Stephen Baxter - Longtusk

Milkbreath grabbed his trunk, angry and embarrassed. "Wisdom comes to all of us with age. But some are born wise. Wouldn’t you expect that the Matriarch of Matriarchs, the wisest of all, would be special? Wouldn’t you?"

"I don’t know…"

"You’re so much trouble to me, Longtusk! Always wandering off or getting under my feet or fighting with your sister or embarrassing me — sometimes I wish you were still in my belly, like this little one." She stroked the heavy bulge under her belly fur.

Longtusk fumed silently.

Splayfoot came galloping up to him. His sister was a knot of fat and orange fur, with a trunk like a worm and tusks like lemming bones, and her face was rounded and smoothed-out, as if unfinished. This was her first summer, and her new-born coat of coarse underfur and light brown overfur was being replaced by thicker and longer fur — though it would be her second year before her coarse guard hairs began to appear. "You’re so much trouble, Longtusk," she squeaked up at him gleefully. She started butting his legs with her little domed forehead. "I’ll be Matriarch and you won’t. Then I’ll tell you what to do!"

He rumbled and raised his huge tusks over her head, meaning to frighten her.

The calf squealed and ran to her mother, who tucked Splayfoot under her belly. "Will you leave this little one alone?"

"It wasn’t my fault!" Longtusk protested. "She started it…"

But Milkbreath had turned away. Splayfoot burrowed at her mother’s chest, seeking her dugs. But Milkbreath had little milk. So, with a deep belch, she regurgitated grass and with gentle kisses fed the warm, pulped stuff to her daughter.

As she fed, Splayfoot peered out from under a fringe of fur, mocking him silently.

It wasn’t so long since Milkbreath had fed him that way, murmuring about how important it was for him to eat the food that had been inside his mother’s belly, for it contained marvelous substances that would help him digest. It hardly seemed any time at all.

And now look at him: pushed away, snapped at, ignored.

He stomped away, not looking back, not caring which way he went.

He came to a track.

It was a strip of bare brown ground a little wider than his own body. Where the muddy ground was firm he could see the round print left by the tough, cracked skin of a mammoth’s sole, a spidery, distinctive map.

He turned and followed the trail, curious to find where it might lead.

To human eyes the mammoth steppe would have looked featureless. It was an immense plain that swept over the north of Eurasia, across the land bridge of Beringia and into North America. But to a mammoth it was as crowded with landmarks as any human city: rubbing trees, wallows, rich feeding areas, salt licks, water holes. And these key sites were linked by trails worn by centuries of mammoth footsteps, trails embedded deep in the mind of every adult Bull and Cow, patiently taught to the calves of each new generation.

Indeed, the land itself was shaped by the mammoths, who tore out trees and trampled the ground where they passed. Other creatures lived in the shadow of the mammoths: depending on the trails they made, using the water sources they opened up with their intelligence and strength. Even the plants, in their mindless way, relied on the scattering of their seeds over great ranges in mammoth dung. Without mammoths, the steppe would not have persisted.

Longtusk stomped through his world, still angry, obsessed. But he thought over the Matriarchs’ conversation: Fireheads and Lost and huge global changes…

He had never seen the Fireheads himself, but he’d met adults who claimed they had. The Fireheads — said to be ferocious predators, creatures of sweeping, incomprehensible danger — seemed real enough, and every young mammoth was taught at a very early age that the only response to a Firehead was to flee.

But the Lost were something else: figures of legend, a deep terror embedded at the heart of the Cycle — the nemesis of the mammoths.

It all seemed unlikely to Longtusk. The mammoths were spread in enormous herds right around the world, and even the great cats feared them. What could possibly destroy them?

And besides, his curiosity was pricked.

Why were all these changes happening now? How quickly would they happen? And why did the world have to become a harder place when he was alive? Why couldn’t he have lived long ago, in a time of calm and plenty?

And, most important of all, why didn’t anybody take him seriously?

Oh, he knew that there came a time when every Bull became restless with his Family; sooner or later all Bulls leave to seek out the company of other males in the bachelor herds, to learn to fight and strut and compete. But it didn’t do him any good, here and now, to know that; and it drove him crazy when all this was patiently explained to him by some smug, pitying aunt or cousin.

After an unmeasured time he paused and looked back. Preoccupied, he hadn’t been paying much attention where he walked; now he found he’d come so far he couldn’t see the mammoths any more.

He heard a thin howl, perhaps of a wolf. He suffered a heartbeat of panic, which he sternly suppressed.

So he had left them behind. What of it? He was a full-grown Bull — nearly — and he could look out for himself. Perhaps this was his time to leave his Family — to begin the serious business of life.

Anyhow — he told himself — he was pretty sure he could find his way back if he needed to.

With a renewed sense of purpose — and with those twinges of fear firmly pushed to the back of his mind — he set off once more.

He came to a river bank.

Mammoths had been here recently. The muddy ground close to the river’s edge was bare of life, pitted by footprint craters, and the trees were sparse and uniformly damaged, branches smashed, trunks splintered and pushed over.

The water was cold. This was probably a run-off stream, coming from a melting glacier to the north. He sucked up a trunkful of water and held it long enough to take off its first chill. Then he raised his trunk and let the water trickle into his mouth.

He pushed farther along the cold mud of the bank. It wasn’t easy going. The river had cut itself a shallow valley which offered some protection from the incessant steppe winds. As a result spruce trees grew unusually dense and tall here, and their branches clutched at him as he passed, so that he left behind clumps of ginger hair.

Then, through the trees, he glimpsed a gleam of tusks, a curling trunk, an unmistakable profile.

It was another mammoth: a massive Bull, come here to drink as he had.

Longtusk worked his way farther along the bank.

The Bull, unfamiliar to Longtusk, eyed him with a vague, languid curiosity. He would have towered over any human observer, as much as three meters tall at his shoulder.

And he towered over Longtusk.

"My name," the Bull rumbled, "is Rockheart."

"I’m Longtusk," he replied nervously. "And I—"

But the Bull had already turned away, his trunk hosing up prodigious volumes of water.

The Bull’s high, domed head was large, a lever for his powerful jaw and a support for the great trunk that snaked down before him. He had a short but distinct neck, a cylinder of muscle supporting that massive head. His shoulders were humped by a mound of fat, and his back sloped sharply down toward the pelvis at the base of his spine. His tusks curled before him, great spirals of ivory chipped and scuffed from a lifetime of digging and fighting.

And his body, muscular, stocky, round, was coated by hair: great lengths of it, dark orange and brown, that hung like a skirt from his belly, down over his legs to the horny nails on his swollen pads of feet, and even in long beard-like fringes from his chin and trunk. His tail, raised slightly, was short, but more hair made it a long, supple insect whisk. His ears were small, tucked back close to his head, all but lost in the great mass of hair there.