The next day the hunters walked to and fro across the frozen desert, studying tracks and traces of dung. At last they seemed to come to a decision.
The Shaman pointed north. The mastodonts were loaded up once more.
"Why?" Longtusk rumbled. "They have their bones and their marrow. What else can they want?"
"More," called Thunder grimly. "Fireheads always want more. And they think they know where to find it."
It took another day’s traveling.
The hunters grew increasingly excited, pointing out heaps of dry dung, trails that criss-crossed this dry land — and even, in one place, the skeleton of a mammoth, cleansed of its meat by the carrion eaters, its bones scattered over the dust.
…And Longtusk heard them, smelled their dung and thin urine, long before he saw them.
He rounded a low, ice-eroded hill. The land here was a muddy flat.
And around this mud seep stood mammoths.
With their high bulging heads, shoulder humps and thick straggling hair, the mammoths looked strange in Longtusk’s eyes, accustomed after so long to the sight of short, squat mastodonts; suddenly he felt acutely conscious of his own sloping back and thick hair, his difference.
But these mammoths were bedraggled, clearly in distress.
The mammoths gathered closely around holes in the ground. They reached with their trunks deep into the holes and sucked up the muddy, brackish water that oozed there.
They were jostling for the seeping water. But there wasn’t enough for everybody.
So the mammoths fought each other, wordlessly, dully, endlessly. The plain was filled with the crack of tusk on tusk, the slap of skull on flank. Calves, thin and bony, clustered around the legs of the adults, but they were pushed away harshly. The infants wailed in protest, too weak to fight for the water they needed.
Longtusk watched all this, trembling, scarcely daring to breathe. The familiarity of them — their hair, their curling tusks — was overwhelming. And yet, what was he? He was not some wretched creature grubbing in the dirt for a drop of water. But if not mammoth, what had he become? He felt himself dissolve, leaving only a blackness within.
There were perhaps forty individuals — but this was not a Family or a Clan, for there were Bulls here, closer to the Cows and calves than they would be in normal times. But these were clearly not normal times. One gaunt Cow walked across the muddy flat to a place away from the others. With nervous, hasty scrapes with her feet, she began to dig out a fresh hole. Just behind her, white flensed bones rose out from the muddy ground. She stepped carelessly on a protruding skull, cracking it.
Walks With Thunder grunted softly, "See the bones? Many have perished here already."
Longtusk quoted the Cycle: "Where water vanishes, sanity soon follows."
"Yes. But, beyond sanity, there is necessity. In times as harsh as this, mature Bulls survive, for they can travel far in search of water and food. The Cows are encumbered with their calves, perhaps unborn, and cannot flee. But they are right to push away their calves — so that those who do get water, those who survive, are those who can have more young in better times. And so the old and the young perish. Necessity… We did not come here by accident, Longtusk. The Fireheads knew they would find mammoths in this place of seeping water."
"But the mammoths would not be here in this cold desert," growled Longtusk, "if they had not been pushed so far north by the Fireheads."
Willow, the Dreamer, jumped into an abandoned hole. He picked up a pawful of mud and began to suck at it, slobbering greedily, smearing his face with the sticky black stuff. Unlike the mastodonts, the wretched Dreamer had no keeper to care for him, and was probably in as bad a condition as these starving mammoths.
Now the wind shifted. As the mastodonts’ scent reached him one of the Bull mammoths stirred, raising his muddy trunk to sniff the air. He turned, slowly, and spotted the Fireheads and their mastodonts. He rumbled a warning.
The Bulls scattered, lumbering, trumpeting their alarm. The Cows clustered, drawing their calves in close.
But the Fireheads did not approach or threaten the mammoths. They began to unload the mastodonts and to prepare a hearth.
Gradually, thirst began to overcome the mammoths’ caution. The Cows turned their attention back to the seep holes, and quickly made use of the places vacated by the Bulls. After a time, some of the Bulls came back, raising their tusks and braying a thin defiance at the mastodonts.
Longtusk stepped to the edge of an abandoned hole. There was a little seeping water, so thick with clay it was black, but the hole was all but dry.
He was aware that a Bull mammoth was approaching him. He did not turn that way; he held himself still. But he could not ignore the great creature’s stink, the weight of his footsteps, his massive, encroaching presence, the deep rumble that came to him through the ground.
"…You smell of fat."
Longtusk turned.
He faced a Bulclass="underline" taller, older than Longtusk, but gaunt, almost skeletal. His guard hair dangled, coarse and lifeless. One of his tusks had been broken, perhaps in a fight; it terminated in a crude, dripping stump. The Bull stood listlessly; white mucus dripped from his eyes. He must barely be able to see, Longtusk realized.
Longtusk’s heart was suddenly hammering. Once the Bull’s accent would have been familiar to him — for it had been the language of Longtusk’s Clan. Was it possible…?
"I am not fat," said Longtusk. "But you are starving."
The mammoth stepped back, growled and slapped his trunk on the ground. "You are fat and ugly and complacent, and you stink of fire, you and these squat hairless dwarfs. You have forgotten what you are. Haven’t you — Longtusk?"
"…Rockheart?"
"I’m still twice the Bull you are." And Rockheart roared and lunged at Longtusk.
Longtusk ducked aside, and the Bull’s tusks flashed uselessly through the air. Rockheart growled, stumbling, the momentum of his lunge catching him off balance. Almost effortlessly Longtusk slid his own tusks around the Bull’s, and he twisted Rockheart’s head. The huge Bull, roaring, slid sideways to the ground.
Longtusk placed his foot on Rockheart’s temple.
He recalled how this Bull had once bested him, humiliating him in front of the bachelor herd. But Longtusk had been a mere calf then, and Rockheart a mature adult Bull. Now it was different: now it was Longtusk who was in his prime, Longtusk who had been trained to keep his courage and to fight — not just other Bulls in half-playful dominance contests, but animals as savage as charging rhinos, even hordes of scheming, clever Fireheads.
"I could crush your skull like a bird’s egg," he said softly.
"Then do it," rumbled Rockheart. "Do it, you Firehead monster."
Firehead monster.
Is it true? Is that what I have become?
Longtusk lifted his foot and stepped back.
As Rockheart, gaunt and weak, scrambled to his feet and roared out his impotent rage, Longtusk walked away, saddened and horrified.
The Fireheads lingered close to the seep holes for a night and a day.
Longtusk found it increasingly difficult to bear the noise of this nightmarish place: the clash of tusks, the bleating of calves.
He said to Walks With Thunder, "Why do the Fireheads keep us here? What do they want?"
"You know what they want," Thunder said wearily. "They want hearts and kidneys and livers and bones, for fat to feed to their cubs. They prefer to take their meat fresh, from the newly dead. And here, in this desolate place, they need only wait."