Stephen Baxter - Longtusk

Something startled the birds. Ducks and swans rose from the water, a racket of rattling, snapping wings, leaving behind the barking, flightless geese. The birds caught the light, and they seemed to glow against the dull gray of the sky, as if burning from within. There were actually many flocks, he realized, passing to and fro in a great lattice above him, as if he were standing at the bottom of an ocean through which these birds swam.

And he was still utterly, desolately, alone. He wished his Family were here.

…There was a splashing sound, a little way out from the lake shore. He turned slowly. He saw motion, a ripple on the water, but his eyes were too poor to make out anything more clearly.

The splashing creature stood up in the water on its two hind legs: upright, ungainly, brushing drops from the hair on its head. It was his friend of yesterday. It had discarded its furs; they lay in a neat pile on the shore. And now Longtusk could clearly see that it — he — was a male. His body was coated by a fine light brown hair; wet, it lay flat against the contours of his body. There was an odd patch of discoloration on his face, a jagged line across his cheek like the aurora’s subtle curtain. Perhaps it was a birthmark, Longtusk speculated.

He was pushing a twig of some kind — Longtusk thought it was willow — into his mouth and expertly swiveling it around with his paw. Perhaps he was cleaning out his teeth.

Willow, he thought. That’s what I will call this odd little creature. Willow.

Longtusk didn’t like to admit to himself how pleased he was to see a familiar creature.

Willow let the water drain from his eyes — and he saw Longtusk clearly, standing placidly on the shore only a few paces away.

He yelped in shock, and glanced over at his pile of furs. There was a pointed stick resting there — perhaps the one he had used yesterday against the cat — but it was much too far away to reach.

But of course Longtusk meant him no harm. And when he realized this, after long heartbeats, Willow seemed to relax.

With much splashing, Willow made his way through the water to Longtusk. He reached out to scratch the mammoth’s trunk hair as he had the day before. His mouth issued a stream of incomprehensible grunts; his row of teeth shone white in the morning sun.

Willow’s face was round, all but bare of the light hair that coated the rest of his muscular body. His skull was long, and black hair dangled from it as from the belly of a mammoth. His nose was broad and deep, and his face seemed to protrude, almost as if it had been pulled forward by his great nostrils. His eyes gleamed like lumps of amber beneath huge bony forehead ridges.

He lifted his willow stick and offered it to Longtusk. For an instant the stubby fingers at the end of Longtusk’s trunk touched Willow’s palm, and Willow snatched back his paw with a frightened yelp. But then he held the stick forward again, and let Longtusk take it.

Longtusk had never seen Willow’s kind before, but now, in the light of day, his mind more clear, he knew what this creature was.

These were not Fireheads, but the cousins of Fireheads. The mammoths called them Dreamers.

Dreamers could be found in little pockets of habitation around the landscape, rarely traveling far from their homes. They would sometimes scavenge dead mammoths, but unlike other predators they were little threat.

And there were very few of them. Once — it was said in the Cycle — the Dreamers had covered the world. Now they were rarely encountered.

Willow ran his little paws through the long hairs on Longtusk’s flank and back. When he probed at the broken flesh there, Longtusk couldn’t help but flinch and growl. Willow stumbled back, his paws coated with blood and dirt.

The Dreamer cupped his paws and began to ladle water over Longtusk’s back. As blood and dirt was washed away, the pain was clear and sharp, but Longtusk made himself stand stock still.

Then Willow bent over and dug. He straightened up with his paws full of black, sticky lake-bottom mud. He began to cake this liberally over Longtusk’s wounds. Again this hurt — especially as the little Dreamer couldn’t see what he was doing, and frequently poked a finger into a raw wound. But already Longtusk could feel how the thick mud was soothing the ache of his injuries.

There was a guttural shout from the shore. Both Longtusk and Willow turned.

It was another Dreamer, like Willow. But this one was much taller — presumably an adult, probably a male — and it, he, was dressed in thick heavy furs. There was no hair on the top of his long boulder-shaped head, which was marked with strange stripes of red and yellow.

Stripeskull, Longtusk thought.

Stripeskull had a pointed stick in his paw. This was no skinny sapling as Willow had carried, but a thick wooden shaft, its tip cruelly sharp and blackened by fire — and even Willow’s little stick had been enough to bring down a cat, Longtusk recalled. Stripeskull’s muscles bulged, and Longtusk had no doubt he would be able to hurl that stick hard enough to slice right through Longtusk’s thick skin.

But Willow ran out of the lake, dripping glistening water, waving his forelegs in the air. Stripeskull was obviously angry and frightened — but he was hesitating, Longtusk saw.

The huge adult grabbed Willow’s arm in one mighty paw and pulled him away from the lake. Again he raised his stick at Longtusk and jabbered something complex and angry. Then he turned and retreated toward the fire cave, dragging Willow with him.

Willow looked back once. Longtusk wondered if he could read regret, even longing, in the little one’s manner.

It didn’t matter. For Longtusk, of course, had no place here. Sadly he started to work his way out through the boulders and scree to the higher ground, seeking food.

In the days that followed, Longtusk walked far and wide.

It wasn’t particularly surprising that this land was so unfamiliar to him. It was an unpromising, ugly place, all but barren — not a place for mammoths. There seemed to be a sheet of hard black rock that underlay much of the land; here and there the rock broke to the surface, and in those places nothing grew save a few hardy lichen. Even where the rock was buried it had pushed the permafrost closer to the surface, and little could grow in the thin layer of moist soil on top.

Longtusk was a big animal, and he needed to find a great deal of fodder every day. Soon he had to walk far to find a place beyond his own trample marks and decaying spoor.

Still he saw no sign of any other mammoth: no trails, no spoor save his own. He tried trumpeting, rumbling and stamping. His sensitive ears picked up only the distant howl of wolves, the slow grind of the ice sheet to the north, the moan of chill air spilling down from the North Pole.

And winter was drawing in rapidly, the days shriveling and the nights turning into long, cold, star-frosted deserts of darkness. It was a winter Longtusk knew he would be lucky to survive, alone.

Though he roamed far, he was drawn back to the lake and the cave. After all the only being in his world who had shown him any kindness was the Dreamer cub, Willow. It was hard to leave that behind.

There was more than one cave, in fact. There was a whole string of them, right along the river bank and lake shore, gaping mouths in the rock from which the Dreamers would emerge, daily, to do their chores.

Longtusk watched them.

The males would seek out meat. With their long blackened sticks they hunted smaller animals like reindeer and red deer. They generally ignored the larger animals, like horses and aurochs. But they would often scavenge meat from an animal brought down by some more fierce predator, chasing away the hyenas and condors, slicing at the carcass with pieces of stone they held in their paws.