Horsetail rumbled, "What do you mean?"
"I defied her," he said, unwelcome old memories swimming to the surface of his mind.
"Who?"
"The most powerful Firehead of them all. She thought I was hers, you see. And yet I defied her…"
He knew it was hard for them to understand. All this was ancient history to the other mammoths, an exotic legend of times and places and creatures they had never known — maybe just another of Longtusk’s tall stories, like his tales of she-cats and rhinos and Fireheads with caps of mammoth-ivory beads…
It was not their fault. He had wanted to bring his Clan to a safe place, and these generations of fat, complacent mammoths were what he had dreamed of seeing. It wasn’t their fault that he had succeeded too well — that their lives of comfort and security had prepared them so badly for the ordeal ahead.
But he recalled Crocus.
He recalled how she had hunted down the Firehead who had killed her father. He knew she would not have forgotten, or forgiven.
As long as he was alive, nobody was safe here.
Horsetail and Threetusk approached him and spoke quietly so the others couldn’t hear.
Horsetail said, "You aren’t the only one who has seen the corridor to the south. But it is harsh, and we don’t know how long it is, or what lies at its end. Perhaps it is cold and barren all the way to the South Pole."
"When we set off for the nunatak," he said evenly, "we didn’t know how far that was either. We went anyway. You know, Threetusk — you’re the only one left who does. You will have to show them how to survive."
Horsetail said severely, "We have old, and sickly, and calves. Many of us will not survive such a trek."
"Nevertheless it must be made."
"And you?" asked the Matriarch. "Do you believe you could walk through the corridor?"
"Of course not." He brayed his amusement. "I probably wouldn’t last a day. But I’m not going."
Threetusk said, "What?"
Briefly, briskly, he stroked their trunks. "I know the Fireheads. You don’t. And I have thought deeply on their nature. And this is what I have concluded. Listen closely, now…"
Saxifrage watched this, fascinated, the rumbling phrases washing over her.
Later, boldly, she stepped forward from under her mother’s belly and tugged her trunk. "What did he say? What did he say?"
But Horsetail, grave and silent, would not reply.
They filed past him, down the sloping rock face and onto the ice, bundles of confusion, fear and resentment — much of it directed at him, for even though the smoke columns from the Fireheads’ hearths were now visible for all to see, they still found it impossible to believe they represented the danger he insisted.
Nonetheless, they were his Clan. He wanted to grab them all, taste each one with his trunk. For he knew he would not see them again, not a single one of them.
But he held himself back. It was best they did not think of him, for the ice and the dismal corridor to the south would give them more than enough to occupy their minds.
And besides, he still had company: the little Dreamer, Willow. He had tried to push the Dreamer, gently, off the rock and after the column of mammoths. But Willow had slapped his trunk and dug his old, bent fingers in Longtusk’s fur, his intentions clear.
Company, then. And a job to complete.
Longtusk waited until the long column of mammoths had shrunk to a fine scratch against the huge white expanse of the ice.
And then he turned away: toward the west, and the Fireheads.
5
The Corridor
It was, Threetusk decided later, an epic to match any in the long history of the mammoths.
But it was a story he could never bear to telclass="underline" a story of suffering and loss and endless endurance, a blurred time he recalled only with pain.
It was difficult even from the beginning. Away from the warmth of the nunatak, the hard, ridged ice was cold and unyielding under their feet — crueler even than he recalled from the original trek so long ago. Where snow drifted the going was even harder.
The land itself was unsettling. The mammoths could hear the deep groaning of the ice as it flowed down from its highest points to the low land and the sea. A human would have heard only the occasional crack and grind, perhaps felt a deep shudder. To the mammoths, the agonized roar of the ice was loud and continuous, a constant reminder that this was an unstable land, a place of change and danger.
And — of course — there was nothing to eat or drink, here on the ice. They had barely traveled half a day before they had used up the reserves of water they carried in their throats, and the calves were crying for the warm rocks they had left behind.
But they kept on.
After a day and a night, they came to a high point, and they were able to see the way south.
To the left the ice was a shallow dome, its surface bright and seductively smooth. To the right, the ice lay thick over a mountain range. Black jagged peaks thrust out of the white, defiant, and glaciers striped with dirt reached down to the ice sheet like the trunks of immense embedded animals.
And the two great ice sheets were separated by a narrow band of land — colorless, barren, a stripe of lifeless gray cutting through blue-white.
It was the corridor.
They found a glacier, a tongue of ice that led them down from the icecap to the barren strip of land. The climb down the glacier was more difficult than Threetusk had imagined — especially when they got to the lower slopes, and the glacier, spilling onto the rock, spread out and cracked, forming immense crevasses that blocked their path.
Nevertheless they persisted, until they reached the land itself.
Horsetail stood by Threetusk, frost on her face, her breath billowing in a cloud around her. They gazed south at the corridor that faced them.
They stood on bare rock, sprinkled with a little loose stone, gravel and rock. There were deep furrows gouged into the land, as if by huge claws. Here and there, against the ice cliffs that bounded the corridor, there were pools of trapped meltwater, glimmering. Little grew here: only scattered clumps of yellow grass, a single low willow, clutching the ground.
A wind blew in their faces, raising dust devils that whirled and spat hard gray sand into their eyes. Saxifrage, the calf, plucked at a spindly grass blade without enthusiasm, bleating her discomfort.
Threetusk said, "It’s as if the land has been scraped bare of everything — even the soil — down to the bedrock. There may be water, but little to eat."
"The calves are probably too fat, as Longtusk always says," Horsetail said briskly. "We’ll let them rest a night. There is some shelter, here in the lee of the glacier. Then, in the morning—"
"We go on."
"Yes."
Longtusk had a single intention: not to allow the Fireheads to complete their journey, in pursuit of his mammoths, across the land bridge. And he believed he knew how to do it, where he must go to achieve it.
With Willow on his back snoring softly, Longtusk, with stiff arthritic limbs, picked his cautious way down off the nunatak rocks. He took a final, regretful step off the warmth of the black rock, and let his footpads settle on hard ice.
It would begin as a retracing of the great trek which had brought him here.
…But everything was different now.
The ice was, in places, slick with a thin layer of liquid water, making it slippery and treacherous, so that he had to choose his steps with care. And there seemed to have been a fresh frost overnight; ice crystals sparkled like tiny eyes on the blue surface of the hard older ice.
The nunatak receded behind him, becoming a hard black cone of rock, diminishing. It was as if he was leaving behind his life: his ambiguous position in the small society of the Clan, his prickly relationships with Threetusk, Horsetail and the others, the endless complexity of love and birth and death. Not for much longer would he have to carry around his heavy load of pain and loss and memory.