As the days wore away, and they drove steadily northward, the nature of the land began to change.
The air became chill, and the winds grew persistent and strong. Sometimes the wind flowed from west to east, and Walks With Thunder told Longtusk that such immense air currents could circle the planet, right around the fringe of the great northern icecaps.
And sometimes the wind came from the north, driving grit and ice into their faces, and that was the most difficult of all, for this was a katabatic wind: air that had lain over the ice, made cold and dry and heavy, so that it spilled like water off the ice and over the lower lands below.
They reached land recently exposed by the retreating ice. The ice had scoured away the softer soil down to bedrock, and it was a place of moraines of sand and gravel, rock smashed to fragments by the great weight of ice that had once lain here. There was little life — a few tussocks of grass, isolated trees, some lichen — struggling to survive in patches of soil, wind-blown from the warmer climes to the south.
The mastodonts became uneasy, for unlike the Fireheads they could hear the sounds of the icepack: the crack of new crevasses, the thin rattle of glacial run-off rivers and streams, the deep grind of the glaciers as they tore slowly through the rock. To the mastodonts, the icepack was an immense chill monster, half alive, spanning the world — and now very close.
Longtusk knew they could not stay long in this blighted land; whatever the Fireheads sought here must be a treasure indeed.
And it was as night began to fall on this wind-blasted, frozen desert that Longtusk came upon the corpse.
At first he could see only a hulked form, motionless, half covered by drifting dirt. Condors wheeled above, black stripes against the silvery twilight.
A hyena was working at the corpse’s belly. It snarled at the mastodonts, but fled when a hunter hurled a boomerang.
Walks With Thunder was beside Longtusk. "Be strong, now…"
The mastodonts and hunters gathered around the huge, fallen form, awed by this immense slab of death.
It — she — was a female. She had slumped down on her belly, her legs splayed and her trunk curled on the ground before her. She was gaunt, her bones showing through her flesh at pelvis and shoulders, and her hair had come loose in great chunks, exposing dried, wrinkled skin beneath.
It was clear she was not long dead. She might have been sleeping.
But her eye sockets were bloody pits, pecked clean by the birds. Her small ears were mangled stumps. And Longtusk could see the marks of hyena teeth in the soft flesh of her trunk.
"She was pregnant," Walks With Thunder said softly. "See her swollen belly? The calf must have died within her. But she was starving, Longtusk. Her dugs are flaccid and thin. She would have had little milk to give her calf. In the end she simply ran out of strength. They say it is peaceful to go to the aurora that way…"
Longtusk stood stock still, stunned. He had seen no woolly mammoth since his separation from his Family — nothing but imperfect Firehead images of himself.
Nothing until this.
"We should Remember her," he said thickly.
Thunder rumbled harshly, "I thought you were the one who rejected the Cycle… Never mind. Did you know her?"
"She is old and dead. I can’t recall, Thunder!"
The Fireheads were closing on the fallen mammoth with their stone axes and knives. Walks With Thunder wrapped his trunk around Longtusk’s and pulled him backward.
The Shaman’s hard eyes were fixed on Longtusk, calculating, as the Fireheads butchered the mammoth.
First they wrapped ropes around her legs. Then, chanting in unison and with the help of mastodont muscles, they pulled her on her back. Longtusk heard the crackle of breaking bones as her limp mass settled.
With brisk, efficient motions, a hunter slit open her belly, reached into the cavity and hauled out guts — long tangled coils, black and faintly steaming — and dumped them on the ground. There was a stink of blood and spoiled food and rot. But there were no flies, for few insects prospered in this cold desert.
Then the hunters pulled out a flaccid sac that bulged, heavy. It was the calf, Longtusk realized. Mercifully the hunters put that to one side.
The hunters cracked open her rib cage, climbed inside the body, and began to haul out more bloody organs, the heart and liver and kidneys, black lumps marbled with greasy fat.
Eviscerated, the Cow seemed to slump, hollowed.
When she was emptied, the butchers cut great slits in the Cow’s skin and began to drag it off her carcass. Where the tough hide failed to rip away easily, they used knives to cut through connective tissue to separate it from the pink flesh beneath. They chopped the separated skin into manageable slices and piled it roughly.
Then, with their axes, they began to cut away the meat from the mammoth’s bones. They started with the hindquarters, making fast and powerful cuts above the knee and up the muscle masses. Then they dug bone hooks into the meat and hauled it away, exposing white, bloody bone. The bone attachments were cut through quickly, and the bones separated.
When one side of the Cow had been stripped, the ropes were attached again and the carcass turned over, to expose the other side.
The butchers were skilled and accurate, rarely cutting into the underlying bone, and the meat fell easily from the bones, leaving little behind. They assembled the meat into one immense pile, and extracted the huge bones for another heap.
When they were done the night was well advanced, and the Cow had been reduced to silhouetted piles of flesh and flensed bones, stinking of blood and decay.
The Fireheads built a fire and threw on some of the meat until the air was full of its stink. With every expression of relish they chewed slices of fat, bloody liver, heart and tongue. Even Willow, sitting alone at the fringe of the fire’s circle of light, chewed noisily on the dark meat.
Then the hunters cracked open charred and heated bones and sucked hot, savory marrow from the latticework of hollow bone within.
And at last Longtusk understood.
"I have seen them devour the contents of such bones at the settlement."
"Yes," said Walks With Thunder. "They were mammoth bones, Longtusk. Fireheads rarely hunt mammoths. You are a big, dangerous beast, grazer, and the hunters’ reward, if their lives are spared, is more meat than they can carry. That’s why they prefer the smaller animals for food.
"But they need mammoths. For they need fat."
"The animals they hunt regularly, the deer and the horses, are lean, with blood-red meat. But you, little grazer, are replete with fat, which clings to your heart and organs and swims within your bones. The Fireheads must consume it, and they need it besides for their lamps and paints and salves, and—"
"All the years I watched them trek to the north, returning with their cargoes of great bones. All those years, and I never suspected they were mammoth… Thunder, why didn’t you tell me?"
"It was thought best," said Walks With Thunder carefully, "that you should not know. I made the decision; blame me. What good would it have done you to have known? But now—"
"But now, the Shaman wants me to see this. He is forcing me to confront the truth."
"This is your test," said Walks With Thunder. "Will you fail, Longtusk?"
Longtusk turned away. "No Firehead will defeat me."
"I hope not," Thunder said softly.
But, as it turned out, the greatest test was yet to come.