Silverhair

everything she said and did.

Silverhair’s heart warmed as she looked over her Family, one by one, bedraggled as their dark winter fur blew away from their backs. Suddenly the twenty days of her separation from them seemed much longer.

'We must tell them what we saw,' said Silverhair to Lop-ear. 'The strange creature on the floe—'

'No,' said Lop-ear. 'Not now.'

'Why not? Surely Owlheart and Eggtusk will be able to help us make sense of it.'

'They have other things on their minds right now. And besides…' He shook his great head, so that rust-brown hair shook over his eyes. 'I have a feeling it isn’t something the Matriarch will be glad to hear.'

Silverhair found herself shivering at his words. She knew he had touched on the truth. When she thought back now over the incident with Skin-of-Ice, the ice floe monster, she felt little but dread. But that wasn’t logical, she told herself. Everything strange seemed frightening at first; it didn’t mean it was necessarily bad…

They trotted forward and joined the Family.

The greeting ceremony was affectionate but brief, for Owlheart was trying to ensure that everybody’s mind was on the migration. But Silverhair, ignoring Lop-ear’s advice, approached Owlheart, and told the Matriarch what she had found.

She tried to crystalize the monster for the Matriarch: walking upright on two long legs, strange objects held in the paws of the forelegs — face smeared with the blood of a walrus — helplessly thin, but coated with strange, artificial fur — and, strangest of all, that utter lack of scent.

Owlheart listened, and caressed Silverhair’s ear. 'My poor granddaughter,' she rumbled. 'If only you had a little less of Longtusk in you. But perhaps it’s as well for all of us that you don’t.'

'What do you mean?'

'You must tell nobody else what you saw. Do you understand?'

'But Lop-ear—'

'Nobody.'

And the Matriarch trotted away, trunk held high as if to detect danger, toward Eggtusk. They began to speak, a long and serious conversation punctuated by glares at Silverhair.

Silverhair sighed. She didn’t know why, but it seemed she was in trouble again.

After a final bout of defecation, a final brief graze, the migration began.

The walk was not easy.

The new calf, Sunfire, was thin and sickly. At the frequent stops, Silverhair helped Foxeye with simple mammoth medicine. She would place her trunk into the calf’s tiny mouth, ensuring she did not choke on her food; and at rest times, she nudged the baby to her feet, for there was a danger that the infant’s weight would press down on her lungs and prevent her breathing.

Wolfnose, too, was having a great deal of difficulty walking. All four of her legs, stiffened with arthritis, seemed as inflexible as tree trunks as they clumped down on the hard, frozen ground. And several bones in her back were fused into hard, painful units. She was too proud to admit to the pain, still less give in to it. But Wolfnose was clearly able to keep up only a slow pace.

The others helped her by huddling her. Eggtusk and the Matriarch herself walked along to either side, helping Wolfnose stay upright, and Lop-ear walked behind her, gently nudging her great thighs to help her keep going.

The world was silent around them, empty as a skull. The only sound was the crackle of frost under their feet, the hiss of breath through their long nostrils, and the occasional word of instruction or encouragement from the adults, or complaint from the calves. The land was mostly flat, but here and there they had to clamber over frozen hills, blocks of ice embedded in the ground.

As Silverhair walked, she could picture where she was, imagine the mammoths crawling across the great, empty belly of the Island.

The mammoths’ ability to hear the deepest noises of the Earth enables them to do much more than communicate over long distances. Mammoths can hear the distinctive voices of the landscape: the growl of breaking waves and cracking ice at a seashore, the low humming of bare sand, the droning of the wind through mountains. All this enables them to build up a complex, three-dimensional map of the world around them, extending to regions far beyond the horizon. They are able to predict the weather — for they can hear the growl of turbulent air in the atmosphere — and even receive warnings about Earth tremors, for the booming bellow of seismic waves as they pass through the planet’s rocky heart are the deepest voices of all.

So Silverhair had a kind of map in her head that encompassed the whole of the Island, and even a sense of the roundness of the Earth, spinning and nodding on its endless dance around the sun. Silverhair’s mind had deep roots — deeper than any human’s — roots that extended into the rocky structure of the world itself.

But her powerful ability to listen to the planet’s many voices also made her uncomfortably aware that this was the only mammoth group she could sense, right across the Island. She could feel the sweep and extent of the rocky land, and the mammoths were stranded at the center of this huge, echoing landscape, like pebbles thrown onto an ice floe.

She felt distracted, restless, disturbed. Where was everybody?

They passed a family of wolves.

The wolves were lying on the ground, huddled against the cold, their white-furred backs turned to the teeth of the wind, their heads tucked into their bellies for warmth. An adult — perhaps a bitch — stood up and glared as Silverhair rumbled past.

'Once,' rumbled Wolfnose, eyeing the wolf, 'I saw a mammoth brought down by a wolf pack. Long before any of you were born. He was a calf — a Bull, called Willowleg, for his legs were spindly and weak. The wolves pursued him, despite the efforts of the rest of the Family to keep them off. The wolves are smart. They took it in turns to pick up the running, so they did not tire as Willowleg did.

'At last they cornered him in a crevasse, where the rest of us could not follow. Willowleg got his back to the rock wall and fought. But there were many wolves. First they cut him down, with bites to his legs and hindquarters, and then, at last, they got in a killing bite to the throat. And then they pulled him apart.

'Wolves have Family too,' she said, her old eyes sunk in folds of skin. 'The lead male eats first, then his senior bitches, and any female who is feeding cubs.' She regarded the wide-eyed calves. 'It is the way of things. But be wary of the wolves.'

Silverhair could see the wolf’s moist eyes, the gleam of her teeth in the sunlight, and imagined the calculation going on in her sharp-edged mind, the dark legacy of Aglu, brother of Kilukpuk.

Wolfnose’s story was a timely warning. Of all of them, for all his greater size and strength compared to Sunfire, Croptail was probably the most vulnerable to predators like the wolves. Croptail could no longer rely on the close protection of Foxeye — she was preoccupied with the new infant, and her instincts were in any event to push the growing Bull away — but he had not yet learned to forage effectively for himself, or to defend himself from the wolves. So Silverhair made sure she always knew where Croptail had got to, and she stopped periodically and raised her trunk, listening and sniffing for signs of danger on the wind.

The days were still cruelly short, but nevertheless lengthening, with the sun’s brief arc above the horizon extending with each day that passed. The weather remained clear and bitterly cold. Wind whipped across the empty ground, blowing up particles of ice so small and hard and dry they felt like grit when they got into Silverhair’s eyes.

One day, when the sun was at its height and bathing the frosty ground with a spurious gold, Owlheart called a halt. The mammoths dispersed to scrape grass from the hard ground and drop dung.

The calves found the energy to play. Sunfire pestered her older brother, placing her trunk in his mouth to test the grass he was eating, rubbing against him and even collapsing in a heap beside him. At times they chased each other, mounting mock charges and wrestling with their trunks.

Foxeye wearily admonished Croptail to be careful with his sister, but Silverhair knew such play was important in teaching the calves to develop their own abilities — and most important, to learn about each other, for it was the bond between Family members that was the most important weapon of all in their continued survival. Anyhow, the calves’ cheerful play warmed the dispirited adults.

Poor Wolfnose stood stiffly, away from the others, her great legs visibly trembling.

Owlheart called Silverhair, Lop-ear, and Snagtooth to her.

Owlheart began digging at the ground. She broke the crusted surface with her tusks and forefeet, scooping the debris out of the way with her trunk. Owlheart’s left tusk was much more worn than the right, a good deal shorter, and its tip was rounded and grooved. Most mammoths favor their right tusk as their master tusk, but Owlheart, unusually, preferred the left, and that showed in the unevenness of the wear.

'The winter has been dry,' said Owlheart as she dug. 'Perhaps the thaw will come soon, but we are thirsty now. But here, in this place, there is water to be found — liquid, for most of the year. This is a place where the inner warmth of the Earth reaches to the surface and keeps the water beneath from freezing, even when the world is as cold as a corpse’s belly…'

Now, looking around more carefully, Silverhair saw the ground was pitted by a series of shallow craters: pits dug in the ground by mammoths of the past.

'Remember this place,' Owlheart said. 'For it is a place of Earth’s generous warmth, and water; and it may save your life.'

Silverhair turned, scanning the horizon. She raised her trunk and let the hairs there dangle in the prevailing wind. She studied the sky, and scraped with her tusks at the ground. She let the scents and subtle sounds of the landscape sink into her mind.

She was remembering. Even as Owlheart spoke, she was adding a new detail, exquisite but perhaps vitally important, to the map of scents and breezes and textures that each mammoth carried in her head.

'Now, help me dig,' said Owlheart.

Silverhair, Lop-ear, and Snagtooth stepped forward, took their places around the preliminary hole dug by their Matriarch, and began to work at the ground.

The ground was hard: even to the stone-hard tusks of mammoths, it offered stiff resistance. Save for the occasional peevish complaint by Snagtooth, there was no talking as they worked: only the scrape of tusk and stamp of foot, the hissing of breath through upraised trunks.

They worked through the night, taking breaks in turns.

As the night wore on — and as there was little sign of water, and they became steadily more exhausted — Silverhair had a growing sense of unease.

Owlheart was not a Matriarch who welcomed debate about her decisions. Nevertheless, as Owlheart took a break — standing to pass her dung a little way away from the others — Silverhair summoned up the courage to speak to her.

Owlheart was evidently weary already from her work, and her pink tongue protruded from her mouth.

'You’re thirsty,' said Silverhair.

'Yes. A paradox, isn’t it? — that the work to find water is making me thirstier than ever.'

'Matriarch, Foxeye is still weak, Croptail is weaning and vulnerable to the wolves, Wolfnose can barely walk. The digging is exhausting all of us…'

The Matriarch’s great jaw ceased its fore-and-back motion. 'You’re right,' she said.

'…What?'

'We’re in no fit state to have set off on an expedition like this. That’s what you’re leading up to, isn’t it? But I wonder if you realize what peril we are in, little Silverhair. Where water vanishes, sanity soon follows. That’s what the Cycle teaches. Thirst maddens us. Soon, without water, we would turn on each other… I have to avoid that at all costs, for we would be destroyed.