Silverhair

The Story of the Hotbloods

The first Cycle story of all (Silverhair told Icebones, her calf) — the very first of all — is of long, long ago, when there were no mammoths.

In fact, there were no wolves or birds or seals or bears.

For the world belonged to the Reptiles.

Now, the Reptiles were the greatest beasts ever seen — so huge they made the Earth itself shake with their footfalls — and they were cunning and savage hunters.

But they didn’t have things all their own way.

Our ancestors called themselves the Hotbloods.

The Hotbloods were small, timid creatures who lived underground, in burrows, the way lemmings do. The ancestors of every warm-blood creature you see today lived in those cramped dens: bear with seal, wolf with mammoth. They had huge, frightened eyes, for they would emerge from their burrows only at night, when the Reptiles were less active and less able to hunt them. They all looked alike, and rarely even argued, for their world was dominated by the constant threat of the Reptiles.

That was the way the world had been for ten thousand Great-Years.

It was into this world that Kilukpuk, the first of all Matriarchs, was born. If you could have seen her, small and cautious like the rest, you would never have imagined the mighty races that would one day spring from her loins. But despite her smallness, Kilukpuk was destined to become the mother of us all.

Now, Kilukpuk had a brother, called Aglu. He was hard-eyed and selfish, and was often accused of hiding when foraging parties were being readied, and of stealing others’ food — even stealing from infants. But Aglu was sly, and nothing was ever proven.

Despite his faults, Kilukpuk loved her brother. She defended him from attack, and did not complain when he took the warmest place in the burrow, or stole her food, for she always dreamed he would learn the error of his ways.

Now, there came a time when a great light appeared in the night sky.

It was a ball of gray-white, and it had a huge, hairy tail that streamed away from the sun. The light was beautiful, but it was deadly, for it turned night to day, and made it easy for the Reptiles to pick off the foraging Hotbloods. Great was the mourning in the burrows.

One night Kilukpuk was out alone, digging in a mound of Reptile dung for undigested nuts — when suddenly…

Well, Kilukpuk never knew what happened, and I don’t suppose any of us will.

The Earth trembled. There was a great glow, as if dawn were approaching — but the glow was in the west, not the east. Clouds boiled across the sky.

Then the sky itself started to burn, and a great hail of shooting stars poured down toward the land, coming from the west.

Kilukpuk felt a new shaking of the ground. Silhouetted against the red fire-glow of the west, she saw Reptiles: thousands, millions of them — and they were running.

The Reptiles had ruled the world as gods. But now they were fleeing in panic.

Kilukpuk ran back to her burrow, convinced that if even the gods were so afraid, she, and her Family, were sure to die.

The days that followed were filled with strangeness and terror.

A great heat swept over the land.

Then a rain began, salty and heavy, so powerful it was as if an ocean was emptying itself over their heads.

And then the clouds came, and snow fell even at the height of summer.

Kilukpuk and her Family, starved and thirsty, thought this was the end of all things. But their burrows protected the Hotbloods, while the creatures of the surface perished.

At last the cold abated, and day and night returned to the world.

No Reptiles came. There were no footfalls, no digging claws, no bellows of frustrated hunters.

At last, one night, Kilukpuk and Aglu led a party to the surface.

They found a world that was all but destroyed. The trees and bushes had been smashed down by winds and burned by fire.

There were no Reptiles, anywhere.

But the Hotbloods found food to eat in the ruined world, for they were used to living off scraps anyhow. There were roots, and bark that wasn’t too badly burned, and the first green shoots of recovering plants.

Soon the Hotbloods grew fat, and, without the ground-rattling footfalls of the Reptiles to disturb them, began to sleep well during the long, hot days of that strange time.

But there came a time when some Hotbloods did not return from the nightly foraging expeditions, just as it had been before. And then, one day, Kilukpuk was wakened from a dreamless sleep by a slam-slam-slam that shook dirt from the roofs of the burrows.

Aglu, her brother, came running through the burrows. "It is the Reptiles! They have returned!"

Kilukpuk gathered her calves to her. They were terrified and bewildered.

After that, things rapidly got worse. More foragers were lost on the surface. The Hotbloods became as fearful and hollow-eyed as they had ever been, and food soon began to run short in the burrows.

But Kilukpuk could not help but notice that not all the Hotbloods were suffering so. While the others were skinny and raddled by disease, Aglu and his band of companions seemed sleek and healthy. Kilukpuk grew suspicious, though her suspicion saddened her, for she still loved her brother deeply.

At last, one night, she followed Aglu and his companions to the surface. She saw that Aglu and the others made little effort to conceal themselves — in fact, they laughed and cavorted in the Moonlight.

Then they did a very strange thing.

When they had eaten their fill of the roots and green plants, Aglu and his friends climbed up low bushes and hurled themselves at the ground. They pushed pebbles off low outcrops and let them dash against the ground. They even picked up heavy branches and slammed them against the ground — all the time roaring and howling as if they were Reptiles themselves.

And when an unwary Hotblood came poking her nose out of the ground, Aglu and his friends prepared to attack her.

Immediately Kilukpuk rose up with a roar of rage. She fell on Aglu and his followers, cuffing and kicking and biting them, scattering their pebbles and their sticks.

The Hotblood whose life had been spared ran away. Aglu’s followers soon fled, leaving Kilukpuk facing her brother. She picked him up by the scruff of the neck. "So," she said, "you are the mighty Reptile that has terrified my calves."

"Let me go, Kilukpuk," he said, wriggling. "The Reptiles have gone. We are free—"

"Free to enslave your Cousins with fear? I should rip you to pieces myself."

Aglu grew frightened. "Spare me, Kilukpuk. I am your brother."

And Kilukpuk said, "I will spare you. For Hotblood should not kill Hotblood. But you are no brother of mine; and your mouth and fur stink of blood. Go now."

And she threw him as hard as she could; threw him so far, his body flew over the horizon, his cries diminishing.

She went back to the burrows to comfort her calves, and tell her people the danger was over: that they need not skulk in their burrows, that they could live on the land, not under it, and they could enjoy the light of the day, not cower in darkness.

And Kilukpuk led her people to the sunlit land, and they began to feed on the new plants that sprouted from the richness of the burned ground.

As for Aglu, some say he was ripped apart and eaten by his own calves, and they have never forgotten the taste of that grisly repast: for they became the bear and the wolf, and the other Hotbloods that eat their own kind.

Certainly Kilukpuk never gave up her vigilance, even as she grew strong and sleek, and her fertile loins poured forth generation after generation of calves. And her calves feared nobody.

Nobody, that is, except the Lost.

1 The Headland

Silverhair, standing tall on the headland, was cupped in a land of flatness: a land of far horizons, a land of blue and gray, of fog and rain, of watery light no brighter than an English winter twilight.

It was the will of Kilukpuk, of course, that Silverhair should be the first to spot the Lost. Nobody but Silverhair — Silverhair the rebel, the Cow who behaved more like a musth Bull, as Owlheart would tell her — nobody but she would even have been standing here, alone, on this headland at the southwestern corner of the Island, looking out to sea with her trunk raised to test the air.

The dense Arctic silence was abruptly broken by the evocative calls of birds. Silverhair saw them on the cliff below her, prospecting for their colony: the first kittiwakes, arriving from the south. It was a sign of life, a sign of spring, and she felt her own spirits rise in response.

A few paces from Silverhair, in a hollow near the cliff edge, a solid bank of snow had gathered. Now a broad, claw-tipped paw broke its way out into the open air, and beady black eyes and nose protruded. It was a polar bear, a female. The bear climbed out, a mountain of yellow-white fur. She was lean after consuming her body fat over the winter, and her long, strong neck jutted forward; her muscles, long and flowing, worked as she glided over the crusted snow.

The bear saw Silverhair. She fixed the huge mammoth with a glare, quite fearless.

Then she stretched, circled, and clambered back in through the narrow hole to the cubs she had borne during the winter, leaving a hind leg waving in the air.

Amused, Silverhair looked to the south.

The black bulk of a spruce forest obscured her view of the coast itself — and of the mysterious Nest of Straight Lines that stood there, a place that could be glimpsed only when the air was clear of fog or mist or snow, a sinister place that no mammoth would willingly visit. But Silverhair could see beyond the forest, to the ocean itself.

Here and there, blown snow snaked across the landfast ice that fringed the Island’s coast. Two pairs of black guillemots, striking in their winter plumage, swam along the sea edge, mirrored in the calm water. Pack ice littered the Channel that lay between Island and Mainland. The ice had been smashed and broken by the wind; the glistening blue-white sheet was pocked by holes and leads exposing black, surging water.

Away from the shore the sea remained open, of course, as it did all year round, swept clear of ice by the powerful currents that surged there. Frost-smoke rose from the open water, turned to gold by the low sun. And beyond the Channel, twilight was gathering on that mysterious Mainland itself. It was the land from which — according to mammoth legend recorded in the Cycle — the great hero Longtusk had, long ago, evacuated his Family to save them from extinction.

And as the day waned she could see the strange gathering of lights, there on the Mainland: like stars, a crowded constellation, but these lights were orange and yellow and unwinking, and they clung to the ground like lichen. Silverhair growled and squinted, but her vision was poor. If only she could smell that remote place; if only it sent out deep contact rumbles rather than useless slivers of light.

And now heavy storm clouds descended on that unattainable land, obscuring the light.

In the icy breeze, the air crackled in her nostrils, and her breath froze in the fur that covered her face.

That was when she saw the Lost.

She didn’t know what she was seeing, of course.

All she saw was something adrift on the sea between Island and Mainland. At first she thought it was just an ice floe; perhaps the unmoving shapes on top of the floe were seals, resting as they chewed on their monotonous diet of fish and birds.

But she had never seen seals sitting up as these creatures did, never seen seals with fins as long and splayed as those — never heard voices floating over the water and the shore of ice and rock, as petulant and peevish as these.

Even the "ice floe" was strange, its sides and one end straight, the other end coming to a point like a tusk’s, its middle hollow, cupping the seal-like creatures inside. Whatever it was, it was drifting steadily closer to the Island; it would surely come to ground somewhere south of the spruce forest, and spill those squabbling creatures on the shore.

She knew she should return to the Family, tell them what she had seen. Perhaps Owlheart or Eggtusk, in their age and wisdom — or clever Lop-ear, she thought warmly — would know the meaning of this. But she had time to watch a little longer, to indulge the curiosity that had already caused her so much trouble during her short life…

But now she heard the stomping.

It was a deep pounding, surging through the rocky ground. A human would have heard nothing, not even felt the quiver of the ground caused by those great footfalls. But Silverhair recognized it immediately, for the stomping has the longest range of all the mammoths’ means of calling each other.

It was the distinctive footfall of Owlheart herself: it was the Matriarch, calling her Family together. The birth must be near.

When Silverhair had been a calf, the Island had rung to the stomping of mammoths, for there were many Families in those days, scattered across the tundra. Now there was only the remote echo of her own Matriarch’s footfall. But Silverhair — nervous about the birth to come, her curiosity engaged by what she had seen today — did not reflect long on this.

The new spring sun was weak, a red ball that rolled along the horizon, offering little warmth. And already, heartbreakingly soon, it was setting, having shed little heat over the snow that still covered the ground. The last light turned the mountains pink, and it caught Silverhair’s loose outer fur, making it glow, so that it was as if she were surrounded by a smoky halo.

She stole one last glimpse at the strange object in the sea. It had almost passed out of sight anyway, as it drifted away from the headland.

She turned and began her journey back to her Family.

Later she would wonder if it might have been better to have ignored the Matriarch’s call, descended to the shore — and without mercy, destroyed the strange object and the creatures it contained.

2 The Birth

Mammoths wander. Few wander as far as Silverhair did, however.

It took her ten days to cross the Island and return to the northern tundra where her Family was gathered. She was not aware of the way the ground itself shuddered as her feet passed, and the way lemmings were rattled in their winter burrows in the snow. But the rodents were unconcerned, and went about their tiny businesses without interruption. For they knew that the mammoths, the greatest creatures in the land, would do them no harm.

Silverhair knew that the worst of the winter was over: that time of perpetual night broken only by the occasional flare of the aurora borealis, and of the hard winds from the north that drove snow and ice crystals before them. The return of the sun had been heralded by days in which the darkness was relieved by twilight, when the black star pool above had turned to a dome of glowing purple — purple enriched by swathes of blue, pink, even some flashes of green — before sinking back to darkness again, all without a sliver of sunlight.

But every day the noon twilights had grown longer and stronger, until at last the sun itself had come peeking over the horizon. At first it was just a splinter of blinding light that quickly disappeared, as if shy. But at last the sun had climbed fully above the horizon for the first time in more than a hundred days.

In the new light, to the north, she could see the sweep of the Island itself. The tundra was still largely buried in pale snow and ice, with none of the rich marsh green or splashes of flowering color that the growth of summer would bring. And beyond, to the farthest north, she could see the bony faces of the Mountains at the End of the World, looming out of the bluish mist that lingered there, brown cones striped by the great white glaciers that spilled from rocky valleys. The Mountains were a wall of ice and rock beyond which no mammoth had ever ventured.

Along the south coast of the Island, more sheltered, the oily green-black of a spruce forest clung to the rock. The trees were intruders, encroaching on the ancient tundra that provided Silverhair’s Family with the grassy food they needed.

Despite her sense of urgency, Silverhair paused frequently to feed. Her trunk was busy and active, like an independent creature, as it worked at the ground. She would wrap her trunk-fingers around the sparse tufts of grass she found under the snow, cramming the dark green goodies into her small mouth, and grind them between her great molar teeth with a back-and-forth movement of her jaw. The grass, the last of the winter, was coarse, dry, and unsatisfying, as was the rest of her diet of twigs and bark of birches, willows, and larches; with a corner of her mind she looked forward to her richer summer feast to come.

And she would lift her anus flap and pass dung, briskly and efficiently, as mammoths must ten or twelve times a day. The soft brown mass settled to the ice behind her, steaming; it would enrich the soil it touched, and the seeds that had passed through Silverhair’s stomach would germinate and turn the land green.

The Family had no permanent home. They would gather to migrate to new pastures, or when one of their members was in some difficulty. But they would scatter in pairs or small groups to forage for food during the day, or to sleep at night. There was never any formal arrangement about where to meet again — nor was one necessary, for the mammoths were by far the most massive beasts in the landscape, and the authoritative stomping of Owlheart, and the rumbling and calls of the Family gathered together, traveled — to a mammoth’s ears — from one end of the Island to another.

On the eighth day a line of white vapor cut across the deep blue sky, utterly straight, feathering slightly. Silverhair peered upward; the vapor trail was at the limit of her poor vision. There was a tiny, glittering form at the head of the vapor line, like a high-flying bird, but its path was unnaturally straight and unwavering, its wings frozen still. A sound like remote thunder drifted down, even though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

Silverhair had seen such things before. Nobody could tell her what it was, what it meant. After a time, the glittering mote passed out of sight, and the vapor trail slowly dispersed.

On the ninth day Silverhair was able to hear not just the Matriarch’s stomping, but also the rumbles, trumpets, and growls of her people. The deep voices of mammoths — too deep for human ears — will carry far across the land, unimpeded by grassland, snowbanks, even forest.

And in the evening of that day, when the wind was right, she could smell home: the rich, hot odor of fresh dung, the musk stink of wet fur.

On the tenth day she was able to see the others at last. The mammoths, gathered together, were blocky shapes looming out of the blue-tinged fog. Silverhair was something of a loner, but even so, she felt her heart pump, her blood flow warm in her veins, at the thought of greeting the Family.

Warm at the thought — she admitted it — of seeing Lop-ear once more.

The mammoths were scraping away thin layers of snow with their feet and tusks to get at the saxifrage buds below. Molting winter fur hung around them in untidy clouds, and she could see how gaunt they were, after a winter spent burning the fat of the long-gone summer. It had been a hard winter, even for this frozen desert, and standing water had been unusually hard to find. Silverhair knew that when the weather lifted — and if the thaw did not come soon — the Matriarch would have to lead them to seek open water. It would be an arduous trek, and there was no guarantee of success, but there might be no choice.

The Family’s two adult Bulls came to meet her.

Here was powerful old Eggtusk, his ears ragged from the many battles he had fought, and with the strange egg-shaped ivory growth in his tusk that had given him his name. And here, too, was Lop-ear, the younger Bull, with his dangling, parasite-damaged ear. The Bulls launched into their greeting ceremony, and Silverhair joined in, rumbling and trumpeting, excited despite the shortness of her separation.

The three mammoths raised their trunks and tails and ran and spun around. They urinated and defecated in a tight ring, their dung merging in a circle of brown warmth on the ground. Old Eggtusk was the clumsiest of the three, of course, but what he lacked in elegance he made up for in his massive enthusiasm.

Now they touched one another. Silverhair clicked tusks with Eggtusk, and — with more enthusiasm — touched Lop-ear’s face and mouth, wrapping her trunk over his head and rubbing at his scalp hair. She found the musth glands in his cheeks and slowly snaked her trunk across them, reading his subtle chemical language, while he rubbed her forehead; then they pulled back their trunks and entangled them in a tight knot.

A human observer would have seen only three mammoths dancing in their baffling circles, trumpeting and growling and stomping, even emitting high-pitched, bird-like squeaks with their trunks.

Perhaps, with patience, she might have deduced some simple patterns: the humming sound that indicated a warning, a roar that was a signal to attack, the whistling that means that one of the Family is injured or in distress.

But mammoth speech is based not just on the sounds they make — from the ground-shaking stomps and low-pitched rumbles, bellows, trumpets, and growls, to the highest chirrups of their trunks — but also on the complex dances of their bodies, and changes in how they smell or breathe or scratch, even the deep throb of their pulses. All of this makes mammoth speech richer than any human language.

"…Hello!" Silverhair was calling. "Hello! I’m so glad to see you! Hello!"

"Silverhair," Eggtusk growled, failing to mask his pleasure at seeing her again. "Last back as usual. By Kilukpuk’s mite-ridden left ear, I swear you’re more Bull than Cow."

"Oh, Eggtusk, you can’t keep that up." And she laid her trunk over Eggtusk’s head and began to tickle him behind his ear with her delicate trunk-fingers. "Plenty of mites in this ear too."

He growled in pleasure and shook his head; his hair, matted with mud, moved in great lanks over his eyes. "You won’t be able to run away when you have your own calf. You just bear that in mind. You should be watching and learning from your sister."

"I know, I know," she said. But she kept up her tickling, for she knew his scolding wasn’t serious. A new birth was too rare and infrequent an event for anyone to maintain ill-humor for long.

Rare and infrequent — but not so rare as what she’d seen on the sea, she thought, remembering. "Lop-ear. You’ve got to come with me." She wrapped her trunk around his, and tugged.

He laughed and flicked back his lifeless ear. "What is it, Silver-hair?"

"I saw the strangest thing in the sea. To the south, from the headland. It was like an ice floe — but it wasn’t; it was too dark for that. And there were animals on it — or rather inside it — like seals—"

Lop-ear was watching her fondly. He was a year older than Silverhair. Although he wouldn’t reach his full height until he was forty years old, he was already tall, and his shoulders were broad and strong, his brown eyes like pools of autumn sunlight.

But Eggtusk snorted. "By Kilukpuk’s snot-crusted nostril, what are you talking about, Silverhair? Why can’t you wander off and find something useful — like nice warm water for us to drink?"

"The animals were cupped inside the floating thing, for it was hollow, like—" She had no language to describe what she’d seen. So she released Lop-ear’s trunk and ripped a fingerful of trampled grass from the ground. Carefully, sheltering the blades from the wind, she cupped the grass. "Like this!"

Lop-ear looked puzzled.

Eggtusk was frowning. "Seals, you say?"

"But they weren’t seals," she said. "They had four flippers each — or rather, legs — that were stuck out at angles, like broken twigs. And heads, big round heads… You do believe me, don’t you?"

Eggtusk was serious now. He said, "I don’t like the sound of that. Not one bit."

Silverhair didn’t understand. "Why not?"

But now, from the circle of Cows, Foxeye, her sister, cried out.

Lop-ear pushed Silverhair’s backside gently with his trunk. "Go on, Silverhair. You can’t stay with us Bulls. Your place is with your sister."

And so Silverhair, with a mix of fascination and reluctance, walked to the center of the Family, where the Cows were gathered around her sister.

At the heart of the group was massive Owlheart — Silverhair’s grandmother, the Matriarch of them all — and like a shadow behind her was Wolfnose. Wolfnose, Owlheart’s mother, had once been Matriarch, but now she was so old that her name, given her for the sharpness of her sense of smell as a calf, seemed no more than a sad joke.

Before Owlheart’s tree-trunk legs, a Cow lay on her side on the ground. It was Foxeye, Silverhair’s sister, who was close to birthing.

Owlheart lifted her great head and fixed Silverhair with a steady, intense glare; for a few heartbeats, Silverhair saw in her the ghost of the patient predator bird after whom the Matriarch had been named. "Silverhair! Where have you been?" She added such a deep rumble to her voice that Silverhair felt her chest quiver.

"To the headland. I was just—"

"I don’t care," said Owlheart.

Given the question, it wasn’t a logical answer. But then, Silverhair reflected, if you’re the Matriarch, you don’t have to be logical.

Now Snagtooth — Silverhair’s aunt, Owlheart’s daughter — was standing before her. "About time, Silverhair," she snapped, and she spat out a bit of enamel that had broken off the misshapen molar that grew out of the left side of her mouth. Snagtooth was tall for a Cow: big, intimidating, unpredictably angry.

"Leave me alone, Snagtooth."

Croptail pushed his way between Snagtooth’s legs to Silverhair. "Silverhair! Silverhair!" Croptail was Foxeye’s first calf. He was a third-molar — on his third set of teeth — born ten years earlier. He was a skinny, uncertain ball of orange hair with a peculiar stub of a tail. Kept away from his mother during this birth, he looked lost and frightened. "I’m hungry, Silverhair." He pushed his mouth into her fur, looking for her nipples.

Gently she tried to nudge him away. "I can’t feed you, child."

The little Bull’s voice was plaintive. "But Momma is sick."

"No, she isn’t. But when she has the new baby, you’ll have to feed yourself. You’ll have to find grass and—"

Snagtooth was still growling at Silverhair. "…You always were unreliable. My sister would be ashamed."

Silverhair squared up to her sour-eyed aunt. "Don’t you talk about my mother."

"I’ll say what I like."

"It’s only because you can’t have calves of your own, no matter how many Bulls you take. That’s why you’re as bitter as last summer’s bark. Everybody knows it—"

"Why, you little—"

Owlheart stepped between them, her great trunk working back and forth. "Are you two Bulls in musth? Snagtooth, take the calf."

"But she—"

Owlheart reared up to her full height, and towered over Snagtooth. "Do not question me, daughter. Take him."

Snagtooth subsided. She dug an impatient trunk into the mat of fur under Silverhair’s belly and pulled out a squealing Croptail.

At last, Silverhair was able to reach Foxeye. Her sister was lying on her side, her back legs flexing uncomfortably, the swell in her belly obvious. Her fur was muddy and matted with dew and sweat.

Silverhair entwined her trunk with her sister’s. "I’m sorry I’m so late."

"Don’t be," said Foxeye weakly. Her small, sharp eyes were, today, brown pools of tears, and the dugs that protruded from the damp, flattened fur over her chest were swollen with milk. "I wish mother were here."

Silverhair’s grip tightened. "So do I."

The pregnancy had taken almost two full years. Foxeye’s mate had been a Bull from Lop-ear’s Family — and that, Silverhair thought uneasily, was the last time any of them had seen a mammoth from outside the Family. Foxeye had striven to time her pregnancy so that her calf would be born in the early spring, with a full season of plant growth and feeding ahead of it before the winter closed around them once more. It had been a long, difficult gestation, with Foxeye often falling ill; but at last, it seemed, her day had come.

The great, stolid legs of Owlheart and Wolfnose stood over Foxeye, and Silverhair felt a huge reassurance that the older Cows were here to help her sister, as they had helped so many mothers before — including her own.

Foxeye’s legs kicked back, and she cried out.

Silverhair stepped back, alarmed. "Is it time?"

Owlheart laid a strong, soothing trunk on Foxeye’s back. "Don’t be afraid, Silverhair. Watch now."

The muscles of Foxeye’s stomach flexed in great waves. Then, with startling suddenness, it began.

A pink-purple fetal sac thrust out of Foxeye’s body. The sac was small, streamlined like a seal, and glistening with fluid. As it pushed in great surges from Foxeye’s pink warmth, it looked more like something from the sea, thought Silverhair, than mammoth blood and bone.

One last heave, and Foxeye expelled the sac. It dropped with a liquid noise to the ground.

Owlheart stepped forward. With clean, confident swipes of her tusks she began to cut open the fetal sac and strip it away.

Foxeye shuddered once more. The afterbirth was expelled, a steaming, bloody mass of flesh. Then Foxeye fell back against the hard, cold ground, closing her eyes, her empty belly heaving with deep, exhausted breaths.

Silverhair watched, fascinated, as the new calf emerged from its sac. The trunk came first, a thin, dark rope. Then came the head, for a moment protruding almost comically from the sac. It was plastered with pale orange hair, soaked with blood and amniotic fluid, and it turned this way and that. Two eyes opened, bright pink disks; then the tiny mouth popped moistly open under the waving trunk.

"Her eyes," Silverhair said softly.

Wolfnose, her great-grandmother, was stroking and soothing Foxeye. "What about her eyes?"

"They’re red."

"So they should be. Everything is as it should be, as it has been since Kilukpuk birthed her last Calves in the Swamp."

The baby was a small bundle of bloody, matted fur, sprawled on the grass. She breathed with wet sucking noises, and her breath steamed; she let out a thin wail of protest and began to scrabble at the ground with her stumpy legs.

Owlheart’s trunk tapped Silverhair’s flank. "Help her, child."

Silverhair stepped forward nervously. She lowered her trunk and wrapped it around the calf’s belly. Her skin was hot, and slick with birthing fluid that was already gathering frost.

With gentle pulling, Silverhair helped the infant stagger to her feet. The calf looked about blindly, mewling.

An infant mammoth, at birth, is already three feet tall. A human baby weighs less than the mammoth’s brain.

"She wants her first suck," Owlheart said softly.

With gentle tugs Silverhair guided the stumbling infant forward.

Foxeye knelt, then stood uncertainly, so that her pendulous dugs hung down before the calf. Silverhair slid her trunk under the calf’s chin, and helped the calf roll her tiny trunk onto her forehead. Soon the baby’s pink mouth had found her mother’s nipple.

"Red eyes," said Foxeye. "Like the rising sun. That’s her name. Sunfire."

Then Silverhair, with Owlheart and Wolfnose, stood by the calf and mother. They kept the infant warm with their bodies, and used their trunks to clean the baby’s hair as she stood amid the rich hair of her mother’s belly, protected by the palisade of the huge legs around her. After a time Foxeye moved away from the reaching calf, encouraging her to walk after her.

And as she watched the infant suckle, Silverhair felt an odd pressure in her own empty dugs.

At the end of the long night, with the deep purple of dawn seeping into the eastern sky, Silverhair broke away from the Cows so she could feed and pass dung.

Wolfnose came wandering over the uneven tundra.

Silverhair, moved by an obscure concern, followed her great-grandmother.

The old Cow, her hair clumpy and matted, tugged fitfully at the trampled grass. But the coordination of her trunk fingers was poor, and the wiry grass blades evaded her. Silverhair could see that even when Wolfnose managed to drag a fingerful from the hard, frozen ground and cram it in her mouth, much of the crushed grass spilled from her mouth, and a greenish juice trickled over her lower lip.

Silverhair tenderly reached forward and tucked the grass back into Wolfnose’s mouth.

Wolfnose was so old now that the two great molars in her jaw — her last set — were wearing down, and soon they would no longer be able to perform the job of grinding her food for her. Then, no matter what the Family did for her, Wolfnose’s ribs and backbone would become even more visible through her sagging flesh and clumps of hair. And, if the wolves spared her, her rheumy eyes would close for the last time.

It would be a time of sadness. But it was as it had been since the days of Kilukpuk.

Wolfnose was mumbling even as her great jaw scraped ineffectually at the grass. "Too long," she said. "Too long."

"Too long since what?" Silverhair asked, puzzled.

"Since the last birth. That whining Bull-calf who’s always under my feet—"

"Croptail."

"Too long…"

Mammoths do not have clocks, or wristwatches, or calendars; they do not count out the time in arbitrary packages of seconds and days and years, as humans do. Nevertheless, the mammoths know time on a deep level within themselves. They can measure the slow migration of shadows across the land, the turning faces of Arctic poppies, the strength of air currents. So massive are mammoths that they can feel the turn of the Earth on its axis, the slow pulse of the seasons as the Earth spins in its stately annual dance, making the sun arc across the sky. And so deep and long are their memories, they are even aware of the greater cycles of the planet. There is the Great-Year, the twenty-thousand-year nod of the precessing axis of the spinning planet. And the mammoths know even the million-year cycle of the great ice sheets, which lap against the mountains like huge frozen waves.

So Silverhair knew time. She knew how she was embedded in the great hierarchy of Earth’s rhythms.

And she knew that Wolfnose was right.

Wolfnose said, "One infant, and one half-starved calf. It’s not enough to keep the Family going, Grassfoot."

Grassfoot had been the name of Silverhair’s mother — Wolfnose’s granddaughter — who, when Silverhair was herself still an infant younger than Croptail was now, had died. Calling Silverhair "Grassfoot" was a mistake Wolfnose had made before.

"I know," said Silverhair sadly. "I know, Great-Grandmother." And, tenderly, she tucked more grass into the old Cow’s trembling mouth.

After a time Owlheart came forward. Her huge head loomed over Silverhair, so close that the Matriarch’s wiry hair brushed Silverhair’s brow. She pulled Silverhair away from Wolfnose.

"I know you’re no fool, child," rumbled Owlheart. "Sometimes I think you’re the smartest, the best of us all."

Silverhair was startled; she’d never been spoken to like that before.

"But," the Matriarch went on, "I want you to understand that there is nowhere so important for you to be, right now, as here, at the time of this, our first new birth for many seasons. Never mind headlands. Never mind plausible young Bulls, even. Do you know why you must be here?"

"To help my sister."

The Matriarch shook her great head. "More than that. You must learn. Soon you will be ready for estrus, ready for a calf of your own. And that calf will depend on you — for its whole life, at first — and later, for the lore and wisdom you can teach it. We don’t come into the world fully made, like the birds and the mice. We have to learn how to live. And it will be up to you to teach your calf. There is no greater responsibility. But you cannot teach if you do not learn yourself." Owlheart stepped back. "And if you do not learn, you will never become the great Matriarch I think you could be."

At that, Silverhair’s mouth dropped open, and her pink tongue rolled out with surprise. "Me? A Matriarch?"

It was the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard.

But Owlheart held her gaze. "It is your destiny, child," she said sadly. "Don’t you know that yet?"

3 The Walk South

Mammoths sleep for only a few hours at a time. During the long nights of winter — and during the Arctic summer, when the sun never sets — they sleep not to a fixed pattern but whenever they feel the need.

So when Silverhair woke, the Moon was still high in the sky, bathing the frozen land in blue light. But soon the short spring day would return. She heard a snow bunting call — a herald of spring — and a raven croaked by overhead.

Silverhair remembered the great mystery she had confronted, and — despite the new calf, despite Owlheart’s rumblings — her curiosity was like a pull on her tail, dragging her south again.

Lop-ear was a little way away from the Family, digging in a patch of snow for frozen grass. Silverhair shook frost from her outer guard hair and went to him.

For fear of disturbing the others she silently wrapped her trunk around his and tugged. At first he was reluctant to move; Bull or not, he didn’t have quite the powerful streak of curiosity that motivated Silverhair. But after a few heartbeats he let Silverhair lead him away.

Lop-ear spoke with high-pitched chirrups of his trunk that he knew would not carry back to the Family. "Look at Owlheart."

Silverhair turned to look back at the Family. She could see the massive dark forms of Owlheart and Wolfnose looming protectively over Foxeye and her new calf. And she could see Owlheart’s eyes, like chips of ice in that huge brown head: an unblinking gaze, fixed on her.

"They don’t call her Owlheart for nothing," Lop-ear murmured.

Silverhair shivered. She remembered Owlheart’s admonitions: she should stay and spend time with her sister and the calf. But the pull of curiosity in her was too strong. She knew she had to go and explore what she had found on that remote coast.

So she turned away, and the two of them walked on, heading south.

There was ice everywhere, beneath the starry sky. The ridged ice and snowdrifts seemed to flow smoothly under their feet.

Silverhair walked steadily and evenly. Her bulk was dark and huge, herself and Lop-ear the only moving things in all this world of white and blue and black. She walked with liquid grace, her head nodding with each step, her trunk swaying before her, its great weight obvious. When she ran, her footsteps were firm, her powerful legs remaining stiff beneath her great weight, her feet swelling slightly as they absorbed her bulk.

They battled through a storm.

The snow and fog swirled around them, matting their hair with freezing moisture, at times making it impossible for them to see more than a few paces ahead. But Silverhair knew the storm was the last defiant bellow of the dying winter, and she kept her head down and used her bulk to drive herself forward across a tundra that was like a frozen ocean.

They walked by night, when the only light came from the Moon, which cast a glittering purple glow on the fields of ice and snow. At such times the world was utterly still and silent, save for their own breathing.

To a watching human, Silverhair would have looked something like an Asian elephant — but coated with the long, dark brown hair of a musk ox — round and solid and dark and massive, looking as if she had sprouted from the unforgiving Earth itself.

From the ground under her tree-trunk legs to the top of her broad shoulders — as a human would have measured her — Silverhair was seven feet tall. She was fifteen years old. She could expect to continue growing until she was twenty-five or thirty, until she reached the height of eight or nine feet attained by Owlheart, the Matriarch of the Family. But at that, she would be dwarfed by the biggest of the Bulls — like crusty old Eggtusk, who stood all of eleven feet tall at the shoulder.

Her head was large, with a high dome on her crown. Her face, with its long jaw, was surprisingly graceful. Her shoulders had a high, distinctive hump, behind which her back sloped markedly from front to rear — unlike the horizontal line of an elephant’s back.

Her body was a machine designed to combat the cold.

The layer of fat under her skin — thick as a human forearm — kept her warm through the lightless depths of the Arctic winter. Her ears and tail were small, otherwise those thin, exposed organs would be at risk from frostbite — but the long hairs that extended from her fleshy tail would let it serve as an effective fly-swat in the mosquito-ridden months of the short summer. There was even a small flap of skin beneath her tail, to seal her anus from the cold.

Her ears had an oddly human shape. Her eyes, too, were small like a human’s, and buried deep in a nest of wrinkled skin, shielded from the worst of the weather by thick lashes.

Her tusks were six feet long. Sprouting from their deep sockets at the front of her face, the tusks twisted before her in a loose spiral, their tips almost touching before her. The undersides of both her tusks were worn, for she used them to strip bark and dig up plants — and, in the depths of winter, her tusks served as a snowplow to dig out vegetation for feeding, or even as an icebreaker to expose water to drink in frozen ponds. The bluish ivory of the tusks was finely textured, with growth rings that mapped her age.

Her trunk, six feet long, served her as her nose, hand, and arm, and was her main feeding apparatus. It was a tube of flesh packed with tiny muscles, capable of movement in any direction, even contraction and extension like a telescope. It had two finger-like extensions at its tip for manipulating grass and other small objects. As it worked, the trunk’s surface folded and wrinkled, betraying the complexity of its structure.

A heavy coat of fur covered her body. Over a fine, downy underwool, her guard hairs were long, coarse, and thick, springy and transparent — more like lengths of fishing line than human hair. The hair on her head was just a few inches long. But it hung down in a longer fringe under her chin and neck, and at the sides of her trunk. From her flanks and belly hung a skirt of guard hair almost three feet long, giving her something of the look of a Tibetan yak.

Her coat was dark orange-brown, like a musk ox’s. And in a broad cap between her eyes lay the patch of snow-white fur that had given Silverhair her name.

Silverhair was Mammuthus primigenius: a woolly mammoth.

Ten thousand years before, creatures like Silverhair had populated the fringe of the retreating northern ice caps — right around the planet, through Asia from the Baltic to the Pacific, across North America from Alaska to Labrador. But those days were gone.

The isolation of this remote island, off the northern coast of Siberia, had saved Silverhair and her ancestors from the extinction that had washed over the mainland, claiming her Cousins and many other large animals.

But now the mammoths were trapped here, on the Island.

And Silverhair and her Family were the last of their kind, the last in all the world.

The short days and long nights wore away.

Silverhair and Lop-ear took time to care for their skin. They scratched against an outcropping of rock, luxuriantly dislodging the grasses and dirt that had lodged in the crevices of their skin and under their hair. They used a patch of dusty, dried-out soil to powder their skin and force out parasites.

Under her thick hair, Silverhair’s skin would have looked rough and callused. But it was very sensitive. Under a tough, horny outer layer were receptors so acute, she could pinpoint an annoying insect and brush it off with a precise flick of her trunk, or swish of her tail — or even crush it with one focused ripple of her skin.

Nevertheless, Silverhair looked forward to the summer, when open puddles of water would be available, and she would be able to wallow comfortably in mud, cooling and washing out ticks and fleas and lice.

"…I wonder if Owlheart guessed where we were going," Lop-ear was saying as he scratched. "Did you see her talking to Eggtusk?"

"No. But after that lecture I’m surprised she’s letting me out of the sight of the calf."

Lop-ear raised his trunk to sniff at the frosty air. "She was right. Raising the young is the most important thing of all. But she’s obviously making an exception for you."

"Why?"

"Perhaps because — to Owlheart — this may be more important than anything else you can do — even more important than learning about calves." Lop-ear rested his trunk on his tusks. "Owlheart is wise," he said. "She listens with more than ears. She listens with her heart and mind. That’s why she’s Matriarch."

"And why," said Silverhair miserably, "I could never be Matriarch, if I live until the Earth spins itself to dust." She told Lop-ear what Owlheart had said: that it was her destiny to be Matriarch.

"She’s probably right," he said. "There aren’t too many candidates."

"Foxeye—"

"Your sister is a fine mother. But she’s weak, Silverhair. You know that. Other than that, there is only Snagtooth."

Silverhair’s fur bristled. "I would leave the Family if she were ever Matriarch. She’s mean-spirited, vindictive…"

"Then who else is there?"

When she thought it through like that, he was, of course, right. His logic was relentless. But it was all utterly depressing.

"I don’t want to be a Matriarch," she said miserably. "I don’t want all that responsibility."

"Perhaps you really do have the spirit of Longtusk inside you."

"That’s ridiculous," she said. But she was pleased to hear him say it.

Lop-ear lifted his trunk and rubbed her snow-white scalp with affection, a gentle touch that thrilled her. "Like Longtusk, you’re a wanderer," said Lop-ear. "Perhaps you too could lead us to places no one else could even dream of. And, like Longtusk, you’re perverse. After all, Longtusk had to fight to win the command of his Family, didn’t he? The story goes, the other Bulls all but killed him, rather than accept his orders."

"But I don’t want to fight anybody."

"Maybe not. But you fight yourself, Silverhair. How typical it is of you that you should choose to model yourself on the one Cycle hero who you could never be, Longtusk the Bull!"

He was right.

In all the great tundra of time reflected in the Cycle, there is only one Bull hero: Longtusk.

When the world warmed, and the ice fell back into the north, the Lost — the mammoths’ only true enemy — had come pushing into the mammoth tundra from the south, butchering and murdering. All over the planet, mammoths had died, Families and Clans falling together.

All, that is, save the Family of Longtusk: for Longtusk had somehow brought his people across the cold sea waters here, to the Island. Nobody knew how he had done this. Some said he had flown like a bird, carrying his Family on his mighty back; some said he stamped his mighty foot and caused the sea to roar from the ground. At any rate, the Lost had never followed, and the mammoths had been safe.

But Longtusk had given his life…

They found a deep puddle with only a thin layer of ice on top. Lop-ear broke through this easily with his tusk, and they plunged their trunks into the water. When Lop-ear had taken a trunkful he closed the trunk by clenching its fingers, lifted the end, and curled it into his mouth. Then he tilted his head back, opened his trunk, and let the water gush into his mouth, a delicious and cooling stream.

They soon drained the puddle. It was a rare treat: standing water had been scarce this winter, and the Family was counting on an early spring thaw. Mammoths need much fresh water each day. They can eat snow, but have to sacrifice precious body heat to melt it.

"Of course," said Lop-ear, "even if you were to become Matriarch, I’m not at all sure where you could lead us."

"What do you mean?"

He led her to a patch of frost overlying harder, older ice. Lop-ear picked up a twig with his trunk and began to scrape at the frost.

"Here is the Island," he said. It was a rough oval. "It is surrounded by sea, which we can’t cross. To the north, there are the Mountains at the End of the World. And to the south, there is the spruce forest." More scratchings.

Silverhair watched him, baffled. "What are you doing?"

He looked up. "I’m…" He had no word for it. "Imagine you’re a bird," he said at last. "A guillemot, flying high over the Island."

"But I’m not a bird."

"In Kilukpuk’s name, Silverhair, if you can imagine yourself as Longtusk you can surely stretch your mind that far!"

She stretched out her ears and spun, pretending to wheel like a bird. "Look at me! Caw! Caw!"

"All right, Silverhair the gull. Now, you’re looking down at the Island. You see it sitting in the middle of the sea, like a lump of dung in a pond. Yes?"

"Yes…"

"Look — now!" With his trunk, he pointed to the frost scrapings he had made.

And — looking down as if she were a mammoth-gull, concentrating hard — for a heartbeat, yes, she could see the Island, see it through his scrapings, just as if she really were a gull, balanced on the winds high above.

To Silverhair, the simple drawing was a kind of magic; she had never seen anything like it.

"Every time the Earth spins around the sun, the summer is a little longer, the winter a little less harsh. And the forest encroaches a little more on the tundra." Absently Lop-ear dug in the soil with his tusks, burrowed with his trunk, and produced a scraping of grass. "You know, Wolfnose remembers a time — when she was only a calf herself — when the spruce forest was just a few straggling saplings clinging to the coast. And now look how far it has spread." With his twig, he pointed to the middle of the Island. "You see? We are contained in this strip of the Island, between forest and mountains, like a calf that has fallen in a mudhole. And the strip is narrowing."

"So what do we do?"

"I don’t know. This Island is all we have. We have absolutely nowhere else to go."

She admired Lop-ear’s unusual mind, the clarity and depth of thinking he was capable of. But his logic was chilling. "It can’t be true," she said. "What about the Sky Steppe?"

Lop-ear said, "Do you really believe that?"

Silverhair was scandalized. "Lop-ear, it’s in the Cycle."

The Cycle contains tales of a mysterious Steppe that floats in the sky, where — the story goes — mammoths will one day roam free.

But Lop-ear was growling. "Look — we can know the past because we remember it, and we can tell it to our calves, who remember it in turn… Through the Cycle, and the memories of our mothers, we can ‘remember’ all the way back to Kilukpuk’s Swamp. That’s all sensible. But as to the future—" He tossed his twig in the air. "We can no more know the future than we can say how that twig will fall."

The stick rattled to the bone-hard ground, out of her sight.

"And besides," he said, "there might soon be nobody to go to the Sky Steppe anyhow."

"What do you mean?"

He looked at her mournfully. "Think about it. When was the last time you heard a contact rumble from my Family — or any other Family, come to that? How many mammoths have we seen on this trek? We haven’t even found footprints or fresh dung—"

The thought was chilling; she turned away from it. "You think too much."

"I wish I could stop," he said quietly.

They moved on, through cloudy day and Moonlit night.

They came to a place they knew was good for salty soil. It was frozen over, but they set to scraping at the ice with their tusks until they had exposed some of the bone-hard soil. Then they dug out a little of the soil and tucked it into their mouths; the soil was dry and dusty, but it contained salt and other minerals otherwise missing from the mammoths’ diet.

And nearby, under a thin layer of hoarfrost, they found a heap of mammoth dung. It was reasonably fresh, and hope briefly lifted; perhaps other Families were, after all, close.

But then Silverhair recognized the dung’s sharp scent. "Why, it’s mine," she said. "I must have come this way before."

Lop-ear broke open the pat of dung — it wasn’t quite frozen in the center — and began to lift chunks of it to his mouth. Mammoths will eat a little dung to sustain the colonies of bacteria that live in their guts, which help them digest grasses.

"Maybe our luck is changing, even so," he said around a mouthful of soil and dung.

"How?"

"Look up."

She did so, and she saw a curtain of light streaks spread across the sky — mostly yellow and crimson, fading to black, but here and there tinged with green. It extended from the horizon, all the way up the sky, almost to the zenith over their heads. The curtain rippled gently, like the guard hairs that dangle from the belly of a mammoth.

It was an aurora.

Mammoths believe the aurora is made up of the spirits of every mammoth who has ever lived, brought to life again by a wind from the sun, so joyous they dance at the very top of the air.

Lop-ear said, "What do you think? Is Longtusk up there somewhere, looking down on us? Do you think he’s come to guide our way?"

Indeed, the ghostly light of the aurora had made the Moonlit landscape glow green and blue, almost as brightly as day.

With uplifted hearts, they set off once more.

After days of walking they climbed a shallow ridge that gave them a view of the Island’s south coast, and Silverhair could see the pale blue-white gleam of pack ice on the sea. But between the two mammoths and the coast, lying over the land like a layer of guard hair, there lay the spruce forest. The first isolated, straggling trees were already close.

The two mammoths skirted the darker depths of the forest, staying at the northern fringe where only a few scattered, stunted trees encroached on the rocky tundra, ancient plants that grew no higher than their own bellies. It was well known that wolves inhabited the deeper forest. It was unlikely that even a pack would take on two full-grown mammoths, but inside the denser parts of the forest, movement would be difficult, and they would be foolish to offer the wily predators any opportunity.

The only sounds were the crunch of ice beneath their feet, the hiss of breath in their trunks, and the low moan of the wind in the trees. In the branches of a dwarf spruce a solitary capercaillie sat, unperturbed, eyeing them as they passed.

Night was falling by the time they reached the headland.

The sea opened up before them, flat and calm. A fringe of fast ice pushed out from the land, hard and glistening. Farther out, the sea ice was littered with trapped icebergs, sculptured mountains that glowed green and blue. Silverhair could see the rope of water that cut off the Island from the Mainland — which was, she saw, still shrouded by storm clouds that hid the glittering and mysterious array of lights that clustered there.

As the sun waned, the colors faded to an ice-blue twilight. The air grew colder, and the seawater steamed.

It was a bleak, frozen scene. But there was life here. More seabirds were arriving from the south, fulmars and black guillemots, and they had begun their elaborate courtship in the pink, watery sunshine. Seals slid through the open water, snorting when they broke the surface.

Beneath the headland was a valley that descended to the rocky southern coast. Silverhair and Lop-ear clambered down this valley.

Between the walls of the valley, nothing moved save an occasional swirl of dry snow crystals lifted by the wind. The mountainside here had been blown almost clear of snow, and in the shade the rock was covered by a treacherous glaze of ice. Their broad feet gripped the ground well; the round soles of Silverhair’s feet were thickened into ridges for that purpose. But even so her feet slid out from under her, and she barely managed to keep from stumbling. Once, she found herself teetering on the edge of a sheer drop into a snow-filled chasm.

Surrounded by these huge walls of ice and rock, Silverhair gained an unwelcome perspective on the smallness and frailty of even a mammoth’s life.

At last they reached the beach. It was growing dark, and they decided to wait out the long night there.

The beach was a strange place where neither of them felt comfortable.

For one thing, it was noisy compared to the thick stillness of the Arctic nights they were used to: they heard the continual lapping of the sea at the shingle, the crunching of stones beneath their shifting feet, the snapping and groaning of the sea ice as it rose and fell in response to the oily surges of the water beneath. There was no food to be had, for this eroded, shifting place was neither land nor sea. It was even considered a waste to pass dung here, for it would merely wash away to sea rather than enrich the land.

They endured a long, uncomfortable night of broken sleep.

The dawn, when at last it came, was clear. The sky turned an intense blue, and the sea ice was so white that the horizon was a firm line. As the sunrise itself approached, a shaft of deep red light shot suddenly straight up, piercing the blue. Silverhair looked out over the sea ice and saw that, thanks to a mirage effect, the distant pack ice seemed to be lifting into the sky, illusory towers rising and falling in the heat from the sun. And when the sun rose a little higher she saw a ghostly companion rise with it, a halo scattered by ice crystals in the air.

Lop-ear impulsively ran to the water’s edge. Breaking the thin ice, he waded in until his legs were immersed up to his hips and his belly hair was soaked and floating loosely on the surface.

He looked back at Silverhair. "Come on. What are you waiting for?"

Silverhair took a hesitant step forward. She dipped one foot in the water, and steeled herself to go farther.

Silverhair had an abiding dread of deep water. As a small calf, she had almost fallen into a fast-flowing glacier runoff stream. She had been washed down the stream, bobbing like a piece of rotten wood, her squeals all but drowned out by the rush of water. Only the fast brain and strong trunk of Wolfnose had saved her from being dashed against the rocks, or drowned.

Lop-ear waded clumsily back toward her; he splashed her, and the water droplets were icy. "I’m sorry," he said. "I forgot. That was stupid of me."

"It’s all right. I’m just being foolish."

Lop-ear grunted. "There’s nothing foolish about learning to avoid danger." He quoted the Cycle: "The wolf’s first bite is its responsibility. Its second is yours. I’m being selfish—"

"No." And Silverhair waded forward deliberately, leading the way into the ocean.

The water immediately soaked through the hair over her legs. Close to freezing, its cold penetrated to her skin. Her hair, waving like seaweed around her belly, impeded her progress. The sheets of land-fast ice crackled around her legs and chest.

Lop-ear stopped her. "That’s far enough," he said. "Now…"

Awkwardly he kneeled down so his chest was immersed. Then he dipped his head; soon the water was lapping over his eyes and forehead.

He lifted his head in a great spray, and she could see frost forming on his hair and eyelashes. He said, "Did you hear me?"

With great reluctance, she dropped her head so that her trunk and right ear were immersed in the icy water. Lop-ear extended his trunk underwater and emitted a series of strange calls: deep-toned whistles and bleats mixed with higher-pitched squeaks and squeals.

"What are you doing?"

"Calling our Cousins. The Calves of Siros. Don’t you know your Cycle? The sea cows, Silverhair."

She snorted. "But the sea cows all died lifetimes ago. The Lost hunted them even harder than they hunted us. That’s what the Cycle says—"

"The Cycle isn’t always right."

"Have you ever seen a sea cow?"

"No," he said. "But I’ve never seen the back of my own head either. Doesn’t mean to say it doesn’t exist." He thrust his trunk back into the sea and continued his plaintive call.

Reluctantly she ducked her ear back under the water.

The sea had its own huge, hollow noises, like an immense, empty cavern. She heard the voices of seals: birdlike chirrups, long swooping whistles, and short popping cries that the seals bounced off the ice sheets above them, using the echoes to seek out their airholes. Then, deeper and more remote, were the groans of whales, and still deeper, calls that might come from half the world away…

And — briefly — they heard a series of low whistles, interspersed with high-pitched squeaks and squeals.

But the sound died away.

They lifted their heads out of the water. They looked at each other.

"It was probably only an echo," she said. "Some undersea cliff."

"I know. There’s nothing there. But wouldn’t it have been wonderful if—"

"Come on. Let’s go and get warm."

They turned and splashed their way out of the water. Silverhair shook her head to rid it of the frost that was forming. To get their blood flowing through their chilled skin once more, they played: they chased each other across the shingle, mock-wrestled with their trunks, and gamboled like calves.

Silverhair looked back once, at the place where they had called to the sea cows.

Far out in the Channel she thought she could see something surface: huge, black, sleek. Then it was gone.

It was probably just a trick of the light.

4 The Monster of the Ice Floe

When they were warm they continued along the beach, in search of the peculiar creatures Silverhair had spotted.

Hundreds of guillemots were arriving on the cliffs above them. This first sign of the summer’s burst of fecundity seemed incongruous on such a bitterly cold morning; in fact, the nesting ledges were still covered in snow and ice. But the seabirds had to start early if they were to complete their breeding cycle before, all too soon, the snow of winter returned. And so the birds clung to the cliffs and fought over the prime nesting sites. So intense were these battles, Silverhair saw, that two birds, locked together beak to bloody beak, fell from the high cliffs and dashed themselves against the sea ice below.

Fast as a spray of blown snow, an Arctic fox darted forward and grabbed both birds, killing them immediately. The fox buried his catch in the ice, and returned to the foot of the nesting cliff in search of more pickings.

From a snowbank high on the cliff a female polar bear, her fur yellow-white, pushed her way out of her den. She yawned and stretched, and Silverhair wondered if it was the bear she had seen before.

The bear clambered back up to her den and sat by the entrance. After a time a cub appeared — small, dumpy, and dazzling-white — and it greeted the world with terrified squeaks. A second cub emerged, then a third. The mother walked confidently down the steep cliff toward the sea while the cubs looked on with trepidation. At last two of the cubs followed her, gingerly, sliding backwards, their claws clutching the snow. The other stayed in the den entrance and cried so loudly its mother returned with the others, and she suckled all three in the sun. Then the bear walked steadily down to the sea ice — in search of her first meal since the autumn — and her cubs clumsily followed.

The mammoths walked around a rocky spur, and they came to the Nest of Straight Lines.

Lop-ear slowed, his eyes wide, his trunk held up in the air, his good ear cocked, alert for danger.

Silverhair was trembling, for this was an unnatural place. Still, she said, "We have to go on. The strange ice floe, whatever it was, must have come to rest farther on than this. Come on."

And without allowing herself to hesitate, she set off along the beach. After a few heartbeats she heard Lop-ear’s heavy steps crackling on the shingle as he followed.

In this mysterious place, set back from the beach, a series of blocky shapes huddled against the cliff. They were dark and angular, each of them much larger even than a mammoth. The great blocks were hollowed out. Holes gaped in their sides and tops, allowing in the low sunlight; but there was no movement within.

Lop-ear said, "Those things look like skulls to me."

Looking again, she saw that he was right: skulls, but with eye sockets and gaping mouths made out of straight lines, and big enough for a mammoth to climb inside.

"They must be the skulls of giants, then," she said.

The most horrific aspect of the place was that the whole of it was constructed of hard, straight lines. It was the lines that had earned the place its mammoth name, for aside from the horizon line and the trunks of trees, there are few long, straight lines in nature.

In the center of the Nest there was a great stalk: like the trunk of a tree, but not solid, made of sticks and spars through which Silverhair could see the pale dawn sky. And at the top of the stalk there were a series of big round shells, like the petals of a flower — but much bigger, so big they looked as if a mammoth could clamber inside.

The mammoths peered up at the assemblage of brooding forms, dwarfed.

"Perhaps those things up there are the ears of the giants who lived here," said Lop-ear, awed.

"But what happened to the giants?"

"You know what Eggtusk says."

"What?"

"That this place has nothing to do with giants," he said.

"Then what?"

"Lost," said Lop-ear. "The Lost made this."

And as he spoke the name of the mammoths’ most dread enemy of the past, it was Silverhair’s turn to shiver.

By unspoken agreement they hurried on.

A flat sheet lying on the shingle briefly caught Silverhair’s eye. It looked at first like a broken sheet of ice — but as she came closer, she saw that it was made of wood — though she knew of no tree that produced such huge, straight-edged branches.

There were markings on the sheet.

She slowed, studying the markings. The patterns reminded her oddly of the scrapings Lop-ear had made in the frost. There was a splash of yellow, almost like a flower — or like a star, cupped in a crescent Moon. And beneath it, a collection of lines and curves that had no meaning for her:

She wanted to ask Lop-ear about it; perhaps he would understand. But he had already hurried ahead, and she didn’t want to linger alone in this unnatural place; she ran to catch him up.

With the Nest of Straight Lines behind them, they approached the half-frozen sea.

"What I saw must have been about here," said Silverhair, trying to think.

Lop-ear looked around and raised his trunk. "I can’t smell anything."

The two mammoths walked a little way onto the ice, which squeaked and crackled under them. The ice that clung closest to the shore, where the sea was frozen all the way to the bottom, was called landfast ice. It formed in protected bays, or drifted in from the sea. Its width varied depending on how deep the water was. Later in the summer the landfast ice would break free and melt, or drift away with the pack ice.

The pack ice was the frozen surface of the deeper ocean. It was a blue-white sheet crumpled into pressure ridges, like lines of sand dunes sculpted in white. Farther away from the land Silver-hair could see black lines carved in the ice: leads, cracks exposing open water between the loose mass of floes. As the spring wore on, the leads would extend in toward the coast, splitting off the ice floes. The floes would break up, or be washed out to open sea by the powerful current that ran between the Mainland and the Island.

Dark clouds hung over the open Channel, that forbidding stretch of black, open water; the clouds formed from the steam rising from the water.

And on a floe far from the land, she made out a black, unmoving shape.

She trumpeted in triumph. Gulls, startled awake, cawed in response.

"There!" she cried. "Do you see it?"

Lop-ear patiently stared where she did. "I don’t see a thing. Just pressure ridges, and shadows… Oh."

"You do see it! You do! That’s what I saw, floating in the sea — and now it’s on the ice."

It might have been the size of a mammoth, she supposed — but a mammoth lying inert on the floe. All Silverhair’s fear had evaporated like hoarfrost, so great was her gladness at rediscovering the strange object. "Come on." And she set out across the landfast ice.

Reluctantly Lop-ear followed.

As they moved away from the shore, the quality of the sound changed. The soft lapping of the sea was gone, and the ice creaked and groaned as it shifted on the sea, a deep rumble like the call of a mammoth.

The pressure ridges were high here, frozen waves that came almost up to her shoulder. The ridges were topped by blue ice, scoured clean by the wind, and soft snow lay in the hollows between them. The ridges were difficult to scramble over, so Silverhair found a lead and walked along at the edge of the water, where the ice was flatter.

Frost-smoke, sparkling in the sunlight, rose from the black, oily water.

On one floe she found the grisly site of a polar bear’s kill. It was a seal’s breathing hole, iced over and tinged with blood. She could see a bloodstained area of ice where the bear must have dragged the seal and devoured it. And there was a hollowed-out area of snow near a pressure ridge, marked by black excrement, where the bear had probably slept after its bloody feast.

The wind picked up. Ice crystals swirled around her. When she looked up at the sun, she saw a halo around it. She knew she must be careful, for that was a sign the sea ice might break up.

She came to a place where the pressure ridges towered over her. Surrounded by the ridges, all she could see was the neighboring hummocks and the sky above.

She struggled to the top of a crag of ice.

From here she could see the tops of the other ridges, and the narrow valleys that separated them. They looked as if they had been scraped into this ice surface by some gigantic tusk.

And she realized that she had walked farther out to sea than she had imagined, for she found herself staring up at an iceberg.

It was a wedge-shaped block trapped in the pack ice. She saw how its base had been sculpted into great smooth columns by the water that lapped there, and by the scouring of windblown particles of ice and snow. Blue light seemed to shine from within the body of the translucent ice.

Farther from the shore she saw many giant bergs, frozen in, standing stark and majestic all across title sea ice. The ice between the bergs was smooth and flat. Older bergs, silhouetted in the low light, were wind-sculpted and melted, some of them carved into spires, arches, pinnacles, caves, and other fantastic shapes. Perhaps they would not survive another summer. She could see that some of the bergs had shattered into smaller pieces, and here and there she made out growlers, the hard, compact cores of melted bergs, made of compressed greenish ice, polished smooth by the waves.

In the light of the low sun, the colors of the bergs varied from white to blue, pink and purple, even a rich muddy brown, strange-shaped scraps littering the pack ice.

And from this vantage, Silverhair saw the strange object she had come so far to find.

Dark and mysterious, the thing rested on a floe that had all but broken away from the main mass of pack ice. Only a neck of ice, ten or eleven paces wide, still connected the floe to the land.

She scrambled down the ridge to the edge of the floe. Then she hesitated, looking down with trepidation at the narrow ice bridge and the unyielding blackness of the water below. Lop-ear came to join her.

"It’s quite wide," she said uncertainly. She took a step forward, near the center of the bridge, and pushed at the ice with her lead foot. It creaked and bowed, meltwater pooling under her foot, but it held. "If I keep away from the edges it should be safe."

"Silverhair, that’s terribly dangerous."

"We’ve come this far—"

And without letting herself think about it any further, she stepped forward onto the bridge.

One step, then another: avoiding the rotten ice, testing every pace, she worked her way steadily across the bridge.

The water lapped only a few paces to either side of her.

At last she arrived on the floe. The ice there, though bowing a little, was relatively solid. There were even some pressure ridges here, one or two of the ridges as tall as she was.

She turned and looked back to Lop-ear. He was a compact, dark shape on a broad sheet of blue-white ice, and he seemed a long way away.

She raised her trunk and trumpeted bravely. "Don’t follow me. The bridge is fragile."

"Come back as soon as you can, Silverhair."

"I will."

She turned and with caution made her way across the floe.

The mysterious object was, she supposed, about the size of a large adult mammoth. Overall it looked something like a huge, stretched-out eggshell. It was flat at one end, tusk-sharp at the other, and hollow inside. But she could see that the bottom of it was smashed to pieces, perhaps by a collision with the ice.

It certainly wasn’t made of ice.

She reached out a tentative trunk-finger and stroked its surface.

She snatched back her trunk, shocked. It was wood, covered by some hard, shining coat — a coat that masked its smell — but wood nonetheless.

The short hairs on her scalp prickled. Something about this thing — perhaps the short, sharp lines of its construction — reminded her unpleasantly of the Nest of Straight Lines.

There was a cracking sound.

"Silverhair!" Lop-ear’s voice sounded disturbingly remote.

She spun around, and in the light of the already setting sun, she saw two things simultaneously.

The narrow ice bridge back to the pack ice had collapsed, stranding her here.

And there was a monster on the ice floe.

The monster seemed to have stepped from behind a pressure ridge, where it had been hidden from her view — and she from its. It was smaller than she was — much smaller. It was, perhaps, about the size of a small seal. It had four legs. It was standing on its hind legs, like a seal balancing on its tail.

But this was no seal.

Its legs were long: longer, in proportion, even than a mammoth’s. It was skinny — surely it could not withstand the cold with so little fat to insulate it — and it didn’t have any fur, not even on its shiny, hairless, skull-like head. In fact, it seemed to have nothing to protect it but a loose-fitting outer skin.

Its ears were small, and startlingly like a mammoth’s. Its eyes were set at the front of its head, like a wolf’s — a predator’s eyes, the better to hunt with. And those binocular eyes were fixed on Silverhair, in fear or calculation.

It was clutching things in its forelegs. In one paw it held something shiny, like a shard of ice. In the other was something soft that dripped blood. It was the liver of a walrus, she recognized. And there was blood all around the monster’s small mouth.

A child of Aglu, then.

She must show no fear. What would Longtusk have done in such a situation?

She lowered her head so her tusks would not seem a threat, and she spoke to the creature. "I am called Silverhair," she said. "And you—"

Its predator’s eyes were wide, its gaze fixed on her, its small, hairless face wreathed in steam. There was frost on its shining dome of a head. It was a male, she decided, for she could see no sign of dugs.

"I will call you ‘Skin-of-Ice,’ " she said.

She took a step toward the creature, meaning to touch him with her trunk, as mammoths will when they meet; perhaps she would go through the greeting ritual with him.

But he cried out. He raised the glittering, sharp thing in his paw, and backed away.

The wind picked up abruptly, and ice crystals whirled around her face. The floe rocked, and she stumbled.

When she looked again, the monster had gone.

She caught one last glimpse of him, hopping nimbly across the widening leads, heading for the shore far from Silverhair and Lop-ear.

The wind began to blow more strongly through the Channel. The sea became choppy, and as it drifted through the Channel the ice floe began to break up. Soon Silverhair found herself stranded in a mass of loose ice that was drifting rapidly eastward.

Suddenly she was in peril.

But now Lop-ear was calling her, with a deep rumble that easily crossed the ice and water to her. "This way! This way!"

She saw that a smaller floe had nudged alongside the floe she rode. It was even more fragile than the one she was riding — but it was closer to the shore.

Not allowing herself to hesitate, she marched briskly across the narrow lead to the smaller floe.

Behind her the ice at the floe’s edge crumbled into fragments.

This floe, much smaller than the first, was spinning slowly, and heaving from side to side in the heavy swell as the current swept it along. Then another floe came bumping alongside with a crunch of smashing ice; she hurried forward onto it, and found herself a little closer again to land.

So she worked her way, floe by floe, across the ice, following a complex path that she hoped would lead her to the shore.

At the edge of one floe, a herd of walrus were gamboling among the loose ice. They completely ignored her. It was a mixed group, mothers with calves of various ages, and one massive male with long, curved tusks protruding from his small face. Some of the walruses had their tusks hooked to the edge of the ice as they rested, to save themselves from sinking as they slept. The stink of walrus was almost overpowering, for it seemed they had been defecating on the same floe all winter. The walrus scratched hoarfrost from their bodies with surprisingly gentle flippers, and occasionally turned over in great heaps of pinkish blubbery flesh, their long ivory tusks glinting in the sun.

With their warty skin, wide mustaches, and tiny heads atop their long, ponderous bodies, Silverhair found it hard to think of the walrus as anything but spectacularly ugly.

She wondered sadly if one of this comfortable family had fallen victim to Skin-of-Ice. Perhaps they didn’t know about it yet.

Silverhair skirted the walrus carefully.

Her progress was agonizing — one step forward, another back — and she lost track of the time she had spent here, inching across the treacherous ice.

Brown mist, blown from over the open water, swirled around her, making it hard to keep to her chosen track. The loose floes spun around, crashed and tilted, and she felt as if the whole world, of ice and sea and land, were in motion. More than once she stepped through rotten ice, and her feet took more dunkings in the icy water, and the fur on her legs was soon heavy and stiff with ice.

If she couldn’t get back to the shore, these separating floes would eventually be blown out to sea. There — the Cycle taught — she would suffer death by starvation or thirst — if the floes did not crumble and drown her — and if killer whales did not ram their snouts through the thinning ice to reach her.

But gradually, she realized, she was working her way, floe by floe, step by step, back toward the shore. Lop-ear ran along faithfully, calling out the floes he spotted, evidently determined he would not abandon her.

At last, as she neared the landfast ice and got away from the fastest-flowing water, the swell subsided and the rolling of the floes became more bearable.

And she found herself on a hard, unyielding surface.

For a moment she stood there, unable to believe it was over, that she had reached the land. In fact, she felt giddy, so used had she become to standing on a surface that tipped and heaved beneath her. But Lop-ear’s trunk was soon over her head, touching her mouth and cooing reassurance.

With relief, she trotted away from the ice’s edge.

She turned and saw the floe that had so nearly carried her to her death. There was the anonymous hulk of distorted wood. And there, just visible as black dots on the ice, were the droppings she had made as she had circled the shrinking floe.

But now frost-smoke and the mist off the sea closed around the floe, and it was carried away to invisibility.

5 The Tusk

The Family was a small, bulky knot in the landscape, dark on dark. But Silverhair could hear the mammoths’ rumbles and chirrups, kindly or complaining in turn; she could feel the deep sound passing through the frozen earth as those great feet lumbered back and forth; and she could smell the rich, welcoming smell of wet mammoth fur, a rich stink that carried on the wind. She could even smell the moist, slightly stale aroma of the milk her sister was producing for her new calf.

And as they approached the Family, Silverhair saw that the Matriarch was preparing for a migration.

Owlheart was moving among her charges, gathering and encouraging them with gentle slaps of her trunk. Silverhair’s sister, Foxeye, was gathering her calves around her. Foxeye herself looked unsteady on her feet, weakened by the long trial of her pregnancy and the birth. Sunfire, the new baby, stayed close to her mother, nestling in the long hairs of Foxeye’s belly. The calf’s milk tusks were already budding at her cheeks, white as Arctic flowers. Silverhair heard Foxeye murmuring the ancient tale of Kilukpuk’s Calves to her, and she remembered how her own mother — when Silverhair wasn’t much older than Sunfire was now — had made her swear the ancient Oath of Kilukpuk. And there was little Croptail, scarcely more than an infant himself, his baffled resentment of his new sister visible even from afar.

Snagtooth and Wolfnose stood a little distance away, cropping the sparse, dry grass that protruded through the frost. Neither of them took much part in the proceedings: Snagtooth seemed, as usual, sullen and withdrawn, and Wolfnose, though standing straight and tall, was very still, and Silverhair knew that she was trying to spare her worn-out knees before the long trek that faced her.

And there was stolid old Eggtusk, unmistakable for that bulb of ivory on his tusk, if not for his mighty shoulders. The powerful old Bull stood shoulder to shoulder with Owlheart, supporting everything she said and did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

They trotted forward and joined the Family.

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

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

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

"What do you mean?"

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

"But Lop-ear—"

"Nobody."

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

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

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

The walk was not easy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They passed a family of wolves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Now, help me dig," said Owlheart.

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

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

They worked through the night, taking breaks in turns.

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

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

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

"You’re thirsty," said Silverhair.

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

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

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

"…What?"

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

"Perhaps if we had stayed where we were, the thaw might have come to us before we all died of thirst. But that was not my judgment," Owlheart growled. "And that is the essence of being Matriarch, Silverhair. Sometimes there are no good choices: only a series of bad ones."

"And so we are forced to stake all our lives on the bounty of a seephole," Silverhair protested.

"The art of traveling is to pick the least dangerous path." That was another line from the Cycle, a teaching of the great Matriarch, Ganesha the Wise.

Owlheart turned away, evidently intent on resuming her interrupted feeding.

But still Silverhair wasn’t done. She blurted, "Maybe the old ways aren’t the right ways anymore."

Owlheart snorted. "Have you been talking to Lop-ear again?"

Silverhair was indignant. "I don’t need Lop-ear to tell me how to think."

"The defiant one, aren’t you? Tell me what has brought on this sudden doubt."

Silverhair spoke to the Matriarch again of the monster she had encountered on the ice floe. "So you see, if there is such a strange creature in the world, who knows what else there is to find? The world is changing. Anyone can see that. It’s why the winters are warmer, why the good grass and shrubs are harder to find. But maybe there’s some good for us in all this. If we only go searching — listen with open ears — we might discover—"

Owlheart cut her off with a slap of her trunk, hard enough to sting. "Listen to me carefully. There is nothing for us in what you saw at the coast — nothing but misery and pain and death. Do you understand?"

"Won’t you even tell me what it means?"

"We won’t talk of this again, Silverhair," said Owlheart, and she turned her massive back.

There was a commotion at Silverhair’s feet. Gloomy, frustrated, she looked down. She saw a little animated bundle of orange hair, smelled the warm cloying aroma of milk. It was Sunfire. The calf trotted over to the Matriarch’s fresh dung and began to poke into the warm, salty goodies with her trunk. Soon she was totally absorbed. Silverhair, watching fondly, wished she could be like that again, trotting after her own concerns, in a state of blissful, unmarked innocence.

Eggtusk came up. His giant, inward-curving tusks loomed over her, silhouetted against the sky. For a while he walked with her.

She saw that they had become isolated from the rest of the Family. And with a flash of intuition, she saw why he had approached her. "Eggtusk—"

"What?"

"The thing I saw on the ice floe, in the south. You know what it is, don’t you?"

He regarded her. His words, coming deep from the hollow of his chest, were coupled with the unnatural stillness of his great head. It made her feel small and weak.

"Listen to me very carefully," he said. "Owlheart is right. You must not go there again. And pray to Kilukpuk that your monster did not recognize you, that it does not track you here."

"Why? It looked weaker than a wolf cub."

"Perhaps it did," said Eggtusk sadly. "But that little beast was stronger than you, stronger than me — than all of us put together. It was the beast which the Cycle tells us can never be fought."

"You mean—"

"It was a Lost, little one. It was a Lost, on our Island. Now do you see?" Eggtusk seemed to be trembling, and that struck a deep dread into Silverhair’s heart, for she had never seen the great Eggtusk afraid of anything before…

Snagtooth screamed.

"Circle!" snapped the Matriarch.

Almost without thinking, Silverhair found herself joining the others in a tight circle around Snagtooth, with the calves cowering inside and the adults arrayed on the outside, their tusks and trunks pointing outward, huge and intimidating, ready to beat off any predator or threat.

But Silverhair knew there were no predators here — nobody, in fact, but Snagtooth herself.

Snagtooth raised her head from the scraped-out hole. Her right tusk was snapped off, almost at the root where it was embedded in her face. Instead of the smooth spiral of ivory she had carried before, there was now only a broken stump, its edge rimmed by jagged, bone-like fragments. A dark fluid dripped from the tusk’s hollow core; it was pulp, the living core of the tusk. The skin around the tusk root was ripped and bleeding heavily.

Each of the mammoths felt the pain of the break as if it were their own. Sunfire, the infant, squealed in horror and burrowed under her mother’s skirt of hair.

Eggtusk lowered his trunk and reached into the hole in the ground. With some effort, he pulled out the rest of the broken tusk. "She trapped it under a boulder that was frozen in the ground," he said. "Simple as that. By Kilukpuk’s hairy anus, what a terrible thing. You always were too impatient, Snagtooth—"

Snagtooth howled. With tears coursing down the hair on her face, she made to charge him, like a Bull in musth, with her one remaining tusk.

Eggtusk, startled, held his ground and, with a twist of his own mighty tusks, deflected her easily, without harming her.

Owlheart stepped between them angrily. "Enough. Leave her be, Eggtusk."

Eggtusk withdrew, growling.

Owlheart laid her trunk over Snagtooth’s neck, and stroked her mouth and eyes. "He was right, you know. Your teeth are brittle — why do you think you are called Snagtooth in the first place? — and a tusk is nothing but a giant tooth… The best thing to do is to freeze that stump, or otherwise the pulp will grow infected, and we will cake it with clay to stop the bleeding. You two," she said to Lop-ear and Silverhair. "Get on with your digging. It’s all the more important now."

She led Snagtooth away from the others.

With Lop-ear, Silverhair resumed her work, trying to ignore the splashes of tusk pulp and splinters of ivory that disfigured the ground.

At last — after hacking at such cost through a trunk’s length of permafrost — they broke through to seepwater. But the water was low and brackish, so thin it took long heartbeats for Silverhair to suck up as much as a trunkful.

The hole was too deep for the infants’ short trunks to reach the water, so Foxeye and Silverhair let water from their own trunks trickle into the mouths of the young ones. Sunfire was still learning to drink; she spilled more water than she swallowed.

Wolfnose could not bend so easily, and she too had difficulty reaching the water. But she refused any help, proudly; she insisted she had drunk enough by her own efforts, and walked stiffly away.

The mammoths drank as much as the seephole would offer them. But it wasn’t enough, and there was still no sign of the spring thaw.

"We have to go on," said Owlheart solemnly. "Farther west, to the land beneath the glaciers. There, at this time of year, meltwater will be found running over the land. That’s where we must go."

That was a land unknown to Silverhair — and a dangerous place, for sometimes the meltwater would come from the glaciers in great deluges that could carve out a new landscape, stranding or trapping unwary wanderers. That the Matriarch was prepared to take such a risk was a measure of the seriousness of the situation; nevertheless, Silverhair felt a prick of interest that she would be going somewhere new.

They slept before going on.

The short day was soon over. A hard Moon sailed into the sky, lighting up high clouds of ice. The silence of the Arctic night settled on the Family, a huge emptiness broken only by the mewling of Sunfire at her mother’s breast, and Snagtooth’s growled complaints at the pain of her shattered tusk.

Silverhair could feel the cold penetrate her guard hair and underwool, through her flesh to her bones. Perhaps, she thought, this is how it will feel to grow old.

The Moon was still rising when Owlheart roused them and told them it was time to proceed.

6 The Mountains at the End of the World

Cold, dry nights, lengthening days. Sometimes a dense gray fog would descend on the mammoths, wrapping them in obscurity. Nevertheless, the full summer was approaching. Each night the sun dipped to the horizon, becoming lost in the mist, but the sky grew no darker than a rich blue, speckled with stars.

There came a night when the sun did not set. By day it rolled along the horizon, distorted by refraction and mist; but even at midnight slivers of ruddy light were visible, casting shadows that crossed the land from horizon to horizon, and the sky was filled with a wan glow that lacked warmth but was sufficient to banish the stars. Silverhair knew that the axis of the planet had reached that point in its annual round where it was tipped toward the sun, and there would be no true darkness for a hundred days.

The land, here in the Island’s northern plain, rolled to the horizon with a sense of immensity. There was little snow or ice here; the wind blew too strongly and steadily for that. And it was a flat place. The sparse plants that clung to life — tough grasses resistant to both frost and drought, small shrubs like sagebrush, wormwood, even rhododendron — all grew low, with short branches and strong root systems to resist the scouring effects of the wind. Even the dwarf willows cowered against the ground, their branches sprawled over the rock, dug in.

When the wind picked up, it moaned through the sparse grass with an eerie intensity.

At last the Mountains at the End of the World hove into Silverhair’s view. In the low sunlight the upper slopes of the Mountains were bathed in a vibrant pink glow, which reflected down onto the slopes beneath where blue shadows pooled, the colors mixing to indigo and mauve.

As the land rose toward the Mountains, gathering like a great rocky wave, it became steadily more stony and barren. Here nothing grew save sickly colored lichen, useless for the mammoths to eat.

And the land showed the battle scars left by huge warring forces of the past: giant scratches in the rock, boulders and shattered scree thrown as if at random over the landscape, smooth-sided gouges cut into what soil remained. It was, rumbled Wolfnose, the mark of the ancient ice sheets that had once lain a mile thick over this land.

They approached a dark wall of spruce trees, unexpected so far north. Silverhair wondered if some outcropping of the Earth’s inner warmth was working here to sustain these trees. The Family was forced to push farther north, to skirt the trees and the barren land that surrounded them.

The light changed. It became strange: almost greenish in its unnaturally pale tinge. Looking up, Silverhair saw ice clouds scudding hard across the sky. A flock of ptarmigan in brilliant white plumage took off like a snow flurry and flew toward the Mountains. Their display calls echoed eerily from the rocky walls.

"Storm coming."

She turned, and found the bulk of Eggtusk alongside her.

"And that’s new," he growled, indicating the neck of forest ahead of them. "New since the last time the Family came this way."

"When was that?"

"Before you were born. Every year the forest pushes farther north, like pond scum on the great backside of Kilukpuk. Except that, unlike Kilukpuk, we can’t scrape the land clean on a rock! Bah."

Overhead, the greenish light was obscured by a layer of black, scudding clouds.

As the storm gathered they continued to skirt the forest, heading northeast, until they came to the fringe of the Mountains at the End of the World.

They walked past the eroded foothills of a mountain, which loomed above Silverhair. It was a severe black-brown cone, and glaciers were white ribbons wrapped around it. Yellow sunlight gleamed through the mountain’s deep, ice-cut valleys.

High above her there was a snow avalanche. It poured down the mountain in a mighty, drawn-out whisper, and for a while she was enveloped in dancing flakes. The wind increased, coming through the towering rock pinnacles that rose above her, a keening lament that resonated in her skull. A whir of ice splinters came scuttling across the rock shelf’s surface; with every further step she took, she crunched on crystals.

This was a noisy place. The cliff faces were alive with the crack of ice, the rustle and clatter of falling scree. Silverhair knew this was the voice of rock and ice, the frost’s slow reworking of the upraised landscape.

Her spirit was lifted. The violence of the land exhilarated her.

Such was the clamor of ice and rock and wind from this huge barrier that even with their acute hearing, Silverhair’s Family knew nothing of the land beyond the Mountains at the End of the World. Not even Longtusk himself had been able to glean the secrets of the lands that might lie to the north. Perhaps nothing lay beyond, nothing but mist and sky. But if this truly was the End of the World, Silverhair thought, there could be no better marker than these Mountains.

They came to the snout of one of the great glaciers. The glacier was a river of ice, flowing with invisible slowness, its smooth curves tinted blue, surprisingly clean and beautiful.

The glacier had poured, creaking, down from the Mountains, carving and shattering the rock as it proceeded. But here, where it spilled onto the rocky plain, the pressure on that ice river was receding. The glacier calved into slices and towers, some of which had fallen to lie smashed in great blocks at her feet. Silverhair found herself walking amid sculptures of ice and snow, carved by the wind and rain into columns and wings and boulders, adorned with convoluted frills and laces, extraordinarily delicate and intricate.

But the land here was difficult. The mammoths were forced to thread their way between the ice blocks and the moraines, uneven mounds of sharp-edged debris, scoured by the glacier from the Mountains and deposited here. The wind was hard now, spilling off the Mountains. It plastered the mammoths’ hair against their bodies, and Silverhair could feel it lashing against her eyes.

At last the glacier itself loomed above them, a wall of green ice and windswept snow.

Silverhair was stunned by the glacier’s scale. The mammoths were the largest creatures in this landscape, yet the ice wall before her was so tall, its top was lost in mist that lingered above, as if reaching to the very clouds. Where the low sunlight caught the ice, it shone a rich white-blue, as if stars were trapped within its structure; but loose fragments scattered over its surface sparkled like dew.

A pair of Arctic foxes sprinted past, probably a mating pair, their sleek white forms hard to see against the ice; Silverhair heard the foxes’ complex calls to each other.

There was a flash, and thunder cracked; the mammoths flinched.

"Take it easy," shouted Eggtusk, his trunk aloft, sniffing for danger. "That was well to the south of us. Probably struck in that forest we skirted."

Silverhair looked that way. There was another flash, and this time she saw the lightning bolt, liquid fire that shot down into the forest from the low clouds racing above. The bolt struck a tree, which fell into the forest with a crash. A steady, reddish glow was gathering in the heart of the forest.

Fire.

Now the rain came, a hard, driving, almost horizontal sheet of water, laced with snow and hailstones.

The Matriarch had to shout and gesture. "We’ll climb up toward the Mountains. Maybe we can shelter until this passes. Silverhair, look after Foxeye and the calves. The rest of you help Wolfnose. Hurry now."

The Family moved to obey.

…Save for Lop-ear, who came up to Silverhair. "I’m worried about that fire," he said. "The grasses here are as dry as a bone, and with that wind, the fire could soon be on us."

She looked toward the forest. The light of the fire did seem to be spreading. "But it’s a long way away," she said. "And the rain—"

"Is hard but it’s just gusting. Not enough to extinguish the forest, or even soak the grass."

Soft, wet snow lashed around them.

Silverhair looked for the infant, Sunfire. Foxeye was anxiously tugging at the baby’s ear. But the calf was half lying on the frozen ground, mewling pitiably. The snow had soaked into her sparse, spiky fur, making it lie flat against her compact little body; Silverhair could see lumpy ribs and backbone protruding through a too-thin layer of fat and flesh.

She stood with Foxeye, and by pulling at Sunfire’s ears and trunk, managed to cajole the calf to her feet. Then Silverhair and Foxeye stood one to either side of the infant, supporting her tiny bulk against their legs. Silverhair could feel the calf shiver against her own stolid legs.

They tried to move her forward, away from the spreading flames. But the bedraggled Sunfire was too exhausted to move.

Silverhair looked back over her shoulder anxiously. Fanned by the swirling wind, the fire had taken a firm hold in the stand of trees behind them, and an ominous red light was spreading through the gaunt black trunks. Already she could see flames licking at the dry grass of the slice of exposed tundra that lay between the mammoths and the forest.

But her awareness of the fire spread far beyond the limited sense of sight. She could smell the gathering stink of wood succumbing to the flames, the sour stench of burning sap, hear the pop and hiss of the moist wood. She understood the fire, felt it on a deep level; it was as if a flame were burning through the world map she carried in her head.

She knew they had to flee. But she and Foxeye could not handle the calf on their own. She turned, looking for help.

Poor Wolfnose was turning away from the fire, slow and stately as some giant hairy iceberg, but her stiff legs were unable to carry her as once they had. "I’m not a calf anymore, you know…" But Owlheart, Eggtusk, and Lop-ear were striving to help her. Their giant bulks were walls of soaked fur to either side of Wolfnose, and Lop-ear had settled himself behind her, and was pushing at her rear with his lowered forehead. Owlheart, helping with her mother and trumpeting instructions to the Family as a whole, was even finding time to wrap a reassuring trunk over the head of Croptail; the young Bull stuck close to the Matriarch.

But that left nobody to help Silverhair and Foxeye with the calf.

Nobody — except her aunt, Snagtooth, who stood away from the others, still mewling like a distressed calf over her shattered tusk.

Silverhair turned to Foxeye and raised her trunk. "Wait here."

Foxeye, exhausted herself, was close to panic. "Silverhair — don’t leave me—"

"I’ll be back." She trotted quickly over to Snagtooth.

The mud Owlheart had caked over the smashed tusk stump was beginning to streak over Snagtooth’s fur and expose the mess of blood and pulp that lay beneath. Snagtooth’s eyes were filled with a desolate misery, and Silverhair felt a stab of sympathy, for the wound did look agonizing. But for now, she knew she had to put that from her mind.

She grabbed her aunt’s trunk and pulled. "Come on. Foxeye needs your help."

"I can’t. You’ll have to cope. I have to look after myself." Snag-tooth snatched her trunk back.

Silverhair growled, reached up with her trunk, and grabbed Snagtooth’s healthy tusk. "If there was anybody else, I wouldn’t care," she rumbled. "But there isn’t anybody else." She moved closer to Snagtooth and spoke again, loud enough to be audible over the howling of the storm, soft enough so nobody else could hear. "Are you going to come with me, or are you going to make me drag you?"

For long heartbeats Snagtooth stared down at Silverhair. Snagtooth was older, and massive for a Cow, a good bit bigger than Silverhair. Silverhair wondered if Snagtooth would call her bluff and challenge her — and if she did, whether Silverhair could cope with her, despite the smashed tusk.

But Snagtooth backed down. "Very well. But you aren’t Matriarch yet, little Silverhair. I won’t forget this."

She turned away, and with evident reluctance made her way toward Foxeye and the slumping Sunfire.

Silverhair felt chilled to the core, as if she’d taken a bellyful of snow.

It was slow going. The two groups of Family, huddled around the calf and the proud old Cow, seemed to crawl across the hard ground.

Here and there the snow was drifting into deceptively deep pockets. Mammoths always have difficulty traversing deep snow; now Silverhair felt her legs sink into the soft, slushy whiteness, and it pushed like a rising tide up around the long hair of her belly, chilling her dugs. In the deepest of the drifts she had to work hard with Foxeye to keep the calf’s head and trunk above the level of the snow.

And all the time Silverhair could sense the fire pooling over the dry ground. The snow was having no effect now, such was the heat the fire was generating, and she knew their only chance was to outrun it. She stayed close to Sunfire, sheltering the calf from the wind and encouraging her to hurry — and she tried to contain her own rising panic.

But now they were brought to a halt.

Silverhair found herself on the bank of a stream that bubbled its way from the base of the ice and across the rocky land. She could see where the stream was already cutting into the loose soil and debris scattered over the rock, and depositing small stones from within the glacier. The mammoths’ deep knowledge of their Island could not have helped them predict they would encounter this barrier, for every year the runoff streams reshaped the landscape. And the stream was wide, clearly too deep to ford or even to swim.

The mammoths clustered together against the wind, staring at the rushing water with dismay. Silverhair, blocked, felt baffled, frustrated, and filled with a deep dread that reached back to her near-drowning as a calf. It was a bitter irony, for a runoff stream like this was exactly what they had come looking for; and now it lay in their way.

She found Lop-ear standing with her. "We’re in trouble," he said. "Look around, Silverhair. The runoff here. The forest over there, where the fire is coming from. Behind us, the Mountains…"

Suddenly she understood.

They had got themselves trapped here, by river and Mountains and forest, as surely as if they had all plunged into a kettle hole.

Eggtusk approached them. "We can’t cross the stream," he said bluntly.

"But…" said Lop-ear.

Eggtusk ignored him. "It’s not a time for debate. We have to move on. We can’t go north; that way will soon take us into the Mountains. So we follow the stream south. The stream will get broad and shallow and maybe there’ll be somewhere to cross. That’s what Owlheart has ordered, and I agree with her."

He turned away, preparing to go back to Wolfnose, but Lop-ear touched his trunk. "Eggtusk, wait. Going south won’t work. The fire will reach us before we—"

Eggtusk quoted the Cycle: "The Matriarch has given her orders, and we follow."

Lop-ear cried, "Not to our deaths!"

In the middle of the storm, there was a moment of shocked stillness.

Silverhair, startled, was unable to remember anyone continuing to argue with Eggtusk after such a warning.

Nor, evidently, could Eggtusk.

Eggtusk lifted his great head high over Lop-ear; he was an imposing mass of muscle, flesh, and wiry, mud-brown hair. "Any more talk like that and I’ll silence you for good. You’ll frighten the calves."

"They should be frightened!"

Hastily Silverhair shoved her trunk into Lop-ear’s pink, warm mouth to silence him. "Come on," she said. Pulling him with her trunk, nudging him with her flank, she led him away from a glaring Eggtusk.

She felt a deep chill. Lop-ear, with his fast, unusual mind, could sometimes be distracted, a little strange. But she had never seen him so agitated.

…And what, she thought with a deep shiver, if he is right? He’s been right about so many things in the past. What if we really are just walking to our deaths?

Still, Lop-ear called. But the wind snatched away his words, and nobody listened.

7 The Barrier

With Foxeye and a reluctant Snagtooth, Silverhair shepherded a trembling, unsteady Sunfire along the bank of the runoff stream.

Although the depth and ferocity of the central channel gradually reduced, the stream spread further over the surrounding ground, and sheets of water ran over the rock. The cloudy water made the rock slick enough to cause even the tough sole of a mammoth’s foot to slip, and several times poor Sunfire had to be rescued from stumbles.

Meanwhile the storm mounted in ferocity, with gigantic clatters from the sky and startling bolts of lightning and a wind that swirled unpredictably, slamming heavy wet snowflakes into her face.

And all the time she could sense the fire as it spread through the dry old grass toward them.

Lop-ear was helping Owlheart and Eggtusk with Wolfnose’s cautious progress. But he was still calling to the sky, complaining and prophesying doom. At the moment, the Matriarch and the old Bull were too busy to deal with him, but Silverhair knew he would pay for his ill-discipline later.

They came to a young spruce lying across the rocky ground near the stream. It neatly blocked the mammoths’ path.

The little group broke up again. Foxeye, panting and near exhaustion, tucked her infant under her belly-hair curtain. Snagtooth, yowling complaints about her tusk, turned away from the others and scrabbled in the cold mud of the stream bank to cover her wound once more.

Silverhair stepped forward. She saw that the tree’s roots had sunk themselves into shallow soil that was now overrun by the runoff stream; when the soil had washed away, the tree had fallen. The tree itself would not be difficult to cross. They could all climb over, probably, or with a little effort they could even push the tree out of the way.

But the tree was only an outlier of the spruce forest. Other trees grew here, small and stunted and sparsely separated — and some of them, too, had been felled by the runoff. She could see that a little farther south the trees grew more densely, and she could smell the thick, damp mulch of the forest floor.

Eggtusk, with Owlheart, came up to her. Eggtusk saw the fallen tree. "By Kilukpuk’s gravel-stuffed navel. That’s all we need."

"We’ll have to climb over it," said Owlheart.

"Yes. If we get Wolfnose over first—"

But suddenly Lop-ear was here, standing head to head with Eggtusk. He was bedraggled, muttering, excited, eyes wide and full of reflected lightning. "No. Don’t you see? This is the answer. If we push this fallen tree over there — and then go farther toward the forest to find more—"

In the flickering light of the storm, the old Bull stood as solid as if he had grown out of the rock. Owlheart and Wolfnose, the two Matriarchs, stood by and watched, their icy disapproval of Lop-ear’s antics obvious.

Eggtusk said, "You’re risking all our lives by wasting time like this."

Silverhair hurried forward. "What are you trying to say, Lop-ear?"

"I can’t tell you!" he cried. "I just know, if we push the trees together, and—"

"He’s going rogue," said Owlheart. The Matriarch lumbered forward and glowered down at the prancing Lop-ear. "I always knew this calf would be trouble. All his talk of changing things. He’s more like one of the Lost than a mammoth."

"Listen to me!" Lop-ear was trumpeting now. He ran to Owlheart, who was turning away, and grabbed at her trunk. "Listen to me—"

Eggtusk inserted his massive bulk between them. "You don’t touch the Matriarch like that."

"But you must listen."

"Perhaps you’ll listen to this," roared Eggtusk, and he tusked the ground.

It was a challenge.

Eggtusk and Lop-ear faced each other, trunks lowered, ears flaring, gazes locked.

Lop-ear was trembling, and Eggtusk seemed to tower over him, his great incurving tusks poised over his head.

Bull mammoths have their own society, a society of bachelor herds independent of the Families of Cows and calves controlled by the Matriarchs. It is a warrior society, based on continual tests of strength and dominance. Normally, unless enraged by musth, a young Bull like Lop-ear would never challenge a giant tusker like Eggtusk — or if challenged, he would quickly back down.

Now Silverhair waited for Lop-ear to stretch his trunk at Eggtusk to show his deference.

But Lop-ear made no such sign.

Silverhair rushed forward. "Eggtusk, please. He didn’t mean—"

But Owlheart was in her way, solid as a boulder. "Stay back, child. This is a matter for the Bulls."

Lop-ear raised his tusks and made the first blow, dashing his tusks against Eggtusk’s. There was a knock of ivory on ivory, as if one great tree was being smashed into another.

The older Bull did not so much as flinch.

Lop-ear raised his head and again stabbed at Eggtusk’s face. This time Eggtusk dipped sideways, so that Lop-ear’s thrust missed. Eggtusk brought his massive head down and slammed his forehead against Lop-ear’s temple.

Lop-ear cried out, and stumbled back.

Eggtusk trumpeted and lumbered forward. Lop-ear turned to face him, both mammoths trying to stay head-on; if either was turned, his opponent could easily knock him down or even stab him.

Still the rain howled around them, still the lightning split the sky, and still the gathering light and smoke-stink of the fire filled Silverhair’s head. She was peripherally aware of the other mammoths: Foxeye’s weary disbelief, Snagtooth’s disdain, Croptail’s childish excitement.

"I don’t want to fight you," said Lop-ear. He was panting hard, and blood was seeping from a wound in his temple. "But if that’s what I have to do to make you listen—"

Wordlessly Eggtusk trumpeted once more and raised his massive tusks. The sleetish rain swirled around them, and water dripped from their cruel tips.

Lop-ear lunged. Once again Eggtusk sidestepped, and he brought his tusks crashing down on Lop-ear’s domed head with a splintering crash.

Silverhair, horrified, trumpeted in alarm.

The younger Bull bellowed, and fell to his knees.

Eggtusk turned again, and his tusks slashed at Lop-ear’s foreleg, cutting through fur and flesh and drawing thick blood.

For a heartbeat, two, Lop-ear did not move. His face was wreathed in steam, and his great form shuddered.

But then, once again, he clambered stiffly to his feet and turned to face Eggtusk again.

Fights between unmatched Bulls are resolved quickly, Silverhair knew. Usually it would be enough for Eggtusk to raise his great tusks for a junior like Lop-ear to back away.

Usually. But this was not a normal fight.

Silverhair tugged at Owlheart’s trunk. "Matriarch, you have to stop this."

Owlheart quoted the Cycle: "To fight is the way of the Bull…"

"This isn’t about dominance," Silverhair said. "Don’t you see?"

But once again Lop-ear was facing Eggtusk. The space between their staring eyes was filled with tangled hair and steaming breath.

With blood smeared over the dome of his head, Lop-ear charged again.

The Bulls met once more in a splintering crunch of ivory. Silverhair saw that their curving tusks were locked together. This was a risky tactic for both the combatants, for the curving tusks could become locked inextricably, taking both mammoths to their deaths.

The Bulls wrestled. Lop-ear bellowed, resisting Eggtusk.

But the older Bull was much stronger. With a smooth, steady, irresistible effort, Eggtusk twisted his head to one side. Lop-ear pawed at the ground, but it was slick and muddy, and the pads of his feet slipped.

It was over in heartbeats.

His tusks still locked to Eggtusk’s, Lop-ear crashed to the ground.

Eggtusk stood over the helpless younger Bull, his eyes hard. Silverhair saw that he might twist farther, surely snapping Lop-ear’s neck — or he might withdraw his tusks and stab down sharply, driving his ivory into Lop-ear’s helpless body.

The storm cracked over their heads, and for an instant the lightning picked out the silhouette of Eggtusk’s giant deformed tusk.

Eggtusk braced himself for the final thrust.

"No."

The commanding rumble made Eggtusk hesitate.

The voice had been Wolfnose’s. The old Cow, once the Matriarch, was coming forward. The rain dripped unheeded from her tangled hair, and only a smear of tears around her deep old eyes betrayed the pain of her legs.

Eggtusk said, "Wolfnose—?"

"Let him up, Eggtusk."

In the silence that followed, Silverhair could see that they were all waiting for the Matriarch’s response. It was wrong for a Cow to interfere in the affairs of Bulls. And it was wrong for any Cow — even a former Matriarch like Wolfnose — to usurp the authority of the Matriarch herself.

But Owlheart was keeping her counsel.

Eggtusk growled. Then he lowered his head, dropped his trunk, and allowed Lop-ear to clamber to his feet.

The younger Bull stood shakily, his hair matted with mud. He was bleeding heavily from the wounds to his leg and temple.

"This must stop," said Wolfnose.

Eggtusk stiffened. "But the Cycle—"

"I know the Cycle as well as any of you," said Wolfnose. Her voice was even, yet powerful enough to be heard over the bellow of the storm.

Once, Silverhair thought, this must have been a formidable Matriarch indeed.

"But," Wolfnose went on, "Ganesha taught us there are times when the Cycle can’t help us. Look at us: lost, bedraggled, trapped… You will win your fight, Eggtusk. But what value is it? For we shall soon die, trapped here between forest and fire — all of us, even the infant. And then what?" She turned her great head and glared at them, one by one. "When was the last time you saw another Family? And you? When was the last time you heard a contact rumble, at morning or evening? What if we are alone — the last Family of all? It’s possible, isn’t it? I tell you, if it’s true, and if we do die here, then it all dies with us — after more generations than there are stars in the winter sky."

And Silverhair, standing in the freezing rain, saw the truth with sudden, devastating clarity. They had become a rabble, a few shivering, half-starved mammoths, a pathetic remnant of the great Clans that once had roamed here. A rabble so blinded by their own past and mythology, they could not even act.

She stepped forward. "Tell us what to do, Wolfnose."

The old Cow stepped forward and laid her trunk over Lop-ear’s splintered tusk. "We must do what this bright young Bull says."

Lop-ear — breathing hard, shivering, bloody — hesitated, as if waiting to be attacked once more. Then he turned to the runoff stream. "The fallen tree trunk," he said, his voice blurred by blood and pain. "Help me." He bent to the fallen tree, dug his tusks under it, and began to push it toward the stream. But it was much too heavy for him, exhausted as he was.

Wolfnose lumbered forward. With only a grimace to betray her pain she forced her fused knees to bend, and she put her tusks alongside Lop-ear’s and pushed with him.

The tree trunk rocked, then fell back.

Silverhair ran forward. She squeezed between Wolfnose and Lop-ear, and rammed her head against the stubborn tree trunk. With more hesitation, Eggtusk, Owlheart, and even Snagtooth joined in. Only Foxeye stayed back, shielding the calves.

Under the combined pressure of six adult mammoths, the tree trunk soon popped out of its muddy groove in the ground and rolled forward.

With a crunch of branches, the tree crashed over a boulder and came to rest in the stream. The tree was so long, it straddled almost the whole width of the stream. The water, bubbling, flowed over the tree and through its smashed branches.

The mammoths stood for a heartbeat, studying their work.

Silverhair looked back at Wolfnose. But Wolfnose was obviously drained; she stood with her trunk dangling, eyes closed, rain sleeting off her back.

Silverhair turned to Lop-ear. "It’s your idea, Lop-ear. Tell us what to do next."

Now that he was being taken seriously, Lop-ear looked even more nervous and agitated than before. "More trees! That’s it. Pile them on this one. Any you can find. And anything else — boulders, shrubs…"

Eggtusk growled. "By the lemmings that burrow in the stinking armpits of Kilukpuk, what madness is this?"

Owlheart said dryly, "We may as well see it through, Eggtusk. Come on." And she lumbered farther up the stream, to a tumbled sapling.

With the Matriarch’s implicit approval, the others hurried to work.

Silverhair helped Eggtusk haul another huge tree up the stream. But most of the fallen trees were simply too massive to move.

Lop-ear led them to a small stand of saplings, most of them still upright, and began to barge against the smallest of them with his head. "These will do," he said. "Smash them off and take them to the stream."

Silverhair joined in. This, at least, was familiar. Mammoths will often break and push over young trees; the apparently destructive act serves to clear the land and maintain its openness, and thus the health of the tundra.

So the barrier grew, higgledy-piggledy, with branches and stones and even whole bushes thrown on it, their roots still dripping with dirt. Even little Croptail helped, rolling boulders into the stream where they clattered to rest against the growing pile that lay across the stream.

As the barrier grew, the water of the runoff was evidently having trouble penetrating the thickening mass of foliage, rocks, and dirt. At last the water began to form a brimming pool behind the barrier.

And ahead of it, the stream’s volume was greatly reduced to a sluggish brook that crawled through the muddy channel. Silverhair stared in amazement, suddenly understanding what Lop-ear had intended.

Lop-ear stood on the bank of the stream. His head was smeared with blood and mud, and his belly hairs, soaked through, were beginning to stiffen with frost. But when he looked on his work he raised his trunk and trumpeted with triumph. "That’s it! We can cross now."

"By Kilukpuk’s fetid breath," growled Eggtusk. "It’s muddy, and boggy — it won’t be easy — but yes, we should be able to ford there now. I never expected to say this, Lop-ear, but there may be something useful about you after all."

"We should move fast," said Lop-ear, apparently indifferent to Eggtusk’s praise. "The water is still rising. When it reaches the top of the barrier it will come rushing over, just as hard as before."

"And besides," Silverhair pointed out, "that fire hasn’t stopped burning."

The Matriarch, who had already taken in the situation, brayed a sharp command, and the mammoths prepared for the crossing.

They got Foxeye and the calves across first.

Croptail had no difficulty. He slid down a muddy bank into the water, then emerged to shake himself dry and scramble up the far side to his mother’s waiting trunk. Silverhair heard him squeal in delight, as if it were all a game.

Eggtusk was the key to getting Sunfire across. The great Bull plunged willingly into the river, sinking into freezing mud and water that lapped over his belly. The calf slithered down into the ditch and clambered across Eggtusk’s broad, patient back.

Then, with Sunfire safely across, Lop-ear reached down and thrust forward a foot for Eggtusk to grasp with his trunk. Eggtusk pulled himself out, huffing mightily, with Lop-ear scrambling to hold his position, and Owlheart and Silverhair threw bark and twigs beneath Eggtusk’s feet to help him climb.

Wolfnose was more difficult.

Owlheart tugged gently at her mother’s trunk. "Come now."

Wolfnose opened her eyes within their nests of wrinkles, regarded her daughter, and with a sigh lifted her feet from the clinging, icy mud. The others gathered around her, Eggtusk behind her. But when she came to the slippery bank of the stream, Wolfnose stopped.

"I am weary," said Wolfnose slowly. "Leave me. I will sleep first."

Owlheart stood before her, helpless; and Silverhair felt her heart sink.

But Eggtusk growled, and he began to butt Wolfnose’s backside, quite disrespectfully. "I — have — had — enough — of — this!"

Almost against her will, Wolfnose was soon hobbling down the slippery bank. Silverhair and the others quickly gathered around her, helping her to stay on her feet. Wolfnose splashed, hard, into the cold, turbulent stream that emerged from beneath Lop-ear’s impromptu dam. Once there, breathing heavily, she found it hard to scramble out of the clinging mud. But Eggtusk plunged belly-deep into the mud and shoved gamely at the old Cow’s rear.

At last, with much scrambling, pushing, and pulling, they had Wolfnose safely lodged on the far bank.

Not long after they had crossed, the water came brimming over the barrier, like a trunk emptying into a great mouth. The barrier fell apart, the trees scattering down the renewed stream like twigs, and it was as if the place they had forded had never been.

The storm blew itself out.

Silverhair watched as the fire came billowing across the tundra, at last reaching the bank they had left behind. But as the rain grew more liquid — and as the dry grass was consumed, with rain hissing over the scorched ground — the fire died.

Silverhair and Lop-ear emerged from the forest and stood on the rocky ground overlooking the stream. On the far side of the stream the ground was blackened and steaming, with here and there the burned-out stump of a sapling spruce protruding from the ground.

A spectacular sheet of golden light, from broken clouds at the horizon, shimmered beneath the remaining gray clouds above.

"We’ll have to move on soon," said Lop-ear. "There isn’t anything for us to eat on this stony ground…"

"The fire would have killed us," said Silverhair. She was certain she was right. Without Lop-ear’s strange ingenuity, they would have perished. She looked down at the tree trunks scattered along the length of the runoff stream. "I don’t know how you got the idea. But you saved us."

"Yes," Lop-ear said gloomily. "But maybe Owlheart was right."

"What do you mean?"

"I defied the Cycle. I defied Owlheart. I don’t want that, Silverhair. I don’t want to be different."

"Lop-ear—"

"Maybe there is something of the Lost about me. Something dark."

With that, his eyes deep and troubled, he turned away.

No, thought Silverhair. No, you’re wrong. Wolfnose, old and weary as she is, was able to see the value of new thinking — as was Ganesha the Wise before her.

The Cycle might not be able to guide them through the troubled times to come. It would require minds like Lop-ear’s — new thinking, new solutions — if they were to survive.

She thought of the creature she had seen on the ice floe. One of the Lost, Eggtusk had said.

Her brain seethed with speculation over dangers and opportunities. Somehow, she knew, her destiny was bound up with the ugly, predatory monster she had encountered on that ice floe.

Destiny — or opportunity?

Silverhair surveyed the wreckage of the barrier a little longer. She tried to remember how it had been, what they had done to defeat the river. But already, she could not picture how it had been.

And the runoff stream was dwindling. The glacier ice had been melted by the heat absorbed by the rock faces during the day. But as the sun sank, the rock cooled and the runoff slowed, reducing the torrents and gushes to mere trickles — which would, Silverhair realized ruefully, have been easy to cross.

She turned away and rejoined the others.