"So we are waiting for a mammoth to die?"
"Why did you think, Longtusk?"
"These Fireheads believe themselves to be mighty hunters," Longtusk said bitterly. "But it isn’t true. They are scavengers, like the hyenas, or the condors."
Thunder did not reply.
Somehow, in his heart, he had always imagined that his Family were still out there somewhere: just over the horizon, a little beyond the reach of a contact rumble, living on the steppe as they always had. But he had denied the changes in the land he had seen all around him, never thought through their impact on his Family. Now he faced the truth.
He recalled how so recently he had prided himself on his self-control, the fact that he was above mundane concerns, beyond pain and love and hope. He tried to cling to that control, to draw strength from it.
But the comfort was as dry and cold as the mammoths’ seep holes. And he couldn’t get out of his head the disgust and rage of Rockheart.
…The sun wheeled around the sky twice more before it happened.
There was a flurry of motion among the mammoths. The Fireheads, eating and dozing, stirred.
A mammoth Cow, barged away from a water hole, had fallen to her knees. Her breath gurgled in her chest. Other mammoths gathered around her briefly, touching her scalp and tongue with their trunks. But they were weak themselves, ground down by hunger and thirst, and had no help to offer her. Soon she was left alone, slumping deeper into the mud, as if melting.
"At last," rumbled Walks With Thunder brutally.
With fast, efficient cries, a party of Fireheads formed up, gathering their knives and axes and spears, and set off toward the Cow.
Drawn by a hideous curiosity, Longtusk followed.
The Fireheads reached the mammoth. They started to lay their ropes on the ground, ready to pull her onto her back for gutting.
The mammoth raised her head, feebly and slowly, and her eyes opened, gummy with the milky mucus.
The Fireheads stepped back, shouting their annoyance that she was not yet dead.
While the Fireheads argued, the Cow stared at Longtusk. She spoke in a subterranean rumble so soft he could barely hear it. "Don’t you recognize me, Longtusk? Has it been so long?"
Memories swam toward him, long-buried: a calf, a ball of fluffy brown fur, not even her guard hairs grown, scampering, endlessly annoying…
A name.
"Splayfoot." Splayfoot, his sister.
"You’re back in time to Remember me," she said. "You and your Firehead friends. You were going to be the greatest hero of all, Longtusk. Wasn’t that your dream? But now I can smell the stink of fire and meat on you. What happened to you?"
One of the hunters — Bareface — stepped forward. He had a spear in his paw, tipped by shining quartz. He hefted it, preparing for a thrust into her mouth, a single stroke that would surely kill her. Evidently the Fireheads, impatient, had decided to finish her off so they could get on with mining her body for its fat and marrow.
But this was Longtusk’s own sister. His sister!
Longtusk trumpeted his rage.
With a single tusk sweep he knocked Bareface off his feet. The Firehead fell, howling, clutching his leg; bone protruded white from a bloody wound. Longtusk grabbed the spear with his trunk and drove the quartz point deep into the mud.
He went to his sister and wrapped his trunk around hers. "Get up."
"I can’t. I’m so tired…"
"No! Only death is the end of possibility. By Kilukpuk’s dugs, up…" And he hauled her to her feet by main force. She scrabbled at the mud, seeking a footing. Her legs were trembling, the muscles so depleted they could barely support her weight.
But now another mammoth was here — Rockheart, almost as gaunt and weakened. Nevertheless he lumbered up to Splayfoot’s other side, lending his support as Longtusk tried to steady her.
And, startlingly, here was Willow, the squat little Dreamer. He jammed his shoulder under Splayfoot’s heavy rump and shoved as hard as he could. He seemed to be laughing as he, too, defied the Fireheads.
The Fireheads were recovering from their shock at Longtusk’s attack on Bareface. They were reaching for weapons, more of the big spears and axes that could slice through a mammoth’s hide.
But now Walks With Thunder charged at them, his gait stiff and arthritic. He trumpeted, waving his huge old tusks this way and that, scattering the Fireheads. "Go, little grazer!"
And as the water hole receded, and the motley party headed into an empty, unknown land, Longtusk could hear Thunder’s call. "Go, go, go!"
Part 3: Patriarch
Longtusk and the Truth
There are many stories about Longtusk (said Silverhair).
There is a story that Longtusk flew over the ice, carrying his Clan to safety in a place called a nunatak.
There is a story that Longtusk dug his huge tusks into the ground, as we do when we search for water, only to find — not water — but warmth, coming out of bare rock, sufficient to drive back the ice and keep his Clan alive.
There is a story that he stamped his mighty feet and made his refuge of rock and heat fly off into the sky, carrying the mammoths with it, and the rock became the Sky Steppe, the last refuge of all. But Longtusk had to stay behind, here on Earth, to face his death…
Or perhaps Longtusk never died. Some say he returns, from out of the north, a hero come to save us when we face great danger. Perhaps it was he who brought our Family to the Island, before the sea rose and trapped us there. (But perhaps that was somebody else, another hero whose name we have lost, somebody inspired by Longtusk’s legend…)
How can all the stories be true?
Can any of them be true?
Oh, Icebones, I understand. You want to know. And, more than that, you want the stories to be true. I was just like you as a calf!
Longtusk is a wonderful hero. But we’ll never know for sure. You understand that, don’t you?
…What do I think?
Well, stories don’t come out of thin air. Perhaps there’s a grain of truth. Perhaps there really was a Longtusk, and something like the stories really did happen, long ago.
Perhaps. We’ll never know.
If I could know one thing about Longtusk, though, it would be this.
How he died.
1
The Family
Under a gray sunless sky, without shadows, every direction looked the same. Even the land was contorted, confusing, the rock bare, littered here and there by gravel and loess, lifeless save for scattered tussocks of grass.
Longtusk, trunk raised, studied the vast, empty landscape around them. There were no Fireheads, he realized: no storage pits, no hearths, no huts, not even a mastodont, none of it in his vision for the first time for half his lifetime.
The Fireheads had filled and defined his world for so long. Their projects — predictable or baffling, rewarding or distressing — had provided a structure to every waking moment, even when he had defied them. Now the future seemed as blank and directionless as the land that stretched around him.
He felt disoriented, like a calf who had been spun around until he was dizzy.
"I don’t think they are coming after us." He almost wished the Fireheads would follow him. At least that was a threat he could understand.
But it seemed he would not be given that much help. And, for the first time since his capture as a calf, he had to learn to think for himself.
"Of course not," Rockheart was saying. "They have no need to — save revenge, perhaps. And those dwarfish pals of yours were making trouble."