"It is time," he rumbled, loud enough for all to hear.
And the mammoths began to prepare for the separation.
The Family was to be split in two by Longtusk’s project: calf separated from parent, sibling from sibling. And, though it was never stated, a deep truth was understood by all here — that the sundered Family would never be reunited, for those who walked with Longtusk into the cold mists of the east would never come back this way.
Willow pulled on all his clothing, stuffed his jacket and hat and boots with grass for insulation against the cold, and collected together his tools and strips of dried meat. Once he had understood that Longtusk was planning to move on, the Dreamer had been making his own preparations. He had made himself simple tools, spears and stone axes, and he disappeared for days at a time, returning with the fruits of his hunting: small mammals, rabbits and voles. He ate the flesh or dried it, stored the bones as raw material for tools, and used the skin, dried and scraped, to make himself new clothing.
Soon he had become as healthy and equipped as Longtusk could recall — much better than during his time as a creature of the Fireheads. It dismayed Longtusk to think that he, and the mastodonts, had received so much better treatment at the paws of the Fireheads than Willow, their close cousin.
He sought out his mother, the Matriarch.
She wrapped her trunk in his and reached out to ruffle the topknot of fur on his head, just as she had when he was a calf — even though he had grown so tall she now had to reach high up to do so. "Such a short time," she said. "I’ve only just found you, and now we are to be parted again. And this time—"
"I know."
"Maybe we’ll both be right," she said. "Perhaps there really is a warm island of steppe floating in the icecap. And maybe the Fireheads and the weather will spare those who stay here, and we will flourish again. That way there will be plenty of mammoths in the future to argue about who was right and wrong. Won’t it be wonderful?"
"Mother—"
She slipped her trunk into his mouth. "No more talking. Go."
Go, little grazer. Was he destined always to flee, to move on from those who cared for him?
This time, he promised himself grimly, this time is the last, whatever the outcome. Wherever I finish up will be my home — and my grave.
They gathered together: Longtusk, Rockheart, Splayfoot, the bold Bull calf Threetusk, and two young Cows. Just six of them, three Bulls and three Cows, to challenge the icecap — six mammoths, and Willow, the Dreamer.
As they stood in a dismal huddle at the fringe of the Family, the whole venture seemed impossible to Longtusk, absurd.
But here was Rockheart, the last to pledge his commitment to the trek: "You won’t get through a day without me to show you the way, you overfed milk-tusk." Longtusk’s spirit rose as he looked at the huge tusker — gaunt and bony, but a great slab of strength and determination and wisdom.
Now Rockheart raised his trunk. "You taste that?"
"Salt water. Blown from the sea…"
"Yes," said Rockheart. "But it comes from both north and south."
The mammoths would cross the land bridge between Asia and America much too close to its central line for Longtusk to be able to see the encroaching oceans to north and south. But sight is the least of a mammoth’s senses, and, on this bright clear day, Longtusk could taste the traces of salt spray in the air, hear the rush of wind over the ocean, sense the crash of breakers on the twin shorelines.
The neck of land they had to cross seemed fragile to him, easily sundered, and he wondered again about the wisdom of what they were attempting.
But this was no time for doubt.
"From the old land to the new," he said boldly.
"From old to new," Rockheart rumbled.
Longtusk began to march to the east. He could feel the powerful footsteps of the others as they followed him.
It had begun.
3
The Trek
To show his own determination he chose to lead, that first day.
But at the start of the second day, without a word, he quietly deferred to Rockheart, letting the old tusker, with his superior instincts and understanding of the country, go first. That decision paid off many times — especially after the mammoth trails petered out, and the land became increasingly broken and unpredictable.
Willow preferred to walk during the day; it kept him strong and alert. But the mammoths, needing little sleep, would walk through much of the night, and then Willow would ride on Longtusk’s back, muttering his strange dreams. The other mammoths watched in suspicious amazement, unable to understand how a mammoth could allow such a squat little creature onto his back.
There were animals here: musk oxen, horses, bison, even camels, passing in great herds on the horizon. They glimpsed some carnivores — wolves, lions, a saber-tooth cat that sent a shudder of recognition through Longtusk, and a short-faced bear, fat and ugly, which came lumbering from a limestone cave. The predators watched them pass, silently speculating after the manner of their kind, seeking weakness among potential prey.
They saw no other mammoths, no Fireheads, no Dreamers.
They paused to rest and feed in an isolated island of steppe vegetation: a mosaic of grass with flowering plants and herbs like marsh marigolds, harebells and golden saxifrage, and sparse trees like ground willow, few reaching higher than a mammoth’s belly hair.
At Longtusk’s feet, a small face peered out of a burrow. It was a collared lemming. The little rodent, seeing that the mammoths meant him no harm, crawled out of his burrow and began to nibble at the base of an Arctic lupine.
Longtusk realized sadly that, like the mammoths, the vanishing steppe was the lemmings’ only true home. But the lemming’s mind, though sharp, was too small for him to discuss the issue.
Mammoth and lemming briefly regarded each other. Then the lemming ducked beneath the ground once more.
A few more days’ walking brought them to a more mountainous region. To the north there was the sharp tang of ice in the air, and when he looked that way Longtusk saw a small, isolated icecap, a gleaming dome that nestled among the mountains. It was shrinking as the world warmed; it might once have been part of a much more extensive formation.
Then they came to a place where the traveling became much more difficult. Longtusk, as the strongest, took the lead.
The land here was cut through by deep channels. These gouges ran from north to south, and so across their eastward path. Longtusk found himself having to climb down crumbling slopes into the beds of the channels, and then up ridges on the far side, over and over. The channels seemed to have been cut right down to the rock, and there was only thin soil and scanty vegetation, broken by dunes of coarse sand and ridges of gravel. There was little water to be had, for the soil was shallow. But there was thicker growth on the top of the ridges — some of which, surrounded by the deep valleys, had smooth outlines, like the bodies of fish.
Standing on top of such a ridge, cropping the sparse grass wearily, Longtusk looked about at the strange pattern of the land. It was like a dried-up river bed, he thought, a tracery of runnels and ridges in mud, cutting across each other so they were braided like hair, gouged out and worn smooth by running water.
But this was broader than any river valley he had ever seen. And most of the top soil and loose rock had been torn away, right down to the bedrock. If a river had ever run here it must have been wider and far more powerful than any he had encountered before.
To the north the bedrock rose, great shoulders of hard volcanic rock pushing up to either side of this channeled plain. He saw that the rocky shoulders came together in a narrow cleft. Ice gleamed white there, blocking the cleft. But it was from that cleft that these strange deep channels seemed to run.