Longtusk

At first sight he thought it was a Dreamer cub. It was a female, wearing the ragged remains of cut and shaped skins. She was smaller in height than Willow, so presumably younger. She seemed in distress; she was huddled over on herself, clutching her spindly forelegs to her chest, and she was crying.

He ran his trunk tip over her limbs.

She was like a Dreamer, yes. But she was much thinner, her limbs weaker but more graceful. Even her head was a different shape, with a flat face, a prominent chin, a protruding forehead — no heavy eye ridges — and a compact skull. Her body seemed bare of hair: all except her head, where there was a tangled, dirty mane of fine yellow hair.

She wore something around her neck. He bent to see. Little white objects had been punctured with holes, and then strung together on what looked like a strip of sinew.

They were teeth: tiny mammoth teeth, drawn from a very new calf, perhaps even an unborn.

He rumbled in dismay.

At the noise, the cub’s eyes flickered open. They were a startling blue, like steppe melt-pools. When she saw the mountain of muscle and fat and hair over her, tusk shadows looming, she yelped and tried to pull away. But she was weak, and she was trapped by the cleft of rock.

Now he could see quite how ill she was. The fingers on her paws were dead white, and her lips looked blue. But she was not shivering: the cold had penetrated deep into her body, and without help this mite would soon surely die.

He reached down with his trunk, meaning to stroke her, but she wailed feebly, unable to move.

He moved back a few paces. There was a small stand of crocuses glowing in the lee of the rock. With his delicate trunk-fingers, he plucked out a single fat yellow bloom. He carried it to the female, and dropped it on her chest.

She seemed a little less frightened. She tried to close her paw over the flower.

Gently he wrapped his trunk under the cub and lifted her up. She was light as a feather, and her limbs dangled, unresisting. But she had managed to keep hold of her flower. He began to walk, slowly and steadily, toward the cave of the Dreamers.

After a time the cub seemed to lose her fear. She gathered pawfuls of his long trunk hairs and burrowed into them. Soon she was asleep, wrapped in the warm strength of the mammoth’s trunk.

The Dreamers reacted with confusion.

This was a stranger — not one of their Clan — not even one of their kind. At first the adults seemed to have difficulty even seeing the limp cub, as if she was a thing a shadows, only half- glimpsed, too strange to comprehend. But the young were fascinated, and they clustered around, lifting aside his trunk fur to see the sleeping cub.

Some of the males came at Longtusk with their pointed, blackened sticks, as they hadn’t for some months, as if he had brought them threat in the form of this helpless cub. The females were solicitous. As soon as they realized what distress this strange cub was in, they lifted her away from Longtusk and took her toward the hearth. There they stripped away her ragged skins, rubbed grease into her skin, and huddled around her, sandwiching the cub between their own great bodies.

Willow came up to Longtusk. He rubbed Longtusk’s trunk fur affectionately, and Longtusk realized that Willow, at least, thought he had done the right thing -

Somebody screamed.

It was one of the female Dreamers, an old woman, her face twisted by an ancient burn. She was pointing at the three of them: the strange female cub, Willow and Longtusk, over and over, jabbering and growling, frightened.

She sees something, Longtusk realized, chilled. Something about the three of us.

Suddenly the cave walls, solid rock, seemed to melt away, the Dreamers dispersing like smoke, until there was only the three of them, alone, locked together. She sees the end of my life. She thinks we will die together, we three: the yellow-haired cub, Willow, and me.

But how can anybody know the future? And what strange fate could make such a thing happen?…

The old female stumbled away, scared, shouting.

And there was a howl of outrage.

Blood was pouring down Stripeskull’s foreleg, where a stick protruded from his flesh. With a yell of anger and pain he dragged the stick out of his body, ripping the wound wider.

This was no simple stick of sharpened wood, Longtusk realized immediately. It had feathers attached to its base — and it was tipped, not by fire-hardened wood, but by a flake of flint, sharpened to a point much finer than any the Dreamers could manufacture.

And now shadows flitted past the cave, urgent, menacing. Stripeskull threw down the bloody stick and, with a growl of anger, marched to the mouth of the cave.

Longtusk scarcely noticed. He raised his trunk and tested the air, turning it this way and that, questing.

Longtusk was electrified. He could smell mammoth.

6 The Newcomers

He stumbled out of the cave mouth to the open air.

Behind him, from the caves, he heard shouting, raised Dreamer voices. But the noises were small and far away and nothing to do with him. All that mattered was that profound and alluring smell of his own kind: musty fur and dung and even the sharp tang of musth — and, in pulses of deep sound, he thought he could hear huge, heavy strides: many of them, a Family or a bachelor herd, close by.

It was too much to hope that this was his Family; he knew he was far from their normal pastures. But these strangers would surely help him find his way back to his own. It was as if he had suddenly recalled who he was. How could he have spent so long, an entire winter, huddled in a mouth of eroded rock?

But the wind was swirling, and it was impossible to tell where the scents were coming from. He crashed deeper into the brush, trunk raised eagerly.

Before long, at the edge of the river, he came to a place where the stink of mammoths was very strong. He searched until he found a small, compact pile of dung.

Mammoth dung… perhaps.

He poked at it with his trunk, raised a fragment to his tongue to taste. It was warm and soft, obviously very recent, and its smell was strong and pungent. But its texture was strange — thicker and more fibrous than the dung of his Family — and he could taste a heavy concentration of wood and bark.

Mammoths’ diets differ, according to individual taste, and what they eat affects the quality of their dung. But Longtusk knew no mammoth whose diet was quite so skewed as to produce waste like this.

He pushed on.

He found a place where the trees were broken, the branches stripped of their bark and leaf buds, the ground trampled. Another unmistakable sign: mammoths had fed here — more than one, judging by the scale of the damage.

…But, like the dung, the pattern of tree damage was odd. Many of the younger saplings’ trunks had been pushed aside, as if by animals who were shorter and squatter than he was. And he saw that bark and leaf buds had been taken extensively, even from above head height. Woolly mammoths will take a little bark and foliage in their diet, but they prefer the grasses and herbs of the open steppe.

Still he saw no mammoths: not so much as a silhouette glimpsed through the trees, the swish of a tail, or the curve of a trunk. He rumbled, but there was no reply.

If they were here, whoever they were, why did they not greet him?

He decided to return to the mouth of the Dreamers’ cave. From there he would follow the trail that would take him back up to the steppe. Surely there, on the open plain, he would be able to find the strange mammoths.

He reached the edge of the trees, close to the Dreamers’ cave — and, still in the shelter of the trees, he slowed to a halt.

Several of the Dreamers had emerged from their caves. But they were not alone.

Confronting them was a new group of creatures: standing upright like the Dreamers, but spindly, taller, much less robust.

The legs of these others were thin and taut — like those of a horse, meant for running and walking long distances. The newcomers had flat, delicate faces and high bulging skulls. They were covered in skins, like the Dreamers, but Longtusk could see that these garments were much more finely worked than the rough creations of the Dreamers. Their paws were delicate and they held things — pointed sticks and flakes of stone — and other, incomprehensible items, like a length of wood tied up with deer sinew so that it was bent over in an arc.

And they stalked among the Dreamers with arrogance and hostility.

Longtusk spotted Stripeskull. Blood still stained his shoulder where the strange stick had punctured it. But now the big Dreamer was crouching in the dirt. He was roaring defiance, trying to stand using one of his fire-hardened sticks as a prop — but one hind leg was dragging behind him. And Longtusk saw blood pulsing from a broad gash. He was surrounded by five or six of the newcomers, and they held sticks out toward Stripeskull, threatening him.

The Dreamer females and cubs had been brought out of the cave, driven like recalcitrant calves by prods with sticks and stones. The females huddled together in a group, surrounded by the newcomers, with their cubs at the center. They seemed bewildered as much as frightened, and their gaze slid over the newcomers that stalked amongst them — as if they were too strange even to be properly visible, as if the Clan was being overwhelmed by a party of ghosts.

Apart from Stripeskull, Longtusk could see no other Dreamer adult males. Perhaps they were off on one of their scavenging trips — or perhaps they had been driven away, by these cold, calculating others.

Longtusk watched, fascinated, repelled. He knew what he was seeing.

He had never before encountered these creatures, these distorted, hostile cousins of the Dreamers. But many of his kind had — and an understanding of the danger they posed was drummed into every young mammoth.

These were the most ferocious predators of all — more to be feared, despite their frail appearance, than even the great cats — and the only response to encountering them was flight.

For they had mastered fire itself.

And they were not content to let embers burn in shallow hearths, like the Dreamers; instead they used fire to drive their way across the land. Perhaps they had even been responsible for the fire which had separated him from his Family. Hadn’t he glimpsed slender running forms during his dreadful flight through the smoke?

He had been wrong before, when he had first encountered Willow. About these newcomers there could be no doubt, and black dread settled on his heart.

For these were Fireheads.

One of the newcomers turned and looked directly toward him.

This one was shorter than the others, with a broad, plump belly that glistened with grease. He sniffed loudly, his small, straight nose twitching. He was, thought Longtusk, like a fat, overgrown