and went that way. Some of the mammoths watched him lethargically, too weak or weary to be concerned.
Rockheart and Splayfoot lumbered forward and were welcomed into the huddle with strokes of trunk and deeper, contented rumbles. Longtusk hesitated, left outside — outside, as he had been as a mammoth among mastodonts, as he had been as a mammoth at the cave of the Dreamers, and now outside even in this community of mammoths.
Longtusk dredged up memories of his life with his Family, before that terrible separation. He recalled how the adults seemed so tall, their strength so huge, their command imposing, even their stink powerful. Now these wretched, bedraggled creatures seemed diminished; none of them, not even the old Matriarch at the center, was taller than he was.
Light flared, noise roared. There was a sudden blaze to Longtusk’s right, and the mammoths, startled, trumpeted, clustered, tried to run.
It was lightning, he realized, a big blue bolt. It had struck out of the low clouds and set fire to an isolated spruce tree. The tree was burning, and the stink of smoke carried to his trunk — but there was no danger; already the fire was being doused by the continuing rain.
The other mammoths had raised their trunks suspiciously at Longtusk.
He hadn’t reacted. It was only lightning, an isolated blaze; in his years with the Fireheads he’d learned that fire, if contained, was nothing to fear. But he realized now that the others — even the powerful Bull Rockheart — had shown their instinctive fear.
'…He did not run from the fire. He didn’t even flinch.'
'Look how fat he is, how tall. None of us grows fat these days.'
'See the burn on his flank. The shape of a Firehead paw…'
'He came with that little Dreamer.'
'He stinks of fire. And of Fireheads. That is why he wasn’t afraid.'
'He isn’t
But now the gaunt older Cow he had tagged as the Matriarch broke out of the group. Cautiously, ears spread and trunk raised, she approached him. Her hair was slicked down and blackened by the rain.
It had been so long, so very long. But still, there was something in the set of her head, her carriage -
Something that tugged at his heart.
Hesitantly, she reached out with her trunk and probed his face, eyes, mouth, and dug into his hair.
He knew that touch; the years fell away.
'I thought you were gone to the aurora,' she said softly.
'Do I smell of fire?'
'Whatever has become of you, the rain has washed it away. All I can smell is you, Longtusk.' She stepped forward and twined her trunk around his.
Through the rain, he could taste the sweet, milky scent of her breath.
'Come.' Milkbreath pulled him back to the group, where the huddle was reforming. The other mammoths grumbled and snorted, but Milkbreath trumpeted her anger. 'He is my son, and he is returned. Gather around him.'
Slowly, they complied. And as the day descended into night and the storm continued to rage, slow, inquisitive trunks nuzzled at his mouth and face.
He felt a surge of warm exhilaration. After all his travels and troubles he was home, home again.
But, even in this moment of warmth, he noticed that there were no small calves at his feet, here at the center of the huddle — no infants at all, in fact.
Even as he greeted his mother, that stark fact dug deep into his mind, infecting it with worry.
2
The Decision
The storm blew itself out.
The next day was clear and cold, the sky blue and tall. The water that had poured so enthusiastically from the sky soaked into the ground, quickly, cruelly. But the grassy turf was still waterlogged, and drinking water was easy to find. The mammoths wandered apart, feeding and defecating, shaking the moisture out of their fur.
The spruce that had been struck by lightning was blackened and broken, its ruin still smoking.
Longtusk stayed close to his sister, and, with his mother’s help, encouraged her to eat and drink. Slowly her eyes grew less cloudy.
His mother’s attentiveness, as if he was still a calf, filled a need in him he hadn’t recognized for a long time. He answered as fully as he could all the questions he was asked about his life since he had been split from the Family, and slowly the suspicion of the others wore away. And when he told of the loss of his calf and mate, the suspicion started to turn at last to sympathy.
But there were few here who knew him.
Skyhump, the Matriarch of the Family when he had been born, was long dead now — in fact there had been another Matriarch since, his mother’s elder sister, killed by a fall into a kettle hole, and his mother had succeeded her.
And there was a whole new generation, born since he had left.
There was a Bull calf, for instance, called Threetusk — for the third, spindly ivory spiral that jutted out of his right tusk socket — who seemed fascinated by Longtusk. He would follow Longtusk around, asking him endless questions about the warrior mastodonts like Jaw Like Rock, and he would raise his tusks to Longtusk’s in halfhearted challenge.
Longtusk realized that Threetusk was just how
But things were different now. There was no sign of a bachelor herd anywhere nearby for Threetusk to join. Perhaps there was a herd somewhere in this huge land, in another island of nourishing steppe. But how was a juvenile like Threetusk, lacking knowledge of the land, to find his way there in one piece? And if he could
The Family moved slowly over their patch of steppe, eating sparingly, drinking what they could find. After the first couple of days it was obvious their movements were restricted, and Longtusk took to wandering away from the rest, trying to understand the changed landscape.
