Jaw lunged forward with a single clean, strong motion, a thrust born of experience and training, and his tusk punctured Spindle’s heart.
5
The Remembering
The hunting party returned to the Firehead settlement, subdued, all but silent. They moved slowly, for Jaw Like Rock was forced to walk hobbled, armed Firehead hunters shadowing his every step.
Walks With Thunder, meanwhile, moving with slow dignity, bore the bodies of Bedrock and Spindle, wrapped in fur blankets. The long nasal horn of the rhino, Bedrock’s last trophy, was laid on top of his body, still caked with dried blood.
Crocus walked beside Thunder, clutching her father’s cold paw.
"War," growled Thunder, and he raised his trunk suddenly, as if sniffing the winds of vanished past. "You’ve been lucky to see so little of it, little grazer. Brutal and bloody it is, for Fireheads and mastodonts. They teach us special commands, and put us through mock battles to ensure we will not panic at the furious noise, the stink of blood. And they feed us drinks of fermented grass seed, a powerful potion that drives sanity from the mind, replacing it with a mist of blood…
"And then comes the battle.
"It can be magnificent, Longtusk! We charge into the ranks of the enemy, all but invulnerable to their arrows and axes, and scatter their ranks. We stab with our tusks and crush with our feet. If the enemy has never seen mastodonts before they are terrified, awed out of their wits.
"But it never lasts.
"As warriors we are clumsy beasts, Longtusk. The Firehead fighters learn to step aside and assail us from the sides, encircling us and separating us, striking with arrows and spears, slashing our trunks and hamstrings, killing our riders.
"And sometimes — despite the training, despite the intoxicating brews — we recall who we are. Then we panic and retreat, even trampling our own warriors." He closed his small eyes, deep in their pits of wrinkled skin. "I thought I had put it all behind me. Now it is coming again."
When they reached the Firehead settlement, Bedrock’s body was immediately claimed by the Shaman, Smokehat, who had it brought into his own hut of bone and turf. The Shaman berated the Firehead hunters who had been with Bedrock when he died, and even Longtusk and the mastodonts.
As for Crocus, she retreated into Bedrock’s hut — hers, now — carrying the rhino horn.
As the days wore on, Crocus was forced to receive a string of visitors: older males of the Firehead tribe, there to consult, Thunder told Longtusk, about the meaning of the sudden appearance of these other Fireheads, the Whiteskins, on the steppe. But she did not emerge from her hut, refusing even to see Longtusk.
Longtusk felt bereft. He hadn’t realized how much he had come to rely on Crocus’s companionship, which seemed to fill a need not satisfied even by the mastodonts.
He threw his great muscles into the work of heavy lifting and hauling, and his companions treated him with a bluff respect. And when he wasn’t working he spent much of his time in the Firehead settlement.
It was unusual for Bull mastodonts to be allowed to wander without keepers through the Firehead community, but after his long association with Crocus — during which time not a hair on her head had been harmed — Longtusk seemed to be regarded as a special case.
But he remained the only mammoth in the captive herd, and adults gaped at him or cowered from his immense tusks, and he was constantly followed around by a small herd of goggling Firehead cubs. They collected the hair he shed, and used it to stuff their moccasins and hats and pillows. He learned to endure the perpetual tugs and strokes of the cubs, and he took great care not to step on one of those stick-thin limbs or eggshell skulls.
Work went on for Fireheads and mastodonts: hunting game for food, building and rebuilding the huts, extending and filling the storage pits for meat and hay — for the cycle of the seasons was not slowed even by death, and the inevitable approach of winter was never far from the thoughts of anybody in the community.
He watched them butcher a deer. They took its flesh to eat and its skin to make clothing. They even used the tough skin of its forelegs for boot uppers and mittens. They made tools and weapons from its bones and antlers. They used the deer’s fat and marrow for fuel for their lamps, and its blood for glue, and its sinews for bindings, lashings and thread. Gradually the deer was reduced to smaller and smaller pieces, until it was scattered around the settlement.
Longtusk saw a mother use her hair to wipe feces from the backside of a cub.
He saw a male take the lower jawbone of a young deer, from which small sharp teeth protruded like pebbles. He sawed off the teeth at their roots, producing a series of beads almost identical in shape, size and texture, and held together by a strip of dried gum. It was a necklace.
He saw an old male pinch the tiny hearts of captive gulls, seeking to kill them without spoiling their feathers. He skinned the birds, turned the empty skins inside out, and wore the intact skins on his feet — feathers inside — within his boots.
Endless detail, endless strangeness — endless horror.
But the Fireheads went about their tasks without joy or enthusiasm. Even the cubs, when they tried to run and play, were snapped at and cuffed. The settlement had become a bowl of subdued quiet, of slow footsteps.
And Longtusk felt increasingly agitated.
It was natural, he told himself. Bedrock had been the most important of the Fireheads; his death brought finality and change. Who wouldn’t be disturbed?
…But he couldn’t help feeling that his inner turmoil was something beyond that. He was aware that his mood showed in the way he walked, ripped his fodder from the ground, snarled at the Firehead cubs who got in his way or tugged too hard at his belly hairs.
At length, he came to understand what he was going through. He felt oddly ashamed, and he kept it to himself.
Still, Walks With Thunder — as so often — seemed more aware of Longtusk’s moods and difficulties than anybody else. And he came to Longtusk, engaging him in a rumbling conversation as they walked, fed, defecated.
"…It’s interesting to see how differently they treat you," Thunder said, as he watched Firehead cubs, wide-eyed, trot after Longtusk. "Differently from us, I mean. You have to understand that you mammoths were once worshipped as gods by these creatures."
"Worshipped?"
"Remember when we found you at the Dreamer caves, how they threw themselves on the ground? There is little wood here. Trees struggle to grow on land freshly exposed by the ice. And so the Fireheads rely on the mammoths — especially your long-dead ancestors — for bones and skin and fur, material to build their huts and make their clothing and burn on their hearths. Without the resources of the mammoths, it’s possible they couldn’t survive here at all."
Longtusk reminded Thunder of the Dreamers, who had lived so modestly in their rocky caves.
"Ah, but the Fireheads are not like the Dreamers," said Thunder. "They would not be content with eking out unchanging lives like pike basking in a pool. And it is this lack of contentment that drives them on… to greatness and to horror alike.
"They’ve discarded those old beliefs, I think; now, a mammoth is just another animal to them. But still you hairy beasts seem to be admired in a way they have never admired us, despite our long association with them. Of course that doesn’t stop them from going north and—" He stopped abruptly.
The north: the old mystery, Longtusk thought, a mystery that had eluded him for years, despite his quizzing of Jaw Like Rock and other mastodonts; it was as if they had been instructed — perhaps by Thunder — to tell him nothing.