Stephen Baxter - Longtusk

But they weren’t here.

Now, through the smoke, he saw running creatures, silhouetted against the glow: thin, lithe, upright. They looked a little like cats. But they ran upright, as no cat did. And they seemed to carry things in their front paws. They darted back and forth, mysterious, purposeful.

Perhaps they weren’t real. Perhaps they were signs of his fear.

He felt panic rise in his chest, threatening to choke him.

He turned and faced into the smoke. He thought he could see a glow there, yellow and crimson. It was the fire itself, following the bank of smoke it created, both of them driven by the wind from the south.

Then he should run to the north, away from the fire. That must be the way the other mammoths were fleeing.

But fire — sparked by lightning strikes and driven by the incessant winds — could race across the dry land. Steppe plants grew only shallowly, and were easily and quickly consumed. Mammoths were strong, stocky, round as boulders: built for endurance, not for speed. He knew he could never outrun a steppe firestorm.

What, then?

Through his fear, he felt a pang of indignation. Was he doomed to die here, alone, in a world turned to gray and black by smoke? — he, Longtusk, the center of the universe, the most important mammoth who ever lived?

Well, if he wanted to live, he couldn’t wait around for somebody else to tell him what to do. Think, Longtusk!

The smoke seemed to clear a little. Above him, between scudding billows of smoke, the sun showed a spectral, attenuated disc.

He looked down at his feet and found he was standing in a patch of muddy ground, bare of grass and other vegetation. It was a drying river bed, the mud cut by twisted, braided channels. There was nothing to burn here; that must be why the smoke was sparse.

He looked along the line of the river. It ran almost directly south. No grass grew on this sticky, clinging mud — and where the dry driver snaked off into the smoke, the glow of the fire seemed reduced, for there was nothing to burn on this mud.

If he walked that way, southward into the face of the smoke, he would be walking toward the fire — but along a channel where the fire could not reach. Soon, surely, he would get through the smoke and the fire, and reach the cleaner air beyond.

He quailed from the idea. It went against every instinct he had — to walk into a blazing fire! But if it was the right thing to do, he must overcome his fear.

He raised his trunk at the fire and trumpeted his defiance. And, dropping his head, he began to march stolidly south.

The smoke billowed directly into his face, laced with steppe dust: hot grit that peppered his eyes and scraped in his chest. And now the fire’s crackling, rushing noise rose to a roar. He felt he would go mad with fear. But he bent his head and, doggedly, one step at a time, he continued, into the teeth of the blaze.

At last the fire roared around him, and the flames leaped, dazzling white, as they consumed the thin steppe vegetation. Only a few paces away from him grass and low trees were crackling, blackening. Tufts of burning grass and bark scraps fluttered through the air. Some of them stuck to his fur, making it smolder, and he batted them away with his trunk or his tail.

But he had been right. The fire could not reach across the mud of this river bed, and so it could not reach him.

And now there was a change. The sound of the fire seemed diminished, and he found he was breathing a little easier. Blinking, he forced open his eyes and looked down.

He was still standing in his river bed. Its surface had been dried out and cracked by the ferocious heat. To either side the ground was lifeless, marked by the smoldering stumps of ground-covering trees and the blackened remnants of grass and sedge. Near one tree he saw the scorched corpse of some small animal, perhaps a lemming, its small white bones protruding.

The stink of smoke and ash was overwhelming. The steppe, as far as he could see, had turned to a plain of scorched cinders. Smoke still curled overhead… but it was a thinning gray layer which no longer covered the sinking sun.

And there was no fire.

He felt a surge of elation. He had done it! Alone, he had worked out how to survive, and had stuck to his resolve in the face of overwhelming danger. Let Rockheart see him now! — for he, Longtusk, alone, had today faced down and beaten a much more savage and ruthless enemy than any Bull mammoth.

…Alone. The word came back to haunt him, like the distant cry of a ptarmigan, and his elation evaporated.

He turned and faced northward. The fire was a wall across the steppe, from the eastern horizon to the west. Smoke billowed up before it in huge towering heaps, shaped by the wind. It was an awesome sight, and it cut the world in two.

He hammered at the ground with his feet, his stamps calling to the mammoths, his Family. But there was no reply, no rocky echo through the Earth. Of course not; the noise of the fire would overwhelm everything else, and before it all the mammoths must be fleeing — even the greatest of them all, the Matriarch of Matriarchs, fleeing north, even farther from Longtusk.

He would have no chance to gloat of his bravery to Rockheart, or his mother, or anyone else. For everything he knew — the Family, the Clan, the bachelor herd, everything — lay on the other side of that wall of fire.

He cried out, a mournful trumpet of desolation and loneliness.

He looked down at himself. He was a sorry sight, his fur laden with mud and heavily charred. And he was hungry and thirsty — in fact he had no clear memory of the last time he’d eaten.

The sun was dipping, reddening. Night would soon be here.

The last of his elation disappeared. He had thought he had won his battle by defeating the fire. But it seemed the battle was only just begun.

There was only one way for him to go: south, away from the fire. He lowered his head and began to walk.

As he marched into deepening darkness, he tried to feed, as mammoths must. But the scorched grass and sage crumbled at his touch.

His thirst was stronger than his hunger, in fact, but he found no free-standing water. He scraped hopefully at the ground with his tusks and feet. But only a little way down, the ground grew hard and cold. This was the permafrost, the deep layer of frozen soil which never thawed, even at the height of summer. He dug his trunk into the soil and sucked hopefully, but there were only drops of moisture to be had, trapped above the ice layer.

He came across a willow. It hugged the ground, low and flat, not rising higher than his knees. He prized it up with his tusks, stripped off its bark and munched the thin, dry stuff, seeking to assuage his thirst.

He knew there were places scattered around the steppe where free-standing water lay close to the surface, even in the depths of winter, and the mammoths could crack through snow and ice to reach it. The adults knew where to find such wells of life, using a deep knowledge of the land passed on from the generations before them — but Longtusk had only begun learning about the land. Now, scraping at the mud, adrift in this blackened landscape where even the trails had been scorched out of existence, he was learning how truly helpless he was.

He walked farther. The trees grew more thickly, short, ancient willows and birches. Soon there were so many of them they covered the ground with a thick matting of branches. He was walking, in fact, on top of a forest. This dry, cold, wind-blasted land was not a place where trees could grow tall.

…He heard a hiss, deep and sibilant, somewhere behind him.

Mammoths’ necks are short and inflexible, and Longtusk had to turn all the way around — slowly, clumsily, heart hammering.