"They aren’t dwarfs," said Longtusk. "They are mastodonts."
"It doesn’t matter," growled Rockheart. "You won’t be seeing them again."
…Could that be true?
"You’re the leader of this strange little herd of ours, Longtusk," Rockheart said sourly. "But I strongly suggest we head north and east."
"Why?"
"Because we might find something to eat and drink. Although we may have to fight for it." He eyed Longtusk. "You aren’t in your Firehead camp now, being fed hay and water by your masters…"
Perhaps. But Longtusk didn’t want to think about a future in which he became like the mammoths he had seen at the mud seep, fighting over dribbles of brackish mud, pushing away the weak and old and young.
"North and east," he said.
"North and east."
So they moved on.
After a time they found a place where grass grew a little more thickly. Longtusk pulled tufts of the coarse grass into his own mouth, and helped Splayfoot to feed. Her eyes half closed, Splayfoot ground up the grass with slow, feeble movements of her jaw, but he could see her tongue was spotted with black, and she was sucking at the grass as much as eating it.
He said, "She’s very weak. She needs drink as much as food."
Rockheart growled, "There’s no drink to be had here."
It struck Longtusk that Rockheart himself was barely in better condition than Splayfoot. But where Splayfoot was subsiding toward death, Rockheart was still functioning, working. At the mud seep he had even been prepared to challenge Longtusk — and now here he was playing his part in this unexpected journey, which looked as if it would prove long and difficult.
His respect grew for this indomitable, arrogant Bull.
Willow, too, was hungry and thirsty. There was no water here, and the little Dreamer couldn’t eat grass, like the mammoths. He prowled around the area until he found a stunted dwarf willow, clinging to the ground. He prized up its twisted branches and studied them, eventually dropping them with scorn.
Rockheart said, "What’s it doing?"
Longtusk replied, "It — he — is looking for long, straight bits of wood. I expect he wants to make a spear, maybe even a fire. He might catch a lemming or a vole."
Rockheart snorted in disgust, indifferent.
Rockheart and Splayfoot soon stopped eating, evidently having taken their fill.
Longtusk had barely scratched the surface of his hunger. He had been used to much more fodder than this at the Firehead settlement, and if he didn’t take more he would soon be as scrawny and ragged as the others — and ill-prepared for the winter to come, when the mammoths would have to live off their stores of fat.
But to gorge himself was hardly a way to gain trust. So he took care to eat no more than Rockheart’s shrunken stomach could manage.
Having fed as best they could, they moved on.
The sun was already sinking in the sky when they reached the trail.
It was just a strip of trampled land that cut across the gravel-littered rock barrens, passing roughly east to west. Longtusk, instincts dulled by captivity, might not have seen it at all. But Rockheart turned confidently onto the trail and began to head east.
Longtusk — supporting his sister, and occasionally allowing Willow to ride on his back — followed his lead.
They passed a stand of forest. The trees were firs, still young but already tall, growing fast and dense in a green swathe that stretched to the south. The forest had grown so thickly, in fact, that it had already overrun the old trail, and the mammoths had to divert north until the forest was behind them and they were cutting across open land once more.
Longtusk said, "It’s a long time since I was here. But I don’t recall the land being like this."
"Things have changed here, Longtusk — within the lifetime of calves a lot younger than you or me. I recall when this was all steppe, with grass, herbs, shrubs. Now look around: to the south you have the spreading forest, and to the north the bare rock. No place left for the steppe, eh?
"And even where there is steppe — though you might not think it — the climate is wetter than it used to be. There is more rain, more thick snow in the winter. Sometimes the land is waterlogged and boggy. In the summer nothing can grow but grass and lichens, and in the winter we struggle to keep out of snowdrifts so thick they cover our bellies. The land isn’t right for us any more. Deer and moose can chew the trees, and reindeer and musk oxen browse on lichen and moss, dull cloddish brutes… but not us.
"But there are still a few places where the old steppe lingers, pockets of it here and there."
"And that’s where you’re taking us."
"That’s where the mammoths live, yes — if we’re lucky, friendly ones. That was the way we were heading, when we reached the mud seep. But we were weak, and…
"There are fewer of us now, and I suppose in the future there will be fewer still. But we persist. We have before."
"What do you mean?"
Rockheart eyed him. "You’ve been away too long. Have you forgotten so much of your Cycle?"
As winter followed summer, so the Earth had greater seasons, spanning the Great-Years. In the long winters the ice would spread, freezing the land and the air, and the mammoths could fill the expanding Steppe. Now it seemed the Earth’s unwelcome spring was returning, and the steppe was overrun by forests and grass — and the mammoths had to retreat, waiting out the return of the cold, as they had many times before.
It was a time of hardship. But it would pass. That was the teaching of the Cycle. The ice had come and gone for more than two million years, and the mammoths had survived all the intervals of warmth in that immense stretch of time.
…But now Longtusk thought of the Fireheads: clustered around the mud seep, waiting for mammoths to die.
There were no Fireheads in the Cycle. There had been no Fireheads in the world when last the ice had retreated and advanced.
He had been away from his kind a long time, and he didn’t presume to doubt Rockheart’s ancient wisdom. But his experience, he was realizing slowly, was wider than the old tusker’s. He had seen more of the world and its ways — and he had seen the Fireheads.
And he did not feel so confident that the future could be the same as the past.
He kept these thoughts to himself as they pushed on.
As night closed in the clouds thickened, and the wind from the icecap was harsh. Longtusk and Rockheart huddled close around Splayfoot, trying to shelter her and give her a little of their own sparse body heat; and Longtusk allowed the Dreamer to curl up under his belly fur.
Every so often Longtusk would rouse Splayfoot and force her to walk around. He knew that there was a core of heat inside the body of each mammoth, a flicker of life and mind that must be fed like the hearths of the Fireheads. If the cold penetrated too deep, if that flame of life was extinguished, it could never be ignited again.
Splayfoot responded passively, barely conscious.
In the morning they resumed their dogged walking, following Rockheart’s trail.
But soon the light changed.
Longtusk raised his trunk, sniffing the air. He could smell moisture, rain or maybe snow, and the wind was veering, coming now strongly from the east. Looking that way he saw black clouds bubbling frothily.
There was a thin honking, a soft flap of wings far above him. Birds, he saw dimly, perhaps geese, fleeing from the east, away from the coming storm. He recalled what Walks With Thunder had told him of the eastern lands, where the icecap pushed far to the south. And he recalled Thunder’s obscure, half-forgotten legends of a land embedded in the ice — a place that stayed warm enough to keep off the snow, even in the depths of winter. The nunatak.