Soon all the mammoths were exhausted, and several were weakening. They had plenty to drink now, but never enough to eat. Still the wind blew, harsh and fierce.
And then the first calf died.
He was a Bull, small and playful, younger than Saxifrage. He simply fell one day, his papery flesh showing the bones beneath, his eyes round and terrified.
"I have no milk!" his mother wailed. "It’s my fault. I have no milk to give him…"
"We have to leave him," Threetusk said grimly to the Matriarch.
"I know," said Horsetail. "But after this it will be harder to keep them together. Already the Cows with small calves want to strike out alone, to find pasture they don’t need to share with the others."
"That’s natural. It’s what mothers do."
"We must wait until the calf dies," she said. "His mother needs to Remember him. And then we go on."
"Yes."
After that, more deaths followed: calves, the old, and one mature Bull whose leg was crushed in a fall.
Each day the sun climbed lower in the sky. Threetusk knew the summer was ending, and if they couldn’t feed and water in preparation for the cold to come, winter would kill them all as surely as any Firehead would.
And still the mammoths walked on into the teeth of the unrelenting wind, leaving a trail of their dead on the unmarked land.
The land began to rise — gently at first, then more steeply. The grass-covered soil grew thin, until at last a shoulder of rock protruded, bare and forbidding. Still Longtusk climbed, the air growing colder. He stepped with caution up the steepening slopes, avoiding heaps of sharp, frost-shattered scree.
He recalled this place from the trek. He had reached the range of low, glacier-eroded hills which marked the southern border of the ice-melt lake. And as he climbed, the land opened up around him, and he saw the great ice dam before him, lodged in its cleft in the hillside — still containing its mass of meltwater, after all these years.
To his right, to the north, he saw the lake itself — much bigger than he recalled, a shining sheet of gray-blue water stretching to a perfectly sharp horizon. There was ice scattered on it, floes and slushy melt and even a few eroded-smooth icebergs. But the icecap which had first created this lake was much receded now.
The water lapped at a shallow shore of gravel and bare rock, and he saw birds, coons and ducks, swimming among reeds. There were gulls nesting in the steeper cliffs below him. And he could smell the tang of salt, much more strongly now. The northern ocean, which ran all the way to the pole itself, must have broken in on this lake, turning it into an immense pool of brine, an inlet of the ocean itself.
To his left — to the south of the hills — the land swept away. It was a rough plain, marked here and there by the sky-blue glimmer of pools and the glaring bone-white of old ice. Far away he could see a flowing dark patch, clouded by dust, that might be horses or bison. If he listened closely he could hear the thunder of hooves, feel the heavy stamp of that moving ocean of meat.
But this blanket of life — grown much thicker since the last time he passed here — did not conceal the deeper rocky truth of this landscape. He could see how the land was folded, wrinkled, cut deeply by channels and gorges. Most of these channels were dry, though thin ribbons of water gleamed in some of them. They flowed south, away from the lake-ocean behind him, and in places they cut across each other, braided like tangled hair.
It was a land shaped by running water — just like the muddy rivulet where he had drunk. But no rivulet had made this land, not even a great river; only the mightiest of floods could have shaped this immense panorama.
He turned back and forth, trunk raised, sniffing the air, understanding the land.
He knew what he must do here. And he knew, at last, how he would die.
He set off for the ice dam itself.
"…Threetusk."
He paused, lifting bleary, wind-scarred eyes. The wind had eased, for the first time in — how long?
He raised his trunk and looked back at the column of mammoths, wearily trudging in his footsteps. They had been walking over a rocky plateau that had been even more barren and unforgiving than the rest of the corridor. Had they lost anyone else since he last counted? But he couldn’t even recall the names of those who had fallen…
Horsetail was pulling at his trunk. He saw how thin she had become, the bones of her skull pushing through tangled fur.
But she was saying, "Threetusk — smell."
Wearily he raised his trunk and sniffed the air.
There was water, and grass, and the dung of many animals.
They blundered forward.
They came to a ridge. He stepped forward cautiously.
The land fell away before him, a steep wall of tumbled rocks. To his left, a waterfall thundered. It was glacier melt: the ghost of snows that might have fallen a Great-Year ago, now surging into the land below.
And that land, he saw, was green.
Pools glimmered in the light of the low sun. He saw clouds of birds over some of the pools, so far away they might have been insects. The land around the pools, laced by gleaming streams, was steppe: coarse grass, herbs, lichen, moss, stunted trees.
And there were animals here, he saw dimly: horses, what looked like camels — and, stalking a stray camel, a pack of what appeared to be giant wolves.
"We made it," he said, wondering. "The end of the corridor. We had to battle through the breath of Kilukpuk herself. But we made it. We have to tell Longtusk — tell him he was right."
Horsetail looked at him sadly. "Where Longtusk has gone, I don’t think even a contact rumble would reach him." She sniffed at the ground, probing with her trunk. "We need to find a way down from here…"
Threetusk looked back, troubled. The journey had been so hard that it had been some time since he had thought of the defiant old tusker they had left behind.
What had become of Longtusk?
6
The Tears of Kilukpuk
Cautiously, Longtusk walked forward onto the ice dam. In places the ice, melting, had formed shallow pools; some of these were crusted over, and more than once a careless step plunged his foot into cold, gritty water.
He reached the center of this wall of ice, where it was thinnest — and weakest.
The ice dam was old.
On its dry southern side its upper surface was gritty and dirty, in places worn to a grayish sheen by years of rain. Its northern side had been hollowed out by lapping water, so that a great lip of ice hung over a long, concave wall. The ice under the lip gleamed white and blue, and more ice, half-melted and refrozen, gushed over the lip to dangle in the air, caught in mid-flow, elaborate icicles glistening.
He could feel the groan of this thinning dam under the weight of the water — a weight that must be rising, inexorably, as the sea level rose, spilling into the lake. The ice dam settled, seeking comfort, like a working mastodont laboring under some bone-cracking load. But there was little comfort to be had.
Instability — yes, he thought; that was the key.
A memory drifted into his mind: how Jaw Like Rock had taken that foolish keeper — what was his name? Spindle? — riding on his back standing up. Jaw had stopped dead, and stood square on the broken ground. Spindle had tried to keep his balance, but without Jaw’s assistance he was helpless, and he had fallen.
It had been funny, comical, cruel — and relevant. For the water of the lake was poised high above the lower land, contained only by this fragile dam, just as the keeper’s weight had been suspended over Jaw.