Longtusk

The Story of Longtusk and the Fireheads

As you know, Icebones (said Silverhair), Longtusk spent most of his years as a young Bull away from other mammoths.

Everywhere he went he won friendship and respect — naturally, since he was the greatest hero of all, and even other creatures could recognize that — and in many instances he was made their leader, and led them to fruitfulness and success before passing on to continue his adventures.

And so it came to pass that Longtusk came to live with the Fireheads, and to rule them.

Now the Fireheads are the strangest creatures in all the Cycle: weak yet strong, smart yet stupid. In the summer heat they had difficulty finding the food and drink they needed, and in the winter cold they suffered because they had no winter coat.

So Longtusk decided to teach them how to live.

When they were cold, he took them to the west, where Rhino lived.

Now Rhino was a magnificent beast with a coat as thick as a mammoth’s and great horns like upturned tusks (yes, she really existed, Icebones, have patience!). And Longtusk said to the Fireheads, "You need coats like Rhino’s to fend off the cold. See how warm and comfortable she is? When the wintertime is over she sheds her hair, and you may take it to make your own coats. Isn’t that right, Rhino?"

And Rhino replied, "Yes, Longtusk" — for all the creatures of the world knew Longtusk—"my hair will be all your friends need, and they may have it."

And the Fireheads muttered and calculated, for that is their way.

And when Longtusk’s back was turned, they attacked poor Rhino, and robbed her of her fine coat, and even took her magnificent horns.

When he found out what had happened, Longtusk berated the Fireheads for their greed and impatience. "You could have taken all you needed, if only you had waited!"

And the Fireheads said they were sorry. But in their hearts they were not.

When it rained, Longtusk took the Fireheads to the east, where Dreamer lived.

Now Dreamer was a little like the Fireheads, but she was placid and kind and accepting, and she had lived for many years in caves hollowed out of the rock of a hillside. And, of course, the caves kept the rain from her head.

And Longtusk said to the Fireheads, "You need a cave like Dreamer’s to fend off the rain. See how warm and comfortable she is? There are many caves in this hillside, and you may take them for your own shelter. Isn’t that right, Dreamer?"

And Dreamer replied, "Yes, Longtusk" — for all the creatures of the world knew Longtusk—"the caves will be all your friends need, and they may have them."

And the Fireheads muttered and calculated, for that is their way.

And when Longtusk’s back was turned, they attacked poor Dreamer, and robbed her of her fine cave, and threw her out into the rain.

When he found out what had happened, Longtusk berated the Fireheads for their greed and impatience. "You could have taken all you needed without stealing Dreamer’s home!"

And the Fireheads said they were sorry. But in their hearts they were not.

Then the Fireheads became thirsty.

So Longtusk took them to the north, where the mammoths lived.

He brought them to a place where the mammoths, in their wisdom, knew that water seeped from deep in the ground. They were digging there with tusks and feet, bringing the water to the surface.

And Longtusk said to the Fireheads, "You must dig for water as the mammoths do. See how much water there is? And when you have learned what the mammoths have to teach you, you can find water of your own. Isn’t that right, Matriarch?"

And the Matriarch of the mammoth Family said, "Yes, Longtusk" — for all the mammoths knew Longtusk—"in the ground there is all the water your friends need, and we will teach them how to find it."

And the Fireheads muttered and calculated, for that is their way.

And when Longtusk’s back was turned, they attacked the poor mammoths, and drove them away, and robbed them of their water.

When he found out what had happened, Longtusk berated the Fireheads. "You could have found your own water without robbing the mammoths — oh, you are impossible!"

And the Fireheads said they were sorry. But in their hearts they were not.

By now Longtusk knew that all his teaching was wasted on such creatures. He had decided besides that he had spent enough time away from his Clan.

So he turned his back on the Fireheads and walked away, leaving them to fend for themselves. They called to him plaintively, begging him to return, but he would not.

And so Longtusk returned to the mammoths, and became their Patriarch, and…

But that’s another story. Perhaps the greatest of them all.

What happened to the Fireheads without Longtusk’s wisdom, driven only by their own foolishness, cold and wet and thirsty? Nobody knows.

Some say they quickly died out.

And some say they became monsters.

1 The Bone Pit

All around Longtusk, sleeping mastodonts lay like immense boulders. In the summer they preferred to sleep on their backs, exposing their bare feet and bellies to the cool air. From time to time one of them, startled by a noise, would rise smoothly and silently to his feet, like some hairy ghost, before settling back.

But Longtusk could not sleep — even after the months he had been kept here in the Firehead settlement.

He could hear small Firehead footsteps as they pattered across the hard ground, their thin Firehead voices as they came and went on their strange, incomprehensible business. Sometimes he even heard the clear voice of the female cub, Crocus, who — in another life that was long ago and far away — he had saved from freezing.

And, worst of all, he could smell the meat they hung up on frames of wood to dry: rags of brown and purple, laced here and there by pale fat or strings of tendon, some of it even clinging to shards of white bone. Most of the meat came from deer and horse and smaller animals, but there were some larger chunks, great knobbly pieces of bone he couldn’t recognize.

And he could smell the meat that burned, slowly, in the great stone-lined pits in the ground, the billowing greasy black smoke that lingered in the air.

At least he had put aside the panic he had felt continually when he had first been brought here to the Firehead settlement, as every instinct drove him to flee the smoke from the fires. But he would never grow used to that dreadful meat stink. It seemed to have seeped into his very fur, so that he was never free of it.

So Longtusk endured, waiting for morning.

The keepers came in the gray light of dawn. They talked softly and cleared their throats to alert the mastodonts of their approach. The mastodonts stirred, rumbling, and there was a rustle of leathery skin against the hobbles that bound their legs.

Most of the mastodonts were Bulls — not really a bachelor herd, for the tree-browsing mastodonts were more solitary than mammoths, Longtusk had found. But there were Families here too, Cows and calves.

The keepers approached their animals, one by one, talking softly. The mastodonts rumbled and whooshed in response, reaching out with their trunks to search the Fireheads’ layers of fur for tidbits of food. It was a display of affection and submission that never failed to embarrass Longtusk.

This morning the fat little keeper the mastodonts called Lemming approached Longtusk, holding out a juicy strip of bark. And, as he always did, Longtusk rumbled threateningly, curled his trunk and backed away as far as the hobbles knotted tightly around his legs would let him.

Lemming wore trousers and leggings of deer skin, moccasins and a broad hat of a tougher leather, and his clothing was stuffed with dry grass to keep him warm. Bits of grass stuck out around his wide, greasy face as he studied Longtusk, peering into the mammoth’s ears and eyes and mouth.

Jaw Like Rock, his hobbles already loosened, came loping over. With a deft movement he snatched the bark from Lemming’s paw and tucked it into his mouth. "Waste of good food," he rumbled as he munched.

"It comes from the paw of a Firehead," Longtusk said.

"So what? Food is food."

"I’m not like you."

"He wasn’t intending you any harm, you know. He was checking your eyes and ears for infection. And he wanted to see your tongue, too." Jaw opened his mouth and unrolled his own tongue, a leathery black sheet of muscle that dripped with saliva. "The keepers know that a healthy mastodont has a nice pink tongue umblemished by black spots, brown eyes without a trace of white, the right number of toenails, strong and sturdy joints, a full face and broad forehead… You have all of that; if you were a mastodont you’d be a prize."

Longtusk growled, impatient with advice.

"You’re the only mammoth we have here, Longtusk. The keepers don’t know what to make of you. Some of them think you can’t be tamed and trained, that you’re too wild. And the Shaman, Smokehat, is jealous of you."

"Jealous? Why?"

"Because the Fireheads used to believe that mammoths were gods. Some of them seem to think you’re a god. And that takes away from the Shaman’s power. Having you around gives even little Lemming a higher status. Don’t you understand any of this, grazer?"

"No," said Longtusk bluntly.

"All I’m saying is that if you give him an excuse, the Shaman will have you destroyed. Lemming is fond of you. But you’re going to have to help him, to give him some sign that you’ll cooperate, or else—"

But now, as if to disprove Jaw’s comforting growl, his own keeper approached: Spindle, thin, ugly and brutal. He lashed at Jaw with his stick, apparently punishing the mastodont for his minor theft of the food.

Jaw didn’t so much as flinch.

"Of course," he rumbled sourly, "not everything’s wonderful here. But there are ways to make life bearable."

And he lifted his fat, scarred trunk and sneezed noisily. A gust of looping snot and bark chips sprayed over Spindle, who fell over backward, yelling.

Jaw Like Rock farted contentedly and loped away.

The mastodonts were prepared for another working day. Their hobbles were removed — or merely loosened, in the case of Longtusk and a few others, mastodonts in musth and so prone to irritability. Longtusk was a special case, of course, and he wore his hobbles with a defiant pride. As they worked the keepers were careful to keep away from his tusks, so much more large and powerful than the strongest mastodont’s.

Ten mastodonts, plus Longtusk, were formed up into a loose line. Walks With Thunder was at the head. Lemming sat neatly on the great mastodont’s neck, his fat legs sticking out on either side of Thunder’s broad head.

Lemming tapped Thunder’s scalp and called out, "Agit!"

Walks With Thunder loped forward, trumpeting to the others to follow him.

The mastodonts obeyed. They were prompted by cries from the keepers — Chai ghoom! Chi! Dhuth!, Right! Left! Stop! — and they were directed by gentle taps of the keepers’ goads: gentle, yes, but Longtusk had learned by hard experience that the keepers also knew exactly where to strike him to inflict a sharp burst of pain, brief and leaving no scar.

Half the mastodonts bore riders. Most of the others carried the equipment the working party would need during the day. Those without riders were led by loose harnesses of rope tied around their heads.

Longtusk, of course, had no rider, and his harness was kept tighter than the rest. Not only that, his trunk was tied to Walks With Thunder’s broad tail, so that he was led along the path like an infant with his mother.

Then they walked slowly out of the Firehead settlement.

The Fireheads had spread far, reshaping the steppe, and they were still building. They had made themselves shelters — like the caves of the Dreamers — but of wood and rock and turf and animal skin. They built huge pits in the ground into which they hurled meat ripped from the carcasses of the creatures they hunted. And the Fireheads had built a great stockade of wood and rock, within which the mastodonts were confined. To Longtusk it was a place of distortion and strangeness, and he was habitually oppressed, crushed by a feeling of confinement and helplessness and bafflement.

But for now they were out of the stockade, and with relief Longtusk found himself on the open steppe. As the sun climbed into a cloud-dusted sky, they soon left behind the noise and stink of the settlement, and walked on steadily south.

The air was misty and full of light. Longtusk saw that it was a mist of life: vast clouds of insects, mosquitoes and blackflies and warble flies and botflies, that rose from the lakes to plague the great herbivores — including himself — and a dreamier cloud of ballooning spiders and wind-borne larvae, riding the breezes to a new land.

Through this dense air the mastodonts walked steadily, their fat low-slung rumps swaying gracefully, their tails swishing and their trunks shooting out from side to side in search of branches and leaves from the few low trees which grew here. After walking for a time they started to defecate together, a long synchronized symphony of dung-making.

Much of the land was bare, a desert of gravel and soils and a few far-flung plants. Here and there he noticed thicker tussocks of grass, speckled with wild flowers, fed by the detritus at the entrances to the dens of the Arctic foxes, and on the slight rises where owls and jaegers devoured their prey, watering the soil with blood. Steppe melt-ponds stood out boldly, bright blue against the tan and green of the plain. In the center of the larger ponds Longtusk could see the gleam of aquamarine, cores of ice still unmelted at the height of summer.

His footsteps crunched on dead leaves, bits of flowers, fragments of twig, a thick layer of it. Some of this material might be years old. And later he came across the carcass of a wolf-killed deer. It had been lightly consumed, and now its meat had hardened, its skin turned glassy. He knew it might lie here for three or four years before being reduced to bones.

On the steppe, away from the Fireheads’ frantic rhythms, time pooled, dense and slow; even decomposition worked slowly here.

He came across a golden plover, sitting on her nest on the ground. She stared back at him, defiant. The birds of the steppe had to build their nests on the ground, as there were no tall trees. Some of them — like buntings and longspurs — even lined their nests with bits of mammoth wool. This plover’s nest was made of woven grass, and it contained pale, darkly speckled eggs. As the mastodonts walked by, the plover got off its nest and ran back and forth, feigning a broken wing, trying to distract these possible predators from the nest itself.

Walks With Thunder, as he often did, tried to explain life to Longtusk.

"…The Fireheads are strange, but there is a logic to everything they do. Almost everything, anyhow. They are predators, like the wolves and foxes. So they must hunt."

"I know that. Deer and aurochs—"

"Yes. But such animals pass by this way only infrequently, as they follow their own migrations in search of their fodder for summer or winter. And so the Fireheads must store the meat they will eat during the winter. That is the purpose of the pits — even if all those dead carcasses are repellent to us. And it explains the way they salt their meat and hang it up to dry in strips, or soak it in sour milk, and—"

"But," Longtusk complained, "why do they not follow the herds they prey on, as the wolves do? All their problems come from this peculiar determination to stay in one place."

Walks With Thunder growled, "But not every animal is like the mastodont — or the mammoth. We don’t mind where we roam; we go where the food is. But many animals prefer a single place to live. Like the rhinos."

"But these Fireheads have nothing — no fat layers, hardly any hair, no way of keeping warm in the winter or digging out their food."

"But they have their fire. They have their tools. And," Walks With Thunder said with a trace of sadness, "they have us."

"Not me," rumbled Longtusk. "They have me trapped. But they don’t have me."

To that, Walks With Thunder would say nothing.

Longtusk disturbed a carpet of big yellow butterflies that burst into the air, startling him. One of the butterflies landed on the pink tip of his trunk, tickling him. He swished his trunk to and fro, but couldn’t shake the butterfly free; finally, the mocking brays of the mastodonts sounding in his ears, he blew it away with a large sneeze.

They came to a river which meandered slowly between gently sloping hummocks. Vegetation grew thickly, down to the water’s edge: grass, herbs and a stand of spruce forest almost tall enough to reach Longtusk’s shoulders. Farther downstream there were thickets of birch and even azalea, with lingering pink leaves from their spring bloom. In the longer grass wild flowers added splashes of color: vetch, iris, primroses, mauve and blue and purple and yellow.

The mastodonts were allowed to rest. They spread out, moving through the sparse trees with a rustle of branches, tearing off foliage and shoving it into their mouths greedily. Some of them walked into the water, sucking up trunkfuls of the clear, cold liquid and spraying it over their heads and backs.

Longtusk was still hobbled. He moved a little away from the rest, seeking the grass and steppe vegetation he preferred.

He had never been here before. It seemed a congenial place — for mastodonts anyhow. But Longtusk, clad in his thick fur, was already too hot, and mosquitoes buzzed, large and voracious. He looped his trunk into his mouth, extracted a mixture of spit and water, and blew it in a fine spray over his face and head and belly.

He wondered what the Fireheads wanted from this place. Stone, perhaps. The Fireheads liked big flat slabs of stones to put inside their huts and storage pits — but he could see no rock of that kind here. Perhaps they would bring back wood; the mastodonts were strong enough to knock over and splinter as many trees as required.

The keepers came to round up the mastodonts, calling softly and tapping their scalps and flanks with their bone-tipped goads. The mastodonts cooperated with only routine rumbles of complaint.

All the mastodonts had worked here many times before, and they appeared to know what to do. The most skillful and trusted, led by Walks With Thunder, walked down toward the river. They came to a place where the grass had been worn away by deep round mastodont footprints. They began to scrape at the muddy river bank with their tusks and feet, and clouds of mosquitoes rose up around them as they toiled.

Longtusk could see that they were uncovering something: objects that gleamed white in the low sun. He wondered what they were.

…There was a sudden, sharp stench, a stink of death and decay, making Longtusk flinch. Some of the mastodonts trumpeted and rumbled in protest, but, under the calm, watchful eye of Walks With Thunder, they continued to work. Perhaps something had died here: a bison or rhino, its carcass washed along the river.

Soon, with the supervision of the keepers, they were dragging the large white objects from the mud. Walks With Thunder dug his tusks under one of the objects and wrapped his trunk over the top; he rammed his feet against the ground and hauled, until the clinging, cold mud gave way with a loud sucking noise, and he stumbled back.

The thing’s shape was complex, full of holes. It was mostly white, but something dark brown clung to it here and there, around which mosquitoes and flies buzzed angrily.

It might have been a rock.

Jaw Like Rock stood alongside Longtusk, swishing his tail vigorously. "I can stand the work," the squat Bull muttered. "It’s these wretched mosquitoes that drive me to distraction."

Longtusk asked, "Are those rocks heavy?"

Jaw turned to look at him quizzically. "What rocks?"

"The rocks they are pulling out of the river bank."

Jaw hesitated. He said carefully, "Nobody has told you what we’re doing here? Thunder hasn’t explained?"

"No. Aren’t they rocks?"

Jaw fell silent, seeming troubled.

Longtusk found, at his feet, a patch of what looked like mammoth dung. He poked at it and it crumbled. It was dried out, stale, half frozen, obviously old. Regretfully he lifted a few crumbs to his mouth; their flavor was thin.

Since the day he had been separated from his Family by the fire storm — despite the way the Fireheads had him undertake these jaunts across the countryside — he had never seen a single one of his own kind.

But the expeditions always headed south.

He asked Jaw about this.

"Sometimes there are expeditions to the north, Longtusk," Jaw rumbled. "But—"

"But what?"

Jaw Like Rock hesitated, uncomfortable. "Ask Walks With Thunder."

Longtusk growled, "I’m asking you."

"It is difficult to work there. It is poor land. The ice is retreating northward and uncovering the land; but the new land is a rocky desert. To the south, plants and animals have lived for many generations, and the soil is rich…"

He’s keeping something from me, Longtusk thought. Something about the northern lands, and what the Fireheads do there.

"If the south is so comfortable, why do the Fireheads live where they do? Why not stay where life is easy?"

Jaw sneezed as pollen itched at his trunk. He slid his trunk over one tusk and began to scratch, scooping out lumps of snot. "Because to the south there are already too many Fireheads. They have burned the trees and eaten the animals, and now they fight each other for what remains. Fireheads are not like us, Longtusk. A Firehead Clan will not share its range with another.

"Bedrock tried to take the land belonging to another Clan. There was a battle. Bedrock lost. So he has come north, as far as he can, so that his Clan can carve out a new place to live."

Longtusk tried to understand what all this meant.

He imagined a line that stretched, to east and west, right across the continent, dividing it into two utterly different zones. To the south there was little but Fireheads, mobs of them, fighting and breeding and dying. To the north the land was as it had been before, empty of Fireheads.

And that line of demarcation was sweeping north, as Firehead leaders like Bedrock sought new, empty places to live, burning across the land like the billowing line of fire which had separated him from his Family.

It was to the north that Longtusk knew he must return one day, when the chance arose. For it was to the north — where there were no Fireheads, in the corridor of silent steppe which still encircled the planet below the ice — that was where the mammoth herds roamed.

The keepers approached Longtusk now. It was time to don his pack gear, he realized gloomily. He was not yet trusted with complex tasks like digging, but he was regarded as capable of carrying heavy weights.

The pack gear was substantial.

First the keepers laid over him a soft quilted pad. It extended from his withers to his rump and halfway down his sides. On top of this came a saddle of stout sacking stuffed with straw. It had a split along the back to relieve the pressure on his spine; most of the weight he had to carry would rest on his broad rib cage. And then came a platform, a flat plate of cut wood with four posts in the corners, with ropes slung between the posts to prevent his load from falling off.

The whole assembly was strapped to him by one length of thick plaited rope which went around his head and girth and up under his tail. To prevent chafing the rope was passed through lengths of hollow bone that rubbed smoothly against his chest.

And now Walks With Thunder was approaching with his mysterious, complex load, and the stench of decay grew stronger.

Longtusk became fearful.

He could see that Thunder’s cargo was rounded, with two gaping sockets at the front. It seemed to have tooth marks, as if some scavenger had worked on it. The brown stuff that clung to it looked like flesh, heavily decayed and gnawed by the scavenger. There was rough skin over the scraps of flesh, and lanks of hair clung, brown and muddy.

It was bone, Longtusk realized with horror. A bone, to which decaying meat still clung.

"What’s going on here, Jaw? What is that thing?"

"Listen to me," said Jaw Like Rock urgently. "It isn’t what it seems…" He laid his trunk over Longtusk’s head, trying to soothe him, but Longtusk shook it off.

The keepers began to look alarmed.

The bone thing had the stump of a tusk, broken and gnawed, sticking out of its front. A mammoth tusk.

"Nobody was killed here," Jaw was saying. "This wasn’t the fault of the Fireheads, or anybody else. It just happened, a very long time ago…"

Longtusk looked again at the river bank. He saw that the white objects were not rocks, not one of them. They were all bones: thick leg bones and vertebrae and ribs and shoulder blades and skulls, sticking out of the mud, many of them still coated with flesh and broken and chewed by scavengers.

It was a field of corpses: the corpses of mammoths.

And here was Walks With Thunder, about to load the great vacant skull onto Longtusk’s back.

Longtusk swept his tusks, knocked the skull from the grasp of an astonished Walks With Thunder, and smashed it to pieces underfoot.

He recalled little after that.

They got him under control, and brought him through the long march back to the Fireheads’ settlement.

As the day wound to its close, their work done, the mastodonts were allowed to find food and water, and to mingle with the Family of Cows and calves.

Longtusk did not expect such freedom tonight.

He hadn’t injured any of the Fireheads. But, despite Thunder’s apologies and urging, he hadn’t allowed the keepers to remount his pack gear or to place any of their grisly load on his back. The other mastodonts, some grumbling, had had to accept his share of the load. As a result he was expecting punishment.

But now the little keeper, Lemming, faced him. To Longtusk’s surprise, Lemming came close, easily within range of the mammoth’s great tusks. He seemed to trust Longtusk.

Lemming reached out with one small paw and touched the long hairs that grew from the center of Longtusk’s face, between his eyes. Tiny fingers pulled gently at the hairs, combing out small knots, and the Firehead spoke steadily in his thin, incomprehensible voice. He seemed regretful, as if he understood.

Now Lemming reached down and loosened the hobbles around Longtusk’s ankles. Then, with the gentlest of taps from his goad, he encouraged Longtusk to wander off toward his feeding ground.

Longtusk — confused, dismayed, baffled by kindness — moved away from the trees in search of steppe grass.

The Moon was high and dazzling bright — a wintry Moon, brilliant with the reflected light of ice-laden Earth. It was Longtusk’s only companion.

Even when he ate, he had to do it alone. He needed the coarse grass and herbs of the steppe, and could tolerate little of the lush leaves and bark the mastodonts preferred. Tonight, though, he could have used a little company.

Walks With Thunder had apologized for not warning him, and tried to explain to him about the bones in the river bank. It wasn’t a place of slaughter. It wasn’t even the place where all those decomposing mammoths had died.

Mammoths had been drawn to the river’s water over a long period of time — generations, perhaps even a significant part of a Great-Year. But a river bank could be a hazardous place. Mammoths became stuck in clinging mud and starved, or fell through thin ice and drowned. Their bodies were washed down the river, coming to rest in a meander or backwater.

Again and again this happened, the corpses washing downstream from all along the river bank, and coming to rest in the same natural trap, until a huge deposit of bodies had built up.

Sometimes the river would rise, immersing the bodies and embedding them in mud and silt, and fishes might nibble at the meat. And in dry seasons the water would drop, exposing the bodies to the air. The stench of their rot would attract flies, and larvae would burrow through the rotting flesh. Predators would come, wolverines or foxes or wolves, to gnaw on the exposed bones.

At last the bodies were buried by silt and peat, and vegetation grew over them.

But then the river’s path had changed. The water began to cut away at the great natural pit of bones, exposing the corpses to the air once more…

"You see?" Thunder had said. "Nobody killed those mammoths. Why, they might have died centuries ago, their bodies lying unremarked in the silt layers until now. What’s left behind is just bone and rotting flesh and hair. The Fireheads imagine they have a use for all those old bones — and what harm does it do? The mammoths have gone, their spirits flown to the aurora. Strange, yes, are the ways of the Fireheads, but you’ll learn to live with them. I have…"

Yes, thought Longtusk angrily, and he ripped tufts of grass roughly from the ground as he stomped along alone, all but blinded by his teeming thoughts. Yes, Thunder, you’ve grown used to all this. It doesn’t matter what happens to my bones when I’ve flown to the aurora; you’re right.

But you have forgotten you are a Calf of Kilukpuk. You have forgotten how we Remember those who go to the aurora before us.

I will not forget, no matter how long I live, how long I am kept here. I will never forget that I am mammoth.

"…Are you in musth?"

The contact rumble was light, shallow. Close.

Preoccupied, he looked up. A small mastodont was facing him. A calf? No, a Cow — not quite fully grown, perhaps about his own age. She was chewing on a mouthful of leaves. Her jaw was delicate and neatly symmetrical, along with the rest of her skull, and that chewing, unmammoth-like motion didn’t seem as ugly and unnatural when she did it as when a big ugly Bull like Jaw Like Rock took whole branches in his maw of a mouth and -

"You’re staring at me," she said.

"What?… I’m sorry. What do you want?"

"I want to feed in peace," she growled. Her four tusks were short, Moon white, and she raised them defiantly. "And I want you to answer my question."

"I’m not in musth."

"The Matriarch says I must keep away from Bulls in musth. I’m not ready for oestrus yet. And even if I was—"

"I said, I’m not in musth," he snapped, rumbling angrily.

"You act as if you are."

"That’s because—" He tried to calm down. "It’s not your fault."

She stepped closer, cautiously. "You’re the mammoth, aren’t you? The calf of Primus. I heard them talking about you. I never met a mammoth before."

Longtusk felt confused.

What should he say to her? In his short life he had had little contact with Cows outside his immediately Family. If this was a Bull he’d know what to do; he’d just start a fight.

He snorted and lifted his head. "What do you think of my tusks?"

She evaded his tusks, apparently unimpressed, and reached out with her slender trunk. She placed its warm, pink tip inside his mouth, startling him. Then she stepped back and lowered her trunk.

She sneezed. "Ugh. Saxifrage."

"I like saxifrage. Where I come from, we all eat saxifrage."

She curled her trunk contemptuously. She turned and ambled away, her hips swaying with liquid grace, and she tore at the grass as she passed.

Good riddance, thought Longtusk.

"…Wait," he called. "What’s your name?"

She raised her trunk, as if sniffing the air, and trumpeted her disdain. "Neck Like Spruce."

"My name is—"

"I know already," she said. And she walked off into moonlight.

2 The Rider

All too soon the short Arctic summer was gone, and winter closed in once more.

During the day Longtusk, seeking food, would scrape aside the snow and frost to find thin grass and herbs, dead and frozen. Sometimes Fireheads would follow him and chop turf and twigs from the exposed ground, fuel to burn in their great hearths.

The mastodonts, less well adapted to the cold, needed leaves and bark from the trees. But soon all the trees close to the Firehead settlement were stripped or destroyed, and they had to travel far to find sustenance.

This became impossible as the winter closed in, and the Firehead keepers would come out of their huts to bring feed, bales of yellowed hay gathered in the summer months. Longtusk watched with contempt as the mastodonts — even strong, intelligent males like Walks With Thunder and Jaw Like Rock — clustered around the bales, tearing into them greedily with their tusks and trunks.

The Fireheads regularly checked the mastodonts’ trunks, eyes, ears and feet. Frostbite of the mastodonts’ ears was common, and the Fireheads treated it with salves of fat and butter.

During the long nights, the mastodonts would huddle together for warmth, grumbling and complaining as one or another was bumped by a careless hip or prodded by a tusk. And they would regale each other with tales from their own, peculiarly distorted, version of the Cycle: legends of the heroic Mammut and her calves as they romped through the impossibly rich forests of the far south, where the sun never set and the trees grew taller than a hundred mastodonts stacked up on top of each other.

Longtusk tried to join in with tales of the heroes of mammoth legend, like Ganesha the Wise. But he’d been very young when he had heard these stories, and his memory was poor. When he jumbled up the stories the mastodonts would trumpet and rumble their amusement, nudging him and scratching his scalp with their trunks, until he stalked off in anger.

But as they talked and listened the younger mastodonts — and Longtusk — were soaking up the wisdom of their elders, embedded in such legends: how to find water in dry seasons or frozen winters, where to find salt licks, and particularly rich stands of trees.

Longtusk had left his Family at a very young age, and he found he had much to learn, even about the simple things of life.

There was a time when the toes of both his forelegs and hind legs gave him trouble, the skin cracking and becoming prone to infection.

Finally Walks With Thunder noticed and took him to one side. "This is what you must do," he said. The mastodont rummaged among his winter-dry fodder and selected a suitable branch. Holding it in his trunk he stripped the leaves away and peeled back the bark, munching it efficiently. Then he took the branch, broke it into four lengths and laid them out in front of him. He selected one piece and, with brisk motions, sharpened it to a point against a rock.

Then, satisfied with the shape, he began to clean methodically between his toenails, digging out the dirt, and wiping the stick clean.

"You never saw this before?" he said as he worked.

"No," Longtusk said, embarrassed.

"Longtusk, you sweat between your toes. You must keep your toes clean or the glands will clog, causing the problems you are suffering now. It is even more important to keep your musth glands clean." He picked up a shard of stick and, with a practiced motion, dug it into one of the temporal glands in the side of his face. "But you must be careful to use a suitable stick: one that is strong and straight and not likely to break. If it snaps and jams up your gland, it cannot discharge and it will drive you crazy." He eyed Longtusk. "You don’t want to end up like that fool Jaw Like Rock, do you?…"

When the nails were clean the mastodont blew spittle on them with his trunk and polished them until they gleamed.

And so, as he grew, month on month, Longtusk’s education continued, the orphan mammoth under the brusque, tender supervision of the older mastodonts.

In the worst of it, when the snow fell heavily or the wind howled, there was nothing to do but endure. Longtusk did not measure time as a human did, packaging it into regular intervals. Even in summer, time dissolved into a single glowing afternoon, speckled by moments of life and love, laughter and death. And in the long reaches of winter — when sometimes it wasn’t possible even to risk moving for fear of dissipating his body’s carefully hoarded heat — time slid away, featureless, meaningless, driven by the great rhythms of the world around him, and by the deep blood-red urges of his own body.

Longtusk secretly enjoyed these unmarked times, when he could stand with the others in the dark stillness and feel the shape of the turning world.

Longtusk’s deep senses revealed the world beyond the horizon: in the hiss of a gale over a distant stretch of steppe, the boom of ocean breakers on a shore, the crack of ice on melting steppe ponds. And, in the deepest stillness of night, he could sense the thinness of this land bridge between the continents, with the frozen ocean to the north, the pressing seas to the south: surrounded by such immense forces, the land seemed fragile indeed.

Longtusk was learning the land on a level deeper than any human. He had to know how to use it to keep him alive, as if it was an extension of his own body, as if body and land merged into a single organism, pulsing with blood and seasons. As he matured, he would come to know Earth with a careless intimacy a human could never imagine.

Once, Longtusk woke from a heavy slumber and raised his head from a snowdrift.

Snow lay heavily, blanketing the ground. But the sky was clear, glittering with stars. The mastodonts were mounds of white. Here and there, as a mastodont stirred, snow fell away, revealing a swatch of red-black hair, a questing trunk or a peering eye.

And the aurora bloomed in the sky, an immense flat sheet of light thrown there by the wind from the sun.

It started with a gush of brightness that resolved itself into a transparent curtain, green and soft pink. Slowly its rays became more apparent, and it started to surge to east and west, like the guard hairs of some immense mammoth, developing deep folds.

It appeared at different places in the sky. When the light sheet was directly above, so that Longtusk was looking up at it, he saw rays converging on a point high above his head. And when he saw it edge-on it looked like smoke, rising from the Earth. Its huge slow movements were entrancing, endlessly fascinating, and Longtusk felt a great tenderness when he gazed at it.

Mammoths — and mastodonts — believed that their spirits flew to the aurora on death, to play in the steppes of light there. He wondered how many of his ancestors were looking down on him now — and he wondered how many of his Family, scattered and lost over the curve of the Earth, were staring up at the aurora, entranced just as he was.

The aurora moved steadily north, breaking up into isolated luminous patches, like clouds.

At last the days began to lengthen, and the pale ruddy sun seemed to leak a little warmth, as if grudgingly.

Life returned to the steppe.

The top layers of the frozen ground melted, and fast-growing grasses sprouted, along with sedges, small shrubs like Arctic sagebrush, and types of pea, daisy and buttercup. The grasses grew quickly and dried out, forming a kind of natural hay, swathes of it that would be sufficient to sustain, over the summer months, the herds of giant grazing herbivores that lived there.

Early in the season a herd of bison passed, not far away. Longtusk saw a cloud of soft dust thrown high into the air, and in the midst of it the great black shapes crowded together, with their humpback shoulders and enormous black horns; their stink of sweat and dung assailed Longtusk’s acute sense of smell. And there were herds of steppe horses — their winter coats fraying, stripes of color on their flanks — skittish and nervous, running together like flocks of startled birds.

In this abundance of life, death was never far away. There were wolves and the even more ferocious dholes, lynxes, tigers and leopards: carnivores to exploit the herbivores, the moving mountains of meat. Once, near an outcrop of rock, Longtusk glimpsed the greatest predator of them all — twice the size of its nearest competitor — a mighty cave cat.

And — serving as a further sign of the relentless shortness of life — condors and other carrion eaters wheeled overhead, waiting for the death of others, their huge out-folded wings black stripes against the blue sky.

Work began again. The mastodonts were put to digging and lifting and carrying for the Fireheads.

Longtusk was still restricted to crude carrying. Those who had shared his chores last season were now, by and large, tamed and trained and trusted, and had moved on to more significant work. Of last year’s bearers, only Longtusk remained as a pack animal.

What was worse, during the winter he had grown. Towering over the immature, restless calves he had to work with — his mighty tusks curling before him, useless — he endured his work, and the taunts of his fellows. But a cloud of humiliation and depression gathered around him.

Longtusk realized, with shock, that he was another year older, and he had withstood yet another cycle of seasons away from his Family. But compared to the heavy brutal reality of the mastodonts around him, his Family seemed like a dream receding into the depths of his memory.

He was surrounded by restraints, he was coming to realize, and the hobbles and goads of the keepers were only the most obvious. These mastodonts had lived in captivity for generations. None of them even knew what it was to be free, to live as the Cycle taught. And his own memories — half-formed, for he had been but a calf when taken — were fading with each passing month.

And besides, he didn’t want to be alone, an outsider, a rogue, a rebel. He wanted to belong. And these complacent, tamed mastodonts were the only community available to him. The keepers knew all this — the smarter ones — and used subtle ploys to reinforce the invisible barriers that restrained the mastodonts more effectively than rope or wood: pain for misbehavior, yes, but rewards and welcoming strokes when he accepted his place.

If he could no longer imagine freedom, a life different from this, how could he ever aspire to it?

So it was that when Walks With Thunder came to him and said that the keeper, Lemming, was going to make an attempt to teach him to accept a rider, Longtusk knew the time had come to defy his instincts.

Lemming snapped, "Baitho! Baitho!"

Walks With Thunder murmured, "He’s saying, Down. Lower your trunk, you idiot. Like this." And Thunder dipped his trunk gently, so it pooled on the ground.

Longtusk could see that all over the stockade mastodonts were turning toward him. Some of the Fireheads were pausing in their tasks to look at him, their spindly forelegs akimbo; he even spotted the blonde head of the little cub, Crocus, watching him curiously.

Longtusk growled. "They want to see the mammoth beaten at last."

"Ignore them," Walks With Thunder hissed. "They don’t matter."

The Firehead raised his stick and tapped Longtusk on the root of his trunk.

Longtusk rapped his trunk on the ground, and as the air was forced out of the trunk it emitted a deep, terrifying roar.

Lemming fell back, startled.

"Try again," Thunder urged.

I have to do this, Longtusk thought. I can do this.

He lowered his head and let his trunk reach the ground, as Thunder had done.

"Good lad," said Thunder. "It’s harder to submit than to defy. Hang onto that. You’re stronger than any of us, little grazer. Now you must prove it."

The Firehead stepped onto Longtusk’s trunk. Then he reached out and grabbed Longtusk’s ears, his tipped stick still clutched in his paw.

Longtusk, looking forward, found he was staring straight into the Firehead’s small, complex face.

This, he realized, is going to take a great deal of forbearance indeed.

"Utha! Utha!" cried Lemming.

"Now what?"

"He’s telling you to lift him up."

"Are you sure?"

"Just do it."

And Longtusk pushed up with his trunk, lifting smoothly.

With a thin wail the Firehead went sailing clean over his rump.

Walks With Thunder groaned. "Oh, Longtusk…"

The Firehead came bustling round in front of him. He was covered in mastodont dung, and he was jumping up and down furiously.

"At least he had a soft landing," Longtusk murmured.

"Baitho!"

"He wants to try again," Walks With Thunder said. "Go ahead, lower your trunk. That’s it. Let him climb on. Now take it easy, Longtusk. Don’t throw him — lift him, smoothly and gently."

Longtusk made a determined effort to keep the motions of his trunk even and steady.

But this time Lemming was thrown backward. He completed a neat back-flip and landed on his belly in the dirt.

Other Fireheads ran forward. They lifted him up and started slapping at his furs, making great clouds of dust billow around him. They were flashing their small teeth and making the harsh noise he had come to recognize as laughing: not kind, perhaps, but not threatening.

But now the other keeper, Spindle, came forward. His goad, tipped with sharp bone, was long and cruel, and he walked back and forth before Longtusk, eyeing him. He was saying something, his small, cruel mouth working.

"Take it easy, Longtusk," Walks With Thunder warned.

"What does he want?"

"If Lemming can’t tame you, then Spindle will do it. His way—"

Suddenly Spindle’s thin arm lashed out toward Longtusk. His goad fizzed through the air and cut cruelly into the soft flesh of Longtusk’s cheek.

Longtusk trumpeted in anger and reared up, as high as his hobbles would allow him. He could crush Spindle with a single stamp, or run him through with a tusk. How dare this ugly little creature attack him?

But the Firehead wasn’t even backing away. He was standing before Longtusk, forelegs extended, paws tucked over as if beckoning.

"Don’t, Longtusk," Walks With Thunder rumbled urgently. "It’s what he wants. Don’t you see? If you so much as scratch Spindle, they will destroy you in an instant. It’s what he wants…"

Longtusk knew Thunder was right. He growled and lowered his tusks, glaring at Spindle.

The Firehead, tiny teeth gleaming, lashed out once more, and again Longtusk felt the goad cut deep into his flesh.

But suddenly it ceased.

Longtusk looked down. The girl-cub, Crocus, was standing before him. She seemed angry, distressed; tears ran down her small face. She was tugging at Spindle’s foreleg, making him stop. Her father, Bedrock, and the Shaman Smokehat were standing behind her.

Spindle was hesitating, his blood-tipped goad still raised to Longtusk.

At last Bedrock gestured to Spindle. With a snort of disgust the keeper threw his goad in the dirt and stalked away.

Now Crocus stood before Longtusk, gazing up at him. She was growing taller, just as he was, and an elaborate cap of ivory beads adorned her long blonde hair, replacing the simple tooth necklace circle she had worn when younger. She seemed afraid, he saw, but she was evidently determined to master her fear.

"Baitho," she said, her voice small and clear. Down, down.

And Longtusk, the warm blood still welling from his face, obeyed.

She stepped onto his trunk, reached forward, and grabbed hold of his ears.

He raised his trunk, gingerly, carefully.

Thunder was very quiet and still, as if he scarcely dared breathe. "Right. Lower her onto your back. Gently! Recall how fragile she is… imagine she’s a flower blossom, and you don’t want to disturb a single petal."

Rumbling, working by feel, Longtusk did his best. He felt the cub’s skinny legs slide around his neck.

"How’s that?"

Walks With Thunder surveyed him critically. "Not bad. Except she’s the wrong way around. She’s facing your backside, Longtusk. Try again. Let her off."

Longtusk lowered his hind legs. Crocus skidded down his back, landing with a squeal in the dirt.

"By Kilukpuk’s hairy navel," Walks With Thunder groaned, and Bedrock stepped forward, anxious.

But Crocus, though a little dusty, was unharmed. She trotted around to Longtusk’s head once more. She pulled her face in the gesture he was coming to recognize as a smile, and she patted the blood-matted hair of his cheek. "Baitho," she said quietly.

Again he lowered his trunk for her.

This time he got her the right way around. Her legs wrapped around his neck, and he felt her little paws grasping at the long hairs on top of his head. She was a small warm bundle, delicate, so light he could scarcely feel her.

Rumbling, constrained by his hobbles, Longtusk took a cautious step forward. He felt the cub’s fingers digging deeper into his fur, and she squealed with alarm. He stopped, but she kicked at his flanks with her tiny feet, and called out, "Agit!"

"It’s all right," Walks With Thunder said. "She’s safe up there. Go forward. Just take it easy, Longtusk."

So he stepped forward again.

Crocus laughed with pleasure. Keepers ran alongside him — as did Bedrock, still wary, but grinning. The watching mastodonts raised their trunks and trumpeted in salute.

But the Shaman, ignored by the Fireheads and their leader, was glaring, quietly furious.

It was all a question of practice, of course.

By the end of that first day Longtusk could lift the little Firehead onto his back, delivering her the right way around, almost without effort. And by the end of the second day he was starting to learn what Crocus wanted. A gentle kick to the left ear — maybe accompanied by a thin cry of Chi! — meant he should go left. Chai Ghoom! and a kick to the right ear meant go right. Agit! meant go forward; Dhuth! meant stop. And so on.

By the end of the third day, Longtusk was starting to learn subtler commands, transmitted to him through the cub’s body movements. If Crocus stiffened her limbs and leaned back he knew he was supposed to stop. If she leaned forward and pushed his head downward he should kneel or stoop.

Crocus never used a goad on him.

It wasn’t all easy. Once he spied an exceptionally rich clump of herbs, glimpsed through the branches of a tree. He forgot what he was doing and went that way, regardless of the little creature on his back — who yelped as the branches swept her to the ground. Alternatively if Longtusk thought the path he was being told to select was uncomfortable or even dangerous — for instance, if it was littered with sharp scree that might cut his footpads — he simply wouldn’t go that way, regardless of the protests of the cub.

After many days of this the keeper, Spindle, came to him, early in the morning.

Spindle raised his goad. "Baitho! Baitho!"

Longtusk simply glared at him, chewing his feed, refusing to comply.

The beating started then, as intense as before, and Longtusk felt old wounds opening on his cheek. But still he would not bow to Spindle.

Nobody else, he thought. Only the girl-cub Crocus.

At last Crocus came running with the other keepers. With sharp words she dismissed Spindle. Then, with Lemming’s help, she applied a thick, soothing salve to the cuts Spindle had inflicted on Longtusk’s cheek and thighs.

Without waiting for the command, Longtusk lowered his trunk and allowed her to climb onto his back once more.

Although Longtusk’s workload didn’t change, he became accustomed to meeting Crocus at the beginning or end of each day. She would ride him around the mastodont stockade, and Longtusk learned to ignore the mocking, somewhat envious jeers of the mastodonts. As she approached he would coil and uncoil his trunk with pleasure. Sometimes she brought him tidbits of food, which he chewed as she talked to him steadily in her incomprehensible, complex tongue.

She seemed fascinated by his fur. Longtusk had a dense underfur of fine woolly hair that covered almost all his skin. His rump, belly, flanks, throat and trunk were covered as well by a dense layer of long, coarse guard hair that dangled to the ground, skirt-like. The guard hair melded across his shoulders with a layer of thick but less coarse hairs that came up over his shoulders from low on the neck.

Crocus spent a great deal of time examining all this, lifting his guard hairs and teasing apart its layers. As for Longtusk, he would touch Crocus’s sweet face with the wet tip of his trunk, and then rest against her warmth, eyes closed.

Eventually Crocus’s visits became a highlight of his day — almost as welcome as, and rather less baffling than, his occasional meetings with the young mastodont Cow, Neck Like Spruce.

Once he took Crocus for a long ride across the bare steppe. They found a rock pool, and Longtusk wallowed there while Crocus played and swam. The sun was still high and warm, and he stretched out on the ground. She climbed onto his hairy belly and lay on top of him, soothed by the rumble of his stomach, plucking his hair and singing.

Even though he knew he remained a captive — even though her affection was that of an owner to the owned — and even though the growing affection between them was only a more subtle kind of trap, harder to break than any hobbles — still, he felt as content as he had been since he had been separated from his Family.

But he was aware of the jealous glares of Spindle and Smokehat.

Longtusk grew impatient with all these obscure mental games, the strange obsessions of the Fireheads. But Thunder counseled caution.

"Be wary," he would say, as the mastodonts gathered after a day’s work. "You have a friend now. She recalls you once saved her life. And that’s good. But you’re also acquiring enemies. The Shaman is jealous. It is only the power of her father, Bedrock, which is protecting you. Life is more complicated than you think, little grazer. Only death is simple…"

3 The Settlement

The Fireheads’ numbers were growing, with many young being born, and they worked hard to feed themselves.

As spring wore into summer, Firehead hunters began making journeys into the surrounding steppe. The hunters looked for tracks and droppings. What they sought, Longtusk was told, was the spoor of wolves, for that told them that there was a migrant herd somewhere nearby, tracked by the carnivores.

And at last the first of the migrants returned: deer, some of them giants, their heads bowed under the weight of their immense spreads of antlers.

The deer trekked enormous distances between their winter range in the far south, on the fringe of the lands where trees grew thickly, and their calving grounds on the northern steppe. The calving grounds were often dismal places of fog and marshy land and bare rock. But they had the great advantage that most predators, seeking places to den themselves, would fall away long before the calving grounds were reached. And when the calves were born the deer would form into vast herds in preparation for the migration back to the south: enormous numbers of them, so many a single herd might stretch from horizon to horizon, blackening the land.

To Longtusk these great migrations, of animals and birds, seemed like breathing, a great inhalation of life.

And the Fireheads waited for the migrant animals to pass, movements as predictable as the seasons themselves, and prepared to hunt.

One day, late in the summer, Crocus walked with her father and the Shaman to the bone stockpile, a short distance from the mastodont stockade.

Longtusk, still not fully trusted, wasn’t allowed anywhere near this grisly heap of flensed bones, gleaming in the low afternoon sun.

Crocus walked around the pile, one finger in her small mouth. She ran her paws over clutches of vertebrae, and huge shoulder blades, and bare leg bones almost as tall as she was. At last she stopped before a great skull with sweeping tusks. As the skull’s long-vacant eye sockets gaped at her, the cub rubbed the flat surfaces of the mammoth’s worn yellow teeth.

Longtusk wondered absently what that long-dead tusker would have made of this.

Crocus looked up at her father and the Shaman, talking rapidly and jumping up and down with excitement. This skull was evidently her choice. Bedrock and Smokehat reached down and, hauling together, dragged the skull from the heap. It was too heavy for them to lift.

Then, his absurd headdress smoking, the Shaman sang and danced around the ancient bones, sprinkling them with water and dust. Longtusk had seen this kind of behavior before. It seemed that the Shaman was making the skull special, as if it was a living thing he could train to protect the little cub who had chosen it.

When the Shaman was done, Bedrock gestured to the mastodont trainers. Lemming and the others walked through the stockade and selected Jaw Like Rock and another strong Bull. Evidently they were to carry the skull off.

But Crocus seemed angry. She ran into the stockade herself, shouting, "Baitho! Baitho!"

Longtusk lowered his trunk to the ground and bent his head. With the confidence of long practice she wriggled past his tusks, grabbed his ears and in a moment was sitting in her comfortable place at his neck. Then, with a sharp slap on his scalp, she urged him forward. "Agit!"

She was, he realized, driving him directly toward the pile of bones.

As he neared the pile an instinctive dread of those grisly remains built up in him. The other Fireheads seemed to sense his tension.

He kept walking, crossing the muddy, trampled ground, one broad step at a time.

He reached the great gaping skull where it lay on the ground. There was a lingering smell of dead mammoth about it, and it seemed to glare at him in disapproval.

Crocus tapped his head. "A dhur! A dhur!" She wanted him to pick it up.

I can’t, he thought.

He heard a high-pitched growl around him. The hunters were approaching him with spears raised to their shoulders, all pointing at his heart.

The Shaman watched, eyes glittering like quartz pebbles.

From out of nowhere, a storm cloud of danger was gathering around Longtusk. He felt himself quiver, and in response Crocus’s fingers tightened their grip on his fur.

Longtusk stared into the vacant eyes of the long-dead mammoth. What, he wondered, would you have me do?

It was as if a voice sounded deep in his belly. Remember me, it said. That’s all. Remember me.

He understood.

He touched the vacant skull with his trunk, lifted it, let it fall back to the dirt. Then he turned.

He faced a wall of Firehead hunters. One of them actually jabbed his chest with a quartz spear tip, hard enough to break the skin. But Longtusk, descending into the slow rhythms of his kind, ignored these fluttering Fireheads, even the spark of pain at his chest.

He gathered twigs and soil and cast them on the ancient bones, and then turned backward and touched the bones with the sensitive pads of his back feet. Longtusk was trying to Remember the spirit which had once occupied this pale bone, this Bull with no name.

The Fireheads watched with evident confusion — and the Shaman with rage, at this ceremony so much older and deeper than his own posturing. Farther away, the mastodonts rumbled their approval.

The Firehead cub slid to the ground, waving back the spears of the hunters. Slowly, hesitantly, Crocus joined in. She slipped off her moccasins and touched the skull with her own small feet, and bent to scoop more dirt over the cold bones. She was copying Longtusk, trying to Remember too — or, at least, showing him she understood.

At last, Longtusk felt he was done. Now the skull was indeed just a piece of bone, discarded.

Crocus stepped up to him, rubbed the fur between his eyes, and climbed briskly onto his back. She said gently, "A dhur."

Clumsily, but without hesitation, he slid his tusks under the skull and wrapped his trunk firmly over the top of it. Then he straightened his neck and lifted.

The skull wasn’t as heavy as it looked; mammoth bone was porous, to make it light despite its great bulk and strength. He cradled it carefully.

Then — under the guidance of Crocus, and with Bedrock, the Shaman, and assorted keepers and spear-laden hunters following him like wolves trailing migrant deer — he carried the skull toward the Firehead settlement.

Ahead of him, smoke curled into the air from a dozen fires.

The trail to the settlement was well beaten, a rut dug into the steppe by the feet of Fireheads and mastodonts. But Longtusk had not been this way before.

He passed storage pits. Their walls were scoured by the tusks of the mastodonts who had dug out these pits, and they were lined with slabs of smooth rock. Longtusk could see the pits were half-filled with hunks of dried and salted meat, or with dried grasses to provide feed for the mastodonts; winter seemed remote, but already these clever, difficult Fireheads were planning for its rigors.

Farther in toward the center of the settlement there were many hearths: out in the open air, blackened circles on the ground everywhere, many of them smoldering with dayfires. Chunks of meat broiled on spits, filling the air with acrid smoke.

There was, in fact, a lot of meat in the settlement.

Some of it dangled from wooden frames, varying in condition from dry and curled to fresh, some even dripping blood. There were a few small animals, lemmings and rabbits and even a young fox, hung up with their necks lolling, obviously dead.

And, most of all, there were Fireheads everywhere: not the few keepers and hunters the mastodonts encountered in their stockade and during the course of their work, but many more, more than he could count. There were males and females, old ones with yellowed, gappy teeth and frost-white hair, young ones who ran, excited, even infants in their mothers’ arms. They all wore thick clothing of fur and skin, stuffed with grasses and wool; all but the smallest cubs wore thick, warming moccasins.

Some of the Fireheads worked at the hearths, turning spitted meat. One female had a piece of skin staked out over the ground and she was scraping it with a sharpened stone, removing fat and clinging flesh and sinew, leaving the surface smooth and shining. He saw a male making deerskin into rope, cutting strips crosswise for strength. They seemed, in fact, to use every part of the animals they hunted: tendons were twisted into strands of sinew, and bladders, stomach and intestines were used to hold water.

They made paint, of ground-up rock mixed with animal fat, or lichen soaked in aurochs’ urine. Many of them had marked their skins with stripes and circles of the red and yellow coloring, and they wore strings of beads made of pretty, pierced stones or chipped bones.

Many of the Fireheads were fascinated by Longtusk. They broke off what they were doing and followed, the adults staring, the cubs dancing and laughing.

Here was one small group of Fireheads — perhaps a family — having a meal, gathered around a sputtering fire. They had bones that had been broiled on their fire, and they cracked the bones on rocks and sucked out the soft, greasy marrow within. Longtusk wondered absently what animals the bones had come from.

As he passed — a great woolly mammoth bearing a huge skull and with the daughter of the chief clinging proudly to his back — the Fireheads stopped eating, stared, and joined the slow, gathering procession that trailed after Longtusk.

…Now, surrounded by Fireheads, he was aware of discomfort, a sharp prodding at his rump.

He turned. He saw the Shaman, Smokehat, bearing one of the hunters’ big game spears. The quartz tip was red with blood: Longtusk’s blood.

He saw calculation in the Shaman’s small, pinched face. Sensing his tension, Smokehat was deliberately prodding him, trying to make him respond — perhaps by growing angry, throwing off Crocus. If that happened, if he went rogue here at the heart of the Firehead settlement, Longtusk would surely be killed.

Longtusk snorted in disgust, turned his back and continued to walk.

But the next time he felt the tell-tale prod at his rump he swished his tail, as if brushing away flies. He heard a thin mewl of complaint.

Smokehat was clutching his cheek, and blood leaked around his fingers. Longtusk’s tail hairs had brushed the Firehead’s face, splitting it open like a piece of old fruit. With murder in his sharp eyes, the Shaman was led away for treatment; and Longtusk, with quiet contentment, continued his steady plod.

He heard a trumpeted greeting. He slowed, startled.

There were mastodonts here: a small Family, a few adult Cows, calves holding onto their mothers’ tails with their spindly little trunks. They wandered freely through the settlement, without hobbles or restraints, mingling with the Fireheads.

One of the Cows was Neck Like Spruce.

"Well, well," she said. "Quite a spectacle. Life getting dull out in the stockade, was it?"

When he replied, his voice was tight, his rumbles shallow. "If you haven’t anything useful to say, leave me alone."

She sensed his tension, and glanced now at the hunters who followed him, spears still ready to fly. "Just stay calm," she said seriously. "They are used to us. In fact they feel safer if we are here. Where there are mastodonts, the cats and wolves will not attack… Where are you going?"

He growled. "Do I look as if I have the faintest idea?"

She trumpeted her amusement, and broke away from her Family to walk alongside him.

At last the motley procession approached the very heart of the Firehead settlement, and Longtusk slowed, uncertain.

There were larger structures here — perhaps a dozen of them, arranged in an uneven circle. They were rough domes of gray-green and white. The largest of all, and the most incomplete, was at the very center.

Crocus slid easily to the ground. She took the tip of Longtusk’s trunk in her small paw and led him into the circle of huts.

He stopped by one of the huts. It was made of turf and stretched skin and rock, piled up high. On the expanses of bare animal skin, there were strange markings, streaks and whirls of ochre and other dyes, and there and there the skin was marked with the unmistakable imprint of a Firehead paw, marked out as a silhouette in red-brown coloring. The dome-shaped hut had a hole cut in its top, from which smoke curled up to the sky.

There were white objects arrayed around the base of the hut. White, complex shapes.

Mammoth bones.

Big skulls had been pushed into the ground by their tusk sockets, all around the hut. Curving bones, shoulder blades and pelvises, had been layered along the lower wall of the hut. There were heavier bones, femurs and bits of skulls, tied to the turf roof. And two great curving tusks had been shoved into the ground and their sharp points tied together to form an arch over a skin-flap doorway.

Some of the bones were chipped and showed signs of where they had been gnawed by predators, perhaps as they had emerged from the remote river bank where they had been mined.

Now the flap of skin parted at the front of the hut, and a woman pushed out into the colder air. She gaped at the woolly mammoth standing before her, and clutched her squealing infant tighter to her chest.

Longtusk, baffled, was filled with dread and horror. "By Kilukpuk’s last breath, what is this?"

"This is how the Fireheads live, Longtusk," said Neck Like Spruce. "The turf and rock keeps in the warmth of their fires…"

"But, Spruce, the bones. Why…?"

She trumpeted her irritation at him. "This is a cold and windy place, if you hadn’t noticed, Longtusk. The Fireheads have to make their huts sturdy. They prefer wood, but there is little wood on this steppe, and what there was they have mostly burned. But there are plenty of bones."

"Mammoth bones."

"Yes. Longtusk, your kind have lived here for a long time, and the ground is full of their bones. In some ways bone is better than wood, because it is immune to frost and damp and insects. These huts are built to last a long time, Longtusk, many seasons… And it does no harm," she said softly.

"I know." For, he realized, these mammoths had long gone to the aurora, and had no use for these discarded scraps.

There was a gentle tugging at his trunk. He glanced down. It was Crocus; she was trying to get him to come closer to the big central hut.

He rumbled and followed her.

This hut would eventually be the biggest of them all — a fitting home for Bedrock and his family, including little Crocus — but it was incomplete, without a roof.

A ring of mammoth femurs had been thrust into the ground in a circle at the base, and an elaborate pattern of shoulder blades had been piled up around the perimeter of the hut, overlapping neatly like the scales of some immense fish.

The floor had been dug away, making a shallow pit. Flat stones had been set in a circle at the center of the hut to make a hearth. And there was a small cup of carved stone, filled with sticky animal fat, within which a length of plaited mastodont fur burned slowly, giving off a greasy smoke. With a flash of intuition he saw that it would be dark inside the hut when the roof had been completed; perhaps sputtering flames like these would give the illusion of day, even in darkness.

Under Crocus’s urging, he laid down the skull he carried, just outside the circle of leg bones. Crocus jumped on it, excited, and made big swooping gestures with her skinny forelegs. Perhaps this skull would be built into the hut. Its glaring eye sockets and sweeping tusks would make an imposing entrance.

Now Crocus ran into the incomplete hut, picked up a bundle wrapped in skin, and held it up to Longtusk. When the skin wrapping fell away Longtusk saw that it was a slab of sandstone, and strange loops and whorls had been cut into its surface.

"Touch it," called Neck Like Spruce.

Cautiously Longtusk reached forward with his trunk’s fragile pink tip, and explored the surface of the rock.

"…It’s warm."

"They put the rocks in the fires to make them hot, then clutch them to their bellies in the night."

Now Crocus was jabbering, pointing to the markings on the skin walls, streaks and whorls and lines, daubed there by Firehead fingers. The cub seemed excited.

He traced his trunk tip over the patterns, but could taste or smell nothing but ochre and animal fat. He growled, baffled.

"It’s another Firehead habit," Spruce said testily. "Each pattern means something. Look again, Longtusk. The Fireheads aren’t like us; they have poor smell and hearing, and rely on their eyes. Don’t touch it or smell it. Try to look through Firehead eyes. Imagine it isn’t just a sheet of skin, but a — a hole in the wall. Imagine you aren’t looking at markings just in front of your face, but forms that are far away. Look with your eyes, Longtusk, just your eyes. Now — now what do you see?"

After a time, with Crocus chattering constantly in his ear, he managed it.

Here was a curving outline, with a smooth sheen of ochre across its interior, that became a bison, strong and proud. Here was a row of curved lines, one after the other, that was a line of deer, heads up and running. Here was a horse, dipping its head and stamping its small foot. Here was a strange creature that was half leaping stag and half Firehead, glaring out at him.

He looked around the settlement with new eyes — and he saw that there were makings everywhere, on every available surface: the walls of the huts, the faces of the Fireheads, the shafts of the hunters’ spears, even Crocus’s heated stone. And all of the markings meant something, showing Fireheads and animals, mountains and flowers.

The illusions were transient and flat. These "animals" had no scent, no voices, no weight to set the Earth ringing. They were just shadows of color and line.

Nevertheless they were here. And everywhere he looked, they danced.

The settlement was alive, transformed by the minds and paws of the Fireheads, made vibrant and rich — as if the land itself had become conscious, full of reflections of itself. It was a transformation that could not even have been imagined by any mammoth or mastodont who ever lived. He trembled at its thin, strange beauty.

How could any creatures be capable of such wonder — and, at the same time, such cruelty? These Fireheads were strange and complex beings indeed.

Now Crocus dragged his face back to the wall of her own hut. Here was a row of stocky, flat-backed shapes, with curving tusks before them.

Mastodonts. It was a line of mastodonts, their tusks, drawn with simple, confident sweeps, proud and strong.

But Crocus was pointing especially at a figure at the front of the line. It was crudely drawn, as if by a cub — by Crocus herself, he realized.

It looked like a mastodont, but its back sloped down from a hump at its neck. Its tusks were long and curved before its high head, and long hairs draped down from its trunk and belly.

He growled, confused, distressed.

"Longtusk?" Neck Like Spruce called. "That’s you, Longtusk. Crocus made you on the wall. You see? She was trying to honor you."

"I understand. It’s just—"

"What?"

"I haven’t seen a mammoth since I was separated from my Family. Neck Like Spruce, I think I’ve forgotten what I look like."

"Oh, Longtusk…"

Crocus came to him, perceiving his sudden distress. She wrapped her arms around his trunk, buried her face in his hair, and murmured soothing noises.

4 The Hunt

Winter succeeded summer, frost following fire.

Sometimes, Longtusk dreamed:

Yellow plain, blue sky, a landscape huge, flat, elemental, dominated by the unending grind and crack of ice. And mammoths sweeping over the land like clouds -

He would wake with a start.

All around him was order: the mastodont stockade, the spreading Firehead settlement, the smoke spiraling to the sky. This was the reality of his life, not that increasingly remote plain, the mammoth herds that covered the land. That had been no more than the start of his journey — a journey that had ended here.

Hadn’t it?

After all, what else was there? Where else could he go? What else was there to do with his life, but serve the Fireheads?

Troubled, he returned to sleep.

And five years wore away.

The hunting party of Fireheads and mastodonts — and one woolly mammoth — marched proudly across the landscape. The high summer cast short shadows of Longtusk and his rider: Crocus, of course, now fully grown, long-legged and elegant, and as strong and brave as any of the male Firehead hunters. She was equipped for the hunt. She carried a quartz-tipped spear, and wore a broad belt slung over her shoulder, laden with stone knives and hammers, and — most prized of all — an atlatl, a dart thrower made of sculpted deer bone.

"…Ah," Walks With Thunder said now, and he paused. "Look."

Longtusk looked down at the ground. At first he saw nothing but an unremarkable patch of steppe grass, with a little purple saxifrage. Then he made out scattered pellets of dung.

Walks With Thunder poked at the pellets with his trunk tip. "See the short bitten-off twigs in there? Not like mastodonts; we leave long twisted bits of fiber in our dung. And we produce neat piles too; they kick it around the place as it emerges…" He brought a piece of dung into his mouth. "Warm. Fresh. They are close. Softly, now."

Alert, evidently excited, he trotted on, and the party followed.

Over the years Longtusk had been involved in many of the Fireheads’ hunts. Most of them targeted the smaller herbivores. The Fireheads would follow a herd of deer or horse and pick off a vulnerable animal — a cow slowed by pregnancy, or a juvenile, or the old or lame — and finish it quickly. Then they would butcher it with their sharpened stones and have the mastodonts carry back the dripping meat, skin and bones.

The hunts were usually brief, efficient, routine events, and only rarely would the hunters take on an animal the size of, say, a giant deer. The hunters were after all seeking food, and they tried to make their success as certain as possible, minimizing the risks they took.

But today’s hunt was different. Today they were going after the largest prey of all. And only the strongest and most able hunters, including Bedrock himself, had been included in the party.

Though Crocus had joined in hunts before — the only female Firehead to do so — and had become skillful with spear and stone knife, this was the first time she had been allowed by her father to take part in such an event. And so — because Longtusk still refused to allow any other rider on his back but Crocus — it was the first time for him, too.

They were heading west, and they came to a strange land.

There were pools here, but they were small and misshapen and filled with icy, cloudy, sour water. Trees, mostly spruce, struggled to grow, but they were stunted and leaned at drunken angles. The ground was broken and hummocky, and Longtusk had to step carefully. Here and there, in fact, the turf was no more than a thin crust over a deeper hollow. With his deeper senses he could hear the peculiar echoes the crusty ground returned, but still an incautious footstep could lead to a stumble or worse.

Walks With Thunder, with Bedrock proudly borne on his back, loped alongside Longtusk. "The ice is retreating to its northern fastness. But this is a place where a remnant of ice was covered over by wind-blown silt and soil before it could melt. The earth is thin; the trees can establish only shallow roots, so they grow badly. And the ice is still there, beneath us… Look."

They came to a low ridge, half Longtusk’s height. Under a lip of grass, he could see ice protruding above the ground, dirty, glistening with meltwater.

"The stagnant ice is slowly melting away. As it does so it leaves hollows and caverns under a crust of unsupported earth. But sometimes the rain and meltwater will work away at the ice, turning it into a honeycomb. So watch your step, little grazer, for you don’t want to snap a tusk or an ankle. And you don’t want to dump your rider on her behind."

So Longtusk stepped carefully.

When the sun was at its highest the party paused to rest. The mastodonts were freed of their packs, hobbled loosely and allowed to wander off in search of food.

Later some of them, Longtusk included, underwent some refresher training in preparation for the hunt, along with their riders. Jaw Like Rock, ridden by the cruel Spindle, led them.

Jaw trotted back and forth across the broken ground, and Spindle, riding Jaw’s back, got cautiously to his feet. His feet were bare to improve his grip, and he kept his balance by holding out his forelegs.

Jaw kept up a commentary for the mastodonts. "You can see he can hold his place up there. The hunters stand so they get a better leverage when they hurl their spears and darts.

"But you have to realize it isn’t natural. He isn’t stable. I can feel he’s on the brink of falling over. He can shift his feet and hind legs to adjust his balance, and I have to try to keep my back steady as I move. See? It gets a lot harder when you’re racing over this crusty ground alongside the prey… And if you stop working at it even for a moment—"

He stopped dead.

Spindle tried to keep his balance, waving his forelegs in the air. But without Jaw’s assistance, he was helpless. With a wail, he tumbled to the ground, landing hard.

Longtusk heard his own rider, Crocus, break into peals of laughter. The mastodonts trumpeted and slapped the ground with their trunks.

Spindle was predictably furious. He got to his feet, brushing off dirt and grass blades. He picked up his goad and began to lash at Jaw’s face and rump.

The other keepers turned away, as if disgusted, and the mastodonts rumbled their disapproval.

Longtusk said grimly, "I don’t know how you put up with that."

Jaw eyed him, stolidly enduring his punishment. "It’s worth it. Anyway, nothing lasts forever—"

A contact rumble washed over the steppe. "Silence," Walks With Thunder called. "Silence. Rhinos…"

There were three of them, Longtusk counted: two adults and a calf.

They were at the edge of a milk-white pond. One of the adults — perhaps a female — was in the water, which lapped around the fur fringing her belly. Her calf was in the pond beside her, almost afloat, sometimes putting her head under the water and paddling around her mother.

The other adult, probably a male, stood on the shore of the pond. He was grazing, trampling the grass flat and then using his big forelip to scoop it into his mouth.

They were woolly rhinos.

They were broad, fat tubes of muscle and fat. Their skin was heavy and wrinkled. On massive necks were set squat, low-slung heads with small ears and tiny black eyes. Their bodies were coated with dark brown fur, short on top but dangling in long fringes from their bellies. They had high humps over their shoulders, short tails and, strangest of all, each had two long curving horns protruding up from their noses. The bull’s nasal horn in particular was long and glinting and sharp.

Small birds clustered on the bull’s back, pecking, searching for mosquitoes and grubs.

Now the cow climbed out of the water, ponderous and slow, followed by her calf. Dripping, she grunted, shifted her hind legs, and emitted a spray of urine, horizontal and powerful, that splashed into the pond water and over the nearby shore. The urine came in gargantuan proportions. Longtusk saw, bemused, a series of powerful blasts, until it dwindled to a trickle down the long hairs of the cow’s hind legs.

The bull, rumbling in response, immediately emptied his own bladder in a spray that covered the cow’s. Then he rubbed his hind feet in the wet soil.

Thunder grunted. "The rhinos talk through their urine and dung. When other rhinos come this way, they will be able to tell that the cow over there is in oestrus, ready to mate. But the bull has covered her marker, telling the other bulls that she is his…"

They were almost like mammoths, Longtusk thought, wondering: short, squat, deformed — nevertheless built to survive the harshness of winter.

The party of mastodonts and Fireheads began to pad softly forward.

"They haven’t sensed us yet," said Thunder. "See the way the Bull’s ears are up, his tail is low? He’s at his ease. Let’s hope he stays that way."

The rhino calf was the first to notice them.

She (or he, it was impossible to tell) was prizing up dead wood with her tiny bump of a horn, apparently seeking termites. Then she seemed to scent the mastodonts. She flattened her ears and lifted her tail.

She ran around her mother, prodding her with her horn. At first the mother, dozing, took no notice. But the calf put both her front feet on the mother’s face and blew in her ear. The cow got to her feet, shaking her head, and rumbled a warning to the male.

The rhinos began to lumber away from the pond, in the direction of open ground. The small birds which had been working on the backs of the rhinos flew off in a brief burst of startled motion.

The mastodonts and their riders pursued, rapidly picking up speed. Those animals heavy with pack were left behind, while others lightly laden for the chase hurtled after the rhinos: they included Thunder, bearing Bedrock, Jaw with Spindle — and Longtusk, carrying Crocus, who clung to his hair, whooping her excitement as the steppe grass flew past.

"This is it," said Thunder, tense and excited. "We’re going after the bull."

Longtusk said, "Why not the cow? She is slowed by the calf."

"But she is not such a prize. See the way the bull’s back is flat and straight, the cow’s sagging? That shows she is old and weak. This hunt is a thing of prestige. Today these hunters are chasing honor, not the easiest meat. We go for the male."

Soon they passed the cow and her calf. The cow flattened her ears, wrinkled her nose and half-opened her mouth, as if she was about to charge. But the mastodonts and their riders ignored her, flying onward over the steppe in pursuit of the greater quarry.

They drew alongside the male rhino. He ran almost elegantly, Longtusk thought: like a horse, his tail high, his feet lifting over the broken ground. Even as he ran he bellowed his protest and swung his powerful horns this way and that, trying to reach the mastodonts.

With practiced ease Bedrock slid to his feet on the broad back of Walks With Thunder and prepared his atlatl. He raised a dart — it was almost as long as Bedrock was tall, and its tip, pure quartz crystal, glinted cruelly — and he fitted a notch in the base of the dart to the thrower. The thrower, perhaps a third the length of the dart, was carved from the femur of a giant deer.

Longtusk could feel Crocus clambering to her feet on his back. She was unsteady, and he sensed her leaning forward, ready to grab at his hairs if she felt herself falling. Nevertheless she hefted her own dart.

And she threw first.

She hurled hard and well — but not accurately enough; the dart’s tip glanced off the rhino’s back, scraping through his hair, and slid onward toward the ground.

Now her father raised his dart. He held it flat, with the thrower resting on his shoulder, his hand just behind his ear. Then, with savage force, his entire lean body whipping forward, he thrust at the dart. Longtusk saw the thin shaft bow into a curve, and then spring away from Bedrock, as if it was a live thing, hissing through the air.

The hard quartz tip shone like a falling star as it flew at the rhino. The dart hit beneath the rhino’s rib cage — exactly where it could do most damage.

The dart point had been designed and made by master craftsmen for its purpose. It was long, sharp and did not split off or shatter on first impact. Instead it drove itself through the rhino’s hair and layers of hide and fat, embedding itself in the soft, warm organs within.

The rhino screeched, his voice strangely high for such an immense animal. Longtusk could smell the sharp metallic tang of the blood which spurted crimson from the wound, and black fluid oozed from the rhino’s lips.

But still, with awesome willpower, the rhino ran on. The pain must have been agonizing as the dangling, twisting spear ripped at the wound, widening it further and deepening the internal injury.

Now another mastodont bearing a young, keen-eyed hunter called Bareface drew alongside the rhino. The hunter took careful aim and hurled his dart — not at the rhino’s injured torso, but at his hind legs.

The dark sliced through fur and flesh. The rhino fell flat on the ground and rolled over, snapping off the dart that protruded from his side.

Still defiant, the rhino tried to rise. But his hind leg dangled uselessly, pumping blood, and he fell again in dirt already soaked with his own blood. Urine and dung gushed, liquid, adding to the mess in the dirt.

The mastodonts halted. The Fireheads jumped down, approaching the rhino warily.

The rhino thrashed in the dirt and bellowed his rage, slashing the air with his long horn. But he was already mortally wounded; a spray of red-black liquid shot from his mouth.

Defying the swings of that cruel horn, Bedrock leaped nimbly onto the rhino’s broad back, grabbing great pawfuls of fur. With grim determination, already covered in dirt and blood, Bedrock crawled forward until he reached the base of the rhino’s neck. Then he pulled from his belt a long, sharp chisel of rock. Defying the thrashings of the rhino, he stabbed the chisel into the creature’s flesh, at the top of his spine. Then he produced a hammer rock from his belt.

Under Bedrock’s single blow, the stone blade slid easily through the rhino’s hide.

As his spine was severed the rhino’s eyes widened, startled, almost curious. Then he slumped flat against the blood-stained dirt, his magnificent body reduced to a flaccid, quivering mound.

He raised his head to face Longtusk. He breathed in short sharp gasps, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.

Walks With Thunder said grimly, "He’s trying to speak to you. Who are you? Why are you doing this?"

"How can you understand him?"

"We are all Hotbloods, grazer."

Then, mercifully, Bedrock drove another blade into the rhino’s spine.

The rhino’s head slumped to the ground. His body rumbled and shuddered as its huge, complex processes closed down.

When life was gone, panting mastodonts and blood-spattered Fireheads stood away from the corpse. They seemed united by the vivid moment, stilled, as if the world pivoted on the death of this huge, defiant animal.

Then Bedrock climbed onto the rhino’s back, his furs stained with blood. He raised his paws in the air and hollered his triumph, and his hunters yelled in response. They sound like wolves, Longtusk thought; it is the feral cry of the predator.

And I have run with them. For an instant an image of his mother came into his mind, her smell and warmth and touch, as clearly as if she was standing before him. Oh, Milkbreath, I have come on a long journey since I last saw you!

Bedrock jumped down and walked to the rhino’s slumped head. He gripped his hammer rock and swung it against the base of that huge horn. With a sharp crack, the horn split away from a shallow depression in the rhino’s face. Bedrock raised the horn to the sky, then tucked it into his belt.

The hunters gathered around the rhino, producing their knives of stone, and began to slice through skin and fur.

Longtusk said, "Now what? It will take a while to butcher this huge animal."

"Oh, they aren’t going to butcher it," said Jaw Like Rock. "It’s too big a beast to haul across the steppe, too much meat to eat and store. They will dig out the liver and consume that. And, of course, Bedrock has his horn…"

"The horn?"

Walks With Thunder rumbled, "Bedrock has a dozen horns already. He will take this one and have it shaped into a dagger or a drinking cup, and he will treasure it forever, a token of his bravery. This wasn’t about gathering meat. Today the Fireheads have proved, you see, what brave hunters they are… Look up there."

Condors wheeled overhead, their wings stretched out, cold and black.

"They know," said Thunder. "They have seen this before, and—"

A Firehead cried out.

It was Bedrock. He stood upright, but a look of puzzlement clouded his face. And his body was quivering.

A thin, small spear protruded from his skull.

Then his eyes rolled back in his head, blood gushed from his mouth, and he collapsed as if his bones had dissolved.

Crocus rushed forward and began to keen, her voice high and thin.

Walks With Thunder said grimly, "Circle."

Longtusk immediately obeyed, taking his place with the others in a rough protective ring around the fallen Firehead. It was an ancient command, millions of years old, so old it was common to both mastodonts and mammoths.

Now Longtusk could smell and hear the assailants who had so suddenly struck down Bedrock. They were Fireheads, of course — but not from the settlement. They were some way away, and they danced and stamped their delight. The skin of their small faces was coated with a fine white powder — perhaps rock flour, sieved from the shallow pools of this strange landscape — a powder that stank sharply of salt.

The young hunter, Bareface, his shaven-smooth visage twisted into an unrecognizable snarl, whipped his foreleg with suppleness and speed.

A boomerang went flying. It spun, whistling, as it soared through the thin air. It was a piece of mammoth ivory carved smooth and curved like a bird’s wing, with one side preserving the convex surface of the original tusk, the other polished almost flat.

The strange Fireheads didn’t even seem to see it coming — they scattered as it flew among them, like mice disturbed by an owl — but the boomerang flew unerringly to the temple of one of them, knocking him to the ground.

Jaw growled his approval. "The one who struck down Bedrock. He will not live out the day…"

"Whiteskins," Thunder muttered. "I never thought I’d see their ugly, capering forms again."

Longtusk said, "You’ve met them before?"

"Oh, yes. Many times. But never so far north."

Now Crocus came running to Longtusk. Her face was contorted with rage, and her blonde hair blew around her. She held the stone chisel which Bedrock had driven into the rhino’s spine. "Baitho! Baitho!" He lowered his head and trunk, and she grabbed his ears and scrambled onto his back. "Agit!"

Her intention was unmistakable.

Without thought — despite rumbles of warning from the mastodonts, cries of alarm from the hunters — Longtusk charged toward the Whiteskins.

Longtusk expected the Whiteskins to flee. But they held their ground. They dropped to their knees and raised weapons of some kind.

Suddenly there were more small spears of the type that had felled Bedrock flying through the air around him, fast and straight.

"They are not spears," puffed Thunder as he ran after the mammoth, "but arrows. The Whiteskins have bows — never mind, grazer! Just keep your head high when you run. You can take an arrow or two — but not your rider."

And, as if in response to Thunder’s warning, a small flint-tipped spear — no, an arrow — plunged out of nowhere into Longtusk’s cheek. The pain was sharp and intense; the small blade had reached as far as his tongue.

Without breaking stride, he curled his trunk and plucked the arrow out of his cheek. Blood sprayed, but immediately the pain lessened.

Jaw Like Rock was charging past him, the keeper Spindle clinging to Jaw’s hair as if for life itself, his mouth drawn back in a rictus of terror. Jaw called, "Had a mosquito bite, grazer?"

"Something like that."

The big tusker trumpeted his exhilaration and charged forward.

Still the strange Fireheads did not break and run.

An arrow lodged in the foreleg of Jaw Like Rock. Longtusk could smell the sharp, coppery stink of fresh blood. Jaw screamed and pulled up, despite repeated beatings from Spindle on his back. Jaw knelt down, snapping away the arrow. Then, bellowing with rage and pain, he plunged on.

Still Spindle continued to beat him and scream in his ear.

Now they were on the Whiteskins. Mastodonts, Whiteskins and Fireheads flew at each other in a crude, uncoordinated mêlée, and trumpets, yells and screams broke the dust-laden air.

Longtusk lunged at the Whiteskins around him with his tusks and trunk. But, nimble and light on their feet, they stayed out of his reach. They jabbed at him with their spears and rocks, aiming to slash at his trunk or belly, or trying for his legs.

Calmly, Thunder called to Longtusk: "Watch out for those knives. These brutes have fought us before. They are trying for your hamstrings. Recall that rhino, grazer. I’ve no intention of carrying you back to the stockade."

Longtusk growled his gratitude.

Jaw Like Rock, enraged by pain, feinted at a fat Whiteskin. The Firehead, evading the lunge of those tusks, got close to Jaw with his spear. But Jaw swung his tusks sideways and knocked the Whiteskin to the ground. Then, with a single ruthless motion, he placed his foot on the head of the scrambling Whiteskin.

Jaw pressed hard, and the head burst like an overripe fruit, and the Whiteskin was limp.

Through all of this Spindle clung to Jaw’s back, white-eyed, obviously terrified.

But for Longtusk there was no time for reflection, or horror; for now one of the Whiteskins came directly at him, jabbing with a long spear. He was a big buck, shaven-headed and stripped to the waist, and the whole of his upper body was coated with the acrid white paste. He had a wound on his temple, a broad cut sliced deep into the greasy flesh there — as if made by a boomerang.

Crocus, on his back, yelled her anger. With a screech like a she-cat, her blonde hair flying around her, she leaped off Longtusk’s back. She landed on the big Firehead, knocking him flat. She raked her nails down his bare back, leaving red gouges. The Whiteskin howled and twisted — and, despite Crocus’s anger and determination, he soon began to prevail, for Crocus’s strength and weight were no match for this big male.

Walks With Thunder, surrounded by his own circle of assailants, called breathlessly, "Protect her, Longtusk. She’s important now. More than you know…"

Longtusk had every intention of doing just that, but while the two Fireheads flailed in the dirt, he could easily harm Crocus as much as her opponent. He stood over them, trumpeting, waiting for an opportunity.

At last the Whiteskin wrestled Crocus flat on her back. He straddled her, sitting astride her belly, raising his fists to strike.

Now was Longtusk’s chance.

The mammoth reached out with his trunk, meaning to grab the Whiteskin around his neck…

The Whiteskin jerked upright, suddenly. His paws fluttered in the air around his face, like birds, out of his control. Then he fell backward, twitched once, and was still.

Longtusk reached down and pulled the corpse off Crocus.

He saw immediately how the Whiteskin had died. The chisel that had destroyed the rhino — still stained by the great beast’s blood — had been driven upward into the Whiteskin’s face, through the soft bones in the roof of his mouth, and into his brain.

The girl got to her feet. She stared down at the creature she had killed. Then she anchored one foot on the Whiteskin’s ugly, twisted face, and yanked the chisel out of his skull. The last of his blood gushed feebly.

She stepped on his chest and emitted a howl of victory — just as her father had on bringing down the rhino.

Then she fell to her knees and buried her face in her paws.

Longtusk reached out his trunk to her. She curled up, pulling the long hairs close around her, as she had as a cub, lost and alone on the steppe.

The Whiteskins were fleeing. The mastodonts trumpeted after them, and the Firehead hunters hurled their last spears and darts.

In all, four Whiteskins had fallen. Under the watchful, contemptuous eyes of Jaw Like Rock — whose leg wound still leaked blood — the trainer, Spindle, walked from one Whiteskin corpse to the next, jabbing his spear into their defenseless cooling bodies.

Walks With Thunder came up to Longtusk. He was dusty, blood-spattered, breathing hard. "I’m getting too old for this. Bedrock came north to find a place to live without war… But the world is filling up, it seems.

"Now we must attend to business. We must collect Bedrock’s body. And we will walk back the way we came and retrieve the spears that were thrown. Then we will return to the settlement. Now, everything will be different… Jaw!"

Longtusk looked up in time to see it happen.

He had heard of this before. A mastodont, cruelly treated by a Firehead keeper, would not lash out in anger. Instead he would bide his time, enduring the insults and punishment, waiting for the right opportunity.

Now here was Spindle, without his goad, dancing on the bodies of already dead Whiteskins; and here was Jaw Like Rock, calmly watching him, unrestrained, not even hobbled.

In the very last instant Spindle seemed to understand the mistake he had made. He raised his paws, as if pleading.

Jaw lunged forward with a single clean, strong motion, a thrust born of experience and training, and his tusk punctured Spindle’s heart.

5 The Remembering

The hunting party returned to the Firehead settlement, subdued, all but silent. They moved slowly, for Jaw Like Rock was forced to walk hobbled, armed Firehead hunters shadowing his every step.

Walks With Thunder, meanwhile, moving with slow dignity, bore the bodies of Bedrock and Spindle, wrapped in fur blankets. The long nasal horn of the rhino, Bedrock’s last trophy, was laid on top of his body, still caked with dried blood.

Crocus walked beside Thunder, clutching her father’s cold paw.

"War," growled Thunder, and he raised his trunk suddenly, as if sniffing the winds of vanished past. "You’ve been lucky to see so little of it, little grazer. Brutal and bloody it is, for Fireheads and mastodonts. They teach us special commands, and put us through mock battles to ensure we will not panic at the furious noise, the stink of blood. And they feed us drinks of fermented grass seed, a powerful potion that drives sanity from the mind, replacing it with a mist of blood…

"And then comes the battle.

"It can be magnificent, Longtusk! We charge into the ranks of the enemy, all but invulnerable to their arrows and axes, and scatter their ranks. We stab with our tusks and crush with our feet. If the enemy has never seen mastodonts before they are terrified, awed out of their wits.

"But it never lasts.

"As warriors we are clumsy beasts, Longtusk. The Firehead fighters learn to step aside and assail us from the sides, encircling us and separating us, striking with arrows and spears, slashing our trunks and hamstrings, killing our riders.

"And sometimes — despite the training, despite the intoxicating brews — we recall who we are. Then we panic and retreat, even trampling our own warriors." He closed his small eyes, deep in their pits of wrinkled skin. "I thought I had put it all behind me. Now it is coming again."

When they reached the Firehead settlement, Bedrock’s body was immediately claimed by the Shaman, Smokehat, who had it brought into his own hut of bone and turf. The Shaman berated the Firehead hunters who had been with Bedrock when he died, and even Longtusk and the mastodonts.

As for Crocus, she retreated into Bedrock’s hut — hers, now — carrying the rhino horn.

As the days wore on, Crocus was forced to receive a string of visitors: older males of the Firehead tribe, there to consult, Thunder told Longtusk, about the meaning of the sudden appearance of these other Fireheads, the Whiteskins, on the steppe. But she did not emerge from her hut, refusing even to see Longtusk.

Longtusk felt bereft. He hadn’t realized how much he had come to rely on Crocus’s companionship, which seemed to fill a need not satisfied even by the mastodonts.

He threw his great muscles into the work of heavy lifting and hauling, and his companions treated him with a bluff respect. And when he wasn’t working he spent much of his time in the Firehead settlement.

It was unusual for Bull mastodonts to be allowed to wander without keepers through the Firehead community, but after his long association with Crocus — during which time not a hair on her head had been harmed — Longtusk seemed to be regarded as a special case.

But he remained the only mammoth in the captive herd, and adults gaped at him or cowered from his immense tusks, and he was constantly followed around by a small herd of goggling Firehead cubs. They collected the hair he shed, and used it to stuff their moccasins and hats and pillows. He learned to endure the perpetual tugs and strokes of the cubs, and he took great care not to step on one of those stick-thin limbs or eggshell skulls.

Work went on for Fireheads and mastodonts: hunting game for food, building and rebuilding the huts, extending and filling the storage pits for meat and hay — for the cycle of the seasons was not slowed even by death, and the inevitable approach of winter was never far from the thoughts of anybody in the community.

He watched them butcher a deer. They took its flesh to eat and its skin to make clothing. They even used the tough skin of its forelegs for boot uppers and mittens. They made tools and weapons from its bones and antlers. They used the deer’s fat and marrow for fuel for their lamps, and its blood for glue, and its sinews for bindings, lashings and thread. Gradually the deer was reduced to smaller and smaller pieces, until it was scattered around the settlement.

Longtusk saw a mother use her hair to wipe feces from the backside of a cub.

He saw a male take the lower jawbone of a young deer, from which small sharp teeth protruded like pebbles. He sawed off the teeth at their roots, producing a series of beads almost identical in shape, size and texture, and held together by a strip of dried gum. It was a necklace.

He saw an old male pinch the tiny hearts of captive gulls, seeking to kill them without spoiling their feathers. He skinned the birds, turned the empty skins inside out, and wore the intact skins on his feet — feathers inside — within his boots.

Endless detail, endless strangeness — endless horror.

But the Fireheads went about their tasks without joy or enthusiasm. Even the cubs, when they tried to run and play, were snapped at and cuffed. The settlement had become a bowl of subdued quiet, of slow footsteps.

And Longtusk felt increasingly agitated.

It was natural, he told himself. Bedrock had been the most important of the Fireheads; his death brought finality and change. Who wouldn’t be disturbed?

…But he couldn’t help feeling that his inner turmoil was something beyond that. He was aware that his mood showed in the way he walked, ripped his fodder from the ground, snarled at the Firehead cubs who got in his way or tugged too hard at his belly hairs.

At length, he came to understand what he was going through. He felt oddly ashamed, and he kept it to himself.

Still, Walks With Thunder — as so often — seemed more aware of Longtusk’s moods and difficulties than anybody else. And he came to Longtusk, engaging him in a rumbling conversation as they walked, fed, defecated.

"…It’s interesting to see how differently they treat you," Thunder said, as he watched Firehead cubs, wide-eyed, trot after Longtusk. "Differently from us, I mean. You have to understand that you mammoths were once worshipped as gods by these creatures."

"Worshipped?"

"Remember when we found you at the Dreamer caves, how they threw themselves on the ground? There is little wood here. Trees struggle to grow on land freshly exposed by the ice. And so the Fireheads rely on the mammoths — especially your long-dead ancestors — for bones and skin and fur, material to build their huts and make their clothing and burn on their hearths. Without the resources of the mammoths, it’s possible they couldn’t survive here at all."

Longtusk reminded Thunder of the Dreamers, who had lived so modestly in their rocky caves.

"Ah, but the Fireheads are not like the Dreamers," said Thunder. "They would not be content with eking out unchanging lives like pike basking in a pool. And it is this lack of contentment that drives them on… to greatness and to horror alike.

"They’ve discarded those old beliefs, I think; now, a mammoth is just another animal to them. But still you hairy beasts seem to be admired in a way they have never admired us, despite our long association with them. Of course that doesn’t stop them from going north and—" He stopped abruptly.

The north: the old mystery, Longtusk thought, a mystery that had eluded him for years, despite his quizzing of Jaw Like Rock and other mastodonts; it was as if they had been instructed — perhaps by Thunder — to tell him nothing.

"Going north for what?" he asked now. "What do they seek in the north, Thunder?"

"I shouldn’t have spoken… What’s this?" Suddenly Thunder’s trunk reached out to Longtusk’s ear.

Longtusk couldn’t help but flinch as Thunder’s trunk, strong and wiry, probed in his fur until its tip emerged coated in a black, viscous liquid.

"By Kilukpuk’s mighty dugs," Thunder said. "I thought I could smell it. The way you’ve been dribbling urine… You’re in musth. Musth!"

Musth — a state of agitation associated with stress or rut; musth, in which this foul-smelling liquid would ooze from a mammoth’s temporal gland; musth — when a mammoth’s body was temporarily not under his full control.

"No wonder you’re so agitated. And it’s not the first time either, I’ll wager."

Longtusk pulled away, trumpeting his irritation. "I’m an adult now, Thunder, a Bull. I don’t need—"

"It’s one thing to know what musth is and quite another to control it. And you’ve picked a terrible time to start oozing the black stuff. In a few days you’ll play perhaps the most important role of your life."

"What role? I don’t understand."

"With Crocus, of course. It will be tiring, difficult, stressful — even frightening. Through it all you must maintain absolute control — for all our sakes. And you decide now is the time to go into musth… Oh. Neck Like Spruce."

Longtusk felt his trunk curl up. "Who?"

"You can’t fool me, grazer. That’s the name of the pretty little Cow you’ve been courting, isn’t it?"

"Courting? I don’t know what you’re talking about."

"Perhaps you don’t. We don’t always understand ourselves very well. It’s true, nevertheless — and now this." Thunder rumbled sadly. "Longtusk, I’m just an old fool of a mastodont. I’m not even one of your kind. And I know I’ve filled your head with far too much advice over the years."

Longtusk was embarrassed. "I appreciate your help. I always have—"

"Never mind that," said Thunder testily. "Just listen to me, one last time. You and I — we look alike, but we’re very different. Our kinds were separated, and started to grow apart, more than a thousand Great-Years ago. And that is a long, long time, ten times longer than the ice has been prowling the world."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"While you’re in musth — now and in the future — stay away from Neck Like Spruce. Otherwise you’ll both be hurt, terribly hurt."

"I don’t understand, Thunder…"

But Thunder would say no more. Rumbling sadly, he walked slowly away, in search of fresh forage.

Soon the settlement, without throwing off its pall of gloom, began to bustle with activity. Longtusk learned that the Fireheads were preparing for their own form of Remembering ceremony for their fallen leader.

Everything was being rebuilt; everything was changing. It was obvious the Remembering of Bedrock would mark a great change in the affairs of the settlement — and therefore, surely, in Longtusk’s own life as well, a change whose outcome was impossible to predict.

Every surface, of rock and treated skin, was scraped bare and painted with new, vibrant images. And everywhere the Fireheads made their characteristic mark, the outstretched paw. The artist would lay a bare paw, fingers open, against the rock, then suck paint into the mouth and spray it through a small tube and over the paw to make a silhouette.

The most busy Firehead, at this strange time, was the old male the mastodonts called Flamefingers. He was the manufacturer of the finest tools and ornaments of bone, ivory and stone. Flamefingers was fat and comfortable. The skills of his nimble paws had won him a long and comfortable life, insulated from the dangers of the hunt or the hard graft of the storage pits.

Flamefingers had an apprentice. This wretched male cub had to bring his master food and drink, cloths for the old Firehead to blow his cavernous nose, and even hollowed-out bison skulls, pots for the great artisan to urinate in without having to take the trouble to stand up.

Longtusk watched in fascination as the young apprentice wrestled to turn an ancient mammoth tusk — an immense spiral twice his height — into ivory strips and pieces, useful for the artisan to work.

At the tusk’s narrow, sharp end, he simply chopped off pieces with a stone axe. Where the tusk was too wide for that, he chiseled a deep groove all around the tusk until only a fine neck remained, and then split it with a sharp hammer blow.

To obtain long, thin strips of ivory the apprentice had to cut channels in the tusk and then prize out the strips with chisels. Often the strips would splinter and break — an outcome which invariably won the apprentice abuse and mild beatings from his impatient master.

But the apprentice could even bend ivory, making bracelets small enough to fit around the slim wrists of Fireheads. First he soaked a section of the tusk in a pit of foul-smelling urine. Then he wrapped the softened tusk in a fresh animal skin, soaked with water, and placed it in the hot ashes of a hearth. The skin charred and fell away in flakes. But the ivory — on extraction from the hearth with tongs made of giant deer antlers — was flexible enough to bend into loops tied off with thongs.

Flamefingers, meanwhile, made a bewildering variety of artifacts from the ivory pieces.

He made tools, whittling suitable sections into chisels, spatulas, knives, daggers and small spears. He engraved the handles of these devices with crosshatched cuts to ensure a firm grip when the tools were held in the paw, and returned the tools to the apprentice for arduous polishing with strips of leather.

But Flamefingers also made many artifacts with no obvious purpose save decoration: for example thin disks, cross-sections from the fatter end of the tusks, with elaborate carvings, pierced through the center to take a rope of sinew or skin.

But the most remarkable artifacts of all were the figurines, of Fireheads and animals.

Flamefingers started with a raw, crudely broken lump of ivory that had been soaked for days. But despite this softening the ivory was difficult to work — easy to engrave along the grain, but not across it — and the artisan patiently scraped away at the surface with stone chisels, removing finer and finer flakes.

And, slowly, like the sun emerging from a cloud, a form emerged from the raw tusk, small and compact, coated in hairs that were elaborately etched into the grain.

Longtusk could only watch, bewildered. The artisan seemed able to see the object within the tusk before he had made it — as if the figure had always been there, embedded in this chunk of ancient ivory, needing only the artisan’s careful fingers to release it.

The artisan held up the finished piece on his paw, blew away dust and spat on it, polishing it against his clothing.

Then he looked up at Longtusk standing over him, with the usual gaggle of Firehead cubs clutching his belly hairs.

Flamefingers smiled. He held up the figure so Longtusk could see it.

Longtusk, drawn by curiosity, reached out with the pink tip of his trunk and explored the carving. Flamefingers watched him, blue eyes gleaming, fascinated by the reaction of the woolly mammoth to the toy.

It was a mammoth, exquisitely carved.

But, though it was delicate and fine, there was a faint, lingering smell of the long-dead mammoth who had owned this tusk, overlaid by the sharp stink of the spit and sweat of Firehead.

Longtusk, intrigued but subtly repelled, rumbled softly and stepped away.

On the day of Bedrock’s Remembering, Crocus at last emerged from her hut. Her bare skin was pale from her lengthy confinement. But her golden hair blazed in the light of the low sun.

All the Fireheads — even the Shaman — bowed before her. She turned and surveyed them coldly.

Today the Fireheads would do more than Remember Bedrock. Today, Longtusk had learned, the Fireheads would accept their new leader: this slim young female, Crocus, the only cub of Bedrock, and now the Matriarch of the Fireheads.

Crocus stepped forward to Longtusk. She walked confidently, as a new Matriarch should. But Longtusk could see how fragile she was from the tenseness of her lips, the softness of her eyes.

"Baitho," she said softly.

Obediently he dipped his head and lowered his trunk to the ground. She climbed on his back with practiced ease. He straightened up, feeling invigorated by her gentle presence at his neck once more.

He raised his trunk and trumpeted; the noise echoed from the silent steppe.

He turned and, with as much grandeur as he could muster, he began to walk toward the grave. The Fireheads and mastodonts formed up into a loose procession behind him.

And now, at a gesture from the Shaman, the music began.

They had flutes made of bird bones, hollowed out and pierced. They had bull-roarers, ovals of carved ivory which they spun around their heads on long ropes. They had instruments made of mammoth bones: drums of skulls and shoulder blades to strike and scrape, jawbones which rattled loudly, ribs which emitted a range of notes when struck with a length of femur. And they sang, raising their small mouths and ululating like wolves.

In all this noise, Longtusk and his passenger were an island of silence, towering over the rest. Her fingers twined tightly in his fur, as they had when she was a small and nervous cub just learning to ride him, and he knew that this day was extraordinarily difficult for her.

The grave was on the outskirts of the settlement, a simple straight-sided pit dug into the ground by Walks With Thunder.

Crocus slid to the ground and stood at the lip of the grave, paws folded. Longtusk stood silently beside her, the wind whipping the hair on his back.

The body of Bedrock already lay at the bottom of the pit, a small and fragile bundle wrapped in rhino hide. Bedrock’s artifacts were set out around him: spears and knives and chisels and boomerangs, the tools of a home-builder and hunter, many of them made of mammoth ivory. And mammoth vertebrae and foot bones had been set out in a circle around him, as if protecting him.

But now the Shaman was here in his ridiculous smoking hat, his skin painted with gaudy designs. He leapt into the pit and began to caper and shout. He had rattles of bone and wood that he shook over Bedrock’s inert form, and he scattered flower petals and sprinkled water, raising his face and howling like a hyena.

As Crocus watched this performance she started to tremble — not from distress, Longtusk realized, but from anger. It was a rage that matched Longtusk’s own musth-fueled turmoil.

At last, it seemed, she could stand it no more. She tugged Longtusk’s trunk. "A dhur," she said. Pick up that thing.

Longtusk snorted in acquiescence. He knelt down, reached into the pit with his trunk, and plucked the Shaman out of the grave, burning hat and all. He set the Firehead down unharmed by the side of the pit.

Smokehat was furious. He capered and jabbered, slapping with his small paws at Longtusk’s trunk.

Crocus stepped forward, eyes alight, and she screamed at the Shaman.

His defiance seemed to melt before her anger, and he withdrew, eyes glittering.

There was silence now. Crocus stepped up to the grave once more. She sat down, legs dangling over the edge of the pit.

Longtusk reached down to help her. But she pushed his trunk away; this was, it seemed, something she must do herself.

She scrambled to the pit floor. She brushed away the dirt and petals that the Shaman had scattered over her father.

She dug an object out of her clothing and laid it on top of the body. It was the rhino horn, the trophy of the last hunt — still stained with the creature’s blood, as raw and unworked as when it had been smashed from the rhino’s skull. Then she stroked the hide covering her father, and she picked up earth and sprinkled it over the body.

She was Remembering him, Longtusk realized. Her simple, tender actions, unrehearsed and personal, were — compared to the foolish ritualistic capering of the Shaman — unbearably moving.

Bedrock had been leader of the Fireheads from the moment Longtusk had first encountered these strange, complex, bewildering creatures. But here he lay, slain and silent, destroyed by a single arrow fired by a white-painted Firehead who had never known Bedrock’s name, had known nothing of the complex web of power and relationships which had tangled up his life. As he gazed on the limp, passive form in the pit, Longtusk was struck by the awful simplicity of death, the conclusion to every story.

At last Crocus stood up. The Fireheads reached into the pit and lowered down bones. They were mammoth shoulder blades and pelvises. Crocus used the huge flat sheets of bone to cover the body of Bedrock. Even in death he would be protected by the strength of the mammoths, which, through their own deaths, had sustained his kind in this hostile land.

Crocus reached up to Longtusk. This time she accepted his help, and he lifted her out of the grave and set her neatly on his back. Then he began to kick at the low piles of earth which had been scooped out of the ground.

When it was done, Longtusk made his way back to the hut Crocus had shared with her father, but now inhabited alone. She slid to the ground, ruffled the fur on his trunk with absent affection, and entered her hut, tying the skin flaps closed behind her.

When she was gone, Longtusk felt a great relief, for he thought this longest and most painful of days was at last done.

But he was wrong.

The Fireheads, having completed their mourning of their lost leader, began to celebrate the ascension of their new Matriarch. And it was soon obvious that the celebrations were to be loud and long.

As the sun dipped toward the horizon the Fireheads opened up a pit in the ground. Here, the butchered remains of several giant deer had been smoking since the previous day. They gathered around and ripped away pieces of the meat with their bare paws, and chewed on it until their bellies were distended and the fat ran down their chins.

Then, as the cubs and females danced and sang, the males produced great pots of foul-smelling liquid, thick and fermented, which they pumped down their throats. Before long many of them were slumping over in sleep, or regurgitating the contents of their stomachs in great noxious floods. But then they would revive to begin ingesting more food and liquid, growing more raucous and uncoordinated as the evening wore on.

The mastodonts watched this, bemused.

At last, under the benevolent guidance of Walks With Thunder, the Cows gathered their calves and quietly made their way to the calm of the stockade, where all but the most trusted of the Bulls were kept.

Longtusk, his emotions still muddled and raging, followed them.

Lemming was here, bringing bales of hay from one of the storage pits. "Lay, lay," he said. Eat, eat. Longtusk had noticed before that this little fat Firehead seemed happier in the company of the mastodonts than his own kind, and he felt a surge of affection.

All the mastodonts were in the stockade.

…All save Jaw Like Rock.

Agitated, disturbed by the throbbing noise and meat smells wafting from the Firehead settlement, Longtusk roamed the stockade. But he couldn’t find the great Bull. When he asked after Jaw, he was met with blank stares.

Then — as the night approached its darkest hour, and the drumming and shouting of the Fireheads reached a climax — he heard a single, agonized trumpeting from the depths of the settlement.

It was Jaw Like Rock.

Longtusk bellowed out a contact rumble, but there was no reply.

He sought out Walks With Thunder.

"Didn’t you hear that? Jaw Like Rock called out."

"No," said Thunder bleakly. "You’re mistaken."

"But I heard him—"

Thunder wrapped his trunk around Longtusk’s. "Jaw is dead. Accept it. It is the way."

Again that trumpeting came, thin and clear and full of pain.

Longtusk, confused, distressed, blundered away from the stockade and headed into the Firehead settlement.

Tonight it had become a place of bewildering noise and stink and confusion. The Fireheads ran back and forth, full of fermented liquid and rich food — or they slept where they had fallen, curled up by the hearths in the open air. He saw one male and female coupling, energetically but clumsily, in the half-shadow of a hut wall.

Few Fireheads even seemed aware of Longtusk; he had to be careful, in fact, not to step on sleeping faces.

He persisted, pushing through the noise and mess and confusion, until he found Jaw Like Rock.

They had put him in a shallow pit, scraped roughly out of the ground and surrounded by stakes and ropes. Fire burned brightly in lamps all around the pit, making the scene as bright as day, but filling the air with stinking, greasy smoke.

It was a feeble confinement from which a great tusker like Jaw Like Rock could have escaped immediately.

But Jaw was no longer in full health.

Jaw was dragging both his hind legs. It seemed his hamstrings or tendons had been cut, so he could no longer bolt or charge. And there were darts sticking out of his flesh, over his belly and behind his ears. His skin was discolored around the punctures, as if the darts had delivered a poison. He was wheezing, and great loops of spittle hung from his dangling tongue.

There were Fireheads all around the pit, all male, and they were stamping, clapping and hammering their drums of bone and skin. One of them was creeping into Jaw’s pit, carrying a long spear. It was Bareface, Longtusk saw, the young hunter who had distinguished himself on the fatal rhino hunt. He was naked, coated in red and yellow paint.

Longtusk trumpeted. "Jaw! Jaw Like Rock!"

Jaw’s answering rumble was faint, and punctuated by gasps for breath. "Is that you, grass chewer? Come to see the dead Bull?"

"Get out of there!"

"…No. It’s over for me. It was over the moment I tusked that spawn of Aglu. I planned it, after all, waited for my moment… But it was worth it. At least Spindle will torture no more mastodonts. Or mammoths."

"You aren’t dead! You breathe, you hurt—"

"I’m dead as poor Bedrock in his hole in the ground. Don’t you see? We belong to the Fireheads. They tend our wounds, and order our lives, and feed us. But we live and die by their whim. It is — a contract. And here, at the climax of this night of celebration, this one who creeps toward me on his belly, Bareface, will prove his courage by dispatching me to the aurora."

"But they’ve already crippled you! Where is the courage in that?"

"The ways of the Fireheads are impossible to understand… But, yes, you’re right, Longtusk. We must see some courage tonight." Jaw raised himself on his crippled legs and trumpeted his defiance. "Remember me, calf of Primus! Remember!"

And with a roar that shook the ground, he hurled himself forward toward Bareface.

The hunter, with lightning-fast reflexes, jammed the shaft of his spear into the ground.

Jaw’s great body impaled itself. Longtusk heard flesh rip, and smelled the sour stink of Jaw’s guts as they spilled, dark and steaming, to the ground.

The Fireheads roared their triumph. Longtusk trumpeted and fled.

He was in a stand of young trees in the new, growing forest that bordered the Firehead settlement. It was still deep night, dark and cloudy.

He couldn’t recall where he had run, how he had got here.

But she was here — he could sense it through his rage, his grief and confusion, the musth that burned through his body — she, Neck Like Spruce, no calf now but a warm and musty presence, solid and massive as the Earth itself, here in the dark, as if she had been waiting for him.

He searched out, sensing and hearing her, and found her. Her secretions were damp on the tip of his trunk. Tasting them, he knew that she, too, was ready: in oestrus, bearing the egg that might grow into their calf.

He heard her urinate, a warm dark stream, and then she turned to face him. He found her trunk, and intertwined it with his, tugging gently, seeking its tip; the soft fingers of her trunk, so unlike his own, explored the long hairs that dangled from his belly.

For a last instant he recalled the warnings of Walks With Thunder: stay away from Neck Like Spruce. Stay away…

Then his mouth found hers, warm tongues flickering, and the time for thinking was over.

6 The Cleansing

Winter and summer, winter and summer…

As she approached the second anniversary of her father’s death and her own accession to power, Crocus assembled a great war party of mastodonts and Firehead hunters. It was a time of preparation, and gathering determination — and dread.

The artisans had worked all winter, manufacturing, repairing and sharpening knives and spear points and atlatls. And every time the weather cleared sufficiently the hunters had gone out to hurl spears and boomerangs at rocks and painted animal figures — and, when they spotted them, live targets, the animals of the winter like the Arctic foxes. There were days when the settlement seemed to bristle with the Fireheads and their weapons, spears, darts and knives as dense as the spiky fur of a mastodont. But all the weapons were small and light — not designed for big game, like the giant deer or the rhino, but to pierce the flimsy hides of other Fireheads: weapons of war, not hunting.

When the preparations were complete, Crocus called for a final feast.

The Firehead hunters gorged themselves on food and drink. Longtusk watched cubs crack open big animal bones to suck out the thick marrow within, the bones returned by hunting parties that roamed north. Not for the first time Longtusk wondered what animal provided those giant snacks.

Longtusk spent his time with Neck Like Spruce, who was now heavy with calf — his calf.

It was unusual for a Bull, mammoth or mastodont, to remain close to his mate so long after the mating; usually a Bull would stay around just long enough to ensure conception by his seed had taken place. But Neck Like Spruce’s case was different.

The calf was already overdue. Like mammoths, the oestrus cycle of these mastodonts was timed so that the calves would be born in early spring, maximizing the time available for them to feed and grow strong before the calves faced the rigors of their first winter.

And throughout it had been a difficult pregnancy, despite the best attention of Lemming, the keeper, and his array of incomprehensible medicines: salves of water and hot butter for wounds, blood-red deer meat to treat inflammations, drops of milk for sore eyes… Spruce had become a gaunt, bony shadow, and her hair had fallen out in clumps.

It disturbed Longtusk that there was absolutely nothing he could do — and it disturbed him even more that Lemming, the undisputed Firehead expert on mastodonts and their illnesses, was at this crucial time preparing to leave, accompanying the Bulls on their northern march.

Through that last night, Longtusk stayed with Neck Like Spruce. She slept briefly. He could see the calf in her belly struggle fitfully, pushing at the skin that contained it.

The next morning, the Fireheads nursing sore heads and crammed bellies, the party assembled in a great column and began its sweep to the north. With Crocus on his back, Longtusk led the slow advance.

Since that first encounter with the Whiteskins two years before there had been several skirmishes with other bands of Fireheads. Crocus’s tribe, settled for several years in their township of mammoth-bone huts, were well-fed, healthy and strong, and were able to fend off the attacks — mounted mostly by bands of desperate refugees, forced north from the overcrowded southern lands.

But this wouldn’t last forever, predicted Walks With Thunder.

"There is no limit to the number of Fireheads who might take it into their heads to come bubbling up from the south. We can defend ourselves and this settlement as long as the numbers are right. But eventually they will overrun us."

"And then?" said Longtusk.

"And then we will have to flee — go north once again, as we have done before, and find a new and empty land. And this is what Crocus, in her wisdom, knows she must plan for; it is surely going to come in her time as Matriarch."

So it was that Crocus was remaking herself. Still young, already skilled in hunting techniques, she had learned to use the tribe’s weapons with as much skill and daring as any of the buck male warriors. And she had learned to command, to force her tribe to accept the harshest of realities.

But Longtusk thought he detected a growing hardness in her — a hardness that, when he thought of the affectionate cub who had befriended him, saddened him.

As for himself, Longtusk was now bigger and stronger than any of the mastodonts. He was no longer the butt of jokes and taunts in the stockade; no longer did the mastodonts call constant attention to his differences, his dense brown hair and strange grinding teeth. Now he was Longtusk, warrior Bull, and his immense tusks, scarred by use, were the envy of the herd.

Only Walks With Thunder still called him "little grazer" — but Longtusk didn’t mind that.

And, such was Crocus’s skill in riding Longtusk — and so potent was the mammoth’s own intelligence and courage — that the stunning, unexpected combination of warrior-queen and woolly mammoth leading the column could, said Walks With Thunder, prove to be the Fireheads’ most important weapon of all.

During the long march, Longtusk’s days were arduous. He was the first to break the new ground, and he had to be constantly on the alert for danger — not just from potential foes, but also the natural traps of the changing landscape. He paid careful attention to the deep wash of sound which echoed through the Earth in response to the mastodonts’ heavy footsteps, and avoided the worst of the difficulties.

And, of course, he had to seek out food as he traveled. Firehead Matriarch on his back or not, he still needed to cram the steppe grasses and herbs into his mouth for most of every day. But the mastodonts preferred trees and shrubs, and if he found a particularly fine stand of trees he would trumpet to alert the others.

A few days out of the settlement a great storm swept down on them. The wind swirled and gusted, carrying sand from the frozen deserts at the fringe of the icecap, hundreds of days’ walk away, to lash at the mastodonts’ eyes and mouths, as if mocking their puny progress. Crocus walked beside Longtusk, blinded and buffeted, clinging to his long belly hairs.

At last the storm blew itself out, and they emerged into calmness under an eerie blue sky.

They found a stand of young trees that had been utterly demolished by the winds’ ferocity. The mastodonts browsed the fallen branches and tumbled trunks, welcoming this unexpected bounty.

Walks With Thunder, his mouth crammed with green leaves, came to Longtusk. "Look over there. To the east."

Longtusk turned and squinted. It was unusual for a mastodont to tell another to "look," so poor was their eyesight compared to other senses.

The sun, low in the south, cast long shadows across the empty land. At length Longtusk made out something: a blur of motion, white on blue, against the huge sky.

"Birds?"

"Yes. Geese, judging from their honking. But the important thing is where they come from."

"The northeast," Longtusk said. "But that’s impossible. There is only ice there, and nothing lives."

"Not quite." Walks With Thunder absently tucked leaves deeper into his mouth. "This is a neck of land, lying between great continents to west and east. In the eastern lands, it is said, the ice has pushed much farther south than in the west. But there are legends of places, called nunataks — refuges — islands in the ice, where living things can survive."

"The ice would cover them over. Everything would freeze and die."

"Possibly," said Thunder placidly. "But in that case, how do you explain those geese?"

"It is just a legend," Longtusk protested.

Thunder curled his trunk over Longtusk’s scalp affectionately. "The world is a big place, and it contains many mysteries. Who knows what fragment of rumor will save our lives in the future?" He saw Crocus approaching. "And the biggest mystery of all," he grumbled wearily, "is how I can persuade these old bones to plod on for another day. Lead on, Longtusk; lead on…"

The geese flew overhead, squawking. They were molting, and when they had passed, white fathers fell from the sky all around Longtusk, like snowflakes.

As the days wore on they traveled farther and farther from the settlement.

Longtusk hadn’t been this far north since he had first been captured by the Fireheads. That had been many years ago, and back then he had been little more than a confused calf.

But he was sure that the land had changed.

There were many more stands of trees than he recalled: spruce and pine and fir, growing taller than any of the dwarf willows and birches that had once inhabited this windswept plain. And the steppe’s complex mosaic of vegetation had been replaced by longer grass — great dull swathes of it that rippled in the wind, grass that had crowded out many of the herbs and low trees and flowers which had once illuminated the landscape. It was grass that the mastodonts consumed with relish. But for Longtusk the grass was thin, greasy stuff that clogged his bowels and made his dung slippery and smelly.

And it was warmer — much warmer. It seemed he couldn’t shed his winter coat quickly enough, and Crocus grumbled at the hair which flew into her face. But she did not complain when he sought out the snow that still lingered in shaded hollows and scooped it into his mouth to cool himself.

The world seemed a huge place, massive, imperturbable; it was hard to believe that — just as the Matriarchs had foreseen, at his Clan’s Gathering so long ago — such dramatic changes could happen so quickly. And yet it must be true, for even he, young as he was, recalled a time when the land had been different.

It was an uneasy thought.

He had been separated from his Family before they had a chance to teach him about the landscape — where to find water in the winter, how to dig out the best salt licks. He had had to rely on the mastodonts for such instruction.

But such wisdom, passed from generation to generation, was acquired by long experience. And if the land was changing so quickly — so dramatically within the lifetime of a mammoth — what use was the wisdom of the years?

And in that case, what might have become of his Family?

He shuddered and rumbled, and he felt Crocus pat him, aware of his unease.

After several more days Crocus guided Longtusk down a sharp incline toward lower ground. He found himself in a valley through which a fat, strong glacial river gushed, its waters curdled white with rock flour. The column of mastodonts crept cautiously after him, avoiding the sharp gravel patches and slippery mud slopes he pointed out.

After a time the valley opened, and the river decanted into a lake, gray and glimmering.

The place seemed familiar.

Had he been here before, as a lost calf? But so much had changed! The lake water was surely much higher than it had once been, and the long grass and even the trees grew so thickly now, even down to the water’s edge, that every smell and taste and sound was different.

…Yet there was much that nagged at his memory: the shape of a hillside here, a rock abutment there.

When he saw a row of cave mouths, black holes eroded into soft exposed rock, he knew that he had not been mistaken.

Crocus called a halt.

She and her warriors dismounted, and on all fours they crept through the thickening vegetation closer to the caves. They inspected footprints in the dirt — they were wide and splayed, Longtusk saw, more like a huge bird’s than a Firehead’s narrow tracks — and they rummaged through dirt and rubble.

At last, with a hiss of triumph, the hunter called Bareface picked up a shaped rock. It was obviously an axe, made and wielded by clever fingers — and it was stained with fresh blood.

And now there was a cry: a voice not quite like a Firehead’s, more guttural, cruder. The mastodonts raised their trunks and sniffed the air.

A figure had come out of the nearest cave: walking upright, but limping heavily. He stood glaring in the direction of the intruders, who still cowered in the vegetation. He was short and stocky, with wide shoulders and a deep barrel chest. His clothing was heavy and coarse. His forehead sloped backward, and an enormous bony ridge dominated his brow. His legs were short and bowed, and his feet were flat and very wide, with short stubby toes, so that he left those broad splayed footprints.

He was obviously old, his back bent, his small face a mask of wrinkles that seemed to lap around cavernous nostrils like waves around rocks. And his head was shaven bare of hair, with a broad red stripe painted down its crown.

Not a Firehead, not quite. This was the Fireheads’ close cousin: a Dreamer. And Longtusk recognized him.

"He is called Stripeskull," Longtusk rumbled to Thunder. "I have been here before."

"As have I. This is where we found you."

Walks With Thunder described how, when the Fireheads had first moved north, they had sent scouting parties ahead, seeking opportunities and threats. Bedrock himself had led an expedition to this umpromising place — and Crocus had been, briefly, lost.

"The Dreamers saved her from the cold," said Longtusk.

Thunder grunted. "That’s as may be. We drove the Dreamers from their caves. But the land was too harsh, and we abandoned it and retreated farther south."

"And the Dreamers returned to their caves?"

"They are creatures of habit. And, back then, the Fireheads did not covet their land."

"But now?"

"See for yourself. The land has changed. Now the Fireheads want this place…"

Longtusk said, "It was so long ago."

"For you, perhaps," Thunder said dryly. "For me, it seems like yesterday."

"How did Stripeskull get so old?"

"Dreamers don’t live long," growled Thunder. "And I fear this one will not grow much older."

"What do you mean?"

But now Stripeskull seemed to have spotted the intruders. He was shouting and gesturing. He had a short burned-wood spear at his side, and he tried to heft it, but his foreleg would not rise above the shoulder.

A spear flew at him. It neatly pierced Stripeskull’s heart.

Longtusk, shocked, trumpeted and blundered forward.

Stripeskull was on the ground, and blood seeped red-black around him, viscous and slow as musth. His great head rocked forward, and ruddy spittle looped his mouth. He looked up and saw the mammoth, and his eyes widened with wonder and recognition. Then he fell back, his strength gone.

Longtusk rumbled mournfully, and touched the body with the sole of his foot. He was gone, as quickly destroyed as a pine needle on a burning tree. How could a life be destroyed so suddenly, so arbitrarily? This was Stripeskull, who had grudgingly spared his own Family’s resources to save Longtusk’s life; Stripeskull, with long memories of his own stretching back beyond his Family to a remote, frosty childhood — Stripeskull, gone in an instant and never to return, no matter how long the world turned.

But even while Stripeskull’s body continued to spill its blood on the trampled dust, the Fireheads were moving onward, driven, busy, eager to progress.

Crocus beckoned to Longtusk. She led him to the dark mouth of the cave. "Bowl, bowl!" Speak…

With a growing feeling of unease, he raised his trunk and trumpeted. The noise echoed within the cramped rock walls of the cave, where it must have been terrifying.

A Dreamer came running out — a female, Longtusk saw, young, comparatively slim, long brown hair flying after her. She saw the mammoth, skidded to a halt and screamed.

She did not know him. The Dreamers grew quickly, as Thunder had said; perhaps this one had been an infant, or not even born, during his time here.

She tried to retreat — but the Shaman, grinning, had moved behind her, blocking her from the cave. Her eyes widened, and for a brief moment Longtusk saw the Shaman through her eyes: ridiculously tall, with a forehead that bulged to smoothness, willow-thin legs, a nose as small and thin as a spring icicle…

Firehead warriors threw a net of hide rope over the female, as if she was a baby rhino, and they wrestled her to the ground. But she was strong, and was soon ripping her way through the net. So they tied more rope around her, leaving her squirming in the dirt.

The hunters fell back, panting hard; one of them was missing a chunk of his ear, bitten off by the Dreamer female. They seemed to be studying her body as she writhed and struggled.

"Perhaps they will mate with her," Longtusk said.

"If they do it will be for pleasure only," said Walks With Thunder. "Their pleasure, not hers. Something else you need to know, Longtusk. Firehead cannot seed Dreamer with cub. They are alike, you see, cousins."

"Like mastodonts and mammoths."

Thunder growled, oddly. "But their blood does not mix. And so they compete, like — like two different species of gulls, seeking to nest on the same cliff face. To the Fireheads, the Dreamers are just an obstacle, something to be cleared out of the way."

"Then what will become of the Dreamers?"

"Though they are strong, they are no match for the cunning Fireheads. If they are lucky, the other Dreamers will have seen what happened here, and scattered."

"And if not?"

Thunder snorted. "The Fireheads are not noted for their mercy to their kin. The Dreamers will be butchered, the survivors enslaved and taken to the settlement where they will work until they die."

Now there was a howl from the cave.

Another Dreamer emerged — this time a male. He was young and strong, and he had a stone knife in his free paw — crude, but sharp and potent. And he had taken a captive. It was Lemming, the mastodont keeper. The Dreamer’s foreleg was tight around Lemming’s neck. Lemming was whimpering, and blood dripped from a wound in his upper foreleg.

The Dreamer’s small eyes, glinting in their caves of bone, swiveled this way and that. He seemed to be trying to get to the female on the ground. Perhaps that was his sister, even his mate.

Crocus stepped forward. She was obviously concerned for Lemming. She held out her paws and said something in her high, liquid tongue.

The Dreamer, not understanding, jabbered back and slashed with his knife.

Longtusk acted without thinking. He slid his trunk around the Dreamer’s neck and yanked so hard the Dreamer lost his grip on Lemming, and he fell back into the dirt at Longtusk’s feet. The mammoth pinned him there with a tusk at the throat.

Lemming fell to the ground, limp. Crocus ran to him and called the others for help.

The Shaman stalked toward the fallen Dreamer. "Maar thode," he snapped at Longtusk. "Maar thode!"

Break. Kill.

Longtusk leaned forward, increasing the pressure on the Dreamer’s throat.

But the Dreamer was saying something too, calling in a language that was guttural and harsh, yet seemed strangely familiar.

On the Dreamer’s face, under a crudely shaved veneer of stubble, there was a mark, bright red, jagged like a lightning bolt. It had faded since this Dreamer was a cub, but it was still there.

Willow, thought Longtusk. The first Dreamer I found, grown from a cub to an adult buck.

And he recognizes me.

Crocus was close by.

Once again the three of us are united, Longtusk thought, and he felt a deep apprehension, as if the world itself was shaking beneath him. He had long forgotten the raving of the strange old Dreamer female when he had first brought Crocus here, her terror at the sight of the three of them together… Now that terror returned to him, a chill memory.

The Shaman hammered Longtusk’s scalp with his goad, cutting into his skin. "Maar thode!"

Longtusk stepped back, lifting his tusk from the Dreamer’s throat. Willow lay at his feet, as if stunned.

With a hasty gesture, Crocus ordered other hunters forward. They quickly bound Willow with strips of hide rope. He did not resist, though his massive muscles bulged.

The Shaman glared at Longtusk with impotent fury.

Now Crocus, accompanied by more hunters, made her way into the cave. There seemed to be no more Dreamers present, and with impunity the hunters kicked apart the crude central hearth. Under Crocus’s orders, two of the hunters began to dig a pit in the ground.

"It seems we will stay here tonight," Walks With Thunder growled. "The cave will provide shelter. And see how the hunters are making a better hearth, one which will allow the air to blow beneath and—"

"The Dreamers have lived here for generations," Longtusk said sharply. "I saw it, the layers of tools and bones in the ground. Even the hearth may have been a Great-Year old. Think of that! And now, in an instant, it is gone, vanished like a snowflake on the tongue, demolished by the Fireheads."

"Demolished and remade," growled Thunder. "But that is their genius. These Dreamers lived here, as you say, for generation on generation, and it never occurred to a single one of them that there might be a different way to build a hearth."

"But the Dreamers didn’t need a different hearth. The one they had was sufficient."

"But that doesn’t matter, little grazer," Thunder said. "You and I must take the world as it is. They imagine how it might be different. Whether it’s better is beside the point; to the Fireheads, change is all that matters…"

The two Dreamer captives, Willow and the female, huddled together on the ground, bound so tightly they couldn’t even embrace. They seemed to be crying.

If Crocus recalled how the Dreamers had saved her life, Longtusk thought, she had driven it from her mind, now and forever.

That night, when Crocus came to feed him, as she had since she was a cub, Longtusk turned away. He was distressed, angered, wanting only to be with his mate and calf in the calm of the steppe.

Crocus left him, baffled and upset.

That night — at the Shaman’s insistence, because of his defiance over Willow — Longtusk was hobbled, for the first time in years.

The Fireheads stayed close to the caves for several days. Crocus sent patrols to the north, east and west, seeking Dreamers. They wished to be sure this land they coveted was cleansed of their ancient cousins before they brought any more of their own kind north.

Lemming became very ill. His wound turned swollen and shiny. The Shaman, who administered medicine to the Fireheads, applied hot cloths in an effort to draw out the poison. But the wound festered badly.

At last the bulk of the column formed up for the long journey back to the settlement. They left behind three hunters and one of the mastodonts. The captive Dreamers had to walk behind the mastodonts, their paws bound and tied to a mastodont’s tail.

The hunters were heavily armed, but there had been no sign of more Dreamers since that first encounter. Perhaps, like the mammoths, the Dreamers had learned that the Fireheads could not be fought: the only recourse was flight, leaving them to take whatever they wanted.

"Since you refused to kill the Dreamer buck," growled Thunder as they walked, "the Shaman has declared you untrustworthy."

"He has always hated me," said Longtusk indifferently.

"Yes," said Thunder. "He is jealous of your closeness to Crocus. And that jealousy may yet cause you great harm, Longtusk. I think you will have to prove your loyalty and trustworthiness. The Shaman is demonstrating, even now, what he does to his enemies."

"What do you mean?"

"Lemming. The Shaman is letting him rot. His wound has festered and turned green, like the rest of his foreleg and shoulder. That is his way. The Shaman does not kill; he lets his enemies destroy themselves. Still, they die."

"But why?"

Thunder snorted. "Because Lemming is a favorite of Crocus’s — and so he is an obstacle to the Shaman. And any such obstacle is, simply, to be removed, as the Fireheads remove the Dreamers from the land they covet. The Fireheads are vicious, calculating predators," the old mastodont said. "Never forget that. The wolf’s first bite is his responsibility. His second is yours… Quiet."

All the mastodonts stopped dead and fell silent. The Fireheads stared at them, puzzled.

"A contact rumble," Walks With Thunder said at last. "From the settlement."

Longtusk strained to hear the fat, heavy sound waves pulsing through the very rocks of the Earth, a chthonic sound that resonated in his chest and the spaces in his skull.

"The calf," Thunder said. "The Cows have sung the birth chorus. Longtusk — Neck Like Spruce has dropped her calf."

Longtusk felt his heart hammer. "And? Is it healthy?"

"…I don’t think so. And Spruce—"

Longtusk, distressed, trumpeted his terror. "I’m so far away! So far!"

Thunder tried to comfort him. "If you were there, what could you do? This is a time for the Cows, Longtusk. Neck Like Spruce has her sisters and mother. And the keepers know what to do."

"The best keeper is Lemming, and he is here, with us, bleeding in the dirt! Oh, Thunder, you were right. A mammoth should not mate a mastodont. We are too different — the mixed blood — like Fireheads and Dreamers."

"Any calf of yours will be strong, Longtusk. A fighter. And Neck Like Spruce is a tough nut herself. They’ll come through. You’ll see."

But Longtusk refused to be comforted.

Lemming was dead before they reached the settlement. His body, stinking with corruption, was buried under a heap of stones by a river.

And when they arrived at the settlement, Longtusk learned he was alone once more.

Neck Like Spruce had not survived the rigors of her birth. The calf, an impossible, attenuated mix of mammoth and mastodont, had not lasted long without his mother’s milk.

The Remembering of mother and calf was a wash of sound and smell and touch, as if the world had dissolved around Longtusk.

When he came out of his grief, though, he felt cleansed.

He had lost a Family before, after all. If it was his destiny to be alone, then so be it. He would be strong and independent, yielding to none.

He allowed Crocus to ride him. But she sensed his change. Her affection for him dried, like a glacial river in winter.

Thus it went for the rest of that summer, and the winter thereafter.

7 The Test

In the spring, seeking to feed the growing population of the settlement, the Fireheads organized a huge hunting drive.

It took some days’ preparation.

Trackers spotted a herd of horses on the steppe. Taking pains not to disturb the animals at their placid grazing, they erected drive lines, rows of cairns made of stone and bone fragments. The mastodonts were used to carry the raw materials for these lines, spanning distances it took a day to cross. The cairns were topped by torches of brush soaked in fat.

Then came the drive.

As the horses grazed their way quietly across the steppe, still oblivious of danger, the hunters ran along the drive lines, lighting the torches. The mastodonts waited, in growing anticipation. It fell to Longtusk to keep the others in order as they scented the horses’ peculiar, pungent stink, heard the light clopping of their hooves and their high whinnying.

The horses drifted into view.

Like other steppe creatures, the horses were well adapted to the cold. They were short and squat. Their bellies were coated with light hair, while their backs sprouted long, thick fur that they shed in the summer, and the two kinds of hair met in a jagged line along each beast’s flank. Long manes draped over their necks and eyes, and their tails dangled to the ground.

The horses could look graceful, Longtusk supposed, and they showed some skill at using their hooves to dig out fodder even from the deepest snow. But they were foolish creatures and would panic quickly, and so were easily hunted en masse.

At last the order came: "Agit!"

Longtusk raised his trunk and trumpeted loudly. The mastodonts charged, roaring and trumpeting, with tusks flashing and trunks raised.

The horses — confused, neighing — stampeded away from the awesome sight. But here came Firehead hunters, whirling noise-makers and yelling, running at the horses from either side.

All of this was designed to make the empty-headed horses run the way the hunters wanted them to go.

The horses, panicking, jostling, soon found themselves in a narrowing channel marked out by the cairns of stone. If they tried to break out of the drive lines they were met by noise-makers, spear thrusts or boomerang strikes.

The drive ended at a sharp-walled ridge, hidden from the horses by a crude blind of dry bush. The lead horses crashed through the flimsy blind and tumbled into the rocky defile. They screamed as they fell to earth, their limbs snapped and ribs crushed. Others, following, shied back, whinnying in panic. But the pressure of their fellows, pushing from behind, drove them, too, over the edge.

So, impelled by their own flight, the horses tumbled to their deaths, the herd dripping into the defile like some overflowing viscous liquid.

When the hunters decided they had culled enough, they ordered the mastodonts back, letting the depleted herd scatter and flee to safety. Then the hunters stalked among their victims, many of them still screaming and struggling to rise, and they speared hearts and slit throats.

Later would come the hard work of butchery, and the mastodonts would be employed to carry meat and hide back to the settlement. It would be hard, dull work, and the stink of the meat was repulsive to the mastodonts’ finely tuned senses. But they did it anyhow — as did Longtusk, who always bore more than his share.

After the successful drive, the Fireheads celebrated, and the mastodonts were allowed a few days to rest and recover.

But Longtusk noticed the Shaman, Smokehat, spending much time at the stockade, arguing with the keepers and jabbing his small fingers toward Longtusk.

Walks With Thunder came to him. Thunder walked stiffly now, for arthritis was plaguing his joints.

Longtusk said, "They seem to be planning another hunt."

"No, not a hunt."

"Then what?"

"Something simpler. More brutal… Something that will be difficult for you, Longtusk. The keepers are debating whether you should be allowed to lead this expedition. But the Shaman insists you go."

"You still read them well."

"Better than I like. Longtusk, this is it. The test. The trial the Shaman has been concocting for you for a long time — at least since that incident when you spared the life of the Dreamer."

"I do not care for the Shaman, and I do not fear him," said Longtusk coldly.

"Be careful, Longtusk," Thunder quoted the Cycle. "The art of traveling is to pick the least dangerous path."

Longtusk growled and turned away. "The Cycle has nothing to teach me. This is my place now. I am a creature of the Fireheads — nothing more. Isn’t that what you always counseled me to become?"

Thunder was aghast. "Longtusk, you are part of the Cycle. We all are. Forty million years—"

But Longtusk, the perennial outsider, had spent the long winter since the death of Neck Like Spruce and her calf building his solitary strength. "Not me," he said. "Not any more."

Thunder sniffed the air sadly. "Oh, Longtusk, has your life been so hard that you care nothing for who you are?"

"Hard enough, old friend, that the Shaman with all his machinations can do nothing to hurt me. Not in my heart."

"I hope that’s true," said Thunder. "For it is a great test that lies ahead of you, little grazer. A great test indeed…"

A few days later the keepers assembled the mastodonts for the expedition. Longtusk accepted pack gear on his back, and took his customary place at the head of the column of mastodonts.

The party left the settlement, heading north. Though Crocus still sometimes participated in the drives and other expeditions, this time she was absent, and the expedition was commanded by the Shaman.

Though they followed a well-marked trail that cut across the steppe, showing this was a heavily traveled route, Longtusk had never come this way before. He did not yet know the destination or purpose of the expedition — but, he told himself, he did not need to know. His role was to work, not to understand.

The Dreamer Willow, enslaved by the Fireheads, was compelled to make the journey too. Willow’s clothing was dirty and in sore need of repair, and his broad back was bent under an immense load of dried food and weapons for the hunters. The pace was easy, for the mastodonts could not sustain a high speed for long, but even so the Dreamer struggled. It was obvious his stocky frame was not designed for long journeys — unlike the taller, more supple Fireheads, whose whip-thin legs covered the steppe with grace and ease.

Over the year since his capture Willow had grown increasingly wretched. During the winter, the female Dreamer taken with him had died of an illness the Fireheads had been unable, or unwilling, to treat. Willow was not like the Fireheads. He had grown up in a society that had known no significant change for generations, a place where the most important things in all the world were the faces of his Family around him, where strangers and the unknown were mere blurs, at the edge of consciousness. Now, alone, he was immersed in strangeness, in constant change, and he seemed constantly on the edge of bewilderment and terror, utterly unable to comprehend the Firehead world around him.

It was said that no matter how far the Fireheads roamed they had not come across another of his kind. Longtusk supposed that just as the mammoths had been scattered and driven north by the Firehead expansion, so had the Dreamers; perhaps there were few of them left alive, anywhere in the world.

Longtusk could not release Willow from his mobile prison of toil and incomprehension. But he sensed that his own presence, a familiar, massive figure, offered Willow some comfort in his loneliness. And now, out of sight of the keepers, he let Willow rest his pack against his own broad flank and hang onto his belly hairs for support.

As the days wore away, and they drove steadily northward, the nature of the land began to change.

The air became chill, and the winds grew persistent and strong. Sometimes the wind flowed from west to east, and Walks With Thunder told Longtusk that such immense air currents could circle the planet, right around the fringe of the great northern icecaps.

And sometimes the wind came from the north, driving grit and ice into their faces, and that was the most difficult of all, for this was a katabatic wind: air that had lain over the ice, made cold and dry and heavy, so that it spilled like water off the ice and over the lower lands below.

They reached land recently exposed by the retreating ice. The ice had scoured away the softer soil down to bedrock, and it was a place of moraines of sand and gravel, rock smashed to fragments by the great weight of ice that had once lain here. There was little life — a few tussocks of grass, isolated trees, some lichen — struggling to survive in patches of soil, wind-blown from the warmer climes to the south.

The mastodonts became uneasy, for unlike the Fireheads they could hear the sounds of the icepack: the crack of new crevasses, the thin rattle of glacial run-off rivers and streams, the deep grind of the glaciers as they tore slowly through the rock. To the mastodonts, the icepack was an immense chill monster, half alive, spanning the world — and now very close.

Longtusk knew they could not stay long in this blighted land; whatever the Fireheads sought here must be a treasure indeed.

And it was as night began to fall on this wind-blasted, frozen desert that Longtusk came upon the corpse.

At first he could see only a hulked form, motionless, half covered by drifting dirt. Condors wheeled above, black stripes against the silvery twilight.

A hyena was working at the corpse’s belly. It snarled at the mastodonts, but fled when a hunter hurled a boomerang.

Walks With Thunder was beside Longtusk. "Be strong, now…"

The mastodonts and hunters gathered around the huge, fallen form, awed by this immense slab of death.

It — she — was a female. She had slumped down on her belly, her legs splayed and her trunk curled on the ground before her. She was gaunt, her bones showing through her flesh at pelvis and shoulders, and her hair had come loose in great chunks, exposing dried, wrinkled skin beneath.

It was clear she was not long dead. She might have been sleeping.

But her eye sockets were bloody pits, pecked clean by the birds. Her small ears were mangled stumps. And Longtusk could see the marks of hyena teeth in the soft flesh of her trunk.

"She was pregnant," Walks With Thunder said softly. "See her swollen belly? The calf must have died within her. But she was starving, Longtusk. Her dugs are flaccid and thin. She would have had little milk to give her calf. In the end she simply ran out of strength. They say it is peaceful to go to the aurora that way…"

Longtusk stood stock still, stunned. He had seen no woolly mammoth since his separation from his Family — nothing but imperfect Firehead images of himself.

Nothing until this.

"We should Remember her," he said thickly.

Thunder rumbled harshly, "I thought you were the one who rejected the Cycle… Never mind. Did you know her?"

"She is old and dead. I can’t recall, Thunder!"

The Fireheads were closing on the fallen mammoth with their stone axes and knives. Walks With Thunder wrapped his trunk around Longtusk’s and pulled him backward.

The Shaman’s hard eyes were fixed on Longtusk, calculating, as the Fireheads butchered the mammoth.

First they wrapped ropes around her legs. Then, chanting in unison and with the help of mastodont muscles, they pulled her on her back. Longtusk heard the crackle of breaking bones as her limp mass settled.

With brisk, efficient motions, a hunter slit open her belly, reached into the cavity and hauled out guts — long tangled coils, black and faintly steaming — and dumped them on the ground. There was a stink of blood and spoiled food and rot. But there were no flies, for few insects prospered in this cold desert.

Then the hunters pulled out a flaccid sac that bulged, heavy. It was the calf, Longtusk realized. Mercifully the hunters put that to one side.

The hunters cracked open her rib cage, climbed inside the body, and began to haul out more bloody organs, the heart and liver and kidneys, black lumps marbled with greasy fat.

Eviscerated, the Cow seemed to slump, hollowed.

When she was emptied, the butchers cut great slits in the Cow’s skin and began to drag it off her carcass. Where the tough hide failed to rip away easily, they used knives to cut through connective tissue to separate it from the pink flesh beneath. They chopped the separated skin into manageable slices and piled it roughly.

Then, with their axes, they began to cut away the meat from the mammoth’s bones. They started with the hindquarters, making fast and powerful cuts above the knee and up the muscle masses. Then they dug bone hooks into the meat and hauled it away, exposing white, bloody bone. The bone attachments were cut through quickly, and the bones separated.

When one side of the Cow had been stripped, the ropes were attached again and the carcass turned over, to expose the other side.

The butchers were skilled and accurate, rarely cutting into the underlying bone, and the meat fell easily from the bones, leaving little behind. They assembled the meat into one immense pile, and extracted the huge bones for another heap.

When they were done the night was well advanced, and the Cow had been reduced to silhouetted piles of flesh and flensed bones, stinking of blood and decay.

The Fireheads built a fire and threw on some of the meat until the air was full of its stink. With every expression of relish they chewed slices of fat, bloody liver, heart and tongue. Even Willow, sitting alone at the fringe of the fire’s circle of light, chewed noisily on the dark meat.

Then the hunters cracked open charred and heated bones and sucked hot, savory marrow from the latticework of hollow bone within.

And at last Longtusk understood.

"I have seen them devour the contents of such bones at the settlement."

"Yes," said Walks With Thunder. "They were mammoth bones, Longtusk. Fireheads rarely hunt mammoths. You are a big, dangerous beast, grazer, and the hunters’ reward, if their lives are spared, is more meat than they can carry. That’s why they prefer the smaller animals for food.

"But they need mammoths. For they need fat."

"The animals they hunt regularly, the deer and the horses, are lean, with blood-red meat. But you, little grazer, are replete with fat, which clings to your heart and organs and swims within your bones. The Fireheads must consume it, and they need it besides for their lamps and paints and salves, and—"

"All the years I watched them trek to the north, returning with their cargoes of great bones. All those years, and I never suspected they were mammoth… Thunder, why didn’t you tell me?"

"It was thought best," said Walks With Thunder carefully, "that you should not know. I made the decision; blame me. What good would it have done you to have known? But now—"

"But now, the Shaman wants me to see this. He is forcing me to confront the truth."

"This is your test," said Walks With Thunder. "Will you fail, Longtusk?"

Longtusk turned away. "No Firehead will defeat me."

"I hope not," Thunder said softly.

But, as it turned out, the greatest test was yet to come.

The next day the hunters walked to and fro across the frozen desert, studying tracks and traces of dung. At last they seemed to come to a decision.

The Shaman pointed north. The mastodonts were loaded up once more.

"Why?" Longtusk rumbled. "They have their bones and their marrow. What else can they want?"

"More," called Thunder grimly. "Fireheads always want more. And they think they know where to find it."

It took another day’s traveling.

The hunters grew increasingly excited, pointing out heaps of dry dung, trails that criss-crossed this dry land — and even, in one place, the skeleton of a mammoth, cleansed of its meat by the carrion eaters, its bones scattered over the dust.

…And Longtusk heard them, smelled their dung and thin urine, long before he saw them.

He rounded a low, ice-eroded hill. The land here was a muddy flat.

And around this mud seep stood mammoths.

With their high bulging heads, shoulder humps and thick straggling hair, the mammoths looked strange in Longtusk’s eyes, accustomed after so long to the sight of short, squat mastodonts; suddenly he felt acutely conscious of his own sloping back and thick hair, his difference.

But these mammoths were bedraggled, clearly in distress.

The mammoths gathered closely around holes in the ground. They reached with their trunks deep into the holes and sucked up the muddy, brackish water that oozed there.

They were jostling for the seeping water. But there wasn’t enough for everybody.

So the mammoths fought each other, wordlessly, dully, endlessly. The plain was filled with the crack of tusk on tusk, the slap of skull on flank. Calves, thin and bony, clustered around the legs of the adults, but they were pushed away harshly. The infants wailed in protest, too weak to fight for the water they needed.

Longtusk watched all this, trembling, scarcely daring to breathe. The familiarity of them — their hair, their curling tusks — was overwhelming. And yet, what was he? He was not some wretched creature grubbing in the dirt for a drop of water. But if not mammoth, what had he become? He felt himself dissolve, leaving only a blackness within.

There were perhaps forty individuals — but this was not a Family or a Clan, for there were Bulls here, closer to the Cows and calves than they would be in normal times. But these were clearly not normal times. One gaunt Cow walked across the muddy flat to a place away from the others. With nervous, hasty scrapes with her feet, she began to dig out a fresh hole. Just behind her, white flensed bones rose out from the muddy ground. She stepped carelessly on a protruding skull, cracking it.

Walks With Thunder grunted softly, "See the bones? Many have perished here already."

Longtusk quoted the Cycle: "Where water vanishes, sanity soon follows."

"Yes. But, beyond sanity, there is necessity. In times as harsh as this, mature Bulls survive, for they can travel far in search of water and food. The Cows are encumbered with their calves, perhaps unborn, and cannot flee. But they are right to push away their calves — so that those who do get water, those who survive, are those who can have more young in better times. And so the old and the young perish. Necessity… We did not come here by accident, Longtusk. The Fireheads knew they would find mammoths in this place of seeping water."

"But the mammoths would not be here in this cold desert," growled Longtusk, "if they had not been pushed so far north by the Fireheads."

Willow, the Dreamer, jumped into an abandoned hole. He picked up a pawful of mud and began to suck at it, slobbering greedily, smearing his face with the sticky black stuff. Unlike the mastodonts, the wretched Dreamer had no keeper to care for him, and was probably in as bad a condition as these starving mammoths.

Now the wind shifted. As the mastodonts’ scent reached him one of the Bull mammoths stirred, raising his muddy trunk to sniff the air. He turned, slowly, and spotted the Fireheads and their mastodonts. He rumbled a warning.

The Bulls scattered, lumbering, trumpeting their alarm. The Cows clustered, drawing their calves in close.

But the Fireheads did not approach or threaten the mammoths. They began to unload the mastodonts and to prepare a hearth.

Gradually, thirst began to overcome the mammoths’ caution. The Cows turned their attention back to the seep holes, and quickly made use of the places vacated by the Bulls. After a time, some of the Bulls came back, raising their tusks and braying a thin defiance at the mastodonts.

Longtusk stepped to the edge of an abandoned hole. There was a little seeping water, so thick with clay it was black, but the hole was all but dry.

He was aware that a Bull mammoth was approaching him. He did not turn that way; he held himself still. But he could not ignore the great creature’s stink, the weight of his footsteps, his massive, encroaching presence, the deep rumble that came to him through the ground.

"…You smell of fat."

Longtusk turned.

He faced a Bull: taller, older than Longtusk, but gaunt, almost skeletal. His guard hair dangled, coarse and lifeless. One of his tusks had been broken, perhaps in a fight; it terminated in a crude, dripping stump. The Bull stood listlessly; white mucus dripped from his eyes. He must barely be able to see, Longtusk realized.

Longtusk’s heart was suddenly hammering. Once the Bull’s accent would have been familiar to him — for it had been the language of Longtusk’s Clan. Was it possible…?

"I am not fat," said Longtusk. "But you are starving."

The mammoth stepped back, growled and slapped his trunk on the ground. "You are fat and ugly and complacent, and you stink of fire, you and these squat hairless dwarfs. You have forgotten what you are. Haven’t you — Longtusk?"

"…Rockheart?"

"I’m still twice the Bull you are." And Rockheart roared and lunged at Longtusk.

Longtusk ducked aside, and the Bull’s tusks flashed uselessly through the air. Rockheart growled, stumbling, the momentum of his lunge catching him off balance. Almost effortlessly Longtusk slid his own tusks around the Bull’s, and he twisted Rockheart’s head. The huge Bull, roaring, slid sideways to the ground.

Longtusk placed his foot on Rockheart’s temple.

He recalled how this Bull had once bested him, humiliating him in front of the bachelor herd. But Longtusk had been a mere calf then, and Rockheart a mature adult Bull. Now it was different: now it was Longtusk who was in his prime, Longtusk who had been trained to keep his courage and to fight — not just other Bulls in half-playful dominance contests, but animals as savage as charging rhinos, even hordes of scheming, clever Fireheads.

"I could crush your skull like a bird’s egg," he said softly.

"Then do it," rumbled Rockheart. "Do it, you Firehead monster."

Firehead monster.

Is it true? Is that what I have become?

Longtusk lifted his foot and stepped back.

As Rockheart, gaunt and weak, scrambled to his feet and roared out his impotent rage, Longtusk walked away, saddened and horrified.

The Fireheads lingered close to the seep holes for a night and a day.

Longtusk found it increasingly difficult to bear the noise of this nightmarish place: the clash of tusks, the bleating of calves.

He said to Walks With Thunder, "Why do the Fireheads keep us here? What do they want?"

"You know what they want," Thunder said wearily. "They want hearts and kidneys and livers and bones, for fat to feed to their cubs. They prefer to take their meat fresh, from the newly dead. And here, in this desolate place, they need only wait."

"So we are waiting for a mammoth to die?"

"Why did you think, Longtusk?"

"These Fireheads believe themselves to be mighty hunters," Longtusk said bitterly. "But it isn’t true. They are scavengers, like the hyenas, or the condors."

Thunder did not reply.

Somehow, in his heart, he had always imagined that his Family were still out there somewhere: just over the horizon, a little beyond the reach of a contact rumble, living on the steppe as they always had. But he had denied the changes in the land he had seen all around him, never thought through their impact on his Family. Now he faced the truth.

He recalled how so recently he had prided himself on his self-control, the fact that he was above mundane concerns, beyond pain and love and hope. He tried to cling to that control, to draw strength from it.

But the comfort was as dry and cold as the mammoths’ seep holes. And he couldn’t get out of his head the disgust and rage of Rockheart.

…The sun wheeled around the sky twice more before it happened.

There was a flurry of motion among the mammoths. The Fireheads, eating and dozing, stirred.

A mammoth Cow, barged away from a water hole, had fallen to her knees. Her breath gurgled in her chest. Other mammoths gathered around her briefly, touching her scalp and tongue with their trunks. But they were weak themselves, ground down by hunger and thirst, and had no help to offer her. Soon she was left alone, slumping deeper into the mud, as if melting.

"At last," rumbled Walks With Thunder brutally.

With fast, efficient cries, a party of Fireheads formed up, gathering their knives and axes and spears, and set off toward the Cow.

Drawn by a hideous curiosity, Longtusk followed.

The Fireheads reached the mammoth. They started to lay their ropes on the ground, ready to pull her onto her back for gutting.

The mammoth raised her head, feebly and slowly, and her eyes opened, gummy with the milky mucus.

The Fireheads stepped back, shouting their annoyance that she was not yet dead.

While the Fireheads argued, the Cow stared at Longtusk. She spoke in a subterranean rumble so soft he could barely hear it. "Don’t you recognize me, Longtusk? Has it been so long?"

Memories swam toward him, long-buried: a calf, a ball of fluffy brown fur, not even her guard hairs grown, scampering, endlessly annoying…

A name.

"Splayfoot." Splayfoot, his sister.

"You’re back in time to Remember me," she said. "You and your Firehead friends. You were going to be the greatest hero of all, Longtusk. Wasn’t that your dream? But now I can smell the stink of fire and meat on you. What happened to you?"

One of the hunters — Bareface — stepped forward. He had a spear in his paw, tipped by shining quartz. He hefted it, preparing for a thrust into her mouth, a single stroke that would surely kill her. Evidently the Fireheads, impatient, had decided to finish her off so they could get on with mining her body for its fat and marrow.

But this was Longtusk’s own sister. His sister!

Longtusk trumpeted his rage.

With a single tusk sweep he knocked Bareface off his feet. The Firehead fell, howling, clutching his leg; bone protruded white from a bloody wound. Longtusk grabbed the spear with his trunk and drove the quartz point deep into the mud.

He went to his sister and wrapped his trunk around hers. "Get up."

"I can’t. I’m so tired…"

"No! Only death is the end of possibility. By Kilukpuk’s dugs, up…" And he hauled her to her feet by main force. She scrabbled at the mud, seeking a footing. Her legs were trembling, the muscles so depleted they could barely support her weight.

But now another mammoth was here — Rockheart, almost as gaunt and weakened. Nevertheless he lumbered up to Splayfoot’s other side, lending his support as Longtusk tried to steady her.

And, startlingly, here was Willow, the squat little Dreamer. He jammed his shoulder under Splayfoot’s heavy rump and shoved as hard as he could. He seemed to be laughing as he, too, defied the Fireheads.

The Fireheads were recovering from their shock at Longtusk’s attack on Bareface. They were reaching for weapons, more of the big spears and axes that could slice through a mammoth’s hide.

But now Walks With Thunder charged at them, his gait stiff and arthritic. He trumpeted, waving his huge old tusks this way and that, scattering the Fireheads. "Go, little grazer!"

And as the water hole receded, and the motley party headed into an empty, unknown land, Longtusk could hear Thunder’s call. "Go, go, go!"