Longtusk

After a time the land began to descend once more. Longtusk found himself walking down a broad, widening valley that curved between rounded, icebound hills. The smooth curving profiles of the hills were barely visible, the blue-white of the ice against the duller white of the sky. But here and there the land was sprinkled with fragments of black rock. The rock made it easier to see the shape of the land around him: the sweep of the valley floor, the tight rounded profiles of the hills.

He came to a piece of the black rock, lying in his path. He nudged it cautiously with his foot. It was frothy, jet black, and sharp-edged — surely sharp enough to cut through the skin of an incautious mammoth’s foot or trunk. He trumpeted a warning.

Now they left the hills behind and the valley flattened out into a wide plain. There was more rock here, he saw: dark fragments scattered across the plain, half buried by the ice. Here and there the fragments were piled up in low unstable heaps. It was as if some giant creature had burst from the land itself, scattering these lumps of rock far and wide.

Now the plain of broken rocks gave way to a broader area, smooth flat ice largely free of the rock lumps. Longtusk guessed they were approaching a frozen lake; rock lumps that fell here must have sunk to the bottom of the water and were now hidden beneath the ice layers.

Cautiously they skirted the lake, sticking to the shore.

But the land here was no longer flat. It was broken by vast bowls, like immense footprints — not of ice, Longtusk realized, but carved out of the rock itself, and coated by thin layers of ice and snow. The mammoths were forced to wend their way carefully between these craters, calling to each other when they were out of sight of one another.

Longtusk wondered what savage force had managed to punch these great wounds in the ground. This was, he thought, a strange place indeed, shaped by forces he couldn’t even guess at.

At last he came to a place where the ground was bare of snow and ice. He walked forward warily.

The ground was warm.

He walked over a gummy brown-gray mud that clung to his footpads; here and there it was streaked orange, yellow, black. The mud was littered with shallow pools of water and rivulets which ran over sticky layers of gray scum. Where snow lay on the ground, he could see how it was melting into the hot pools and streams, folding over in huge complex swathes.

In places the water was so hot it actually boiled, the steam stained a muddy gray by particles of dirt, and there was a sour, claustrophobic stink of sulfur. The steam, curling into the air, formed towers of billows and swirls, pointlessly beautiful. In fact it rose so high it blocked out the sun, like a cloud that reached from the ground to the air, and Longtusk shivered in the cold, reduced light.

He found a place some way from the steaming, active areas. He tasted the water. It was hot — not unpleasantly so — and it tasted sour, acidic. He spat it out.

Nearby was a place where it wasn’t water that boiled but mud, gray-brown and thick. The mud had built itself a chimney, thick-walled, that rose halfway to his belly like some monstrous trunk. The steam here was laced with dark gray dust that plastered itself over the walls of the fumarole. The water had bubbled with a high rushing noise, but the slurping mud made a deeper growling sound, like the agitated rumbling of old Bull mammoths arguing over some obscure point of pride.

…And there was life here.

Lichen and moss clung to the bare rock, and grass, brown and flattened, struggled to survive in swathes over ground streaked yellow by sulfur. The plants were coated with layers of ice — frosted out of the steaming, moisture-laden air — as if the plants themselves were made of ice crystals.

Curiously he reached down and plucked some of the frozen scrub. The ice crumbled away, revealing thin, brittle plant material within; he crushed it with his trunk until it was soft enough to cram into his mouth. It was thin on his tongue, but nourishing.

His heart pulsed with hope and vindication. It was a harsh, unnatural place, he thought, a place of steamy claustrophobic heat and rushing noise in the middle of the stillness of this perpetual winter — but this was the nunatak, just as Thunder’s legend had promised. He trumpeted in triumph -

But somebody was calling.

Rockheart had fallen. The Cows had clustered around him, while Threetusk and Willow stood to one side, awkward, distressed.

Longtusk hurried down the slope.

Rockheart had slumped to his knees, and his trunk drooped on the muddy ground. His breath was a rattle.

'Rockheart! What happened? Why did you fall?'

His rumbled reply was as soft as a calf’s mewling. 'We made it, milk-tusk, didn’t we? By Kilukpuk’s dugs, you were right…'

And Longtusk saw it. Rockheart — understanding that Longtusk would need his experience, knowing he was too weak for the trip — had come anyway, burning up the last of his energy. He had driven the others on until they had reached this island of rocky safety.

And now he could rest at last.

Convulsed by guilt, Longtusk picked up Rockheart’s trunk. 'Rockheart! You mustn’t — not now—'

But it was too late. Rockheart’s last breath bubbled out of his lungs, and he slumped to the warm rock, lifeless.

Longtusk trumpeted his grief, and his voice echoed from the rocky walls of the nunatak.

4 The Nunatak

It was a fine bright spring morning, one of the first after the long winter. The nunatak was a bowl of black rock and green life under a blue-white sky.

Everywhere mammoths grazed.

Longtusk was working on his favorite patch of willow, which grew in the lee of a pile of sharp-edged volcanic boulders. The adults knew he favored this spot, and left the miniature forest for him.

But the calves were another matter.

The calf called Saxifrage was playing with her mother, Horsetail, Longtusk’s niece. Horsetail lay on her side, her trunk flopping, while Saxifrage tried to clamber onto her flank, pulling herself up by grasping the long furs of her mother’s belly.

When she spotted Longtusk, Saxifrage gave up her game, jumped off and approached the old tusker.

But her attention was distracted by a length of broken tusk, snapped off by some young male in an over-vigorous fight. Perhaps she had never come across such a thing before. She picked it up and began to inspect it. She grabbed it with her trunk, turned it over, and rubbed it against the underside of her trunk, making a rasping sound against the rough skin there. She put it in her mouth, chewed it carefully, and turned it over with her tongue. Then she threw it in the air and let it fall to the ground several times, listening intently to the way it rattled on the ground. At last she walked over it and touched it delicately with the tender soles of her hind feet.

Longtusk was entranced.

He couldn’t help contrast the calf’s deep physical exploration of the unfamiliar object with the way a Firehead cub would study something new — just looking at it. For a mammoth calf, the look of something was only the most superficial aspect of it: the beginning of getting to know the object, not the end.

Longtusk rumbled softly. Even after so long in the nunatak, such behaviors still charmed and fascinated him. He’d spent too much of his life away from his own kind, he thought sadly, and that had left scars on his soul that would never, surely, be healed. He wondered if there was anything more important in the world than to watch a new-born calf with her mother, lapping at a stream with her tongue, too young even to know how to use her trunk to suck up water…

Now Saxifrage recalled he was there. She abandoned the tusk fragment and ran to him, dashing under his belly.

He tried to turn, but his legs were stiff as tree-trunks nowadays, his great tusks so heavy they made his head droop if he wasn’t careful; and in his rheumy vision the calf was just a blur of orange-brown fur, running around his feet and under his grizzled belly hair.

As the calf made another pass he looped down his trunk, grabbed her around the waist and lifted her high in the air, ignoring the protests from his neck muscles. She trumpeted her delight, a thin noise just at the edge of his hearing.

He set her down before him once more, and she stepped through the forest of his curling tusks. Her calf fur was orange, bright against his own guard hairs, blackened and gray with age.

She said, 'Longtusk, I’m going to be your mate.'

He snorted. 'I’d be impressed if I hadn’t heard you say the same thing to that old buffer Threetusk yesterday.'

'I didn’t! Anyway I didn’t mean it. Why do they call him Threetusk? He only has two tusks, a big one and that spindly little one.'

'Well, that’s a long story,' said Longtusk. 'You see, long ago — long before you were born, even before Threetusk became the leader of the bachelor herd, in fact — he got in an argument with one of his sons, called Barktrunk—'

'Why was he called that?'

'It doesn’t matter.'

'Where is Barktrunk? I never met him.'

'Well, he died. That was before you were born too. But that’s another story. You see, the first time Barktrunk came into musth—'

'What does musth mean?'

Longtusk growled. 'Ask your mother. Now, where was I? Barktrunk. Now Barktrunk did some digging — just over there, where those rocks are piled up — and he found a new spring of water, and he said we should all drink it at once. He wanted to show us how important and clever he was, you see. Especially the Cows.'

'Why the Cows?'

'Ask your mother! Anyway — what was I saying? — yes, the water. But Threetusk, his father, came over and tasted a little of the water, just on the tip of his trunk, and he said no, this water has too much sulfur. He said so to everybody, right in front of Barktrunk.'

'I bet Barktrunk didn’t like that.'

'He didn’t. And they got into a fight. Now in those days Threetusk was big and strong, not the broken-down grass-sucking old wreck he is now, and you can tell him I said so. It should have been easy for Threetusk to win. But there was an accident. Barktrunk came at him like this' — he feinted stiffly—'but Threetusk dodged, and knocked his head like this' — a deft sideways swipe, but slower than a glacier, he thought sourly—'and that was when it happened. Threetusk got one of his tusks stuck in a cleft in the rock. Just over there. When he was trying to get free the tusk broke off. Maybe that was one of the bits of it you were playing with just now. And then—'

But Saxifrage was running around in circles, trying to catch her own tail. Longtusk rumbled softly; he had lost his audience again.

'You listen to Longtusk,' said Horsetail, Saxifrage’s mother, who had come lumbering up. Named for the long graceful hairs that streamed across her rump, this daughter of Splayfoot was the Matriarch now — she had been since Splayfoot’s death, some years ago, when his sister’s proud heart, strained by her dismal experiences, had at last failed her. Horsetail pulled her calf under her belly fur, where Saxifrage began to hunt for a nipple. 'I’m sorry, Patriarch,' she said respectfully. 'Everybody knows you need time to work on those willow leaves these days.'