Stephen Baxter - Longtusk

Cautiously they skirted the lake, sticking to the shore.

But the land here was no longer flat. It was broken by vast bowls, like immense footprints — not of ice, Longtusk realized, but carved out of the rock itself, and coated by thin layers of ice and snow. The mammoths were forced to wend their way carefully between these craters, calling to each other when they were out of sight of one another.

Longtusk wondered what savage force had managed to punch these great wounds in the ground. This was, he thought, a strange place indeed, shaped by forces he couldn’t even guess at.

At last he came to a place where the ground was bare of snow and ice. He walked forward warily.

The ground was warm.

He walked over a gummy brown-gray mud that clung to his footpads; here and there it was streaked orange, yellow, black. The mud was littered with shallow pools of water and rivulets which ran over sticky layers of gray scum. Where snow lay on the ground, he could see how it was melting into the hot pools and streams, folding over in huge complex swathes.

In places the water was so hot it actually boiled, the steam stained a muddy gray by particles of dirt, and there was a sour, claustrophobic stink of sulfur. The steam, curling into the air, formed towers of billows and swirls, pointlessly beautiful. In fact it rose so high it blocked out the sun, like a cloud that reached from the ground to the air, and Longtusk shivered in the cold, reduced light.

He found a place some way from the steaming, active areas. He tasted the water. It was hot — not unpleasantly so — and it tasted sour, acidic. He spat it out.

Nearby was a place where it wasn’t water that boiled but mud, gray-brown and thick. The mud had built itself a chimney, thick-walled, that rose halfway to his belly like some monstrous trunk. The steam here was laced with dark gray dust that plastered itself over the walls of the fumarole. The water had bubbled with a high rushing noise, but the slurping mud made a deeper growling sound, like the agitated rumbling of old Bull mammoths arguing over some obscure point of pride.

…And there was life here.

Lichen and moss clung to the bare rock, and grass, brown and flattened, struggled to survive in swathes over ground streaked yellow by sulfur. The plants were coated with layers of ice — frosted out of the steaming, moisture-laden air — as if the plants themselves were made of ice crystals.

Curiously he reached down and plucked some of the frozen scrub. The ice crumbled away, revealing thin, brittle plant material within; he crushed it with his trunk until it was soft enough to cram into his mouth. It was thin on his tongue, but nourishing.

His heart pulsed with hope and vindication. It was a harsh, unnatural place, he thought, a place of steamy claustrophobic heat and rushing noise in the middle of the stillness of this perpetual winter — but this was the nunatak, just as Thunder’s legend had promised. He trumpeted in triumph -

But somebody was calling.

Rockheart had fallen. The Cows had clustered around him, while Threetusk and Willow stood to one side, awkward, distressed.

Longtusk hurried down the slope.

Rockheart had slumped to his knees, and his trunk drooped on the muddy ground. His breath was a rattle.

"Rockheart! What happened? Why did you fall?"

His rumbled reply was as soft as a calf’s mewling. "We made it, milk-tusk, didn’t we? By Kilukpuk’s dugs, you were right…"

And Longtusk saw it. Rockheart — understanding that Longtusk would need his experience, knowing he was too weak for the trip — had come anyway, burning up the last of his energy. He had driven the others on until they had reached this island of rocky safety.

And now he could rest at last.

Convulsed by guilt, Longtusk picked up Rockheart’s trunk. "Rockheart! You mustn’t — not now —"

But it was too late. Rockheart’s last breath bubbled out of his lungs, and he slumped to the warm rock, lifeless.

Longtusk trumpeted his grief, and his voice echoed from the rocky walls of the nunatak.

It was a fine bright spring morning, one of the first after the long winter. The nunatak was a bowl of black rock and green life under a blue-white sky.

Everywhere mammoths grazed.

Longtusk was working on his favorite patch of willow, which grew in the lee of a pile of sharp-edged volcanic boulders. The adults knew he favored this spot, and left the miniature forest for him.

But the calves were another matter.

The calf called Saxifrage was playing with her mother, Horsetail, Longtusk’s niece. Horsetail lay on her side, her trunk flopping, while Saxifrage tried to clamber onto her flank, pulling herself up by grasping the long furs of her mother’s belly.

When she spotted Longtusk, Saxifrage gave up her game, jumped off and approached the old tusker.

But her attention was distracted by a length of broken tusk, snapped off by some young male in an over-vigorous fight. Perhaps she had never come across such a thing before. She picked it up and began to inspect it. She grabbed it with her trunk, turned it over, and rubbed it against the underside of her trunk, making a rasping sound against the rough skin there. She put it in her mouth, chewed it carefully, and turned it over with her tongue. Then she threw it in the air and let it fall to the ground several times, listening intently to the way it rattled on the ground. At last she walked over it and touched it delicately with the tender soles of her hind feet.

Longtusk was entranced.

He couldn’t help contrast the calf’s deep physical exploration of the unfamiliar object with the way a Firehead cub would study something new — just looking at it. For a mammoth calf, the look of something was only the most superficial aspect of it: the beginning of getting to know the object, not the end.

Longtusk rumbled softly. Even after so long in the nunatak, such behaviors still charmed and fascinated him. He’d spent too much of his life away from his own kind, he thought sadly, and that had left scars on his soul that would never, surely, be healed. He wondered if there was anything more important in the world than to watch a new-born calf with her mother, lapping at a stream with her tongue, too young even to know how to use her trunk to suck up water…

Now Saxifrage recalled he was there. She abandoned the tusk fragment and ran to him, dashing under his belly.

He tried to turn, but his legs were stiff as tree-trunks nowadays, his great tusks so heavy they made his head droop if he wasn’t careful; and in his rheumy vision the calf was just a blur of orange-brown fur, running around his feet and under his grizzled belly hair.

As the calf made another pass he looped down his trunk, grabbed her around the waist and lifted her high in the air, ignoring the protests from his neck muscles. She trumpeted her delight, a thin noise just at the edge of his hearing.

He set her down before him once more, and she stepped through the forest of his curling tusks. Her calf fur was orange, bright against his own guard hairs, blackened and gray with age.

She said, "Longtusk, I’m going to be your mate."

He snorted. "I’d be impressed if I hadn’t heard you say the same thing to that old buffer Threetusk yesterday."

"I didn’t! Anyway I didn’t mean it. Why do they call him Threetusk? He only has two tusks, a big one and that spindly little one."

"Well, that’s a long story," said Longtusk. "You see, long ago — long before you were born, even before Threetusk became the leader of the bachelor herd, in fact — he got in an argument with one of his sons, called Barktrunk—"

"Why was he called that?"

"It doesn’t matter."