Silverhair

The Story of the Calves of Kilukpuk

Now (Silverhair said to Icebones), every mammoth has heard of the mother of us all: Kilukpuk, the Matriarch of Matriarchs, who grew up in a burrow in the time of the Reptiles. The tale I am going to tell you is of the end of Kilukpuk’s life, two thousand Great-Years ago, when the Reptiles were long gone, and the world was young and warm and empty.

Now by this time Kilukpuk had been alive for a very long time.

Though she was the mother of us all, Kilukpuk was not like us. By now she more resembled the seals of the coast, with stubby legs and a nub of trunk. She had become so huge, in fact, that her body had sunk into the ground, turning it into a Swamp within which she dwelled.

But she had a womb as fertile as the sea.

One year she bore three Calves.

The first was called Probos; the second was called Siros; the third was called Hyros.

There was no eldest or youngest, for they had all been born at the same mighty instant. They all looked exactly the same. They played together happily, without envy or malice.

They were all equal.

Yet they were not.

Only one of them could be Matriarch when Kilukpuk died.

As time wore on, the Calves ceased to play with one another. They took to watching each other with suspicion and hostility, hoping to find some flaw or small crime they could report to their mother. At least, that was how Hyros and Siros behaved. For her part, Probos bore no ill will to her sisters.

Kilukpuk floated in her Swamp, and showed no favor to any of her daughters.

Now, Kilukpuk did not intend that her daughters should stay forever in the Swamp, as she did. So from the beginning she had pushed her three daughters onto the land.

They had mewled and complained, wishing only to return to the comforting mud of the Swamp, and to snuggle once more against Kilukpuk’s mighty dugs — which as you know were as big as the Mountains at the End of the World. But gradually the Calves learned to browse at the grasses and nibble at the leaves of the trees, and ceased to miss the warm bath of the Swamp.

Now, Hyros became very fond of the foliage of the lush trees of those days, and she became jealous if her sisters tried to share that particular bounty. It got to the point where Hyros started climbing the trees to ensure she reached the juiciest leaves before her sisters, and she would leap from branch to branch and even between the trees to keep her sisters away, and she made a great crashing noise when she did so.

And Siros likewise became very fond of the fruits of the seas and rivers, and she became jealous if her sisters tried to share that particular bounty. It got to the point where Siros started swimming in the rivers and sea to ensure she reached the thickest reeds before her sisters, and she made a great galumphing splashing noise while she did so.

Now, none of this troubled Probos. She knew that the grasses and sedges and herbs and bushes of the world were more than enough to feed her for the rest of her long life, and as many calves as she could imagine bearing. She tried to tell her sisters this: that they had nothing to fear from her or each other, for the world was rich enough to support all of them.

This enraged her sisters, for they thought Probos must be trying to trick them. And so, silently, separately, they hatched their plans against her.

One day, when Probos was browsing calmly on a lush patch of grass, she heard Hyros calling from a treetop. "Oh, Probos!" She was so high up, her voice sounded like a bird’s cry. "I want to show you how fond I am of you, sister. Here — I want you to have the very best and sweetest and fattest leaves I can find." And Hyros began to hurl down great mouthfuls of bark and leaves and twigs from the very tops of the trees.

Now, Probos was a little bewildered. For the truth was, she had grown to relish the thin, aromatic flavor of the herbs and grasses. She found tree leaves thick and cloying and damp in her mouth, and the bark and twigs scratched at her lips and tongue. But she did not wish to offend her sister, so she patiently began to eat the tree stuff.

For a day and a night Hyros fed her sister like this, unrelenting, and soon Probos’s dung grew slippery with undigested masses of leaf. But still she would not offend her sister, and she patiently worked her way through the great piles on the ground.

Suddenly Hyros stopped throwing down the leaves. She thrust her small, mean face out of the foliage, and glared down at Probos, laughing. "Look at you now! You will never be able to climb up here and steal my leaves!"

And when Probos looked down at herself, she found she had eaten so much she had grown huge — much bigger than her sisters, though not so big as Kilukpuk — so big that she could, surely, never again climb a tree. She looked up at Hyros sadly. "Why have you tricked me, sister? I had no wish to share your leaves."

But Hyros wasn’t listening. She bounded off through her branches, laughing at what she had done.

Kilukpuk saw this, but said nothing.

A little while later, when Probos was grazing contentedly on a patch of particularly savory herbs, she heard Siros calling from the river. "Oh, Probos!" Siros barely poked her nose out of the water, and her voice sounded like the bubbling of a fish. "I want to show you how fond I am of you, sister. Here — I want you to enjoy the sweetest water of all with me. Come. Give me your nose."

Now, Probos was a little bewildered. For the truth was, she was quite happy with the water she lapped from small streams and puddles; she found river water cold and silty and full of weeds. But she patiently kneeled down and lowered her nose to her sister in the water.

Siros immediately clamped her teeth on the end of Probos’s nose and began to pull. Through a clenched jaw she said, "Now, you stand firm, sister; this will not take long."

For a day and a night Siros dragged at her sister’s nose like this, unrelenting, and soon Probos’s nose started to stretch, longer and longer, like growing grass. And it hurt a great deal, as you can imagine! And while this was going on she could not eat or drink, and her dung grew thin and watery and foul-smelling. But still she would not offend her sister, and patiently she let Siros wrench at her aching nose.

Suddenly Siros stopped pulling at Probos’s nose. She opened her jaws and slid back into the water, and Probos fell backwards.

Siros thrust her small, mean face out of the water, and glared up at Probos, laughing. "Look at you now! What a ridiculous nose. With that in the way, you will never be able to slide through the water and steal my reeds!"

And when Probos looked down at herself, she found her nose had grown so long it dangled between her legs, all the way to the ground.

She looked down at Siros sadly. "Why have you tricked me, sister? I didn’t want to share your reeds or your water."

But Siros wasn’t listening. She turned and wriggled away through the water, laughing at what she had done.

Kilukpuk saw this, but said nothing.

The years passed, and at last the day came when Kilukpuk called her Calves to her.

But the Calves had changed.

Siros had spent so long in the river and the sea that her skin had grown smooth, the hair flowing on it like water. And Hyros had spent so long in the trees that she had become small and agile, fast-moving and nervous.

As for Probos, she had a body like a boulder, and legs like mighty trees, and a nose she had learned to use as a trunk. Whereas Siros wriggled and flopped and Hyros skittered to and fro, Probos moved over the land as stately as the shadow of a cloud.

Kilukpuk hauled herself out of her Swamp. "My teeth grow soft," she said, "and soon I will not be here to be your Matriarch. I know that the question of which of you shall follow me as Matriarch has much vexed you — some of you, at least. Here is what I have decided."

And Hyros and Siros said together, "Which of us? Oh, tell us. Which of us?"

Probos said nothing, but merely wept tears of Swamp water for her mother.

Kilukpuk said, "You will all be Matriarch. And none of you will be Matriarch."

Hyros and Siros fell silent, puzzled.

Kilukpuk said, "You, Siros, are the Matriarch of the Water. But the water is not yours. Even close to the land there will be many who will compete with you for fish and weeds and will hunt you down. But it is what you have stolen from your sisters, and it is what you wanted, and it is what you will have. Go now."

And Siros squirmed around and flopped her way back to the water.

Now Kilukpuk said, "You, Hyros, are the Matriarch of the Trees. But the trees are not yours. You have made yourself small and weak and frightened, and that is how you will remain. Animals and birds will compete with you for leaves and bark and plants and will hunt you down. But it is what you have stolen from your sisters, and it is what you wanted, and it is what you will have. Go now."

And Hyros clambered nervously to the branches of the tall trees.

That left only Probos, who waited patiently for her mother to speak. But Kilukpuk was weakening now, and her great body sank deeper into the water of the Swamp. She spat out fragments of tooth — so huge, by the way, they became glaciers where they fell. And she said to Probos, "You stole nothing from your sisters. And yet what they stole from you has made you strong.

"Go, Probos. For the Earth is yours.

"With your great bulk you need fear no predator. With your strong and agile trunk you will become the cleverest animal in the world. Go now, Probos, Matriarch of the mammoths and all their Cousins who live on the land."

Probos was greatly saddened; but she was a good calf who obeyed her Matriarch.

(And what Kilukpuk prophesied would come to pass, for each of Probos’s Calves and their calves to come. But that was for the future.)

Kilukpuk raised herself from the Swamp and called to her Calves one last time. She said, "You will rarely meet again; nor will your calves, or your calves’ calves. But you will be Cousins forever. You must not fight or kill each other. If you meet your Cousins you will assist each other, without question or hesitation or limit. You will make your calves swear this binding oath."

Well, that was the end of the jealousy between the sisters. Hyros and Siros were remorseful, Probos was gladdened, and the three of them swore to hold true to Kilukpuk’s command.

And that is why, as soon as she is old enough to speak, every calf is taught the Oath of Kilukpuk.

But as Kilukpuk sank back into her Swamp and prepared for her journey back into the Earth, she was saddened. For she knew she had not told even Probos, the best of her Calves, the whole truth.

For, one day, there would be something for them all to fear — even mighty Probos.

8 The Plain of Bones

Arctic summer: the sun arced around the sky’s north pole, somehow aimlessly, and at midnight it rolled lazily along the horizon. It was a single day, long and crystalline, that would last for two months, an endless day of feeding and breeding and dying.

At midnight Silverhair, walking slowly with her Family across the thawing plain, saw that she cast a shadow, ice-sharp, that stretched to the horizon. She felt oddly weighed down by the shadow, as if it were some immense tail she must drag around with her. But the light turned everything to gold, and made the bedraggled mammoths, with their clouds of loose molting fur, glow as if on fire.

They reached an area of tundra new to Silverhair. The mammoths, exhausted by their adventures, spread slowly over the landscape. As the thaw arrived, they found enough to drink in the melt pools that gathered over the permafrost. On days that were excessively hot — because mammoths do not sweat — they would reduce heat by panting, or they would find patches of soft snow to stand in, sometimes eating mouthfuls of it.

The changes in the land were dramatic now. After a month of continuous daylight, the sun was high, and hot enough to melt ice. Rock began to protrude through the thawing hillsides, and blue meltwater glimmered on the frozen lakes. As snowbanks melted, drips became trickles, and gullies became streams, and rivers, marshes, and ponds reformed. In sheltered valleys there were already patches of sedge and grass, green and meadow-like. After months of frozen whiteness the land was becoming an intricate pattern of black and white. This emerging panorama — shimmering with moist light, draped in mist and fog — was still wreathed in silence. But already the haunting calls of Arctic loons echoed to the sky from the melt pools.

The mammoths slept and fed in comparative comfort, and time wore away, slowly and unmarked.

Croptail tried to play with his sister, Sunfire, and his antics pleased the slower-moving adults, who would reach down trunk or tusk to allow the Bull calf to wrestle. But despite her mother’s attention, Sunfire was feeding badly and did not seem to be putting on weight, and her coat remained shabby and tangled. She spent most of her time tucked under her mother’s belly hair, with her face clamped to one dug or other, while Foxeye whispered verses from the Cycle.

Still, it was, all things considered, a happy time. But Silverhair’s spirits did not rise. She took to keeping her distance from the others — even from Lop-ear. She sought out patches of higher ground, her trunk raised.

For something was carried to her by the wind off the sea — something that troubled her to the depths of her soul.

Wolfnose joined her. The old Cow stood alongside Silverhair, feeling with her trunk for rich patches of grass, then trapping tufts between her trunk and tusks and pulling it out.

Silverhair waited patiently. Wolfnose seemed to be moving more slowly than ever, and her rheumy eyes, constantly watering, must be almost blind. So worn were Wolfnose’s teeth, it took her a long time to consume her daily meals. And when she passed dung, Silverhair saw that it was thin and sour-smelling, and contained much unchewed grass and twigs, and even some indigestible soil that Wolfnose, in her gathering blindness, had scooped into her mouth.

But even as her body failed, Wolfnose seemed to be settling into a new contentment.

"This is a good time of year," Wolfnose rumbled at last. She quoted the Cycle: "When the day becomes endless, we shed our cares with our winter coats." She ground her grass contentedly, her great jaw moving back and forth. "But you are not happy, child. Even my old eyes can see that much. What troubles you? Is it Sunfire?"

"I know Foxeye is looking after her well."

"Sunfire was born in a difficult spring, a little too early. Now that summer is approaching, she will flourish like the tundra flowers—"

Silverhair blurted, "Wolfnose — what do you smell here?"

For answer, Wolfnose patiently finished her mouthful of grass. Then she raised her trunk and turned it this way and that.

She said at last, "There is the salt of the sea, to the west. There is the crisp fur of wolves, the sour droppings of lemmings, the stink of the guano of the gulls at the rocky coast…"

"But no mammoths." Silverhair meant the complex of smells that characterized mammoths to each other: the smells of moist hair, dung, mothers’ milk.

Wolfnose said, "No. But there is—"

Silverhair trembled. "There is the stink of death — of dead mammoths."

Wolfnose lowered her trunk and turned calmly to Silverhair. "It isn’t what you think."

Silverhair snapped, "I’ll tell you what I do think. I think that what I can smell is the stench of some other Family’s rotting corpses." She was trembling. She felt an unreasonable anger at Wolfnose’s calm patience.

"I’ll tell you the truth," Wolfnose said. "I can’t say what’s become of the other Families. It’s certainly a long time — too long — since any of us met a mammoth from another Family, and you know my fears about that. But the scent you detect has another meaning. Something wonderful."

"Wonderful? Can death be wonderful?"

"Yes. Come on."

With that, ripping another mouthful of grass from the clumps at her feet, Wolfnose began to walk toward the west.

Silverhair, startled, came to herself and hurried to catch up with Wolfnose. It did not take long, for Wolfnose’s arthritic gait was so forced and slow that Silverhair thought even a glacier could outrun her.

She called, "Where are we going?"

"You’ll find out when we get there."

The thawing ground was moist and fragile under Silverhair’s feet, and every footstep left a scar. In fact, the plain was crisscrossed by the trails of mammoths, wolves, foxes, and other animals, left from last summer and the years before. It could take ten years for the fragile tundra to grow over a single footstep.

Overhead, the snow geese were winging to their breeding grounds to the north, skein after skein of them passing across the blue sky. Occasionally, over the lakes, the geese plummeted from the sky to reach water through thin ice.

The tundra was wet, almost boggy, peppered by rivers, lakes, pools, bogs, and peaty hummocks. Although it had so little rainfall it was actually a desert, the tundra was one of the most waterlogged lands on the planet. There was little evaporation into the cold air and virtually no absorption into the soil; for, just a short trunk’s reach down through the carpet of plants, the ground was always frozen. That was the permafrost: nearly a mile deep, a layer of frozen soil that had failed to melt since the Ice Age.

It was a harsh place. Few plants could survive the combination of the summer’s shallow thawed-out soil and the intensely bitter winds of winter. But now, on the ground, from under the melting snow, the frozen world was coming to life.

Dead-looking stems bore tiny leaves and flowers, and the land was dotted with green and white and yellow. The first insects were stirring too. There were flies in the air, and some spiders and mites toiling on the ground. Silverhair saw a caterpillar cocoon fixed to a dwarf willow. The cocoon twitched as if its occupant were impatient to begin life’s brief adventure.

The edges of the receding snow patches were busy places. New arrivals — migrant birds like buntings, sanderling, turnstone, and horned larks — rushed to and fro as if in desperation, as the sun revealed fresh land with its cargo of roots and insects, ripe for the eating. The noise of the birds was startling after the long silence of the winter.

The lemmings seemed plentiful this year. Their heads popped up everywhere from their holes in the snow, and in some places their busy teeth had already denuded the land, leaving the characteristic "lemming carpet" of shorn grass and hard black droppings.

The lemming hunters were here too. As soon as any lemming left its ball-shaped nest, a long-tailed skua would take off after it, yelping display calls from its hooked beak.

Usually the hapless rodents became nothing more than gifts in a skua’s courtship display. But Silverhair saw one enterprising animal, attacked by a skua, rear up on its hind legs and flash its long teeth. The skua, alarmed, flew away, and Silverhair felt obscurely cheered. She could hear the clattering heartbeat of the little creature as it nibbled in peace at a blade of grass.

But it was probably only a brief respite. The lemmings were hunted ruthlessly, not just by the skuas, but by snowy owls, gulls, and buzzards, and even Arctic foxes and polar bears. Silverhair knew that this lemming’s life, compared to her own, would be fast, vivid, but — even if by some miracle the predators spared it — tragically short.

The sun completed many rounds in the sky as the two mammoths walked on.

Wolfnose even brought Silverhair to some richer pastures, urging her to remember them for the future. "And," she said, "you must understand why the grass grows so well here."

"Why?"

"Once there were many mammoths here — many Families, many Clans. And they had favorite pastures, where their dung would be piled thick. The Clans are gone now — all save ours — but even after so long, their dung enriches the earth…"

Silverhair stared with awe at the thick-growing grass, a vibrant memorial to the great mammoth herds of long ago.

They came at last to the western coast.

The sea was still largely frozen. Sanderling and bunting searched for seeds in the snow, ducks dived through narrow leads in the thin ice, and skuas stood expectantly on prominent rocks. On the cliff below, barnacle geese were already incubating their clutches of eggs, still surrounded by the brilliant white of snow.

The smells of saltwater and guano were all but overpowering. But it was here that the stink of rotten mammoth flesh was strongest of all, and Silverhair was filled with a powerful dread.

At last they came to a shallow, rounded hill. Silverhair could see that it had been badly eroded by recent rainstorms; deep gullies ran down its side, as if scored by giant tusks.

Wolfnose edged forward and poked at the ground with her trunk. "This is called a yedoma," she said. "It is a hill mostly made of ice. Come now."

She led Silverhair around the flank of the hill. The death stink grew steadily stronger, until Silverhair could hardly bear to take another step. But Wolfnose marched stolidly on, her trunk raised, and Silverhair had no option but to follow.

And they came to a place where the yedoma’s collapsing flank had exposed a corpse: the corpse of a mammoth.

Wolfnose stood back, her trunk raised. "Tell me what you see, little Silverhair," she said gently.

Silverhair, shocked and distressed, stepped forward slowly, nosing at the ground with her trunk. "I think it was a Bull…"

The dead mammoth was lying on his side. Silverhair could see that the flesh and skin on which he lay were mostly intact: she could make out his ear on that side, his flank, the skin on his legs, the long dark hair of winter tangled in frozen mud.

But the upper side of the Bull had been stripped of its flesh by the sharp teeth of scavengers. The meat was almost completely removed from the skull, and the rib cage, and even the legs. There was no sign of the Bull’s trunk. The pelvis, shoulder blade, and several of the ribs were broken and scattered. Inside the rib cage nestled a dark, lumpy mass, still frozen hard; perhaps it was the heart and stomach of this dead mammoth.

The Bull, she found, still had traces of food in the ruin of his mouth: grass and sedge, just as she had eaten today. He must have died rapidly, then: too rapidly even to swallow his last meal.

The flensed skull gleamed white in the pale sunlight. Its empty eye socket seemed to stare at her accusingly.

She heard a soft growl. She turned, trumpeting.

A wolf stood there, its fur white as snow. It was a bitch; Silverhair could see swollen dugs dangling beneath her chest.

Silverhair lowered her head, trumpeted, and lunged at the wolf. "Get away, cub of Aglu, or I will drive my tusks into you!"

The wolf lowered her ears and ran off.

Silverhair, breathing hard, returned to Wolfnose. "If she returns I will kill her."

Wolfnose said, "No. She has her place, as we all do. She probably has cubs to feed."

"She has been chewing on the corpse of this Bull!"

Wolfnose trumpeted mockingly. "And what difference does that make to him now? He has belonged to the wolves for a long time; in fact, longer than you think, little Silverhair…"

Silverhair returned to her inspection of the ravaged corpse. "I don’t recognize him. He must be from a Family I never met."

"You don’t understand yet," Wolfnose said gently. "Perhaps he was grazing at the soft edge of a gully or a river bluff. Perhaps he lost his footing, became trapped. The wolves would work at him, and in time he would die. But then, at last, he would be enveloped by the soil, saturated by water, frozen by winter’s return.

"But the river mud that destroyed him also preserved him.

"For you see, if your body happens to be sealed inside ice, it can be saved. The ice, freezing, draws out the moisture that would otherwise rot your flesh… If you were sealed here, Silverhair, although your spirit would long have flown to the aurora, your body would live on — as long as it remained inside the ice, it would be as well preserved as this."

"How long?"

Wolfnose said. "I don’t know. How can I know? Perhaps Great-Years. Perhaps longer…"

Silverhair was stunned.

She could reach down with her trunk and touch the hair of this Bull’s face. The Bull might have been dead only a few days. Yet — could it be true? — he was separated from her by Great-Years.

"Now," said Wolfnose. "Look with new eyes; lift your trunk and smell…"

Silverhair, a little bewildered, obeyed.

And now that her eyes and nostrils were accustomed to the stink of the ancient corpse beside her, she saw that this landscape was not as it had seemed.

It was littered with bones.

Here was a femur, a leg bone, thrusting defiantly from the ground. Here was a set of ribs, broken and scattered, split as if some scavenger had been working to extract the marrow from their cores. And there a skull protruded from the ground, as if some great beast were burrowing upward from within the Earth.

Wolfnose said, "The bones and bodies are stored in the ground. But when the ice melts and they are exposed — after Great-Years of stillness and dark — there is a moment of daylight, a flash of activity. The wolves and birds soon come to take away the flesh, and the bones are scattered by the wind and the rain. And then it is done. The ancient bodies evaporate like a grain of snow on the tongue. So you see, you are fortunate to have witnessed this rare moment of surfacing, Silverhair."

"We should Remember the one in the yedoma," Silverhair said.

"Of course we should," said Wolfnose. "For he has no one left to do it for him."

And so the two mammoths touched the vacant skull with their trunks, and lifted and sorted the bones. Then they gathered twigs and soil and cast them on the ancient corpse, and touched it with the sensitive pads of their back feet, and they stood over it as the sun wheeled around the sky. They were trying to Remember the spirit that had once occupied this body, this Bull with no name who might have been the ancestor of them both, just as they would have done had they come upon the body of one of their own Family.

Silverhair imagined the days of long ago — perhaps when the crushed corpse she had seen had been proud and full of life — days different from now, days when the Clan had covered the Island, days when Families had merged and mingled in the great migrations like rivers flowing together. Days when mammoths had been more numerous, on the Island and beyond, than pebbles on a beach.

She was standing on a ground filled with the bodies of mammoths, generations of them stretching back Great-Years and more, bodies that were raised to the surface, to glimmer in the sun and evaporate like dew. For the first time in her life she could see the great depth of mammoth history behind her: forty million years of it, stretching back to Kilukpuk herself in her Swamp, a great sweep of time and space of which she was just a part.

Like the bones of this long-dead Bull, her soul was merely the fragment of all that mystery that happened to have surfaced in the here and now. And like the Bull, her soul would be worn away and vanished in an instant.

Silverhair felt the world shift and flow around her, as if she herself was caught up by some great river of time.

And she was proud, fiercely proud, to be mammoth.

When they were done the two mammoths turned away from the setting sun, side by side, and prepared for the long walk back to their Family.

At the last moment, Wolfnose stopped and turned back. "Silverhair — what of the tusks?"

Somehow Silverhair had not noticed the Bull’s tusks, one way or another. She trotted back to the yedoma.

The tusks were missing; there was no sign of them, not so much as a splinter. But the tusks had not been snapped away by whatever accident had befallen this Bull, for the stumps in the skull were sharply terminated in clean, flat edges.

She returned to Wolfnose and told her this.

For the first time, she detected fear in the voice of the old one. "Then the Lost have been here."

"…What?"

"I know what you saw on the ice floe in the south, Silverhair," Wolfnose said gravely. "Perhaps they came in search of flesh, like the wolf…"

"What do the Lost want with tusks?"

"There is no understanding the Lost," said Wolfnose bluntly. "There is only fleeing. Come. Let us return to Owlheart and the others."

Their shadows stretching ahead of them, the two mammoths walked together.

9 The Hole Gouged Out of the Sky

Silverhair was impatient during the long journey back to the Family.

It struck her as a paradox that visiting a place of death and desolation like the Plain of Bones should leave her feeling so invigorated. But that was how she felt — as Wolfnose had surely intended.

And — besides all the philosophy — she was young, and the days of spring were bright and warming, and the tundra flowers were already starting to bloom bright yellow amid the last scraps of snow and the first green shoots of new grass. Just as the Cycle promised, she felt she was shedding her cares with the worn-out layers of her winter coat.

Perhaps this would be the year that she would, for the first time, sing the Song of Estrus: when her body would produce the eggs that could form a calf. She remembered the ache in her empty dugs as she had watched Foxeye suckle Sunfire for the first time. Now she could feel the blood surge in her veins, as if drawn by the sun.

She wanted to become pregnant: to bear her own calf, to shelter and feed and raise it, to teach it all she knew of the world, to add her own new thread to the Cycle’s great and unending coat.

And her thoughts were full of Lop-ear. She longed to tell him what she had seen on the Plain of Bones, what it had meant to her…

She longed, bluntly, just to be with him once more.

She trotted across the thawing plains, her head full of warm, blood-red dreams of the young Bull.

Wolfnose had more difficulty.

Even at the best of times her pace was no match for Silverhair’s. The pain in her legs and back was obvious. It took her much longer than Silverhair to feed and to pass dung, and her lengthening stops left Silverhair fretting with impatience.

Thus they proceeded, Wolfnose warring with her own failing body, Silverhair torn between eagerness for the future and responsibility for the past.

At last they came in sight of the Family.

It was a bright morning, and at the center of a greening plain, the Family looked like a series of round, hairy boulders dotted over the landscape. The smell of their dung and their moist coats was already strong, and Silverhair could feel the rumble of their voices as they called to each other. The mammoths were not beautiful — never had the ambiguous gift of the great Matriarch Ganesha to her daughter Prima been more evident to Silverhair — but it was, in her eyes, the finest sight she could have seen.

She raised her trunk and trumpeted her joyous greeting and — quite forgetting Wolfnose — she charged across the tundra toward the Family.

Here came Lop-ear, that damaged ear dangling unmistakably by his head, running to meet her.

Their meeting was so vigorous, she was almost knocked over. They bumped their foreheads, ran in circles, defecated together, and spun around. He was like a reflection in a melt pond, a reflection of her own resurgent youth and vigor.

This is our time, she thought as she spun and danced. This is our summer, our day.

And it seemed perfectly natural that he should run behind her, rear up on his hind legs, place his forelegs on her back, and rest his great weight against her.

But she was not in estrus, and he was not in musth, and — for now — the mounting was only a playful celebration.

They faced each other; Silverhair touched his scalp and tusks and mouth.

"I missed you," he said.

"And I you. You won’t believe what Wolfnose showed me…" She began to recount all she had seen in the Plain of Bones, the ancient carcasses of mammoths just like themselves, swimming out of the ice after a Great-Year’s sleep.

But though he listened intently, and continued to stroke her trunk with his, she could see that his eyes were empty.

After a time she drew back from him. He reached for her again, but she pushed him gently away.

"Something’s wrong. Is it what Owlheart said, about having something of the Lost in you?"

"No. Or at least, not just that. I’m confused, Silverhair. I’m happy to see you, glad the spring has come again. Part of me wants to jump about like a calf. But inside, I feel as if a giant black winter cloud is hanging over me."

She scuffed at the ground, trying to retain that sense of wondrous optimism with which she had returned home. "I don’t understand…"

"Silverhair, if you were singing the Song of Estrus now — who would mount you?"

And with that question she saw his concern. For there were only two Bulls here who might come into musth: Eggtusk and Lop-ear. They’d fought once already; they might easily kill each other fighting over her.

Or over Owlheart, or Foxeye, or even Snagtooth, if their turn came.

Lop-ear said, "And even if we resolve our dominance fights without killing each other — even if all the Cows become pregnant by one or other of us — what then?"

"What do you mean?"

"What of the future? When Sunfire and Croptail and any other calves grow up — and themselves come into estrus and musth — who is to mate with them?" He spun, agitated, his trunk raised as if to ward off invisible enemies. "Already his mother is pushing Croptail away. That’s as it should be. Soon, in a few years, he will want to leave the Family and search for other Bulls, join a bachelor herd. Just as I did, just as Eggtusk did. But Croptail can’t join the Bulls, for there are no other Bulls. He can’t join a bachelor herd, for there is no herd — none that we have met for a long time, at any rate. And when he is in musth, there will be no Cows but his own sisters and aunts and cousins."

She reached out to try to calm him. "Lop-ear—"

But he spun away from her. "Oh, Kilukpuk! I have this stuff rattling around in my skull all day and all night. I want to stop thinking!"

She was chilled by his words, even as she strove to understand. To think so clearly about the possibilities of the future, of change, is not common in mammoths; embedded in the great rhythms of time, the mammoths live in the here and now. But Lop-ear was no ordinary mammoth.

She took hold of his trunk and forced him to face her. "Lop-ear — listen to me. Perhaps you’re right in all you say. But you are wrong to despair. When we were trapped by the fire and the runoff, you found a way to save us. It wasn’t a teaching from the Cycle; it wasn’t something the Matriarch showed you. It was a new idea.

"Now we are facing a barrier even more formidable than that stream. There is nothing to guide us in the Cycle. There is nothing the Matriarch can advise us to do. It’s up to us, Lop-ear. We have to seek out the new, and find a way to survive."

"It’s impossible."

"No. As Longtusk said, ‘Only death is the end of possibility.’ What we must do is look for answers where nobody has looked before."

"Where?"

She hesitated, and the vague determination that had long been gathering in her crystallized. "If Eggtusk is right — that the Lost have come to this Island — then that’s where we must go."

"The Lost? Silverhair, are you rogue?"

"No. Just determined. Maybe the Lost aren’t the monsters of the Cycle anymore. Maybe there’s some way they can help us." She tightened her grasp on his trunk. "We must go south again. Are you with me?"

For long heartbeats he stared into her eyes. Then he said, "Yes. Oh, Silverhair, yes. I’ll follow you to the End of the World—"

There was an alarmed trumpeting.

Silverhair released Lop-ear’s trunk and they both whirled, trunks held aloft.

Owlheart was running. "Wolfnose! Wolfnose!"

Silverhair looked back to the west, the way she had come.

Wolfnose, trailing Silverhair’s footsteps, had fallen to her knees.

Her heart surging, Silverhair ran after her Matriarch.

Silverhair, driven by guilt, was first to reach Wolfnose.

The old Cow’s belly and chest were resting against the ground, her legs splayed, and her trunk was pooled before her. Shanks of winter fur were scattered around her. Her eyes were closed, and it seemed to Silverhair that Wolfnose was slowly subsiding, as if the blood and life were leaking out of her into the hard ground.

She reached out and ran her trunk over the old Cow’s face. The skin looked as rough as bark, but it was warm and soft to the touch, and she could hear the soft gurgle of Wolfnose’s breathing.

Wolfnose opened her eyes. They were sunk in pools of black, wrinkled skin. "Oh, little Silverhair," she said softly.

"Are you tired?"

"Oh, yes. And hungry, so hungry. Perhaps I’ll sleep now, and then feed a little more…"

She started to tip over.

Silverhair rushed to Wolfnose’s side. Wolfnose’s great weight settled against her flank, slack and lifeless, and Silverhair staggered, barely able to support her.

But now the others were here: Lop-ear, Owlheart, and Eggtusk. Silverhair saw that Owlheart had, with remarkable calm and foresight, carried a trunkful of water with her. She offered dribbles of it to Wolfnose, and Silverhair saw Wolfnose’s pink, cracked tongue uncurl and lap at the cool, clear liquid.

Wolfnose’s eyes flickered open once more. She raised a trunk, so heavy it looked as if it was stuffed with river mud, and she laid it over Owlheart’s scalp. "You’re a good daughter, Grassfoot…"

The Matriarch said, "I’ll be a better one when you’re on your feet again."

Wolfnose shuddered, and a deep, ominous gurgling sounded from her lungs. Silverhair listened in horror; it was as if something had broken inside Wolfnose.

Wolfnose closed her eyes, and her trunk fell away from Owlheart’s head.

Owlheart stepped back, staring at her mother in dismay.

When Eggtusk saw that Owlheart was giving up, he roared defiance. "By Kilukpuk’s piss-soaked hind leg, you’re not done yet, Cow!"

He ran around Wolfnose and pushed his head between her slack buttocks. Then he dug his heels into the ground and heaved. The massive body rocked. Eggtusk looked up and bellowed to Silverhair and Lop-ear. "Come on, you lazy calves. Don’t just stand there. Push!"

Lop-ear and Silverhair glanced at each other. Then they braced themselves and pushed at Wolfnose’s sides.

Even after the trials of the winter — during which she had shed more fat than was good for her — Wolfnose was a mature Cow, and very heavy. Silverhair could feel Wolfnose’s ribs grinding as they shoved the slack body upward.

But between them, they managed to lift her off the ground. Wolfnose’s legs straightened out, like cracking tree branches, and her feet settled on the ground.

"That’s it!" Eggtusk bellowed. "Hold her now!"

But there was no strength in those old legs. Silverhair staggered sideways as Wolfnose’s bulk slid against her body.

Eggtusk cried out, "No!"

It was too late. Wolfnose slumped to the ground, this time falling on her side.

Eggtusk began pushing at Wolfnose’s buttocks once more. "Come on! Help me, you dung-heaps! Help me…"

But Wolfnose could not stand again.

Eggtusk crashed to his knees before her. Wolfnose’s eyes, flickering open and closed, swiveled toward him. Eggtusk lifted Wolfnose’s limp trunk onto his tusks. He draped the trunk over his head and put his own trunk into her mouth.

A watching human would have been startled by the familiarity of his choking cries, and the heaving of his chest.

This was love, Silverhair thought, awed. A love of an intensity and depth and timelessness she had never imagined possible. She knew that she would be privileged if, during her life, she ever received or gave such devotion.

And she had never suspected it existed between Eggtusk and Wolfnose.

But Owlheart came to him now. "No more, Eggtusk." And Owlheart wrapped her trunk around his face.

Lop-ear was at Silverhair’s side.

"Oh, Lop-ear," Silverhair said, and her own vision blurred as fat, salty tears welled in her eyes. "If she hadn’t walked with me all that way to the Plain of Bones — if I hadn’t been so careless as to rush her back, to leave her behind so thoughtlessly — all I wanted was to get back, and—"

"Hush," he said. "She wanted to take you to the Plain."

"I could have said no."

"And treated her with disrespect? She wouldn’t have wanted that. It’s nobody’s fault. It is her time." And he twined his trunk in hers, and held her still.

Wolfnose lifted her trunk, shuddered, and slumped. Her breath sighed out of her in a long growl, like a final contact rumble.

Then she was still.

Eggtusk rocked over Wolfnose. He nudged her head with his. He placed his trunk in her mouth, and her trunk in his, and intertwined their trunks. He even walked around behind her and placed his forelegs on her back, as if he were trying to mount her. And he raised his trunk and trumpeted his distress to the empty lands.

Before the end of the day, Owlheart led all the Family to Wolfnose’s body for the Remembering. The sun was low now, and it painted the Earth with gold and fire. Eggtusk, his trunk drooping as he stood over the body, was a noble shadow in Silverhair’s eyes, the stiff hairs of his back catching the liquid light.

The calves both stared at the body. Little Sunfire’s trunk was raised in alarm.

Foxeye tapped at the calves with her trunk. "Watch now," she said, "and learn. This is how to die."

Silverhair found herself staring too. The loss she felt was enormous, as if a hole had been gouged out of the sky.

Owlheart stepped forward, and scraped at the bare ground with her tusks. Then she picked up a fingerful of earth and grass and dropped it on Wolfnose’s unresponding flank.

Silverhair reached down, ripped up some grass, and stepped forward to do the same.

Soon all the Family followed Owlheart’s lead, covering Wolfnose’s body with mud, earth, grass, and twigs. Eggtusk kicked and scraped at the soil, sending heaps of it over the carcass. Even the calves tried to help; little Sunfire looked comical as she tottered back and forth to the fallen body with a blade of grass or a scrap of dust.

As they worked, Silverhair felt a deeper calm settle on her soul. The Cycle said this was how the mammoths — and their Cousins, the Calves of Probos, the world over — had always honored and Remembered their dead. Now Silverhair felt the ancient truth and wisdom of the ceremony seep into her. It was a way to show their love for the spark of Wolfnose, as it floated across the river of darkness to the aurora, leaving the daylight diminished.

When they were done, the mammoths stood for a little longer over the body, and they swayed restlessly from side to side, the younger ones joining in without thinking.

Then Owlheart turned away, and quoted a final line from the Cycle: "She belongs to the wolves now."

She led the Family away. Eggtusk walked at her side, still desolate, his trunk dangling limp between his legs.

Silverhair looked back once. The mound of Wolfnose’s body looked like the yedoma within which she had seen the emerging, ancient corpse.

Suddenly she saw this scene as it might be Great-Years from now. She saw another mammoth, young and foolish as herself, come lumbering across the plain — to discover Wolfnose’s body, stripped by time of flesh and name, emerging once more from the icy ground. It was like a vision of her own life, she thought — as intense as sunlight, as brief as the glimmer of hoarfrost.

Silverhair sought out Lop-ear. She stroked his musth gland with her trunk, but he shrank back, oddly.

She turned her face toward the south.

He hesitated. "Now?"

"Yes. Now."

"Shouldn’t we tell the others?"

"What for? They would only stop us."

She began to walk. Resolutely she did not look back.

After a few heartbeats she heard his heavy footfalls as he lumbered after her. She hid her grim satisfaction.

10 The Time of Musth and Estrus

Once more, their walk took them many days.

They passed through a valley flanked by eroded mountains.

It was a valley of water and light. Gently undulating meadows fell away to a central river, which was slow-moving, wide and deep, meandering through a sandy floodplain. To the west the river’s numerous tangled channels shimmered in the low sun. Above them the valley sides rose up to become dramatic peaks, the white light blazing off the ice that crowned them. The basalt walls, their sheer rock faces shattered by centuries of frost, had eroded into narrow pinnacles that stood against the sky. Every ledge was coated with orange lichen, nourished by the droppings of geese, whose cackling calls echoed down to the mammoths.

There was little snow left on the valley floor now, and trickles of water, cool and fresh, ran from the remaining snowbanks. But the ground was still bare, shaded rust-red, ochre, and russet; of the lush vegetation that would soon cover the valley there was still little sign.

The first bumblebees and butterflies were appearing in the air.

Silverhair suffered her first mosquito bite of the year. She snapped at the troublesome insect with her tail, but she knew that even if she reached it her effort was futile; millions of its relatives would soon be emerging from the silt at the bottom of ice-covered ponds, where they had spent the winter as larvae.

The beauty of the valley, the return of life, the calmness of their situation: all of this, as the long day wore on, was having a profound effect on Silverhair. She could feel the flesh and fat gathering comfortably on her bones, her winter coat falling away. Her body responded deeply to the season, surging with oceanic warmth.

Somewhere within her, seeds were ripening, as if in response to the death she had witnessed. It was estrus; she was thrilled.

She knew that Lop-ear, too, was ready. As he walked he kept his head held high, his trunk curled. He seethed with irritability and urgency. He dribbled musth from the temporal gland at the top of his head, and he left a trail of strong-smelling urine wherever he walked. He was even making a deep rumble, a sound she had heard before only from much older Bulls. But he seemed consumed by his own inner turmoil and ill-defined longing, and when he spoke to her it was only of their greater concerns: the strange encounter with the Lost that may await them in the south, the possibility of bringing the Family to these richer lands, the disturbing, nagging fact that they were finding no recent signs of other mammoth Families anywhere.

He spoke of everything but them.

He was in musth.

Yet he couldn’t see it himself.

Patiently she kept her counsel and waited for him to understand.

After many days of walking they came to a ridge that overlooked the southern coast of the Island.

The world to the south lay displayed before Silverhair, divided into broad stripes, dazzling in her poor vision. Below the blue-gray line of sky was the misty bulk of the Mainland, still obscured by storm clouds. Then came the Channel, a blue-black strip of water bounded by cracked, gleaming pack ice. Below the ridge they were standing on was the shore, a shingle beach fringed by dirty landfast ice.

The all-pervasive sound rising from the coast was of broken pack ice lifting on and off the shore rocks. Farther away in the open Channel, icebergs drifted: a procession of them, mysterious and awe-inspiring, like clouds brought down to Earth. As the light shifted their contours would suddenly glow iridescent blue. Silverhair’s heart was lifted by the stately beauty and strangeness of the bergs; they were the mammoths of the sea, she thought, effortlessly dominating their surroundings, giant and dignified.

The wind was strong, and its cold penetrated Silverhair’s newly exposed underwool. She huddled close to Lop-ear, the wind whipping across her eyes. "There are times when I wish I could keep my winter fur all year around—"

"Hush," he said, staring. "Look…"

And there, resting on the shore, was something she had never seen before.

At first she thought it was the splayed-open body of some giant animal. It had one end coming to a point, the other rounded. Its long, sleek flanks were encrusted with sea plants and streaks of brownish discoloration. And those flanks were torn open, she saw, perhaps ripped by the sea ice. The top of the monster was like a complex, shattered forest, with posts like tree trunks sprouting from each other at all angles.

The thing was huge: so big, she could have walked around inside its belly.

Lop-ear was silent, staring at the hulk, his trunk raised in the air.

She said, "Do you think it’s dead?"

"I don’t think it was ever alive," he said bluntly.

"What, then?"

"I think you must ask the Lost that," he said. "For something as ugly and unfitting as that could only come from their tortured souls. Perhaps it brought them here."

"But it’s damaged. Perhaps that’s why they can’t leave." Suddenly she raised her trunk. "I smell something."

"Yes." He turned, scanning along the coast.

It was smoke.

They saw a small fire, confined to a spot on the beach below, close to the foot of the ridge. There was, Silverhair saw, a shape above it: like a tree, bent all the way over to touch the ground. Objects dangled from the tree-thing over the fire.

Now she could smell something else, carried on the wind. The stink of burning flesh.

And that bent-over object wasn’t a tree, she realized with mounting horror.

It was a tusk.

"By Kilukpuk’s mercy…"

Lop-ear was becoming agitated. "That smell of flesh—" His voice was tight and indistinct. "It is all I can do to keep from fleeing."

"Lop-ear, listen to me." She told him about the body in the yedoma. The way the tusks of the ancient Bull had been hacked away. "Well, now I know what became of those tusks," she said grimly.

They saw movement on the beach. Two creatures — something like wolves, perhaps, but walking upright, on their hind legs — approached the fire. One of them reached out with its foreleg and prodded at the dangling scraps of flesh. It was using its paw as Silverhair would her trunk, to manipulate the burned flesh.

To rip a piece off it.

To lift it to its mouth, and bite into it. Another of the creatures grabbed at the meat, and they fought over it, clumsily.

She felt bile rise in her throat.

Without speaking, the two mammoths turned and fled from the ridge, toward the sanctity and calmness of the north.

The sun rolled along the mist-shrouded horizon. The Moon rose, a gaunt old crescent, clearly visible in the mysterious, subdued sky of the summer midnight.

The two mammoths huddled together.

"They were Lost," Silverhair whispered. "Weren’t they? How can I have ever imagined I could deal with them?" Every instinct, every nerve shrieked for her to fly from this place, from the Lost and their scentless, unnatural activities, their slavering like wolves over burned scraps of flesh.

But Lop-ear didn’t reply.

By the wan light she could see him, apparently unconsciously, reaching into his mouth with his trunk, and tasting her musk. Tasting it for estrus.

Suddenly it was not a time for talking. And her fear, in this strange, remote place, her residual sadness at Wolfnose’s death — all of it transmuted into a powerful longing.

She rumbled, deeper and lower than ever in her life. Then her tone rose gently, becoming stronger and higher in pitch, then sinking down to silence at the end.

This was the Song of Estrus. The call would carry many days’ walk from here, and was a signal to any Bull who heard it that she was a Cow ready to mate.

But there was only one Bull she wanted to hear.

She pulled away from Lop-ear, her head held high. Then she whirled around, backing into him.

She ran across the shadow-strewn plain, the frosty grass crushing beneath her feet, her breath steaming before her face. She could feel him pursuing her, his own giant footfalls like an echo of her own — but much more than an echo, for as he neared her it was as if the other half of her own soul was joining her.

She let him catch her.

He laid his trunk over her shoulder, pulling her back. Still singing, she turned to face him. He was silhouetted in the low light, his body, newly fattened by the spring grass, broad and strong. She stepped from side to side, slowly, and every step she took was mirrored by him. She could see the musth liquid that oozed thickly from the gland on top of his head.

Then, facing her, he gently laid his trunk on her head and body. She twined her trunk around his, and their mouths met.

Thus, since the time of Probos, have the mammoths and their Cousins expressed their readiness to mate.

Now, at last, she let him move behind her.

He placed his tusks and forelegs on her back, and raised himself up. She knew he was taking most of his weight on his own back legs, but even so his mass was solid, heavy, warm on her back.

And she felt him enter her.

When it was over, and his warmth was captured inside her, she entered the mating pandemonium. She rumbled, screamed, trumpeted, defecated, secreted from her musth gland, whirled in a dance that made the ground shake. If other Cows had been present they would have joined in Silverhair’s pandemonium, celebrating the deep ancient joy of the mating. It was as if all her experiences — of death and birth and renewed life, of the immense mammoth history that lay behind her — channeled through this moment. The blood surged in her, remaking her like a larva in its cocoon, and she knew she had never been so alive, so joyous, so tied to the Earth.

This was her summer day; this was her moment. She trumpeted her defiant joy that she was alive.

And at that moment of greatest joy she saw, climbing high in the midnight sky, a splinter of red light: it was the Sky Steppe, where one day her calves would roam free and without fear.

Afterward they stood together, their hides matted, their heads touching.

"You know I will stay with you," he said. "I will guard you from the other Bulls until the end of your estrus."

That was the way, she knew. Mammoths are not romantic, but Lop-ear would protect his mate until the end of her estrus period, when — she hoped — conception would occur, deep within her. Still, she could not help but mock him. "What other Bulls?"

"I will defend you even from the great Bull Croptail!" He raised his head, so his tusks flashed in the flat sunlight, and he danced before her as if he were about to go into battle with the Earth itself -

There was a sharp sound behind them. A cracking twig.

Mammoths’ necks are short, and they cannot easily turn their heads. So Silverhair and Lop-ear lumbered about, to face behind them.

There was something here, just paces away. Like a narrow, branchless tree, casting a long midnight shadow. Silverhair could smell nothing of it.

It was a Lost.

Now it moved. With raised forelegs it lifted some kind of stick and pointed it at them.

Lop-ear said, "We must not show it fear. And we must not frighten it. It is only a Hotblood, like us, after all." He hesitated. "Perhaps it is injured. Perhaps it is hungry. That might be the meaning of the stick it carries—"

Dread filled her. "Lop-ear, don’t!"

"It’s what we have come for, Silverhair."

Lop-ear lowered his trunk and stepped forward. From his forehead resounded the contact rumble.

The apparition took a step back, raised its stick higher. And the stick cracked.

There was a burst of light, a sound like thunder.

It was over in an instant. But that crack of light was enough to show her the strange, hairless head of the creature before her. It was the one she had met on the ice floe, the one she had called Skin-of-Ice.

Lop-ear trumpeted in pain. She turned.

His trunk was raised, his eyes closed. Some dark liquid was gushing over the fur on his chest. It was blood, and it steamed in the cold air.

His hind legs gave way, so that he squatted like a defecating wolf, and his trunk dropped.

She raced to his side. "What has happened to you?"

But he could not speak. Now blood spewed from his open mouth, dangling in loops from his tongue.

She ran behind him and began to nudge at his back with her head. "Get up! Get up!"

He tried; she could feel him padding at the ground with his hind legs, and he lifted his head.

But there was another thunder-crack.

Immediately all four of Lop-ear’s legs gave way and he slumped to the ground.

Silverhair staggered back, appalled, terrified. She could not understand what was happening. But she still had Lop-ear’s warmth inside her, and she was drawn back to him.

There was a new sound: a thin, high whoop, almost like a calf’s immature trumpeting.

It was the creature called Skin-of-Ice, she saw. It — he — was holding his thunder-stick in the air above his head, and was yelping out his triumph. And he was standing on the flank of fallen Lop-ear.

Silverhair felt rage gather in her, deep and uncontrollable. She raised herself up on her hind legs, head high, and trumpeted as loudly as she could.

Skin-of-Ice raised the thunder-stick, and it cracked, again and again. Stinging, invisible insects flew around her.

Her mind crumbled into panic, and she fled.

Later she would remember little of what followed. Only flashes, like the light from Skin-of-Ice’s thunder-stick.

Sometimes she was alone, fleeing across a shadowed plain.

Sometimes the Lost pursued her, thin legs working, mysterious thunder-sticks barking.

Sometimes Lop-ear was there. She spoke to him of the future, the plans they had made. She threatened him with the punishment he would receive from Eggtusk if he didn’t get up and come with her back to the Family right now.

Sometimes she saw a caterpillar, motionless on a willow branch. Then a small opening in its moist hide revealed a small set of jaws: it was a larva of some still smaller insect, eating its host alive from within.

Sometimes there was only the stink of Lop-ear’s cooling blood in her nostrils.

And always, always, the image of Skin-of-Ice: how the murderous Lost would look when she raised his soft, wormlike body on the tip of her tusks.

11 The Rhythms and the Lost

The sun wheeled above the horizon, never setting; the endless daylight was pitiless, for Silverhair sought only darkness.

"Silverhair. Silverhair…"

The words were like contact rumbles, swimming through the earth. And when she opened her eyes, unrolled her trunk so she could smell again, she could see mammoths before her: Eggtusk, Snagtooth.

With a part of her mind, she knew that she had tried to find her way north, back to the Family, where they remained on the bleak plain of volcanic rock in the lee of the great Mountains at the End of the World. She recalled the walk only in fragmented glimpses: the clumps of grass she had once grazed with Lop-ear, an old hill whose eroded contours had reminded her of Lop-ear’s slumped carcass.

She tried to focus on Eggtusk’s words. "…You must listen to what I’m saying. I understand how you feel. We all do. But death is waiting for each of us. The great turning of life and death…"

Then the mammoths would float away from her again, like woolly clouds.

"It was the Lost," Silverhair mumbled. "The Lost and his thunder-stick…"

But they wouldn’t listen. "Even the Lost are part of the Cycle," said Eggtusk. "Though they don’t know it. We are not like the Lost. Give yourself up to the Cycle, little Silverhair. Close your eyes…"

Silverhair felt the rocks under her feet, as if her legs were burrowing like tree trunks to anchor her to the ground that sustained them all. And slowly, the Cycle’s calm teaching reached her.

She remembered how Wolfnose had shown her the Plain of Bones. She felt the great turning rhythms of the Earth. Her mind opened up, as if she held the topology of the whole Earth in her mind, and she saw far beyond the now, to the farthest reaches of past and future.

Her own long life, in the midst of all that epic sweep, was no more than the brief spring blossoming of a tundra flower. And Lop-ear, the same. Yet they mattered: just as each flower contributed to the waves of white and gold that swept across the tundra, so she and Lop-ear were inextricable parts of the greater whole.

And the most important thing in the whole world was Lop-ear’s warmth in her belly: the possibility, still, that she might conceive his calf.

"…To the Lost there is only the here and now," Eggtusk was saying. "They are a young species — a couple of Great-Years, no more — while we are ancient. They have no Cycle. They are just sparks of mind, isolated and frightened and soon extinguished. They never hear the greater rhythms, and never find their place in the world. That is why they disturb so much of what they touch. They are trying to forget what they are. They are dancing in the face of oblivion…"

Silverhair raised her head. She could feel the salt tears brim in her eyes. "But it was my fault."

"Lop-ear was much smarter than you are," Eggtusk said gently. "You couldn’t have made him do anything he didn’t want to do. Even I couldn’t, and I fought him to prove the point — much as I regret that now, by Kilukpuk’s cracked and festering nipples!"

"But I didn’t even perform the Remembering for him."

"No. Well, we can’t very well leave him like that." Eggtusk laid his trunk on her head, and scratched behind her ear. "Do you know where you are?"

She looked around at the featureless tundra. "No," she admitted.

"You’re far from the Family. Far from anywhere. You’ve been wandering, Silverhair. Wandering, but not eating, by the look of you. When you didn’t return, Owlheart sent me to find you. It wasn’t easy."

"I — thank you, Eggtusk."

"Never mind that. You must eat and sleep, young Silverhair. For we have a walk ahead of us. Back to the south."

For the first time since she had lost Lop-ear, her spirits lifted. "To Lop-ear."

"Yes."

"I’m surprised Owlheart let you go."

"I had to promise we’d come back in one piece. Oh, and…"

"Yes?"

He bent so only she could hear. "I had to take Snagtooth with me."

The three mammoths set off at midnight. There was a layer of cloud above, but the pale orange sun hung above the horizon in a clear strip of sky.

Heading south, the mammoths walked slowly, frequently pausing to pass dung and to feed. Despite Silverhair’s urgent wish to return to Lop-ear’s bones, Eggtusk insisted they eat their fill. They were coming into the richest season of the year, the time when the mammoths must lay in their reserves of fat, without which they cannot survive the next winter. As Eggtusk said to Silverhair, "I’d lick out the crusty lichen from between Kilukpuk’s pus-ridden toes before I’d let you starve yourself to death. What use would that be to Lop-ear, or any of us? Eh?"

So under his coaxing and scolding, she cropped the grass and flowers, and the fresh buds of the dwarf willows whose branches barely grew high enough to cover her toes.

Snagtooth continued to be a problem. A growing one, in fact.

Though the stump of her smashed tusk had healed over — a great blood-red scar had formed over the gaping socket — Silverhair saw her banging her head against rock outcrops, as if trying to shake loose the pain of the tusk root. Snagtooth had a great deal of difficulty sleeping; even the back-and-forth movement of her jaw when eating seemed to hurt her.

And Snagtooth was not one to suffer in silence.

She complained, snapped, and refused to do her fair share of digging, even expecting Silverhair and Eggtusk to find her rich clumps of grass and rip them out and carry them to her ever-open mouth. Silverhair could see why Owlheart had taken the opportunity to send her away from Foxeye and the calves for a while.

"I put up with it because I can see she is suffering," grumbled Eggtusk to Silverhair. "Perhaps she has an abscess."

If so, it was bad news; there was no way to treat such an agonizing collection of poison in the mouth, and Snagtooth would simply have to hope it cleared up of its own accord. If it didn’t, it could kill her.

Poor Eggtusk, meanwhile, was having his own trouble with warble flies. Silverhair could see maggots dropping out of red-rimmed craters in his skin, heading for the ground to pupate. Unnoticed, the flies must have laid eggs in his fur last summer. The eggs quickly hatched and the maggots burrowed into Eggtusk’s tissue, migrating around the body before coming to rest near the skin of his back. Here they would have continued to grow through the winter and spring in a cavity filled with pus and blood, breathing through an airhole gnawed in the skin. The eruption of the full-grown larvae was a cause of intense irritation to Eggtusk, who, despite his colorful cursing, was helpless to do anything about it.

Meanwhile the season bloomed around them. As the height of the brief summer approached, the tundra exploded with activity, as plants, animals, birds, and insects sought to complete the crucial stages of their annual lives in this brief respite from the grip of winter. The flowers of the tundra opened: white mountain avens, yellow poppies, white heather, crimson, yellow, red, white and purple saxifrage, lousewort, pink primulas, even the orange marigolds. All these flowers had started their cycle of growth as soon as the snow melted. And birds were everywhere. Snow buntings caught crane flies to feed their chicks. Skuas hunted the fledglings of turnstones and sanderlings. As she passed a cliff, Silverhair saw barnacle geese fledglings taking their first tentative steps from their parents’ nests far above. That meant jumping. The chicks’ stubby wings flapped uselessly, and they fell to the bottom of the cliff. Many chicks died from the fall, and others, trapped in scree, were snapped up by the eager jaws of Arctic foxes.

The silence of the winter was long gone. The air was filled with birdsong — larks and plovers, the haunting calls of loons, irritable jaeger cries — and the buzz of insects, the bark and howls of foxes and wolves. All of it was laced with an occasional agonized scream as some predator attained its goal.

It was a furious chorus of mating and death.

Through the flat, teeming landscape, Silverhair and the others walked stolidly on. When they found a rock face where they could shelter, they slept, as the summer sun scraped its way around the horizon, and the sky faded again to its deepest midnight blue.

Once, Silverhair woke to find herself staring at a snowy owl, a mother perched on her nest with her brood of peeping chicks.

The mother was a white bundle of feathers, standing out clearly against gray shale. Her mate coursed over the rough vegetation, searching for lemmings to bring to his nest. The owl chicks had been born at intervals of three or four days, and the oldest chick was substantially bigger than the smallest. Silverhair knew that if some disaster occurred and the owls’ food supply was threatened, the largest owlet would eat its smallest sibling — and then the next smallest — then the next.

It was brutal. But it was the owls’ way of assuring that at least one youngster would survive the harshest times. The little tableau of beauty and cruelty seemed to summarize the world, this cruel summer, to Silverhair.

The mother owl beat her broad wings slowly, and stared at Silverhair with great sulfur-yellow eyes.

As the endless day wore toward its golden noon, they drew nearer the place where Lop-ear had fallen.

They reached the low ridge near the south coast. Silverhair remembered this place. It was here she had shared Lop-ear’s warmth — here they had encountered the Lost with his thunder-stick — and here she had last seen the body of Lop-ear, like a squat, fur-coated boulder.

The body was gone.

But there were Lost here.

Eggtusk led the two Cows behind an eroded outcrop of rock. The mammoths huddled together uncertainly. Eggtusk raised his trunk cautiously over the rock; the hair of his trunk streamed behind his head.

The mammoths had not been seen. The Lost didn’t seem very observant; none of them was maintaining a watch for wolves — or mammoths, come to that.

The Lost were sitting in a loose circle on the ground. There were six of them. Three of them carried thunder-sticks, like the one that Skin-of-Ice had used against Lop-ear. And one of them — Silverhair could never forget that smooth, unnatural, hairless head — was Skin-of-Ice himself.

The Lost surrounded the carcass of what looked like a fox. They were drinking a clear fluid from flasks, which they passed from paw to paw. They sat unnaturally upright, with strange sets of loose skin over their bodies, and only a few patches of fur on their scalps and faces.

They were like wolves, she thought. Predators, working at a downed prey. But then, they were not like wolves, for they did not work at the fox’s body with their teeth and claws as wolves will. Rather, they had ice-claws — as she called them, for they were made of something that gleamed like sea ice — ice-claws that they held in their paws, and used to cut into the fox’s passive body.

The Lost were grimy, listless, steeped in misery. They seemed to bicker and snap at each other, sometimes descending into clumsy fights.

All but Skin-of-Ice. He sat apart from the rest, thunder-stick on his lap, watching the others coldly.

Silverhair felt a cold, hard determination gather inside her. All her naive dreams of finding some opportunity to work with the Lost had evaporated with the blows inflicted on Lop-ear. These are my enemy, she thought. I will not live in a world that contains them, and I will oppose them to my dying breath.

But to do that, I must understand them.

"We’re in no danger here," said Eggtusk in a soft rumble, inaudible to the Lost. "I’m sure they can’t see us. According to the Cycle, the Lost have poor hearing and smell, and we’re downwind of them. And besides, three grown mammoths against six — or sixty — of those skinny creatures should be no match."

Silverhair growled. "They have thunder-sticks."

"Those spindly things? What harm can they do us?"

Silverhair knew it was difficult for him to imagine, for sticks that spat fire and agony on command had no place in a mammoth’s map of the world. "Eggtusk, a thunder-stick killed Lop-ear. Skin-of-Ice didn’t even have to come close to us to do it."

"Then what should we do?"

"It’s obvious," complained Snagtooth loudly. "We must creep away from this place of blood and Lost, and—"

Eggtusk slapped his trunk over her head. "Quiet, you fool."

Now, to Silverhair’s bewilderment, one of the Lost — a fat brute — shucked off layers of his loose outer skin from his body. His hairless chest and fore-limbs were pink and gleaming with sweat. He swung his ice-claws down through the air, hauling them with both paws. He cracked the fox’s strong leg bones, tore through its skin, cut tendons, prized open ribs, and ripped open the organs that had nestled inside the fox’s body.

As he worked, the Lost made a noise like the caw of a gull. Almost joyous.

When he was done, this savage one opened the fox’s mouth and reached inside. With a fast slash of his ice-claw he severed the fox’s tongue. Then he lifted the limp, fleshy thing above his head, cawing and rubbing his big belly, as if it was the finest delicacy.

"They are like worms," Eggtusk whispered beside Silverhair. "They gnaw on the meat of the dead." Silverhair could hear the anger and disgust in his voice. "Especially that fat one."

"Gull-Caw," Silverhair said.

"What?"

"We will call him Gull-Caw."

Eggtusk was silent for a few heartbeats. Then he said, "We must not hate them. They are Hotbloods, like us. And they have their place in the Cycle, whatever they do. After all, it is not pleasant to watch a pack of wolves work at a seal’s carcass."

Silverhair said, "Wolves take what they need. Even the worms do no more than that. There is none of this joy in death and the tearing apart of the body. These Lost are not like us, Eggtusk."

He looked at her. "It was you," he reminded her, "who wanted to seek out the Lost. Get help from them."

"I was wrong," she said tightly. "I never imagined how wrong."

Snagtooth, on Silverhair’s other flank, was staring, fascinated. "Look at the way they work together."

"You sound as if you admire them," Eggtusk snapped.

Snagtooth grunted. "They are small and weak and isolated on this Island, but they are not slowly dying, as we are. They are not like us. Perhaps they are better."

Silverhair, shocked more deeply by Snagtooth than she had thought possible, watched as the Lost completed their grisly butchering.

And she wondered what had become of Lop-ear. Was it possible his helpless body had received the same fate as the fox?

There was a crack, like thunder.

All three mammoths raised their trunks and trumpeted.

Eggtusk twisted his head and stared at his shoulder. "By Kilukpuk’s oozing scabs…" Blood seeped out of a small puncture in his hide, and spread over his wiry hair.

But Silverhair scarcely noticed. For, standing only a few strides downwind of them, were two of the Lost: Skin-of-Ice and Gull-Caw. They were both holding thunder-sticks.

And they smelled of mammoth: for they had smeared themselves in mammoth dung, the rich, dark stuff clinging to their loose outer skin and their bare faces. That was how they had crept up unnoticed.

Even at this moment of peril Silverhair felt chilled at the cunning of the Lost.

Eggtusk reared on his hind legs, raised his trunk, and trumpeted. "So you’d punch a hole in me, eh?" he roared. "By Kilukpuk’s quivering dugs, we’ll see about that." The great Bull’s forefeet crashed back to the earth, and the ground shook as he lowered his head and charged.

The thunder-sticks wavered. Faced by a trumpeting, hurtling mountain of muscle, flesh, and tusks, the two Lost ran, scampering across the flower-strewn plain like two Arctic hares.

Suddenly, to Silverhair, they did not seem a threat at all. But, she reminded herself, they still carried their thunder-sticks.

With Snagtooth, she ran after Eggtusk.

Skin-of-Ice fell, heavily, and cried out. When he got to his feet again he was clutching his foreleg.

Gull-Caw came back to him. The two Lost stood side by side and raised their sticks.

More thunder-cracks.

Silverhair felt something fly past her ear, a hot scorch. And another crack, and another: a series of rippling explosions like the splintering of a falling tree, sharp sounds that rolled away across the plain.

Eggtusk grunted and staggered. Silverhair saw a new splash of blood on his fleshy thigh. "Get behind me," Eggtusk ordered.

"But—"

"Do as he says," snapped Snagtooth. Her eyes were wide, her smashed tusk dribbling fresh pulp.

Silverhair tucked herself, with Snagtooth, behind Eggtusk’s mighty buttocks.

And now Eggtusk began to walk toward the Lost, his pace measured and deliberate. "So you think you can kill me, do you, little maggots? We’ll see about that. Do you know what I’m going to do with you? I’m going to pick you up with my trunk and drown you in the pus that oozes from Kilukpuk’s suppurating mouth-ulcers. And then—"

But still the thunder-sticks barked, and the strange, invisible, deadly insects slammed into Eggtusk’s giant body. One of them tore away a piece of his shoulder, and Silverhair’s face was splashed by a horrific spray of hair, skin, and pulped flesh.

With each impact Eggtusk staggered. But he did not fall, and he kept the Lost washed in a stream of obscene threats.

Gull-Caw was agitated. The fat one’s thunder-stick no longer barked; he scrabbled at it, frightened, frustrated.

When Skin-of-Ice saw this, he turned and ran.

Gull-Caw roared out his anger at this betrayal. Then, seeing Eggtusk remorselessly approaching, he yowled like a fox cub. He dropped his useless thunder-stick and turned to run, but he stumbled and fell on the ground.

And now Eggtusk was over him.

The great Bull reared up, raising his huge tree-trunk legs high in the air. His deformed tusk glistened, dripping with his own blood; he raised his trunk and trumpeted so loud his voice echoed off the icebergs of the distant ocean.

Silverhair reared back, terrified of him herself.

Eggtusk reached down and wrapped his trunk around the wriggling Lost. He lifted the fat body effortlessly. Eggtusk squeezed, the immense muscles of his trunk wrapped tightly around the Lost’s greasy torso. Silverhair could see the Lost’s eyes bulge, his short pink tongue protrude.

Then Eggtusk threw Gull-Caw into the air. The Lost briefly flew, yelling, his fat limbs writhing, his smooth, ugly skin smeared with Eggtusk’s blood.

The Lost landed heavily on his belly; Silverhair heard the crack of bone.

But still Gull-Caw tried to raise himself, to crawl away, to reach with a bloodied forelimb for his thunder-stick.

Eggtusk leaned forward and knelt on the Lost’s back.

The Lost screamed as that great weight bore down. Silverhair heard the crunch of ribs and vertebrae. The Lost’s scream turned to a liquid gurgle, and blood gushed from his mouth.

Then Eggtusk drove a tusk through his neck, pinning him to the ground.

The Lost twitched once, twice more. Then he was still.

12 The Kettle Hole

Eggtusk pulled his tusk from the body, shaking it to free it of the limp remnant flesh of the Lost. He rooted for the thunder-stick. He curled his trunk-fingers around the black, spindly thing, and lifted it high in the air. "It feels cold."

"It’s a thing of death," said Silverhair.

Eggtusk raised the thunder-stick and smashed it against a rock outcrop until it was bent in two, and small parts tumbled from it. He hurled the wreckage far into the grass. Then he wiped his tusk against the outcrop, to free it of blood and scraps of flesh.

"Now come," said Eggtusk. "We will honor the body of this Lost I have killed." He bent down, wincing slightly, and ripped yellow tundra flowers from the ground. He lumbered over to the corpse and sprinkled the flowers there. He was a fearsome sight with his face masked in blood, one of his eyes concealed by blood-matted hair, and thunder-stick punctures over his legs and chest. Even his trunk had a bite taken out of it.

After a few heartbeats Silverhair and Snagtooth joined in. Soon the carcass of the Lost was buried in grass and flowers. They stood over the corpse as the sun wheeled through the icy sky, Remembering the fat, ugly creature as best they could.

"Let that be an end of it," growled Eggtusk. "Once I destroyed a wolf that had come stalking the Family. We never saw that pack again. The Cycle teaches that mammoths should kill only when we have to. We have frightened the Lost so badly they’ll respect us, and never come near us again…"

Silverhair wanted to believe that was true. But she was unsure. She had watched the way the Lost had carved slices out of that fox. There had been a joy in their behavior. An evil triumph.

She couldn’t help but feel that a world free of Skin-of-Ice would be a better place. And, she feared, the killing wasn’t done yet.

Silverhair tried to treat Eggtusk’s many wounds. They found a stream, and she bathed him with trunkfuls of cold, clear water, washing away the matted blood and dirt in his fur, and she plastered mud over the worst wounds in his flesh. But the pain of the wounds was very great. And she could see that some of the wounds were becoming infected, despite her best ministrations with mud and leaves.

But Eggtusk was impatient to move on. "I don’t think that other worm will pose any threat to us. He can’t have got far. Come on. We’ll follow him."

Silverhair was startled. "We aren’t wolves to track prey, Eggtusk."

"And he still has the thunder-stick," Snagtooth said, her voice without expression.

"That Lost was wounded," Eggtusk said firmly. "If he’s died in some hole, we’ll honor him. Maybe, if he’s alive, we’ll be able to help him."

That seemed extremely unlikely to Silverhair. Besides, there were the other Lost to think about; what had become of them while the mammoths had chased Gull-Caw? Perhaps Eggtusk’s thinking was muddled by pain…

But there was no more time to debate the issue, for already Eggtusk was limping off to the south, the direction Skin-of-Ice had fled.

As browsing grass-eaters, mammoths are poor trackers. As the Cycle says, It doesn’t take the skill of a wolf to sneak up on a blade of grass. Nevertheless, it was surprisingly easy to track the progress the Lost, Skin-of-Ice, had made toward the southern coast.

Eggtusk charged ahead over the plain. "Here is grass he crushed," he said. "Here is a splash of his blood, on this rock. You see? And here is a dribble of urine… I can still smell it…"

Silverhair and Snagtooth followed, more uncertainly. All Silverhair could smell right now was the stink of Eggtusk’s decaying wounds.

"Of course," said Snagtooth softly to Silverhair, "it may be that this Lost wants us to find him."

Silverhair was startled. "But Eggtusk nearly killed him."

"I know," said Snagtooth. "But who knows what goes on in the mind of a Lost?"

Silverhair kept her counsel. Perhaps Eggtusk was launching himself into this quest to take his mind off his wounds. Maybe, when Eggtusk’s injuries had healed sufficiently for him to start thinking more clearly, she could persuade him to return to the Family, and then…

Suddenly Eggtusk trumpeted in triumph.

Silverhair slowed and stood beside him.

The Lost, Skin-of-Ice, was lying on the ground, face down, still some distance away. He wasn’t moving. There was no sign of his thunder-stick. The ground between the Lost and the mammoths was hummocky, broken, tufted with grass and sprinkled with residual ice scraps.

There was no sound, no scent, and she could see the Lost only indistinctly.

The gray cap of hair on Silverhair’s scalp prickled. "I wish I knew where his thunder-stick is," she murmured. "We ought to be careful…"

But Eggtusk was already lumbering ahead, his trunk raised in greeting to the Lost he intended to help.

He approached a patch of ground strewn with grass and broken bushes — even a few broken spruce branches. Silverhair stared at the patch of ground, wondering what could have made such a mess. Wolves? Birds? But there was no scent; no scent at all.

Suddenly she was alarmed. "Eggtusk! Take care—"

Eggtusk, his massive feet pounding at the ground, reached the debris-strewn patch.

With a cracking of twigs and branches, the ground opened up beneath his forefeet. He fell into a pit, amid an explosion of shattered branches and clumps of grass.

Silverhair charged forward. "Eggtusk! Eggtusk!" She could see the dome of his head and the hair of his broad back protruding from the hole. His trumpeting turned to a roar of anguish.

But Snagtooth was tugging at her tail. "Keep back! It’s a kettle hole…"

Silverhair, despite her impatience and fear, knew that Snagtooth was right. It would help no one if she got trapped herself.

She slowed, and took measured steps toward the hole in the ground, testing each footfall. Soon she was walking over the leaves and twigs and grass that had concealed the hole.

Eggtusk was embedded in the hole, a few blades of muddy grass scattered over his back. His trunk lay on the ground, and his great tusks, stained by mud and blood, protruded uselessly before him. He was out of her reach.

As she approached he tried to lift and turn his head. He said, "Don’t come any closer."

"Are you stuck?"

Eggtusk growled wearily. "By Kilukpuk’s snot-crusted nostril hair, what a stupid question. Of course I’m stuck. My legs are wedged in under me. I can’t even move them."

A kettle hole was a hazard of their warming times, Silverhair knew. It formed when a large block of ice was left by a retreating glacier. Sediment would settle over the ice, burying it. Then, as the ice melted, the resulting water would seep away and the sinking sediment, turning to mud, would subside to form a sticky hole in the ground.

Deadly, for any mammoth foolish enough to stray into one. But -

"Eggtusk, kettle holes are easy to spot. Only a calf would blunder into one."

"Thank you for that," he snorted. "Don’t you see? It’s your friend, Skin-of-Ice. Snagtooth was right. That wretched worm did want us to follow him. While we honored his fallen comrade, Skin-of-Ice was preparing this trap for us. And I was fool enough to charge right in…"

He subsided. His breath was a rattle, and he seemed to be weakening. He tried to raise his trunk, then let it flop back feebly to the ground.

Silverhair tried to step forward, but her feet sank deeper into the mud that surrounded the hole. She felt an agitated anger; she had seen too much death this blighted summer. "You aren’t going to do this to me," she cried. "Not yet, you old fool!"

She scrambled back to firm ground and forced herself to think.

She threw branches and twigs over the ground and walked forward on them. Spreading the load helped her keep out of the mud and get a little closer, but in the end her weight was just too great, and each time she got near to Eggtusk she was forced to back up.

Well, if she couldn’t reach Eggtusk, maybe he could get himself out.

She gathered branches and threw them toward Eggtusk’s head. If he could pull them into the pit he might be able to use them to get a grip with his feet.

But even when he managed to grab the branches he seemed too weak, too firmly stuck, to do anything with them.

Despairing, she looked for Snagtooth, seeking help. But Snagtooth was gone: there was no trace of her musk on the wind, no echo of her voice.

But, Silverhair admitted, it wasn’t important. Snagtooth’s mind was almost as impenetrable as a Lost’s, and since her injury that had only worsened. She would be no help anyhow.

And Skin-of-Ice, she noticed, was gone too. Perhaps he had crawled away to die at last. Somehow she suspected it would not be so easy. But she had no time, no energy for him now.

Silverhair brought Eggtusk food, grass and twigs and herbs. But the wind scattered the grass, and Eggtusk’s trunk fingers seemed to be losing their coordination and were having increasing difficulty in grasping the food.

But she kept trying, over and over.

"Do not fret, little Silverhair," he said to her, his voice a bubbling growl. "You’ve done your best."

"Eggtusk…"

He reached out with his trunk as if to stroke her head, but it was, of course, much too far to reach. "Give it up. That Lost has trapped me and killed me. I am already dead."

"No!"

"You have to go back to the Family, tell them what has happened. Owlheart will know what to do… Tell her I’m sorry I didn’t keep my promise to bring you home. And you must tell Croptail that he is the dominant Bull now. Tell him I’m sorry I won’t be there to teach him anymore… Do it, Silverhair. Go…"

"I won’t leave you," she said.

"By Kilukpuk’s mold-choked pores, you always were stubborn."

"And you’ve always been so strong—"

"Should take more than a little hunger to kill old Eggtusk, eh? But it isn’t just that. Watch now."

With infinite difficulty, he rolled his trunk toward him and pushed it below his chin and into the pit, below his body. She could see the muscles of his upper trunk spasm, as if he was pulling at something.

Painfully, carefully, he pulled his trunk out of the pit. He was holding something.

It was a bone, she saw. A rib. It was crusted with dried, blackened blood — and stained with a fresher crimson.

A mammoth rib.

"The bottom of the pit is littered with them," gasped Eggtusk. "They stick up everywhere. Mostly into me. And I think Skin-of-Ice put some kind of poison on them."

"They took it from the yedoma," she said. Or — worse still — from Lop-ear… She felt bile rise in her throat. "They are using our own bones to kill us."

"Oh, these Lost are clever," he said. "Snagtooth was right about that. I couldn’t have dreamed how clever." He let the rib fall to the mud. "Well, little Silverhair. If you’re determined to hang around here, you can help me. There’s something I must do while I still have the strength."

"What?"

"Fetch a rock. As big as you can throw over to me."

She went to an outcrop of rock and obeyed, bringing back a big sandstone boulder. She stood at the edge of the kettle hole, dug her tusks under the rock, and sent it flying through the air toward Eggtusk. It landed before his face, splashing in the mud.

He raised his head, turned it sideways. And then he brought his misshapen tusk crashing against the rock. The tusk cracked, but he showed no awareness of the pain at all.

"Eggtusk! What are you doing?"

"You needn’t try to stop me," he said, breathing hard.

"Why?"

"Better I do it than the Lost. Didn’t you tell me how they robbed the ancient mammoth in the yedoma? I don’t want them doing the same to me."

And again he began to smash his magnificent deformed tusk against the rock, until it had splintered and cracked at the base.

At last it tore loose, leaving only a bloody spike of ivory protruding from the socket in his face.

"Take it," he told Silverhair, his voice thick with blood. "You can reach it. Take it and smash it to splinters."

She was weeping openly now. But she reached out over the mud of the kettle hole, wrapped her trunk around the tusk, and pulled it to her. It was immense: so massive she could barely lift it. Once again she appreciated the huge strength of Eggtusk — strength that was dissipating into the cold mud as she watched.

She lugged the tusk to the outcrop of sandstone, and pounded it until it had splintered and smashed to fragments.

Eggtusk rested for a time. Then he lifted his head again, and started to work on his other tusk.

When he was done, his face was half-buried in the mud, the breath whistling through his trunk; there was blood around his mouth, and pulp leaked from the stumps of his tusks.

"Eggtusk—"

"Little Silverhair. You’re still here? You always were stubborn… Talk to me."

"Talk to you?"

"Tell me a story. Tell me about Ganesha."

And so she did. Gathering her strength, staying the weakening of her own voice, she told him the ancient tale of Ganesha the Wise, and how she had prepared her calf Prima to conquer the cold lands.

He grunted and sighed, seeming to respond to the rhythms of the ancient story…

She woke with a start. She hadn’t meant to sleep.

Eggtusk, still wedged tight in his kettle hole, was chewing on something. "This grass is fine. Isn’t it, Wolfnose? The finest I ever tasted. And this water is as clear and fresh as if it had just melted off the glacier."

But she could see that only blood trickled from his mouth, and all that he chewed was a mouthful of his own hair, ripped from his back.

"Eggtusk—"

He raised his head, and the stumps of his tusks gleamed in the sun. "Wolfnose? Remember me, Wolfnose. Remember me. I see you. I’m coming now…"

His great head dropped to the earth, and it did not rise again.

Silverhair felt the deepest dark of despair settle over her, an anguish of shame and frustration that she hadn’t been able to help him.

Soon she must start the Remembering. She could not reach Eggtusk, or touch his body; but at least she could cover his corpse -

Suddenly there was a band of fire around her neck: a band that dug deep into her flesh. She trumpeted her shock and pain.

And the Lost were here: dancing before her, two of them, and they held sticks in their paws, sticks attached to whatever was wrapped around her neck.

Snagtooth was standing before her, apparently in no distress.

Silverhair, shocked, agonized, tried to speak. When the Lost tugged at their sticks the fire burned deeper in her neck, and it got so tight she could barely breathe. "Snagtooth… Help me…"

But Snagtooth kept her trunk down. "I brought them here."

"You did what?"

"Don’t you see? They are smarter than we are. Submit to them, Silverhair. It isn’t so bad."

"No—" Silverhair struggled to stay on her feet, to ignore the pain in her throat.

Beyond Snagtooth, she saw Skin-of-Ice himself. His damaged foreleg was strapped to his chest.

Light as a hare, he hopped over the mud of the kettle hole, and came to rest on Eggtusk’s broad, unmoving back. He raised his head to the sky and let loose a howl of triumph.

Then he raised an ice-claw in his paw, and drove it deep into Eggtusk’s helpless back.

The thing around Silverhair’s neck tightened. A red mist filled her vision.

She was forced to her knees.

13 The Captive

The Lost threw more loops and lassos at her. Many of them missed, or she shook them off easily, but gradually they caught on her tusks or trunk or around her legs. Soon her head was so heavy with ropes that she could not lift it.

Now the Lost — five or six of them, under the supervision of Skin-of-Ice — began to run around her, whooping and beating at her flanks and legs with sticks. She tried to reach them with her tusks — she knew she could disembowel any of these weak creatures with a flick of her head — but she was pinned, and they were too clever to come close enough to give her the chance to hurt them.

She could not even lift her head to trumpet, and that shamed her more than anything else.

At last Skin-of-Ice himself came forward. His small teeth showed white in his loathsome, naked face as he bent to peer into her eyes. His mouth, a soft round thing, was flapping and making noises.

She managed to haul herself back through a pace or two. But he stood his ground, and the weight dragging at her forced her into submission once more.

He raised a stick, about as long as his foreleg, in the tip of which he had embedded one of his gleaming ice-claws. He held it up before her, waving it before her eyes, as if to demonstrate to her what it was.

One of the other Lost came up. He pawed at Skin-of-Ice, as if trying to restrain him. But Skin-of-Ice shook him off.

Then, with brutal suddenness, Skin-of-Ice lashed out.

He slammed the stick against her face, and the claw penetrated her cheek. The pain was liquid fire.

She kept her gaze on Skin-of-Ice, refusing even to flinch as tire pain burned into her.

He threw down his goad and reached forward to her cheek. His paw came away smeared with her blood — and it cupped a brimming pool of her tears, tears she could not help but spill.

Skin-of-Ice threw the tears back in her face, so that they stung her eyes.

As the sun sank toward the horizon, the Lost gathered loose branches and twigs into a rough heap. The heap somehow erupted into flame, as if at the command of the Lost. They did not seem to fear the fire. Indeed, they fed it with more branches, which they boldly threw onto the embers, and stayed close to it, rubbing their paws as if dependent on the fire for warmth.

After a time a knot of hunger gathered in Silverhair’s stomach, but the Lost would not let her feed. Even when she passed dung, which the Lost could scarcely prevent, they would kick and prod at her so that her stomach clenched, and they picked up the dung and threw it in her face.

Mammoths need a great deal of food daily, and in fact spend much of each day feeding and drinking. To be kept from doing that was a great torment to Silverhair, and she weakened rapidly.

The Lost were not organized. They were careless, lethargic, and seemed to spend a lot of their time asleep.

All save Skin-of-Ice. It was Skin-of-Ice who drove on the others, like a lead Bull, making them work when they would rather sleep or feed or squabble, maintaining the slow cruelty inflicted on Silverhair. All the Lost were repulsive. But it was Skin-of-Ice, she saw, who was the source of evil.

Meanwhile, as the shadows stretched over the tundra, a group of the Lost worked in the pit that had trapped and killed Eggtusk.

Eggtusk was still upright in the pit, his legs trapped out of sight, his head supported by the stumps of his tusks. The blood that had seeped out of his wounds had soaked the ground around the pit, making it black. His body was already rigid with death, and perhaps half-frozen too.

Now the Lost slung ropes around Eggtusk and hauled. At first they could not budge the passive carcass, but they made a rhythmic noise and concerted their efforts.

At last they managed to drag Eggtusk out of the hole.

Silverhair could hear the crackle of frost-ridden fur as Eggtusk was rolled onto his back, exposing his softer underbelly, and then the more ominous crack of snapping bone. His head settled back to the cold earth, and his mouth gaped. Silverhair could see how the dried blood and dirt matted the great wounds in his chest and belly, and his stomach was swollen and hard.

It was Skin-of-Ice himself who began it.

He took an ice-claw and thrust it into Eggtusk’s lower belly. Then, bracing himself and using both paws, he dragged the claw up the length of Eggtusk’s body, cutting through hair and flesh, in a line from anus to throat. Silverhair felt the incision as if it had been made in her own body.

Then, under the direction of Skin-of-Ice, the Lost reluctantly gathered to either side of Eggtusk. They dug their forelimbs into the new wound in his belly, grabbed his rib cage, and hauled back. The rib cage opened like a grotesque flower, the white of bone emerging from the red-black wound.

Eggtusk was opened up, splayed.

Skin-of-Ice now climbed inside the body of Eggtusk. He reached down, and, with his forelegs, began to dig out Eggtusk’s internal organs: heart, liver, a great rope of intestine.

Another of the Lost turned away, and vomit spilled from his mouth.

When Skin-of-Ice was done, the Lost took hold of Eggtusk’s legs and hauled him away from the steaming pile of guts they had removed from the carcass. Then they turned Eggtusk over again; this time he slumped, almost shapeless, against the ground.

The Lost began to hack at the skin of Eggtusk’s legs and around his neck. When it was cut through, they dug their small forelimbs inside the skin and began to haul it off the sheets of muscle and fat that coated Eggtusk’s body. It came loose with a moist rip. Wherever it stuck, Skin-of-Ice or one of the others would hack at the muscle inside the skin, or else reach underneath and punch at the skin from the inside.

At last the skin came free from Eggtusk’s back, belly, and neck, a great sheet of it, bloody on the underside and dangling clumps of hair on the other. Silverhair could see it was punctured by the many wounds he had suffered.

The Lost folded up the skin and put it to one side. Eggtusk’s flayed carcass was left as a mass of exposed muscle and flesh.

Now the Lost took their ice-claws and began to hack in earnest at the carcass. They seemed to be trying to sever the flesh from Eggtusk’s legs, belly, and neck in great sections. They even cut away his tail, ears, and part of his trunk.

When they were done, Eggtusk’s body had been comprehensively destroyed.

But now there came a still worse horror; for the Lost began to throw lumps of dripping flesh on the fire — Eggtusk’s flesh. And when it was all but burned, they dragged it off the fire, sliced it into pieces, and crammed it into their small mouths with every expression of relish.

Silverhair forced herself to watch, to witness every cut and savor every fresh stink, and remember it all.

The Lost seemed baffled by the absence of the old Bull’s tusks, and they spent some time inspecting the bloody stumps in his face. Silverhair realized that Eggtusk had been right. For some reason the loathsome souls of these Lost cherished the theft of tusks above all, and even as he lay trapped and dying Eggtusk had defied his killers.

She clutched that to her heart, and tried to draw courage from Eggtusk’s example.

But she had little time for such reflection, for the goading she endured continued without relief. Soon her need for sleep drove all other thoughts from her mind, and the ache from the injuries to her neck and cheek refused to subside.

Snagtooth was not mistreated as Silverhair was. She was bound by a single loop of rope fixed to a stake driven into the ground. Silverhair thought that with a single yank Snagtooth could surely drag the stake out of the ground. But Snagtooth seemed to have no such intention.

Skin-of-Ice came to Snagtooth, so close she could surely have gutted him with a single flick of her remaining tusk. But Snagtooth dipped her head and let the Lost touch her. He brought her food: pawfuls of grass that he lifted up to her, and water in a shell-like container that he carried from a stream. Passively Snagtooth dipped her trunk into the shell thing. She even lifted her trunk, and Silverhair watched her tongue flick out, pink and moist, to accept the grass from the paw of her captor.

With the watery sun once more climbing the sky, Silverhair saw, in her bleary vision, that Skin-of-Ice had come to stand before her.

He reached toward her with one paw, as if making to stroke her as he had Snagtooth. But Silverhair rumbled and pulled her head away from him.

Before she had time even to see its approach his goad had slapped at her cheek. She could feel the scabs that had crusted over her earlier wounds break open once more, and the pain was so intense she could not help but cry out.

Now Skin-of-Ice turned to his companions and gestured with his goad.

Immediately the pressure around her throat and across her back intensified. She was forced to kneel in the dirt. Under her belly hair, she could feel the stale warmth of her own dung.

And now Skin-of-Ice stepped forward. She could feel him grab her hair, step on one kneeling leg, and hoist himself up onto her back so that he was sitting astride her. The Lost around her were cawing and slapping their paws together, in evident approval of Skin-of-Ice’s antics.

She strained her muscles and tried to dislodge him, but she could not stand, let alone rear; she could not remove this maddening, tormenting worm from her back.

Now the pressure of the ropes lessened, and the Lost came forward and began to prod at her belly. Reluctant though she was to do anything in response to their vicious commands, she clambered slowly to her feet. She could feel Skin-of-Ice wrap his paws in her long hair to keep from falling off as she did so.

The Lost moved around behind her, and she could feel a new load being added to her back: something unmoving that had to be tied in place with ropes around her belly.

She could not see what this load was. But she could smell it. It was the remnants of Eggtusk: bones, skin, and dismembered meat.

She tried to shake the load loose, but the ropes were too tight.

The Lost moved around her belly, loosening the ropes that bound up her legs. Skin-of-Ice pulled her ears and slapped at her with his own goad. The Lost before her dragged at the ropes around her head and trunk.

What they intended was obvious. They wanted her to walk with them to their nest at the south of the Island, to carry the dishonored, mutilated corpse for them.

But she stood firm. She could not escape, but, even as weak as she was, the Lost were not strong enough to haul her against her will.

But now a new rope was attached to her neck. A pair of Lost pulled it across the tundra, and attached it to the collar around Snagtooth’s neck.

One of the Lost held Snagtooth’s trunk in his paw, but otherwise, she was under no duress or goad. Led by the Lost, Snagtooth began to walk, deliberately, to the south. The rope between the two mammoths stretched taut, and began to drag at Silverhair’s neck. And the monster on her back lashed at her with his goad.

Silverhair’s feet slipped on the dusty ground. She took one step, then another. She could resist the feeble muscles of any number of the Lost, but weak and starved as she was, not the hauling of an adult mammoth.

She tried to call to Snagtooth. "Why are you doing this? How can you help them?"

But her voice was weak and muffled. Snagtooth did not hear, or perhaps chose not to; she kept her face firmly turned to the south.

As she stumbled forward from step to step, constantly impeded by the ropes that still loped between her legs, Silverhair felt her shame was complete.

They reached the coast, not far from the place where Silverhair had first encountered Skin-of-Ice.

Silverhair was hauled along the beach.

She saw, groggily, that the season was well advanced. The sea was full of noise and motion. The remnant ice was breaking up quickly, with bangs and cracks. Small icebergs were swept past in the current. She saw a berg strike pack ice ahead and rear up out of the water, before falling back with a ponderous splash.

She was led past a floe where a large male polar bear lay silently beside a seal’s breathing hole. With startling suddenness the bear dived into the pool, and after much thrashing, emerged with its jaws clamped around the neck of a huge ringed seal. The incautious seal was dragged through a breathing hole no wider than its head, and there was a soft crunching as the bones of the seal’s body were broken or dislocated against the ice. Then, with a cuff of its mighty paw, the bear slit open the seal and began to strip the rich blubber from the inside of the seal’s skin.

It seemed to Silverhair that the seal was still alive. Silverhair was dragged away from the bear and its victim. Even the Lost, she realized, were wise enough to watch the bear with caution.

At the top of the beach, away from the reach of the tide, the Lost had made their nest.

There were more Lost here. They moved forward, hesitantly, but with curiosity. They approached Snagtooth, and she allowed them to touch her trunk and tug at the fur of her belly. Even when one of them prodded the stump of her broken tusk, an action that must have been agonizingly painful, she did little more than flinch.

Even on first contact with the mammoths, the Lost seemed to have no fear, so secure were they in their dominance of the world around them. Now Silverhair was dragged forward.

The beach was scarred by the blackened remains of fires. She recognized a stack of thunder-sticks, looking no more dangerous than fallen branches. There were little shelters, like caves. They were made of sheets of reddish-brown shiny stuff that appeared to have come from the monstrous hulk she had observed on the shore with Lop-ear, in a time that seemed a Great-Year remote.

There was much she did not understand. There were the straight-edged, hollowed-out boxes from which the Lost extracted their strange, odorless foods. There were the glinting, shining flasks — almost like hollowed-out icicles — from which the Lost would pour a clear liquid down their skinny throats, a liquid over which they fought, which they prized above everything else. There was the box that emitted a deafening, incessant noise, and the other box that glittered with starlike lights, into which one or another of the Lost would bark incessantly.

And all of this strange, horrific place was suffused with the smell of mammoth: dead, decaying, burned mammoth.

The Lost set up four stakes in the ground. They beat them in place with blocks of wood they held in their paws.

Silverhair was led toward the stakes.

One of the Lost walked around her on his skinny hind legs, plucked at the ropes that bound her grisly load to her belly, and stepped in front of her face to inspect her tusks — and stretching her ropes to the limit, she twisted her head and swiped at him. She caught him a glancing blow with the side of her tusk — he was so light and frail, she could barely feel the impact — and he sprawled on the ground before her. He howled and squirmed. She raised her foreleg. In an instant she would crush the rib cage of this mewling creature.

But Skin-of-Ice was there. He grabbed the paw of the one on the ground and dragged him away from her.

The Lost closed rapidly around her. Commanded by Skin-of-Ice, they prodded, poked, and dragged at Silverhair until the four stakes were all around her. Then they tied rope around her legs, so tightly it bit into her flesh, pinning each of her legs to a stake, and she could not move.

14 The Nest of the Lost

The endless day wore on.

Silverhair had could not lie down, not even move. And she wasn’t allowed to sleep. The Lost tormented her continually.

The stake ropes were never released. Though she chafed against them, she only rubbed raw her own flesh; she could feel how the ropes cut to the very bone of her forelegs.

The Lost would give her no water. Soon it felt as if her trunk was shriveling like drying grass, and her chest and belly were dry as the bones that had emerged from the yedoma.

And they tormented her with food. One of them would hold up succulent grass before her, push it toward her mouth, perhaps even allow a blade or two to touch her tongue. Then, invariably, he would snatch the grass away.

Even when there were no Lost with her — when they were all asleep in their artificial caves, the flasks and scraps of half-chewed mammoth meat scattered around their snoring forms — they would set up one of their deafening noise-making boxes beside her, and its unending stomping ensured she could never sleep.

Snagtooth was kept tied up, in full view of Silverhair. But her tether was just a single rope. Her feet were not bound, so she was free to move as far as the rope would allow her, and she was fed with pawfuls of grass and containers of water.

Several times a day, Skin-of-Ice or one of the others would climb on the back of Snagtooth. The Lost would kick at the back of her ears, as if trying to drive her forward or back. Snagtooth was rewarded with mouthfuls of food if she guessed what they wanted correctly, and strikes of a goad — not as severely as they beat Silverhair — if she got it wrong. All this was greeted with hoots of laughter from the staggering, swaying Lost.

Silverhair tried to recall the Cycle, the legends of Kilukpuk and Ganesha and Longtusk; but the Cycle seemed a remote irrelevance in this place of horror. At last Silverhair’s spirit seemed as if it was half-detached from her body, and even the pain of her poisoned wounds receded from her awareness.

When she was left alone, she would look beyond the camp, seeking solace. Somehow it seemed strange that the world was continuing its ancient cycles, regardless of her own suffering and the cruel designs of the Lost. But life was carrying on.

The cliffs above the beach were crowded with thousands of eider, kittiwakes, murres, and fulmars. Every ledge and crevice was packed with nesting birds, and their noise and smell were overwhelming; so many birds circled in the air, they darkened the sky. At the base of the cliffs was a bright carpet of lichens and purple saxifrage, fertilized by the guano from the birds.

Silverhair saw a thick-billed murre taking its turn to sit on its single egg, freeing its partner to seek food at the ice-edge. But when the attention of the murre was distracted, a gull swooped down and easily snatched the egg, swallowing it in a single movement. The distress of the murre pair was obvious, for they might not have time in the short season to raise another egg. Silverhair, despite her own plight, felt a stab of sadness at the small tragedy.

…But then Skin-of-Ice would return, sometimes with a flask of liquid in his paw. He would adjust the ropes that pinned her, perhaps tightening them around some already chafed and painful spot. And then he would devise some new way to hurt her.

Some of the Lost even seemed to show regret for the suffering they caused. They would hurry past the place she was staked with their faces averted. Or they would stand before her and stare at her, their spindly forelegs dangling, their small mouths gaping open; sometimes they would even reach up to her hesitantly, as if to stroke her or feed her.

But not Skin-of-Ice.

He knows I’m conscious, she thought. He knows I’m in here.

He knows what he does hurts me. That’s why he does it. The others may kill us for food or skin or bones, but not this one. He enjoys inflicting pain. And he enjoys humiliating.

His was a deliberate cruelty of a type she had never encountered before. And she knew it would not stop until she bent her head to him, as had Snagtooth.

Or until one of them was dead.

"…Silverhair. Silverhair. Can you hear me?…"

Snagtooth was a silhouette against the dying light of the fire.

"Leave me alone," said Silverhair.

"You don’t understand." Snagtooth was using the contact rumble, a note so deep, it was not muffled by the clatter of the noise-maker beside Silverhair, so deep it would not disturb the light slumbers of the Lost. But Snagtooth’s voice sounded oddly distorted, as if she spoke with a trunk full of water.

"What is there to understand? You have given yourself to the Lost."

"We can’t fight them, Silverhair. Think about what the Cycle says. Once, the mammoths dominated the north of the whole world. But then the Lost came and took it from us — all of it, except the Island. We have to live as they want us to live. We have no choice."

"There is always a choice," rumbled Silverhair.

"I think they want us to work for them. Lifting things, moving things about, in the odd way they have of wanting to reorder everything. But it isn’t so bad. When one of them climbs on your back, you don’t even feel his weight after a while…"

"You do," said Silverhair softly. "Oh, you do."

"They are feeding me well, Silverhair. They cleaned out my abscess. It doesn’t hurt anymore. Can you imagine how that feels?"

"Is that why you are prepared to bend before them? Because they cleaned out your tusk?"

The rumble fell silent for a long time. Then Snagtooth said, "Silverhair, I think I understand them. I think I am like them."

"Like the Lost?"

"Look around you. There are no bitches here. No cubs. These Lost are alone. Like a bachelor herd, cut off from the Families. No wonder they are so cruel and unhappy… Silverhair, I envy you. I can smell it from here, even above the blood and the rot of your wounds and the burning of Eggtusk’s flesh—"

"Smell what?"

"The calf growing inside you."

Silverhair, startled, listened to the slow oceanic pulsing of her own blood. Could it be true?

Snagtooth murmured, "For me it’s different, Silverhair. Year after year my body has absorbed the eggs of my unborn calves, even before they fully form."

Now, in the midst of her own confusing pulse of joy, Silverhair understood. She should have known: for the Cycle teaches that sterile Cows, unable to produce calves, will sometimes grow as huge as mature Bulls, as if their bodies are seeking to make up in stature what they lack in fertility.

Snagtooth said, "Now do you understand why I submit to the Lost? Because there is nothing else for me, Silverhair. Nothing."

And Snagtooth turned her head, and Silverhair saw her clearly for the first time since they had arrived at this nest. "Oh, Snagtooth…"

Snagtooth’s trunk was gone — her trunk with its hundred thousand muscles, infinitely supple, immensely strong, the trunk that fed her and assuaged her thirst, the trunk that defined her identity as mammoth. Now, in the center of her face, there was only a bloody stump, grotesquely shadowed by the fire’s flickering light.

Snagtooth had allowed the Lost to sever her trunk at its root. She couldn’t even feed herself or obtain water; she had made herself completely reliant on the mercy of the Lost, for whatever remained of her life.

The pain must have been blinding.

"It isn’t so bad!" Snagtooth wailed thickly. "Not so bad…"

The eternal Arctic day wore on.

Silverhair’s stomach was so empty now, her dung so thin, she seemed to have passed beyond the pain of hunger and thirst. She couldn’t even pass urine anymore. The rope burns on her legs seemed to be rotting, so foul was the stench that came from them. She was giddy from lack of sleep, so much so that sometimes the pain fell away from her and she seemed to be floating, looking down on the fouled, bloody body trapped between the stakes on the ground, flying like a gull halfway to the Sky Steppe.

She tried to sense the new life budding inside her — did it have limbs yet? did it have a trunk? — but she could sense only its glowing, heavy warmth.

At last, one dark and cloudy midnight, the situation came to a head.

Skin-of-Ice approached her. She saw that he staggered slightly. His hairless head was slick and shining with sweat. In his paw he held a glittering flask, already half-empty. He raised it in his paw, almost as a mammoth would raise a trunkful of water. But he drank clumsily, as a mammoth never would, and the fluid spilled over his chin and neck.

She had no idea what the clear fluid was. It certainly wasn’t water, for its smell was thin and sharp, like mold. Surely it would only serve to rot him from within. But perhaps that explained why, when the Lost forced this liquid down their throats, they would dance, shout, fight, fall into an uncomfortable sleep far from their nests near the fires or in the artificial caves. Sometimes — she could tell from the stink — they even fouled themselves.

And it was when the clear liquid was inside him that Skin-of-Ice would cause Silverhair the most pain.

He wiped away the mess on his face with his paw. He stalked before her, eyeing her, calculating. Then he turned and barked at the other Lost. Two of them emerged from one of their improvised caves, reluctant, staggering a little. They yapped at Skin-of-Ice, as if protesting. But Skin-of-Ice began to yell at them once more, pointing to the bindings on Silverhair’s legs, and then pointing behind him.

Silverhair stood stolidly in her trap. It was obvious she was to face some new horror. Whatever it was, she swore to herself, though she could not mask her weakness, she would show no fear.

The Lost, reluctantly obeying Skin-of-Ice, clustered around the stakes that trapped Silverhair’s legs and loosened the ropes. Her wounds, with their encrusted blood and scab tissue and half-healed flesh, were ripped open.

Released, her right foreleg crumpled and she dropped to one knee. The blood that flowed in her knees and hips, joints that had been held stiff and unmoving for so long, felt like fire.

But for the first time since being brought to this place, Silverhair’s legs were free. She stood straight with a great effort.

Now the Lost started to prod at her, and to pull at her ropes. She tried to resist, but she was so weakened, the feeble muscles of these Lost were sufficient to make her walk.

She moved one leg forward, then another. The pain in her hips and shoulders had a stabbing intensity.

But the pain began to ease.

Silverhair had always been blessed by good health, and her constitution was tough — designed, after all, to survive without shelter the rigors of an Arctic winter. Even now she could feel the first inklings of a recovery that might come quickly — if she were ever given the chance.

But still, it hurt.

Her strength was returning. But she did not let her limp become less pronounced. Nor did she raise her head, or fight against the ropes. It occurred to her it might be useful if the Lost did not know how strong she was.

As they passed a fire, Skin-of-Ice pulled out burning branches. He kept one himself and passed the others to his companions. Soon the patch of littered beach was illuminated by overlapping, shifting circles of blood-red light, vivid in the subdued midnight glow.

They led her past Snagtooth. Her aunt was still tied loosely by the rope dangling from her neck. The stump of her severed trunk was ugly, but it seemed to be healing over.

Snagtooth turned away.

Silverhair walked on, flanked by the Lost, led by the capering gait of Skin-of-Ice in the flickering light of the torches.

They were dragging her to another shelter: a dome shape a little bigger than the rest. The shelter stank of mammoth. She felt her dry trunk curl.

The other Lost backed away, leaving her with Skin-of-Ice. Almost trustingly, he reached up and grabbed one of the ropes that led to the tight noose around her neck. Feigning weakness, she allowed herself to be led forward toward the shelter.

Skin-of-Ice shielded his torch and led her through the shelter’s entrance. It was so narrow, her flanks brushed its sides.

She felt something soft. It felt like hair: like a mammoth’s winter coat.

Inside the shelter was utter darkness, relieved only slightly by a disk of indigo sky that showed through a rent in the roof. The stench of death was almost overpowering.

She wondered dully what the Lost was planning. Perhaps this was the place where Skin-of-Ice would, at last, kill her.

He bent and flicked his torch over a small pile in the middle of the floor. It looked like twigs and branches. A fire started. At first smoke billowed up, and there was a stink of fat. But then the smoke cleared, and the fire burned with a clear, steady light.

She saw that the fire was built from bone shards, smashed and broken. Mammoth bones.

The fire’s light grew.

The walls of this shelter were made of some kind of skin, and their supports were curved, and gleamed, white as snow.

The supports were mammoth tusks.

The tusks had been driven into the ground, so that their tips met at the apex of the shelter. They were joined at the tip by a sleeve of what looked like more bone, to make a continuous arch.

The wall skins, too, had been taken from mammoths, she saw now: flayed from corpses, scraped and cleaned, rust-brown hair still dangling from them. As she looked down, she saw more bones — jaws and shoulder blades and leg bones as thick as tree trunks — driven into the ground to fix the skins in place.

Black dread settled on her as she understood. This shelter was made entirely from mammoth hide and bone. It was like being inside an opened-out corpse.

But the horror was not yet done. Skin-of-Ice was pointing at the ground with his paw.

Resting by the doorway was the massive skull of a mammoth. She recognized it. She was looking into the empty eye sockets of Eggtusk.

Skin-of-Ice was confronting her, his paws spread wide, and he was cawing. She knew that he had brought her here, shown her this final horror, to complete his victory over her.

She began to speak to him. "Skin-of-Ice, it is you who is defeated," she said softly. "For I will not forget what you have done here. And when I put you in the ground, the worms will crawl through your skull and inhabit your emptied chest, as you inhabit these desecrated remains."

For a heartbeat he seemed taken aback — almost as if he understood that she was speaking to him.

Then he raised his goad.

She summoned all her strength, and reared up. The ropes around her neck and forelegs parted.

Skin-of-Ice, evidently realizing his carelessness, fell backwards and sprawled before her.

At last her trunk was free. She raised it and trumpeted. She took a deliberate step toward him.

Even now he showed no fear. He raised a paw and curled it: beckoning her, daring her to approach him.

She stabbed at him with her tusk.

But he was fast. He squirmed sideways.

Her tusk drove into the earth. It hit rock buried there, and she felt its tip splinter and crack.

Skin-of-Ice wriggled away. But a splash of bright fresh red disfigured his side, soaking through the loose skins he wore.

She felt a stab of exultation. She had wounded him.

He scrambled out of the shelter.

She set about wrecking this cave of skin. She trampled on the heap of burning bones. She smashed away the supports that held up the grisly roof. When the layers of flayed skin fell over her, exposing the midnight sky, she shook them away.

All this took mere heartbeats.

Then, with her trunk, she picked up the fragments of skin, and laid them reverently over her back. She found herself breathing hard, her limited reserves of energy already depleted.

She turned to meet her fate.

Beyond the ruins of the hut there was a ring of light: a dozen burning branches held aloft by the paws of the Lost. Several of them had thunder-sticks, which they pointed toward her. She could see their small eyes, sighting along the sticks at her head and belly.

And there was Skin-of-Ice. He was holding his side, but she could see the blood leaking through his fingers.

She tried to calculate. If she charged directly at him, even if the stinging hail from the thunder-sticks caught her, her sheer momentum could not be stopped. And Skin-of-Ice, wounded as he was, would not be able to evade her this time.

She rumbled to her calf. "So it is over," she said. "But the pain will be mine, not yours. You will not see this terrible world of suffering, dominated by these monsters, these Lost. It will be brief, and then we will be together, in the aurora that burns in the sky…"

She lowered her head -

There was a braying, liquid roar.

The Lost scattered and ran, yelling.

A shape loomed out of the shadows: bristling with fur, one tusk held high. It was Snagtooth. Silverhair could see how she trailed the broken length of rope that had restrained her.

Without her trunk Snagtooth was unable to trumpet, but she could roar; and now she roared again. She selected one of the Lost and hurled herself straight toward him. The Lost screamed and raised his thunder-stick. It spat fire, and Silverhair could see blood splash over Snagtooth’s upper thigh. But the wound did not impede her charge.

Snagtooth’s mutilated head rammed directly into the belly of the Lost.

Silverhair heard a single bloody gurgle, the crackle of crushed bone. The Lost was hurled into the air and landed far from the circle of torches.

But this victory was transient. The Lost gathered their courage and turned on Snagtooth. Soon the still air was rent by the noise of thunder-sticks.

Snagtooth reeled. She fell to her knees.

Silverhair screamed: "Snagtooth!"

Through the storm of noise, Silverhair could hear Snagtooth’s rumble. "Remember me…"

And Silverhair understood. In the end, Snagtooth had thrown off her shame. She had chosen to give her life for Silverhair and her calf. Now it was up to Silverhair to get away, to accept that ultimate gift.

She turned away from the noise, the Lost, the fallen, agonized shape of Snagtooth, and slipped away into the silvery Arctic light.

The Lost closed around Snagtooth with their thunder-sticks and ice-claws.