Stephen Baxter - Longtusk

The hunters cracked open her rib cage, climbed inside the body, and began to haul out more bloody organs, the heart and liver and kidneys, black lumps marbled with greasy fat.

Eviscerated, the Cow seemed to slump, hollowed.

When she was emptied, the butchers cut great slits in the Cow’s skin and began to drag it off her carcass. Where the tough hide failed to rip away easily, they used knives to cut through connective tissue to separate it from the pink flesh beneath. They chopped the separated skin into manageable slices and piled it roughly.

Then, with their axes, they began to cut away the meat from the mammoth’s bones. They started with the hindquarters, making fast and powerful cuts above the knee and up the muscle masses. Then they dug bone hooks into the meat and hauled it away, exposing white, bloody bone. The bone attachments were cut through quickly, and the bones separated.

When one side of the Cow had been stripped, the ropes were attached again and the carcass turned over, to expose the other side.

The butchers were skilled and accurate, rarely cutting into the underlying bone, and the meat fell easily from the bones, leaving little behind. They assembled the meat into one immense pile, and extracted the huge bones for another heap.

When they were done the night was well advanced, and the Cow had been reduced to silhouetted piles of flesh and flensed bones, stinking of blood and decay.

The Fireheads built a fire and threw on some of the meat until the air was full of its stink. With every expression of relish they chewed slices of fat, bloody liver, heart and tongue. Even Willow, sitting alone at the fringe of the fire’s circle of light, chewed noisily on the dark meat.

Then the hunters cracked open charred and heated bones and sucked hot, savory marrow from the latticework of hollow bone within.

And at last Longtusk understood.

"I have seen them devour the contents of such bones at the settlement."

"Yes," said Walks With Thunder. "They were mammoth bones, Longtusk. Fireheads rarely hunt mammoths. You are a big, dangerous beast, grazer, and the hunters’ reward, if their lives are spared, is more meat than they can carry. That’s why they prefer the smaller animals for food.

"But they need mammoths. For they need fat."

"The animals they hunt regularly, the deer and the horses, are lean, with blood-red meat. But you, little grazer, are replete with fat, which clings to your heart and organs and swims within your bones. The Fireheads must consume it, and they need it besides for their lamps and paints and salves, and—"

"All the years I watched them trek to the north, returning with their cargoes of great bones. All those years, and I never suspected they were mammoth… Thunder, why didn’t you tell me?"

"It was thought best," said Walks With Thunder carefully, "that you should not know. I made the decision; blame me. What good would it have done you to have known? But now—"

"But now, the Shaman wants me to see this. He is forcing me to confront the truth."

"This is your test," said Walks With Thunder. "Will you fail, Longtusk?"

Longtusk turned away. "No Firehead will defeat me."

"I hope not," Thunder said softly.

But, as it turned out, the greatest test was yet to come.

The next day the hunters walked to and fro across the frozen desert, studying tracks and traces of dung. At last they seemed to come to a decision.

The Shaman pointed north. The mastodonts were loaded up once more.

"Why?" Longtusk rumbled. "They have their bones and their marrow. What else can they want?"

"More," called Thunder grimly. "Fireheads always want more. And they think they know where to find it."

It took another day’s traveling.

The hunters grew increasingly excited, pointing out heaps of dry dung, trails that criss-crossed this dry land — and even, in one place, the skeleton of a mammoth, cleansed of its meat by the carrion eaters, its bones scattered over the dust.

…And Longtusk heard them, smelled their dung and thin urine, long before he saw them.

He rounded a low, ice-eroded hill. The land here was a muddy flat.

And around this mud seep stood mammoths.

With their high bulging heads, shoulder humps and thick straggling hair, the mammoths looked strange in Longtusk’s eyes, accustomed after so long to the sight of short, squat mastodonts; suddenly he felt acutely conscious of his own sloping back and thick hair, his difference.

But these mammoths were bedraggled, clearly in distress.

The mammoths gathered closely around holes in the ground. They reached with their trunks deep into the holes and sucked up the muddy, brackish water that oozed there.

They were jostling for the seeping water. But there wasn’t enough for everybody.

So the mammoths fought each other, wordlessly, dully, endlessly. The plain was filled with the crack of tusk on tusk, the slap of skull on flank. Calves, thin and bony, clustered around the legs of the adults, but they were pushed away harshly. The infants wailed in protest, too weak to fight for the water they needed.

Longtusk watched all this, trembling, scarcely daring to breathe. The familiarity of them — their hair, their curling tusks — was overwhelming. And yet, what was he? He was not some wretched creature grubbing in the dirt for a drop of water. But if not mammoth, what had he become? He felt himself dissolve, leaving only a blackness within.

There were perhaps forty individuals — but this was not a Family or a Clan, for there were Bulls here, closer to the Cows and calves than they would be in normal times. But these were clearly not normal times. One gaunt Cow walked across the muddy flat to a place away from the others. With nervous, hasty scrapes with her feet, she began to dig out a fresh hole. Just behind her, white flensed bones rose out from the muddy ground. She stepped carelessly on a protruding skull, cracking it.

Walks With Thunder grunted softly, "See the bones? Many have perished here already."

Longtusk quoted the Cycle: "Where water vanishes, sanity soon follows."

"Yes. But, beyond sanity, there is necessity. In times as harsh as this, mature Bulls survive, for they can travel far in search of water and food. The Cows are encumbered with their calves, perhaps unborn, and cannot flee. But they are right to push away their calves — so that those who do get water, those who survive, are those who can have more young in better times. And so the old and the young perish. Necessity… We did not come here by accident, Longtusk. The Fireheads knew they would find mammoths in this place of seeping water."

"But the mammoths would not be here in this cold desert," growled Longtusk, "if they had not been pushed so far north by the Fireheads."

Willow, the Dreamer, jumped into an abandoned hole. He picked up a pawful of mud and began to suck at it, slobbering greedily, smearing his face with the sticky black stuff. Unlike the mastodonts, the wretched Dreamer had no keeper to care for him, and was probably in as bad a condition as these starving mammoths.

Now the wind shifted. As the mastodonts’ scent reached him one of the Bull mammoths stirred, raising his muddy trunk to sniff the air. He turned, slowly, and spotted the Fireheads and their mastodonts. He rumbled a warning.

The Bulls scattered, lumbering, trumpeting their alarm. The Cows clustered, drawing their calves in close.

But the Fireheads did not approach or threaten the mammoths. They began to unload the mastodonts and to prepare a hearth.

Gradually, thirst began to overcome the mammoths’ caution. The Cows turned their attention back to the seep holes, and quickly made use of the places vacated by the Bulls. After a time, some of the Bulls came back, raising their tusks and braying a thin defiance at the mastodonts.