Stephen Baxter - Longtusk

"Listen to me," said Jaw Like Rock urgently. "It isn’t what it seems…" He laid his trunk over Longtusk’s head, trying to soothe him, but Longtusk shook it off.

The keepers began to look alarmed.

The bone thing had the stump of a tusk, broken and gnawed, sticking out of its front. A mammoth tusk.

"Nobody was killed here," Jaw was saying. "This wasn’t the fault of the Fireheads, or anybody else. It just happened, a very long time ago…"

Longtusk looked again at the river bank. He saw that the white objects were not rocks, not one of them. They were all bones: thick leg bones and vertebrae and ribs and shoulder blades and skulls, sticking out of the mud, many of them still coated with flesh and broken and chewed by scavengers.

It was a field of corpses: the corpses of mammoths.

And here was Walks With Thunder, about to load the great vacant skull onto Longtusk’s back.

Longtusk swept his tusks, knocked the skull from the grasp of an astonished Walks With Thunder, and smashed it to pieces underfoot.

He recalled little after that.

They got him under control, and brought him through the long march back to the Fireheads’ settlement.

As the day wound to its close, their work done, the mastodonts were allowed to find food and water, and to mingle with the Family of Cows and calves.

Longtusk did not expect such freedom tonight.

He hadn’t injured any of the Fireheads. But, despite Thunder’s apologies and urging, he hadn’t allowed the keepers to remount his pack gear or to place any of their grisly load on his back. The other mastodonts, some grumbling, had had to accept his share of the load. As a result he was expecting punishment.

But now the little keeper, Lemming, faced him. To Longtusk’s surprise, Lemming came close, easily within range of the mammoth’s great tusks. He seemed to trust Longtusk.

Lemming reached out with one small paw and touched the long hairs that grew from the center of Longtusk’s face, between his eyes. Tiny fingers pulled gently at the hairs, combing out small knots, and the Firehead spoke steadily in his thin, incomprehensible voice. He seemed regretful, as if he understood.

Now Lemming reached down and loosened the hobbles around Longtusk’s ankles. Then, with the gentlest of taps from his goad, he encouraged Longtusk to wander off toward his feeding ground.

Longtusk — confused, dismayed, baffled by kindness — moved away from the trees in search of steppe grass.

The Moon was high and dazzling bright — a wintry Moon, brilliant with the reflected light of ice-laden Earth. It was Longtusk’s only companion.

Even when he ate, he had to do it alone. He needed the coarse grass and herbs of the steppe, and could tolerate little of the lush leaves and bark the mastodonts preferred. Tonight, though, he could have used a little company.

Walks With Thunder had apologized for not warning him, and tried to explain to him about the bones in the river bank. It wasn’t a place of slaughter. It wasn’t even the place where all those decomposing mammoths had died.

Mammoths had been drawn to the river’s water over a long period of time — generations, perhaps even a significant part of a Great-Year. But a river bank could be a hazardous place. Mammoths became stuck in clinging mud and starved, or fell through thin ice and drowned. Their bodies were washed down the river, coming to rest in a meander or backwater.

Again and again this happened, the corpses washing downstream from all along the river bank, and coming to rest in the same natural trap, until a huge deposit of bodies had built up.

Sometimes the river would rise, immersing the bodies and embedding them in mud and silt, and fishes might nibble at the meat. And in dry seasons the water would drop, exposing the bodies to the air. The stench of their rot would attract flies, and larvae would burrow through the rotting flesh. Predators would come, wolverines or foxes or wolves, to gnaw on the exposed bones.

At last the bodies were buried by silt and peat, and vegetation grew over them.

But then the river’s path had changed. The water began to cut away at the great natural pit of bones, exposing the corpses to the air once more…

"You see?" Thunder had said. "Nobody killed those mammoths. Why, they might have died centuries ago, their bodies lying unremarked in the silt layers until now. What’s left behind is just bone and rotting flesh and hair. The Fireheads imagine they have a use for all those old bones — and what harm does it do? The mammoths have gone, their spirits flown to the aurora. Strange, yes, are the ways of the Fireheads, but you’ll learn to live with them. I have…"

Yes, thought Longtusk angrily, and he ripped tufts of grass roughly from the ground as he stomped along alone, all but blinded by his teeming thoughts. Yes, Thunder, you’ve grown used to all this. It doesn’t matter what happens to my bones when I’ve flown to the aurora; you’re right.

But you have forgotten you are a Calf of Kilukpuk. You have forgotten how we Remember those who go to the aurora before us.

I will not forget, no matter how long I live, how long I am kept here. I will never forget that I am mammoth.

"…Are you in musth?"

The contact rumble was light, shallow. Close.

Preoccupied, he looked up. A small mastodont was facing him. A calf? No, a Cow — not quite fully grown, perhaps about his own age. She was chewing on a mouthful of leaves. Her jaw was delicate and neatly symmetrical, along with the rest of her skull, and that chewing, unmammoth-like motion didn’t seem as ugly and unnatural when she did it as when a big ugly Bull like Jaw Like Rock took whole branches in his maw of a mouth and -

"You’re staring at me," she said.

"What?… I’m sorry. What do you want?"

"I want to feed in peace," she growled. Her four tusks were short, Moon white, and she raised them defiantly. "And I want you to answer my question."

"I’m not in musth."

"The Matriarch says I must keep away from Bulls in musth. I’m not ready for oestrus yet. And even if I was—"

"I said, I’m not in musth," he snapped, rumbling angrily.

"You act as if you are."

"That’s because—" He tried to calm down. "It’s not your fault."

She stepped closer, cautiously. "You’re the mammoth, aren’t you? The calf of Primus. I heard them talking about you. I never met a mammoth before."

Longtusk felt confused.

What should he say to her? In his short life he had had little contact with Cows outside his immediately Family. If this was a Bull he’d know what to do; he’d just start a fight.

He snorted and lifted his head. "What do you think of my tusks?"

She evaded his tusks, apparently unimpressed, and reached out with her slender trunk. She placed its warm, pink tip inside his mouth, startling him. Then she stepped back and lowered her trunk.

She sneezed. "Ugh. Saxifrage."

"I like saxifrage. Where I come from, we all eat saxifrage."

She curled her trunk contemptuously. She turned and ambled away, her hips swaying with liquid grace, and she tore at the grass as she passed.

Good riddance, thought Longtusk.

"…Wait," he called. "What’s your name?"

She raised her trunk, as if sniffing the air, and trumpeted her disdain. "Neck Like Spruce."

"My name is—"

"I know already," she said. And she walked off into moonlight.

All too soon the short Arctic summer was gone, and winter closed in once more.

During the day Longtusk, seeking food, would scrape aside the snow and frost to find thin grass and herbs, dead and frozen. Sometimes Fireheads would follow him and chop turf and twigs from the exposed ground, fuel to burn in their great hearths.