Stephen Baxter - Icebones

And the wolf said, "We were hunting. My brother was injured and he died. My parents and my sister and my cubs fell on him, and I joined them, and we fought over the entrails we dragged from his stomach. But the meat tasted sour in my mouth, and I am still hungry, and my brother is gone, and I am alone."

And Longtusk was saddened. But he knew that when a mammoth died, her Family would Remember her properly, and those who had to live on were soothed. But when a wolf died he became nothing but another piece of meat between the teeth of his pack.

Longtusk stayed with the wolf a day and a night, comforting her, and then he walked on.

If you are a Cow you are born into a Family, and you live in that Family, and you die in that Family. All your life. A Family must share in the care and protection of the calves. A Family must respect the wisdom of its elders, and especially the Matriarch. A Family must Remember its dead. In a Family, I becomes We.

All these things Longtusk knew. All these things Kilukpuk taught us, and more.

…I know, I know. I have not said what became of Purga, brother of Kilukpuk.

Well, Purga sired clever creatures who climbed and ran and hunted and built and fought and killed. And they became the Lost.

But that is another story.

The mammoths spent a night on the lip of the great cliff, huddled under a sky littered with hard, bright stars. Icebones was surrounded by the warm gurgles of the mammoths’ bellies, their soft belches and farts. Sometimes she heard a rustle as Woodsmoke scrambled through belly hair and sought a teat to suckle.

But every time sleep approached Icebones imagined she was back in the maze of rock, and that a lithe black creature, all teeth and claws, was preparing to spring out of the air.

It was with relief that she saw the dawn approaching. Finding a stream, she took a trunkful of ice-cold water and tipped it into her mouth. The mammoths were already drifting away in search of the first of the day’s forage. The place they had stood for much of the night was littered with dung.

Autumn’s wounds still seeped blood that leaked into her ragged guard hairs. Shoot cleaned the wounds of blood and dirt with water, and plastered mud into the deepest cuts.

Breeze encouraged her calf to pop fragments of the adults’ dung into his mouth, for it would help his digestion. But his control of his trunk was still clumsy, and he smeared the warm, salty dung liberally over his mouth. He was growing rapidly. His legs, to which tufts of orange hair clung, were spindly and long, and he was already half Icebones’s height.

Finished with the dung, Woodsmoke trotted from one adult to another, chirping his simple phrases: "I am hungry! I am not cold!" — and, most of all: "Look at me! Look at what I am doing!" Autumn grumbled wearily that it might be better for the nerves of the adults if calves did not speak from the moment they were born. But Icebones knew she didn’t mean it.

Icebones walked to the edge of the Gouge.

The canyon was vast, magnificent, austere. It stretched from east to west, passing beyond the horizon in either direction. Its walls, glowing red and crimson and ochre, were nothing but rock, cracked and seamed by heat and frost and wind. Peering down, she saw gray clouds drifting through the canyon, feathery rafts floating on the languid river of air that flowed between those mighty walls.

The wall beneath her was huge, tall enough to dwarf many mountains. Its face was cut into columns and gullies, carved and fluted by water and wind, the detail dwindling to a dim darkness at its base.

But the Gouge’s far southern wall was a mere line of darkness on the horizon. She imagined a mammoth like herself standing on that southern wall, peering north across this immense feature. To such an observer, Icebones would be quite invisible.

The Gouge’s floor was visible beneath the flowing gray cloud. She made out the ripple of dunes, the snaking glint of a river, and the crowded gray-green of forests or steppe — all very different from the high, frozen plain on which she stood. The Gouge was so deep that the very weather was different on its sunken floor.

Thunder, the young Bull, stood beside her. "The valley is big," he said simply.

"Yes. Do you see? It is light there, to the east, but it is still dark there, to the west." It was true. The morning sun, a shrunken yellow disc immersed in pale pink light, seemed to be rising out of the Gouge’s eastern extremity. Long, sharp shadows stretched across the Gouge floor, and mist pooled white in valleys and depressions. And, as she looked further to the west, she saw that the floor there still lay in deep darkness, still in the shadow of the world. "The Gouge is so big that it can contain both day and night."

Thunder growled. "It is too big to understand."

Gently, she prodded his trunk. "No. Feel the ground. Smell it, listen to it. Hear the wind gushing along this great trench, fleeing the sun’s heat. Listen to the rumble of the rivers, flowing along the plain, far below. And listen to the rocks…"

"The rocks?"

She stamped, hard. "You are not a Lost, who is nothing but a pair of eyes. You can hear much more than you can see, if you try. The shape of the world is in the rocks’ song." She walked back and forth, listening to the ringing of the ground. She could feel the spin of the world, and the huge slow echoes that came back from the massive volcanic rise to the east.

And she could feel how this valley stretched on and on, far beyond the horizon. It was like a great wound, she thought, a wound that stretched around a quarter of the planet’s belly.

Now Thunder was trotting back and forth, trunk high, eyes half-closed, slamming his clumsy feet into the ground. "I can feel it." He trumpeted his pleasure. "The Lost showed me nothing like this."

"The Lost do not understand. This is mammoth."

Growling, stamping, he stalked away.

Autumn walked up to Icebones. She moved stiffly. "You are kind to him."

Icebones rumbled, "He has a good heart."

Autumn walked carefully to the lip of the valley. "It must have been a giant river which carved this valley."

"Perhaps not a river," Icebones said. She recalled how she had stood atop the Fire Mountain with the Ragged One, and had seen how the land was uplifted. "Perhaps the ground was simply broken open."

"However it was formed, this tusk-gouge lies across our path. Can we walk around it?"

"The Gouge stretches far to the east of here. The land at its edge is high and cold and barren. It would be a difficult trek."

Autumn raised her trunk and sniffed the warming air that rose from the Gouge. "I smell water, and grass, and trees," she said. "There is life down there."

"Yes," Icebones mused. "If we can reach the floor, perhaps we will find nourishment. We can follow its length, cutting south across the higher land when we near the Footfall itself."

Autumn walked gingerly along the lip of the Gouge. "There," she said.

Icebones made out an immense slope of tumbled rock, piled up against the Gouge wall, reaching from the deep floor almost to its upper surface. As the sun rose further, casting its wan, pink light, the rock slope cast huge shadows. Perhaps there had been a landslide, she thought, the rocks of the wall shaken free by a tremor of the ground.

She murmured doubtfully, "The rock looks loose and treacherous."

"Yes. But there might be a way. And—"

A piercing trumpet startled them both. The Ragged One came lumbering up to them.

"I heard what you are saying," the Ragged One gasped. "But your trunk does not sniff far, Icebones. There is no need to clamber down into that Gouge and toil along its muddy length."