Stephen Baxter - Longtusk

He felt no triumph, no relief: only numbness.

Something protruded from her skull.

It was wood, a long, straight branch. It had been stripped of bark, and one end narrowed to a sharp tip. The tip looked blackened, as if it had been in a fire; but it was evidently hard, hard as a tusk — for it had pierced the cat’s skull, passing through a neat puncture in her temple and out the other side. The flying stick had knocked her out of her spring; she had probably been dead, he realized, even before she collided with the rock.

There was a rustle a few paces away.

Startled, he reared up and trumpeted.

There was something out there on the darkling plain. Something small, purposeful.

He was surprised to find he still had some fear left inside him, a small bubble of it that rose to the surface of his mind, despite his exhaustion.

But this was no cat. It walked upright, on its hind legs.

It was shorter than Longtusk, but it looked strong, with muscled legs and a broad chest. Its head was large with a wide fleshy nose, and a low brow made of caves of bone from which brown eyes peered suspiciously at Longtusk. Short black hair was matted on the creature’s head, and it had fur over its body — not its own fur, Longtusk realized with a shock, but scraps of skin from animals, deer and bison and even fox, somehow joined together.

The two of them stared at each other.

Fragments of lore drifted through Longtusk’s mind. They walk upright. They wear the skin of other creatures. There is no fighting them; only flight is possible…

This creature walked upright, like a Firehead. Was it possible?…

But Longtusk felt no fear now. He seemed exhausted, done with fear.

The strange beast, cautiously, walked forward on its hind legs toward the cat. Longtusk wondered how it kept from toppling over. It wrapped its big front paws around the pointed stick, stepped on the cat’s inert head, and pulled hard. With some reluctance, the stick slid out of the cat’s skull.

Then, watching Longtusk, the creature jabbed with the stick at the cat’s head.

Showing him what it had done.

Slowly Longtusk understood. This creature had thrown the stick through the air, driven it by sheer strength and accuracy into the head of the cat — and thereby saved Longtusk’s life.

If this was a Firehead, it meant Longtusk no harm. Perhaps it was not a Firehead, but something else, something like a Firehead, a lesser threat.

Longtusk seemed unable to think it through, to pick through bits of half-remembered lore.

The creature walked closer to Longtusk. Its head moved back and forth, side to side, and its eyes were bright and curious, even though it was obviously nervous of the mammoth’s great tusks. It worked its mouth and a strange complex growl emerged.

Then it reached out with one of its bare front paws, and, leaning within the radius of the tusks, stroked the long furs on Longtusk’s trunk. Longtusk flinched, but he was beyond fear now, and he submitted to the contact. The creature passed its fingers down through Longtusk’s matted hair, the motion oddly soothing.

But the paw came away sticky with blood, and the creature looked at Longtusk with renewed concern.

It took its stick and began to walk away. A few paces from Longtusk, it paused and looked back.

Longtusk looked down at the shadowy form of the dead cat. Though the rock would provide him with shelter, he had no desire to stay here. This sinuous corpse, still leaking blood, would surely soon attract more predators, hyenas and foxes and maybe even other cats, before the condors descended on what was left of the carcass.

The light was all but gone, and the wind was rising.

He looked up. The upright creature was still waiting, looking back. And Longtusk had no real choice.

Slowly they walked into the night, the woolly mammoth following the Neanderthal boy.

They came to a shallow river valley, where running water — perhaps a tributary of the dried-out stream that had saved Longtusk from the fire — had cut its way into the hard black rock of the ground.

The upright creature scrambled down a heap of frost-shattered scree. It reached a hole of deeper darkness cut into the hillside. It was a cave, Longtusk realized.

And a glimmer of ruddy light came from within it.

Longtusk was baffled. How could there be light inside a cave, a place of shadows?

…And now Longtusk’s sharp sense of smell detected the tang of smoke, carried on the light evening breeze, and he understood the source of that strange inner glow.

Fire. His upright friend had walked into fire — maybe a nest of true Fireheads!

Longtusk stood there on the river bank, torn by conflicting impulses. Should he flee, or should he rush down the bank and pull out his friend, saving the squat little creature as it had saved him from the she-cat?

But his friend had gone into the cave willingly, with no sign of fear.

The sun had not yet risen since Longtusk had been separated from his Family. And yet already he had endured a blizzard of new experiences. Perhaps this new vision, of fire within a cave, was simply one more strangeness he must strive to understand.

But none of that mattered. It was almost completely dark now. He was hungry, tired, thirsty — and alone once more.

Using his trunk to feel his way, he worked through the rocks to the edge of the river. He walked farther, following the stream. The river bed shallowed, and he sensed a lake opening out before him: a scent of cold fresh water, a soft sweep of wind across an expansive surface. At the edge of the lake, lying along the shallow beach, he found great linear heaps of feathers left by molting ducks and geese.

When he waded into the water its icy cold struck through the layers of fur on his legs, and he almost cried out from the pain of the wounds inflicted by the cat. But as the water lifted off the caked blood and dirt, the sharp pain turned to a wider ache, and he sensed the start of healing.

He took a trunkful of water and lifted it to his mouth; it was cool and delicious, and he drank again and again, assuaging a thirst he had nursed since the terrible moments of the fire.

He retreated to the tumbled rocks of the shore. He found a gap between two tall rock faces. He nestled there and, trying to ignore the continuing cold ache of his back and legs, waited for sleep to claim him.

In the morning, with the low sun glowing red through the last of yesterday’s smoke, he made his way out of his rock cleft and down to the water. Near the lake, the water and air and land were full of birds: many species of geese, ducks, even swans on the water, blackbirds and sparrows on the marshy land, and occasional hunters — hawks, kestrels. The short summer was ending, a time when the birds swarmed to breeding grounds like this.

A flock of geese floated on the water, a huge raft of them. They had shed all their flight feathers at once, a great catastrophic molt that had left them temporarily unable to fly, as they put all their energy into breeding and raising young and storing fat for the return journey to their winter lands in the south. All of this had to be completed in just forty or fifty days, before the snow and ice clamped down on the land again.

The rocks were covered by a fine hoar frost, so slippery that even the heavy, wrinkled pads of his feet could not find a firm footing. There was no food to be had here. Nothing grew on these rocks and pebbles and scree, all of it regularly inundated by the flooding lake, save lichen and weed. He knew, gloomily, he would have to travel far today to find the fodder he needed.

But yesterday had depleted him. The wounds on his back ached badly, and he wondered if they were festering. He felt dizzy, oddly hollow, and his eyes were gritty and sore.