Stephen Baxter - Longtusk

Longtusk growled, impatient with advice.

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

"Jealous? Why?"

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

"No," said Longtusk bluntly.

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

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

Jaw didn’t so much as flinch.

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

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

Jaw Like Rock farted contentedly and loped away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then they walked slowly out of the Firehead settlement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I know that. Deer and aurochs—"

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

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

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

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

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

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

To that, Walks With Thunder would say nothing.

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