His life had reduced, at last, to its essence.
Soon — much sooner than he had expected — he found himself clambering down a snub of ice and onto bare rock.
He walked cautiously over rock that had been chiseled and scoured by the retreating ice. Beyond the edge of the cap itself the ice still clung in patches. But it was obvious that the ice’s shrinking had proceeded apace.
He found a run-off stream. It bubbled over shallow mud, cloudy with rock flour. He walked into the brook. It barely lapped over his toes. He drank trunkfuls of the chill, sterile meltwater; it filled his belly and throat.
The water had cut miniature valleys in the flat surface of the mud. The gouges cut across each other, their muddy walls eroded away, so that the incised mud was braided with shallow clefts. Here and there a patch of ground stuck out of the stream, perhaps sheltered by a lump of rock. These tiny islands were shaped like teardrops, their walls eroded by the continuing flow, and grasses, thin and yellow, clung to their surfaces. Longtusk found himself intrigued by the unexpected complexity of this scrap of landscape. Like so much of the world, it was intricate, beautiful — but meaningless, for there were no eyes but his to see it.
He moved on. His feet left shallow craters in the mud; downstream of where he had stood the water, bubbling, began to carve a new pattern of channels.
Soon he reached a new kind of landscape. It was an open forest, with evergreen trees growing in isolated clumps, and swathes of grass in between.
He let down Willow. With brisk efficiency, the Dreamer built and set simple traps of sharpened sticks and sinew.
One of the traps quickly yielded a small rabbit. The Dreamer skinned it, cooked it over a small fire, ate it with every expression of enjoyment — and then, in the warmth of the afternoon, he lay down and began to snore loudly.
Longtusk explored.
The trees were spruce, fir and pines, growing healthy, straight and tall. Farther to the south he saw hardwoods, oak and elm and ash. There was sagebrush abundant in the grassy patches between the trees. The air was too warm for Longtusk and he sought out snow and loose ice to chew and swallow and rub into his fur; the melting snow in his belly cooled him, and bits of ice trapped in his fur evaporated slowly, acting like sweat.
It was not long before he detected the thin scent of water: a great body of it, not much farther to the west. Birds wheeled overhead, some of them gulls. And that water smell was tinged with the sharpness of salt.
It was the meltwater lake he had seen from the nunatak’s summit: still dammed by its plug of ice, now joined to the ocean, grown immeasurably since he had passed by on his original trek to the nunatak. And it was his destination.
He walked back into the forest, through the shade of the young, proud trees. He saw spoor, of horses and bison and other animals. Perhaps the warmth, and the abundance of life here, had something to do with the nearness of that body of water.
But it was no place for mammoths, and the other creatures of the steppe. He felt a huge sadness, for a world was evaporating.
After a night’s rest, they moved on.
The Clan walked between divergent walls of ice.
The twin icecaps were lines of white on the horizon. Sometimes they were too far away to see — but they could always be heard, groaning as if in pain at their endless collapse and crumbling.
The wind gathered strength, always coming from the south, howling in their faces, as if daring them to progress. Even if it was the ice that had made this place barren, it was the wind that kept it so; any soil which formed was whipped away in a cloud of dust, and only the hardiest plants could find root and cling to the rock.
The ground changed constantly. Where soil and dirt collected in hollows, protected from the wind, the surface was boggy and clinging. At times they had to cross islands of ice, left behind by the retreating icecaps and yet to melt. Worse, there were stretches of stagnant ice covered over by a thin crust of detritus, a crust which could conceal pits and crevasses where the underlying ice had melted and drained away.
The going became harder still.
Now they seemed to be descending a shallow slope, as if the whole land inclined to the south. The rock was cut through by valleys — some no more than narrow gullies, and some respectably large channels. Sometimes there were torrents of water, gushing down one valley or another, often carving a new course altogether. Threetusk didn’t understand where these sudden floods came from; perhaps some dam of ice had burst, or a river valley’s wall had been breached.
Where they could, the mammoths followed the broader valleys. But more often than not the valleys cut across their path, and they were forced to spend energy climbing over sharp-crested ridges.
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.