A savage wind from the north, spilling off the flanks of the ice sheet itself, howled across the battered, exposed land. Dust closed around him, shutting out the brief slivers of daylight. This storm brought little snow, but it drove great billows of dust and sand from the pulverized lands uncovered by the retreating ice.
This was an age of savage weather, dominated by the huge masses of cold air that lingered over the immense polar ice sheets, driven to instability by the accelerating warming of the climate. This hard, dry storm, Longtusk knew, might last for months.
He saw no sign of the Dreamers. They must have been sheltering in their caves.
As for himself, he could only push his body against the rocks of the river bank and try to endure.
The days of the storm wore on. He had nothing to drink but scraps of ice and snow, which anyhow chilled him as much as nourished him; and he couldn’t even recall when he had last found anything to eat.
Frost gathered around his mouth and trunk tip and gummed up his eyes. A deep shivering worked its way into his bones.
It was the wind that did the damage. Still air wouldn’t have been so bad, for a thin layer of warm air would have gathered around his body. But the wind, impatient and snatching, stole each scrap of heat his body produced, casting it into the south, gone, useless.
If he was with his Family they would have huddled now, gathered in a group, the youngest calves at the center of the huddle, the adults taking their turns on the outside of the group, facing into the wind. Thanks to the Family, few mammoths would perish in such a storm.
But here, alone, Longtusk had no others to help him and protect him: only these mute, uncaring rocks.
And he knew it wasn’t enough.
The shivering went away, and the cold started to penetrate deep into the core of his body. When it got there, he would quietly slide into a final sleep, not to wake again until he reached the aurora.
But perhaps that wouldn’t be so bad. Perhaps there he would find his mother and his sister and even that bullying oaf Rockheart, whom he would now never get a chance to best.
As the cold gathered around his heart, he felt almost peaceful.
…There was something warm and soft at the tip of his trunk. It was tugging at him. He tried to open his eyes, but they were shut by ice. He shook his head, rumbling, and forced his eyelids to open with a soft crackle.
Sand and grit immediately dug into his opened eyes. The storm still raged all around him.
Something stood before him, a bundle of fur, upright. Brown eyes peered.
It was Willow. And, with one fur-wrapped paw, the Dreamer cub was tugging at Longtusk’s trunk, urging him to follow.
Longtusk had almost reached the blank numbness of death, and it had been comfortable. If he returned to the land of life, he would face all its complexities: choices, hardship, pain. If only Willow let him alone… Just a little longer…
But you are Longtusk. Surely the greatest hero of them all is destined for a better death than this: alone, ignored, frozen by the mindless wind. Take your chance, Longtusk!
His trunk-fingers slipped into Willow’s palm.
It was difficult to walk. His joints had become stiff, so deeply had the cold penetrated them. And when he moved out of the shelter of the rocks, the wind battered him unhindered.
But it wasn’t easy for the Dreamer cub either. He felt Willow stagger, but the cub pulled himself upright against Longtusk.
They seemed to walk for a very long time.
At last they reached a place where the wind was diminished. And Longtusk felt a deep warmth radiating over his face and chest.
He was in the mouth of one of the caves. Willow was standing beside him, pulling off his furs in great frosty grit-laden bundles.
The cave was a well of red light and warmth. Flaps of animal skin had been fixed over this cave mouth. Perhaps they were supposed to drape over the entrance, keeping its warmth inside, like the flap of skin over a mammoth’s anus.
The warmth came from fire, he realized suddenly: a fire that burned, smokily, in a circle of stones.
He recoiled, instinctive fear rising anew in him. But behind him, the Beringian night howled its fury.
There was no place for him out there. Despite the fire, he forced himself to stay still.
There were many Dreamers here: females, males, infants. They lay on the floor of the cave, fat and sleepy, all of them slabs of muscle. The females clustered together with their infants away from the males, who lay on their backs snoring. Some were naked; others wore light skins around their shoulders and waists. Their bare skin looked greasy, as if it had been coated by the fat of some dead animal — perhaps to keep in their bodies’ warmth.
One of the dozing males stirred, perhaps disturbed by the wind that leaked in through the open skins. It was Stripeskull, his red and yellow scalp unmistakable.
His eyes grew large as he saw a mammoth standing in the cave entrance, immense tusk shadows striped over the walls.
With surprising grace Stripeskull rolled to his feet and barked out guttural noises. Other males woke up, blinking and rubbing their eyes; when they saw Longtusk they quickly got to their hind legs, grabbing sticks of wood and sharp stones.
…Then the males fell back, making retching noises and waving their paws before their faces.
Longtusk realized that he had just defecated, as mammoths do many times a day, barely conscious of it. He looked back. His dung was a pile of tubular bricks, acrid, immense. He tried to push it outside the cave. But he succeeded only in smearing the hot, sticky stuff over the cave floor.
Willow was going forward to meet Stripeskull. They jabbered at each other in a fast, complex flow; they made gestures too with their heads and paws. It was obviously a language, Longtusk realized, like the mammoths’ language of trumpets, growls, stomps and postures. But he had absolutely no idea what they were saying to each other. Perhaps even the frequent cuffs about the head which Stripeskull delivered to Willow were like the mammoths’ subtle code of touch and rubbing. But from the way Willow was rubbing his head it was obvious the blows were also meant to hurt.
Lacking any alternative, exhausted, Longtusk stood in the cave mouth and awaited his fate.
At last Willow came to him. He reached out to Longtusk’s trunk, and pushed.
Longtusk understood. He let himself be moved back out of the cave. He wasn’t welcome here; it had only been a childish impulse of Willow’s to bring him here in the first place.
So he must suffer the wind’s bony embrace once more. He felt a stab of resentment at the pain he would have to endure before he regained that numb acceptance…
But Willow was pulling at his trunk. He looked down. The Dreamer cub was hauling as hard as he could, his feet scraping along the ground, trying to halt the retreating mammoth.
Longtusk stopped. He was out of the cave itself, beyond the curtain of skins, but still inside its mouth. It was enough to shelter him from the wind, and the heat that leaked out of the cave seeped into his bones.
Willow held up a twig of dried wood. Longtusk had time to grab it before the cub was snatched out of sight by a glaring Stripeskull, who pulled closed the skins, shutting Longtusk out in the dark.
Longtusk munched on the twig, and — standing in the mouth of the cave, on ground imprinted by splayed Dreamer feet, bathed by stray fire warmth — he slipped easily into a deep and dreamless sleep.
5
The Cave
The storm persisted.
Willow brought him water in a sack of skin. Longtusk drank greedily, despite a lingering stink of bison. But a mammoth is a large animal and the load of water — almost too much for Willow to carry — was downed in a couple of heartbeats.