Stephen Baxter - Longtusk

But here was Rockheart, the last to pledge his commitment to the trek: "You won’t get through a day without me to show you the way, you overfed milk-tusk." Longtusk’s spirit rose as he looked at the huge tusker — gaunt and bony, but a great slab of strength and determination and wisdom.

Now Rockheart raised his trunk. "You taste that?"

"Salt water. Blown from the sea…"

"Yes," said Rockheart. "But it comes from both north and south."

The mammoths would cross the land bridge between Asia and America much too close to its central line for Longtusk to be able to see the encroaching oceans to north and south. But sight is the least of a mammoth’s senses, and, on this bright clear day, Longtusk could taste the traces of salt spray in the air, hear the rush of wind over the ocean, sense the crash of breakers on the twin shorelines.

The neck of land they had to cross seemed fragile to him, easily sundered, and he wondered again about the wisdom of what they were attempting.

But this was no time for doubt.

"From the old land to the new," he said boldly.

"From old to new," Rockheart rumbled.

Longtusk began to march to the east. He could feel the powerful footsteps of the others as they followed him.

It had begun.

To show his own determination he chose to lead, that first day.

But at the start of the second day, without a word, he quietly deferred to Rockheart, letting the old tusker, with his superior instincts and understanding of the country, go first. That decision paid off many times — especially after the mammoth trails petered out, and the land became increasingly broken and unpredictable.

Willow preferred to walk during the day; it kept him strong and alert. But the mammoths, needing little sleep, would walk through much of the night, and then Willow would ride on Longtusk’s back, muttering his strange dreams. The other mammoths watched in suspicious amazement, unable to understand how a mammoth could allow such a squat little creature onto his back.

There were animals here: musk oxen, horses, bison, even camels, passing in great herds on the horizon. They glimpsed some carnivores — wolves, lions, a saber-tooth cat that sent a shudder of recognition through Longtusk, and a short-faced bear, fat and ugly, which came lumbering from a limestone cave. The predators watched them pass, silently speculating after the manner of their kind, seeking weakness among potential prey.

They saw no other mammoths, no Fireheads, no Dreamers.

They paused to rest and feed in an isolated island of steppe vegetation: a mosaic of grass with flowering plants and herbs like marsh marigolds, harebells and golden saxifrage, and sparse trees like ground willow, few reaching higher than a mammoth’s belly hair.

At Longtusk’s feet, a small face peered out of a burrow. It was a collared lemming. The little rodent, seeing that the mammoths meant him no harm, crawled out of his burrow and began to nibble at the base of an Arctic lupine.

Longtusk realized sadly that, like the mammoths, the vanishing steppe was the lemmings’ only true home. But the lemming’s mind, though sharp, was too small for him to discuss the issue.

Mammoth and lemming briefly regarded each other. Then the lemming ducked beneath the ground once more.

A few more days’ walking brought them to a more mountainous region. To the north there was the sharp tang of ice in the air, and when he looked that way Longtusk saw a small, isolated icecap, a gleaming dome that nestled among the mountains. It was shrinking as the world warmed; it might once have been part of a much more extensive formation.

Then they came to a place where the traveling became much more difficult. Longtusk, as the strongest, took the lead.

The land here was cut through by deep channels. These gouges ran from north to south, and so across their eastward path. Longtusk found himself having to climb down crumbling slopes into the beds of the channels, and then up ridges on the far side, over and over. The channels seemed to have been cut right down to the rock, and there was only thin soil and scanty vegetation, broken by dunes of coarse sand and ridges of gravel. There was little water to be had, for the soil was shallow. But there was thicker growth on the top of the ridges — some of which, surrounded by the deep valleys, had smooth outlines, like the bodies of fish.

Standing on top of such a ridge, cropping the sparse grass wearily, Longtusk looked about at the strange pattern of the land. It was like a dried-up river bed, he thought, a tracery of runnels and ridges in mud, cutting across each other so they were braided like hair, gouged out and worn smooth by running water.

But this was broader than any river valley he had ever seen. And most of the top soil and loose rock had been torn away, right down to the bedrock. If a river had ever run here it must have been wider and far more powerful than any he had encountered before.

To the north the bedrock rose, great shoulders of hard volcanic rock pushing up to either side of this channeled plain. He saw that the rocky shoulders came together in a narrow cleft. Ice gleamed white there, blocking the cleft. But it was from that cleft that these strange deep channels seemed to run.

When he raised his trunk that way he could smell water: fresh water, a vast body of it, beyond that cleft in the rock.

The mammoths discussed this briefly. The ice wedge was less than a day’s walk away, and if there was water to be had the detour was surely worth the investment of their time. And besides, Longtusk admitted to himself, he was piqued by curiosity; he would like to know the story of this distorted, damaged land.

They followed one of the wider channels toward the ice plug, their muscles working steadily as the land rose.

At last Longtusk topped a ridge of rock, and he was able to look beyond the cleft and its plug of ice.

There was a lake here. It was broad and placid, and it lay in a natural hollow in the land. The water was fringed by rock and ice: the plug of ice that barred it from the damaged lands to the south, and by the shrinking icecap which lay at its northern end.

The mammoths walked cautiously down to the lake’s gravel-strewn fringe. The water was ice cold, but they sucked it into their trunks gratefully. Threetusk and the young Cows splashed out into the water, playfully blowing trunkfuls of it over each other. After a time they loped clumsily out of the water, their breath steaming, their outer fur crackling with frost.

Willow, too, made the best of the water. He threw off his furs and scampered, squat and naked, into the lake. He cried out at the cold, but immersed himself and scrubbed at the thick hair on his belly and head with bits of soft stone, getting rid of the insects that liked to make their homes there.

There seemed to be little vegetation in this placid pool. But there were signs of life by the shore, holes dug by rabbits and voles and lemmings in the long grass that fringed the water’s edge. And birds wheeled overhead, ducks and gulls.

"…But there are no fish here," said Rockheart. "Strange."

"But no fish could reach this place," Longtusk said thoughtfully.

At the lake’s northern shore, the ice gave directly onto the lake, making a cliff that gleamed white. There was a constant scrape and groan from all across the ice cliff, and Longtusk could see icebergs, small islands of blue-white ice, drifting away from the cliff. The lake water looked black beside the blinding white of the ice.

It was obvious that the ice was flowing from its mountain fastness, with hideous slowness, down toward the lake. And where the ice met the water the icebergs were calving off, great fragments of the disintegrating ice sheet.