Stephen Baxter - Longtusk

The mastodonts, less well adapted to the cold, needed leaves and bark from the trees. But soon all the trees close to the Firehead settlement were stripped or destroyed, and they had to travel far to find sustenance.

This became impossible as the winter closed in, and the Firehead keepers would come out of their huts to bring feed, bales of yellowed hay gathered in the summer months. Longtusk watched with contempt as the mastodonts — even strong, intelligent males like Walks With Thunder and Jaw Like Rock — clustered around the bales, tearing into them greedily with their tusks and trunks.

The Fireheads regularly checked the mastodonts’ trunks, eyes, ears and feet. Frostbite of the mastodonts’ ears was common, and the Fireheads treated it with salves of fat and butter.

During the long nights, the mastodonts would huddle together for warmth, grumbling and complaining as one or another was bumped by a careless hip or prodded by a tusk. And they would regale each other with tales from their own, peculiarly distorted, version of the Cycle: legends of the heroic Mammut and her calves as they romped through the impossibly rich forests of the far south, where the sun never set and the trees grew taller than a hundred mastodonts stacked up on top of each other.

Longtusk tried to join in with tales of the heroes of mammoth legend, like Ganesha the Wise. But he’d been very young when he had heard these stories, and his memory was poor. When he jumbled up the stories the mastodonts would trumpet and rumble their amusement, nudging him and scratching his scalp with their trunks, until he stalked off in anger.

But as they talked and listened the younger mastodonts — and Longtusk — were soaking up the wisdom of their elders, embedded in such legends: how to find water in dry seasons or frozen winters, where to find salt licks, and particularly rich stands of trees.

Longtusk had left his Family at a very young age, and he found he had much to learn, even about the simple things of life.

There was a time when the toes of both his forelegs and hind legs gave him trouble, the skin cracking and becoming prone to infection.

Finally Walks With Thunder noticed and took him to one side. "This is what you must do," he said. The mastodont rummaged among his winter-dry fodder and selected a suitable branch. Holding it in his trunk he stripped the leaves away and peeled back the bark, munching it efficiently. Then he took the branch, broke it into four lengths and laid them out in front of him. He selected one piece and, with brisk motions, sharpened it to a point against a rock.

Then, satisfied with the shape, he began to clean methodically between his toenails, digging out the dirt, and wiping the stick clean.

"You never saw this before?" he said as he worked.

"No," Longtusk said, embarrassed.

"Longtusk, you sweat between your toes. You must keep your toes clean or the glands will clog, causing the problems you are suffering now. It is even more important to keep your musth glands clean." He picked up a shard of stick and, with a practiced motion, dug it into one of the temporal glands in the side of his face. "But you must be careful to use a suitable stick: one that is strong and straight and not likely to break. If it snaps and jams up your gland, it cannot discharge and it will drive you crazy." He eyed Longtusk. "You don’t want to end up like that fool Jaw Like Rock, do you?…"

When the nails were clean the mastodont blew spittle on them with his trunk and polished them until they gleamed.

And so, as he grew, month on month, Longtusk’s education continued, the orphan mammoth under the brusque, tender supervision of the older mastodonts.

In the worst of it, when the snow fell heavily or the wind howled, there was nothing to do but endure. Longtusk did not measure time as a human did, packaging it into regular intervals. Even in summer, time dissolved into a single glowing afternoon, speckled by moments of life and love, laughter and death. And in the long reaches of winter — when sometimes it wasn’t possible even to risk moving for fear of dissipating his body’s carefully hoarded heat — time slid away, featureless, meaningless, driven by the great rhythms of the world around him, and by the deep blood-red urges of his own body.

Longtusk secretly enjoyed these unmarked times, when he could stand with the others in the dark stillness and feel the shape of the turning world.

Longtusk’s deep senses revealed the world beyond the horizon: in the hiss of a gale over a distant stretch of steppe, the boom of ocean breakers on a shore, the crack of ice on melting steppe ponds. And, in the deepest stillness of night, he could sense the thinness of this land bridge between the continents, with the frozen ocean to the north, the pressing seas to the south: surrounded by such immense forces, the land seemed fragile indeed.

Longtusk was learning the land on a level deeper than any human. He had to know how to use it to keep him alive, as if it was an extension of his own body, as if body and land merged into a single organism, pulsing with blood and seasons. As he matured, he would come to know Earth with a careless intimacy a human could never imagine.

Once, Longtusk woke from a heavy slumber and raised his head from a snowdrift.

Snow lay heavily, blanketing the ground. But the sky was clear, glittering with stars. The mastodonts were mounds of white. Here and there, as a mastodont stirred, snow fell away, revealing a swatch of red-black hair, a questing trunk or a peering eye.

And the aurora bloomed in the sky, an immense flat sheet of light thrown there by the wind from the sun.

It started with a gush of brightness that resolved itself into a transparent curtain, green and soft pink. Slowly its rays became more apparent, and it started to surge to east and west, like the guard hairs of some immense mammoth, developing deep folds.

It appeared at different places in the sky. When the light sheet was directly above, so that Longtusk was looking up at it, he saw rays converging on a point high above his head. And when he saw it edge-on it looked like smoke, rising from the Earth. Its huge slow movements were entrancing, endlessly fascinating, and Longtusk felt a great tenderness when he gazed at it.

Mammoths — and mastodonts — believed that their spirits flew to the aurora on death, to play in the steppes of light there. He wondered how many of his ancestors were looking down on him now — and he wondered how many of his Family, scattered and lost over the curve of the Earth, were staring up at the aurora, entranced just as he was.

The aurora moved steadily north, breaking up into isolated luminous patches, like clouds.

At last the days began to lengthen, and the pale ruddy sun seemed to leak a little warmth, as if grudgingly.

Life returned to the steppe.

The top layers of the frozen ground melted, and fast-growing grasses sprouted, along with sedges, small shrubs like Arctic sagebrush, and types of pea, daisy and buttercup. The grasses grew quickly and dried out, forming a kind of natural hay, swathes of it that would be sufficient to sustain, over the summer months, the herds of giant grazing herbivores that lived there.

Early in the season a herd of bison passed, not far away. Longtusk saw a cloud of soft dust thrown high into the air, and in the midst of it the great black shapes crowded together, with their humpback shoulders and enormous black horns; their stink of sweat and dung assailed Longtusk’s acute sense of smell. And there were herds of steppe horses — their winter coats fraying, stripes of color on their flanks — skittish and nervous, running together like flocks of startled birds.

In this abundance of life, death was never far away. There were wolves and the even more ferocious dholes, lynxes, tigers and leopards: carnivores to exploit the herbivores, the moving mountains of meat. Once, near an outcrop of rock, Longtusk glimpsed the greatest predator of them all — twice the size of its nearest competitor — a mighty cave cat.