Stephen Baxter - Longtusk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It might have been a rock.

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

Longtusk asked, "Are those rocks heavy?"

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

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

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

"No. Aren’t they rocks?"

Jaw fell silent, seeming troubled.

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

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

But the expeditions always headed south.

He asked Jaw about this.

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

"But what?"

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

Longtusk growled, "I’m asking you."

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

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

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

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

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

Longtusk tried to understand what all this meant.

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

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

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

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

The pack gear was substantial.

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

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

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

Longtusk became fearful.

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

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

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