They came to a shallow river valley, where running water — perhaps a tributary of the dried-out stream that had saved Longtusk from the fire — had cut its way into the hard black rock of the ground.
The upright creature scrambled down a heap of frost-shattered scree. It reached a hole of deeper darkness cut into the hillside. It was a cave, Longtusk realized.
And a glimmer of ruddy light came from within it.
Longtusk was baffled. How could there be light
…And now Longtusk’s sharp sense of smell detected the tang of smoke, carried on the light evening breeze, and he understood the source of that strange inner glow.
Fire. His upright friend had walked into fire — maybe a nest of true Fireheads!
Longtusk stood there on the river bank, torn by conflicting impulses. Should he flee, or should he rush down the bank and pull out his friend, saving the squat little creature as it had saved him from the she-cat?
But his friend had gone into the cave willingly, with no sign of fear.
The sun had not yet risen since Longtusk had been separated from his Family. And yet already he had endured a blizzard of new experiences. Perhaps this new vision, of fire within a cave, was simply one more strangeness he must strive to understand.
But none of that mattered. It was almost completely dark now. He was hungry, tired, thirsty — and alone once more.
Using his trunk to feel his way, he worked through the rocks to the edge of the river. He walked farther, following the stream. The river bed shallowed, and he sensed a lake opening out before him: a scent of cold fresh water, a soft sweep of wind across an expansive surface. At the edge of the lake, lying along the shallow beach, he found great linear heaps of feathers left by molting ducks and geese.
When he waded into the water its icy cold struck through the layers of fur on his legs, and he almost cried out from the pain of the wounds inflicted by the cat. But as the water lifted off the caked blood and dirt, the sharp pain turned to a wider ache, and he sensed the start of healing.
He took a trunkful of water and lifted it to his mouth; it was cool and delicious, and he drank again and again, assuaging a thirst he had nursed since the terrible moments of the fire.
He retreated to the tumbled rocks of the shore. He found a gap between two tall rock faces. He nestled there and, trying to ignore the continuing cold ache of his back and legs, waited for sleep to claim him.
In the morning, with the low sun glowing red through the last of yesterday’s smoke, he made his way out of his rock cleft and down to the water. Near the lake, the water and air and land were full of birds: many species of geese, ducks, even swans on the water, blackbirds and sparrows on the marshy land, and occasional hunters — hawks, kestrels. The short summer was ending, a time when the birds swarmed to breeding grounds like this.
A flock of geese floated on the water, a huge raft of them. They had shed all their flight feathers at once, a great catastrophic molt that had left them temporarily unable to fly, as they put all their energy into breeding and raising young and storing fat for the return journey to their winter lands in the south. All of this had to be completed in just forty or fifty days, before the snow and ice clamped down on the land again.
The rocks were covered by a fine hoar frost, so slippery that even the heavy, wrinkled pads of his feet could not find a firm footing. There was no food to be had here. Nothing grew on these rocks and pebbles and scree, all of it regularly inundated by the flooding lake, save lichen and weed. He knew, gloomily, he would have to travel far today to find the fodder he needed.
But yesterday had depleted him. The wounds on his back ached badly, and he wondered if they were festering. He felt dizzy, oddly hollow, and his eyes were gritty and sore.
Something startled the birds. Ducks and swans rose from the water, a racket of rattling, snapping wings, leaving behind the barking, flightless geese. The birds caught the light, and they seemed to glow against the dull gray of the sky, as if burning from within. There were actually many flocks, he realized, passing to and fro in a great lattice above him, as if he were standing at the bottom of an ocean through which these birds swam.
And he was still utterly, desolately, alone. He wished his Family were here.
…There was a splashing sound, a little way out from the lake shore. He turned slowly. He saw motion, a ripple on the water, but his eyes were too poor to make out anything more clearly.
The splashing creature stood up in the water on its two hind legs: upright, ungainly, brushing drops from the hair on its head. It was his friend of yesterday. It had discarded its furs; they lay in a neat pile on the shore. And now Longtusk could clearly see that it —
He was pushing a twig of some kind — Longtusk thought it was willow — into his mouth and expertly swiveling it around with his paw. Perhaps he was cleaning out his teeth.
Longtusk didn’t like to admit to himself how pleased he was to see a familiar creature.
Willow let the water drain from his eyes — and he saw Longtusk clearly, standing placidly on the shore only a few paces away.
He yelped in shock, and glanced over at his pile of furs. There was a pointed stick resting there — perhaps the one he had used yesterday against the cat — but it was much too far away to reach.
But of course Longtusk meant him no harm. And when he realized this, after long heartbeats, Willow seemed to relax.
With much splashing, Willow made his way through the water to Longtusk. He reached out to scratch the mammoth’s trunk hair as he had the day before. His mouth issued a stream of incomprehensible grunts; his row of teeth shone white in the morning sun.
Willow’s face was round, all but bare of the light hair that coated the rest of his muscular body. His skull was long, and black hair dangled from it as from the belly of a mammoth. His nose was broad and deep, and his face seemed to protrude, almost as if it had been pulled forward by his great nostrils. His eyes gleamed like lumps of amber beneath huge bony forehead ridges.
He lifted his willow stick and offered it to Longtusk. For an instant the stubby fingers at the end of Longtusk’s trunk touched Willow’s palm, and Willow snatched back his paw with a frightened yelp. But then he held the stick forward again, and let Longtusk take it.
Longtusk had never seen Willow’s kind before, but now, in the light of day, his mind more clear, he knew what this creature was.
These were not Fireheads, but the cousins of Fireheads. The mammoths called them
Dreamers could be found in little pockets of habitation around the landscape, rarely traveling far from their homes. They would sometimes scavenge dead mammoths, but unlike other predators they were little threat.
And there were very few of them. Once — it was said in the Cycle — the Dreamers had covered the world. Now they were rarely encountered.
Willow ran his little paws through the long hairs on Longtusk’s flank and back. When he probed at the broken flesh there, Longtusk couldn’t help but flinch and growl. Willow stumbled back, his paws coated with blood and dirt.
The Dreamer cupped his paws and began to ladle water over Longtusk’s back. As blood and dirt was washed away, the pain was clear and sharp, but Longtusk made himself stand stock still.
Then Willow bent over and dug. He straightened up with his paws full of black, sticky lake-bottom mud. He began to cake this liberally over Longtusk’s wounds. Again this hurt — especially as the little Dreamer couldn’t see what he was doing, and frequently poked a finger into a raw wound. But already Longtusk could feel how the thick mud was soothing the ache of his injuries.
There was a guttural shout from the shore. Both Longtusk and Willow turned.
It was another Dreamer, like Willow. But this one was much taller — presumably an adult, probably a male — and it, he, was dressed in thick heavy furs. There was no hair on the top of his long boulder-shaped head, which was marked with strange stripes of red and yellow.
Stripeskull had a pointed stick in his paw. This was no skinny sapling as Willow had carried, but a thick wooden shaft, its tip cruelly sharp and blackened by fire — and even Willow’s little stick had been enough to bring down a cat, Longtusk recalled. Stripeskull’s muscles bulged, and Longtusk had no doubt he would be able to hurl that stick hard enough to slice right through Longtusk’s thick skin.
But Willow ran out of the lake, dripping glistening water, waving his forelegs in the air. Stripeskull was obviously angry and frightened — but he was hesitating, Longtusk saw.
The huge adult grabbed Willow’s arm in one mighty paw and pulled him away from the lake. Again he raised his stick at Longtusk and jabbered something complex and angry. Then he turned and retreated toward the fire cave, dragging Willow with him.
Willow looked back once. Longtusk wondered if he could read regret, even longing, in the little one’s manner.
It didn’t matter. For Longtusk, of course, had no place here. Sadly he started to work his way out through the boulders and scree to the higher ground, seeking food.
In the days that followed, Longtusk walked far and wide.
It wasn’t particularly surprising that this land was so unfamiliar to him. It was an unpromising, ugly place, all but barren — not a place for mammoths. There seemed to be a sheet of hard black rock that underlay much of the land; here and there the rock broke to the surface, and in those places nothing grew save a few hardy lichen. Even where the rock was buried it had pushed the permafrost closer to the surface, and little could grow in the thin layer of moist soil on top.
Longtusk was a big animal, and he needed to find a great deal of fodder every day. Soon he had to walk far to find a place beyond his own trample marks and decaying spoor.
Still he saw no sign of any other mammoth: no trails, no spoor save his own. He tried trumpeting, rumbling and stamping. His sensitive ears picked up only the distant howl of wolves, the slow grind of the ice sheet to the north, the moan of chill air spilling down from the North Pole.
And winter was drawing in rapidly, the days shriveling and the nights turning into long, cold, star-frosted deserts of darkness. It was a winter Longtusk knew he would be lucky to survive, alone.
Though he roamed far, he was drawn back to the lake and the cave. After all the only being in his world who had shown him any kindness was the Dreamer cub, Willow. It was hard to leave that behind.
There was more than one cave, in fact. There was a whole string of them, right along the river bank and lake shore, gaping mouths in the rock from which the Dreamers would emerge, daily, to do their chores.
Longtusk watched them.
The males would seek out meat. With their long blackened sticks they hunted smaller animals like reindeer and red deer. They generally ignored the larger animals, like horses and aurochs. But they would often scavenge meat from an animal brought down by some more fierce predator, chasing away the hyenas and condors, slicing at the carcass with pieces of stone they held in their paws.
The males ate their meat out in the field, taking little back to the caves. Longtusk realized that like mammoth Bulls they did not provide food or protection for their cubs. That was the job of the females. Slowed by their young, often laden with infants clamped to their breasts, the females did not travel as far as the males, and so did not eat so well. They would hunt with small sticks, seeking out game like rabbits or birds. But their principal foodstuff, plucked from the lake, was aquatic plants like cattails.
The females were as strong and stocky as the males, for they worked even harder in their relentless drive to sustain and protect themselves and their cubs.
As wide as he traveled, Longtusk saw no other groups of Dreamers. This small Clan in their caves seemed utterly isolated, cut off from the rest of their kind. And yet that seemed unimportant to them. They were immersed in their small world, in themselves, in each other; they had no need for a wider web of social contacts like the mammoths’ Clans.
