Stephen Baxter - Longtusk

"There are fewer of us now, and I suppose in the future there will be fewer still. But we persist. We have before."

"What do you mean?"

Rockheart eyed him. "You’ve been away too long. Have you forgotten so much of your Cycle?"

As winter followed summer, so the Earth had greater seasons, spanning the Great-Years. In the long winters the ice would spread, freezing the land and the air, and the mammoths could fill the expanding Steppe. Now it seemed the Earth’s unwelcome spring was returning, and the steppe was overrun by forests and grass — and the mammoths had to retreat, waiting out the return of the cold, as they had many times before.

It was a time of hardship. But it would pass. That was the teaching of the Cycle. The ice had come and gone for more than two million years, and the mammoths had survived all the intervals of warmth in that immense stretch of time.

…But now Longtusk thought of the Fireheads: clustered around the mud seep, waiting for mammoths to die.

There were no Fireheads in the Cycle. There had been no Fireheads in the world when last the ice had retreated and advanced.

He had been away from his kind a long time, and he didn’t presume to doubt Rockheart’s ancient wisdom. But his experience, he was realizing slowly, was wider than the old tusker’s. He had seen more of the world and its ways — and he had seen the Fireheads.

And he did not feel so confident that the future could be the same as the past.

He kept these thoughts to himself as they pushed on.

As night closed in the clouds thickened, and the wind from the icecap was harsh. Longtusk and Rockheart huddled close around Splayfoot, trying to shelter her and give her a little of their own sparse body heat; and Longtusk allowed the Dreamer to curl up under his belly fur.

Every so often Longtusk would rouse Splayfoot and force her to walk around. He knew that there was a core of heat inside the body of each mammoth, a flicker of life and mind that must be fed like the hearths of the Fireheads. If the cold penetrated too deep, if that flame of life was extinguished, it could never be ignited again.

Splayfoot responded passively, barely conscious.

In the morning they resumed their dogged walking, following Rockheart’s trail.

But soon the light changed.

Longtusk raised his trunk, sniffing the air. He could smell moisture, rain or maybe snow, and the wind was veering, coming now strongly from the east. Looking that way he saw black clouds bubbling frothily.

There was a thin honking, a soft flap of wings far above him. Birds, he saw dimly, perhaps geese, fleeing from the east, away from the coming storm. He recalled what Walks With Thunder had told him of the eastern lands, where the icecap pushed far to the south. And he recalled Thunder’s obscure, half-forgotten legends of a land embedded in the ice — a place that stayed warm enough to keep off the snow, even in the depths of winter. The nunatak.

He wondered how far those birds had flown — all the way from the nunatak itself? But how could such a place exist?

The storm was rising, and he put the speculation from his mind. But he memorized the way those geese had flown, adding their track to the dynamic map of the landscape that he, like all mammoths, carried in his head.

By mid-morning the storm had hit.

The sky became a sheet of scudding gray-black clouds, utterly hiding the sun. The wind blew from the east with relentless ferocity, and carried before it a mix of snow, hail and rain, battering their flesh hard enough to sting. Soon they were all soaked through, bedraggled, weary, their fur plastered flat, lifting their feet from one deep muddy footprint into another.

Longtusk let Rockheart lead the way, and Willow followed Rockheart, clinging to his belly fur, his small round face hidden from the wind and rain. Longtusk plodded steadily after Rockheart, being careful never to let the big tusker out of his sight, even though it meant he walked so close he was treading in Rockheart’s thin, foul-smelling dung. And behind Longtusk came Splayfoot, still weak, barely able to see, clinging onto Longtusk’s tail with her trunk like a calf following its mother, as sheltered as he could manage.

But when the eye of the storm approached, the wind started to swirl around. Soon Longtusk, disoriented, couldn’t tell east from west, north from south — and couldn’t even see the trail. But Rockheart led them confidently, probing at the muddy ground with his trunk, seeking bits of old dung and the remnants of footprints, traces that marked the trail.

And it was while the storm was still raging that they came upon the mammoths.

They looked like a clump of boulders, round and solid, plastered with soaked hair. Longtusk saw those great heads rise, tusks dripping with water, and trunks lifted into the air, sniffing out the approach of these strangers. There were a few greeting rumbles for Rockheart and Splayfoot, nothing but suspicious glares for Longtusk.

There were perhaps fifteen of them — probably just a single Family, adult Cows and older calves. The Cows were clustered around a tall, gaunt old female, presumably the Matriarch, and the calves were sheltered under their belly hair and legs.

Longtusk could see no infants. Perhaps they were at the center of the group, out of his sight.

Rockheart lurched off the trail and led them toward the mammoths. Longtusk hadn’t even been aware of the changes in the land around the trail. But now he saw grass, what looked like saxifrage, even a stand of dwarf willow clinging to the rock. It was an island of steppe in this cold desert of rock and glacial debris, just as Rockheart had described.

Willow found a shallow water hole, some distance from the mammoths, and went that way. Some of the mammoths watched him lethargically, too weak or weary to be concerned.

Rockheart and Splayfoot lumbered forward and were welcomed into the huddle with strokes of trunk and deeper, contented rumbles. Longtusk hesitated, left outside — outside, as he had been as a mammoth among mastodonts, as he had been as a mammoth at the cave of the Dreamers, and now outside even in this community of mammoths.

Longtusk dredged up memories of his life with his Family, before that terrible separation. He recalled how the adults seemed so tall, their strength so huge, their command imposing, even their stink powerful. Now these wretched, bedraggled creatures seemed diminished; none of them, not even the old Matriarch at the center, was taller than he was.

Light flared, noise roared. There was a sudden blaze to Longtusk’s right, and the mammoths, startled, trumpeted, clustered, tried to run.

It was lightning, he realized, a big blue bolt. It had struck out of the low clouds and set fire to an isolated spruce tree. The tree was burning, and the stink of smoke carried to his trunk — but there was no danger; already the fire was being doused by the continuing rain.

The other mammoths had raised their trunks suspiciously at Longtusk.

He hadn’t reacted. It was only lightning, an isolated blaze; in his years with the Fireheads he’d learned that fire, if contained, was nothing to fear. But he realized now that the others — even the powerful Bull Rockheart — had shown their instinctive fear.

"…He did not run from the fire. He didn’t even flinch."

"Look how fat he is, how tall. None of us grows fat these days."

"See the burn on his flank. The shape of a Firehead paw…"

"He came with that little Dreamer."

"He stinks of fire. And of Fireheads. That is why he wasn’t afraid."

"He isn’t natural…"

But now the gaunt older Cow he had tagged as the Matriarch broke out of the group. Cautiously, ears spread and trunk raised, she approached him. Her hair was slicked down and blackened by the rain.