"Thunder — you are in musth!"
He rumbled deeply. It was the musth call, she realized. Without understanding it he was calling to oestrus Cows, if any had been here to listen. "I thought I was ill."
"Not ill." She stroked the temporal glands on both sides of his head. They were swollen. "You are sore here." Gently she lifted his trunk and had him coil it so it rested on its tusks. "That will relieve the pressure on one side of your face at least."
"Icebones, what is happening to me? I roam around this Gouge listening, but I don’t know what for. The Cows keep their distance from me — even you.
It was true, she realized. She had responded to his calls without thinking. She said carefully, "Musth means that you are ready to mate. Your smell, and the rumbles you make, announce your readiness to any receptive Cows. The aggression you feel is meant to be turned on other Bulls, for Bulls must always fight to prove they are fit to sire calves. But here there are no Bulls for you to fight — none save Woodsmoke, and you have shown the correct restraint."
He growled, "But there are Cows."
"None of us is in oestrus, Thunder," she said gently. "You will learn to tell that from the smell of our urine. None of us is ready."
She felt his trunk probe at her belly. "Not even you?"
"Not even me, Thunder. I am sorry." Again she was struck by the fact that she had still not come into oestrus, had felt not so much as a single twinge of that great inner warmth in all the time she had been here. "Don’t worry. In a few days this will pass and you will feel normal again."
He grunted. "I hope so."
In fact she suspected that even if one of the Cows were in oestrus, right here and right now, still Thunder would fail to find himself a mate. He was clearly young and immature, and no Cow would willingly accept a mating with such a Bull. If there were other Bulls here he wouldn’t even get a chance, of course. For his first few musth seasons Thunder would simply be overpowered by the older, mature Bulls.
He pulled away, grumbling his disappointment. He raised his tusks into the shining sunlit air, and a swarm of insects, rising from a muddy pond, buzzed around his head, glowing with light. "I feel as if my belly will burst like an overripe fruit. Why, if she were here before me now, I would mate with old Kilukpuk herself—"
"Who speaks of Kilukpuk?"
Thunder brayed, startled, and stopped dead. The voice — like a mammoth’s, but shallow and indistinct — had seemed to come from the reaches of the pond ahead of them.
"What is it?" Thunder asked softly. "Can there be mammoths here?"
Icebones grunted. "What kind of mammoth lives in the middle of a pond?"
"Kilukpuk, Kilukpuk… How is it I know that name?"
And a trunk poked up out of the water, and two wide nostrils twitched. It was short, hairless, stubby, but nevertheless indubitably a trunk.
Icebones stepped forward. The mud squeezed between her toes, unpleasantly thick, cold and moist. "I am Icebones, daughter of Silverhair. If you are mammoth, show yourself."
A head broke above the surface of the water. Icebones saw a smooth brow with two small eyes set on top, peering at her. "Mammoth? I never heard of such things. Bones-Of-Ice? What kind of name is that?" The creature sniffed loudly. "Don’t drop your dung in my pond."
Thunder growled, "If you don’t show yourself I will come in there and drag you out. Before I fill up your pond with my dung."
Thunder’s musth-fueled aggression was out of place, Icebones thought. But it seemed to do the trick.
There was a loud, indignant gurgle. With a powerful heave, a squat body broke through the languidly rippling water.
It stood out of the water on four stubby legs. It had powerful shoulders and rump, and a long skull topped by those small, glittering eyes. It wasn’t quite hairless, for fine downy hairs lay plastered over its skin, smoothed back like the scales of a fish. But the whole body was so heavily coated in crimson-brown mud that it was hard to see anything at all.
It was like no mammoth Icebones had ever seen. And yet it had a trunk, and even two small tusks that protruded from its mouth, curling slightly and pointing downward. And it gazed at Icebones with frank curiosity, its stubby trunk raised.
More of the hog-like creatures came drifting through the water. They looked like floating logs, Icebones thought, though thick bubbles showed where they belched or farted.
Meanwhile the other mammoths gathered around Icebones and Thunder — all save the calf. Woodsmoke, quickly bored, had splashed into the mud at the fringe of the pond and was digging out lumps of it with his tusks.
Spiral asked, "What is it?"
The creature in the pond said, "It is Chaser-Of-Frogs. I am the Mother of the Family that lives here."
Evidently, Icebones thought dryly, her dignity was easily hurt. "Mother? You are a Matriarch?"
Chaser-Of-Frogs eyed Icebones suspiciously. "I do not know you, Bones-Of-Ice. Do you come from the Pond of Evening?"
She must mean one of the lakes to the west of here, Icebones thought. She said, "I come from a place far from here, which—"
Chaser-Of-Frogs grunted and buried her snout-like trunk in pond-bottom mud. "Always making trouble, that lot from Evening. Even though my own daughter mated with one of them. When you go back you can tell them that Chaser-Of-Frogs said—"
Thunder growled and stepped forward. "Listen to her, you floating fool. We come from no pond. We are not like you."
"And yet we are," Icebones said, drawn to the pond’s edge, trunk raised. She could smell fetid mud, laced with thin dung. "You have tusks and a trunk. You are my Cousin."
"Cousin?" The glittering eyes of the not-mammoth stared back at her, curious in their own way. "Tell me of Kilukpuk. I know that name… and yet I do not."
"It is an old name," Icebones said. "Mammoths and their Cousins are born with it on their tongues." And Icebones spoke of Kilukpuk, and of Kilukpuk’s rivalry with her brother, Aglu, and of Kilukpuk’s calves, Hyros and Siros, who had squabbled and fought in their jealousy, of Kilukpuk’s favorite, Probos, and how Probos had become Matriarch of all the mammoths and their Cousins…
Her own nascent Family clustered around her. The log-like bodies in the pond drifted close to the shallow muddy beach, tiny ears pricked, the silence broken only by occasional gulping farts that broke the surface of the water.
"I have never heard such tales," mused Chaser-Of-Frogs. "But it is apt. I sink in the mud, as did Kilukpuk in her swamp. I browse on the plants that grow in the pond-bottom ooze, as she must have done. I am as she was." She seemed proud — but she was so caked in mud it was hard to tell.
How strange, Icebones thought. Could it be that these Swamp-Mammoths really were ancient forms, remade for this new world? Perhaps they had been molded from mammoths, the way Woodsmoke was molding lumps of mud.
Only the Lost would do such a thing, of course. And only the Lost knew why.
"You mammoths," said Chaser-Of-Frogs now. "Tell me where you are going."
"To the east," Thunder said promptly. "We are walking around the belly of the world. We are seeking a place we call the Footfall of Kilukpuk—"
"You will not get far," Chaser-Of-Frogs said firmly. "Not unless you know your way through the Nest of the Lost."