Longtusk turned and began to make his cautious way back along the shuddering dam. The whole ice surface was cracking and unstable now. Crocus was whimpering with fear, and the Dreamer put his strong arm around her, in this last extreme helping this distant cousin to safety. Low and squat, Willow seemed to find it easier to stand on the dam’s shaking surface than the taller, more elegant Firehead.
Above the rush of water, the scream of the cracking ice, Longtusk heard a remote, thin trumpet. It was a mastodont. He looked back, and saw that the mastodonts and their Firehead keepers had fled to the safety of the land, and were fanning out over the hillside there. He couldn’t see if the Shaman was among them. He didn’t suppose it mattered; with Crocus gone, so was his grisly power.
He hoped the mastodonts would survive, and find freedom.
At last the three of them scrambled onto the rocky hillside. It felt scarcely less unsteady than the ice, so powerfully did the gushing water shake it.
He looked over the flooding land to the south. New rivers surged along the dry old valleys, like blood surging through a mammoth’s veins. Already the ridges of soil and gravel, slowly and painfully colonized by the plants, were being overwhelmed and swept away.
But now the ice dam collapsed further. Immense blocks, blocks the size of icebergs, calved off the eroded walls and fell grandly to the battered land — and the flooding reached a new intensity.
A wall of gray water surged from the huge breach, a river trying to empty a sea. This new mighty flow simply overwhelmed the puny canyons and valleys hit by the first flooding, drowning them as if they had never been. A great bank of mist and fog rolled outward from the breached dam, looming up to the sky as swirling clouds.
Beyond the advancing wave front, bizarrely, the sun still shone, and the land was a placid blanket of folded earth peppered with trees. Longtusk saw a herd of bison, a black lake of muscle and fur. They looked up from their feeding at the wall of water that advanced on them, towering higher than the tallest trees.
The herd was gone in an instant, thousands of lives snuffed out as their world turned from placid green to crushing black.
And still the water came, that front of gray advancing without pity over the green, spreading out over the land in a great fan from the breached dam, as if trying to emulate the sea from which it had emerged.
…Now, though, the flow began to diminish, and the water surging over the land began to drain away. Longtusk saw that the breached dam had, if briefly, reformed; slabs of ice and boulders, presumably torn from the basin of the trapped lake, had jammed themselves into the breach, stemming the flow, which bubbled and roared its frustration at this blockage.
As the flood waters subsided, draining into shallow pools and river valleys, the drowned land emerged, glistening.
It was unrecognizable.
Where before there had been green, now there was only the red-brown and black of the bedrock. Under the dam, where the water had fallen to the ground, a great pit had been dug out, gouged as if by some immense mammoth tusk, already flooded with water and littered with ice blocks. It was not that the surface of the land had been washed away, a few trees uprooted — all of it, all the animals and trees and grass and the soil that had sustained them had been scoured clean off, down to the bony bedrock, and then the bedrock itself broken and blasted away. Even the hills had been reshaped, he saw, their flanks eroded and cut away. It was as if a face had been flensed, scraped clean of hair and skin and flesh down to the skull.
Mighty rivers flowed through the new channels, and in folds of the land lakes glimmered — huge expanses, lakes that would have taken days to walk around. It was a new landscape, a new world that hadn’t existed heartbeats before. But he knew there was no life in those rivers and lakes, no plants or fish, not even insects hovering over their surfaces. This was a world of water and rock.
And now there was a new explosion of shattered rock and crushed ice. The temporary dam had failed. The water leaped through and engulfed the land anew, immediately overcoming the lakes and rivers that had formed and gleamed so briefly, a world made and unmade as he watched.
Surely this mighty flood would not rest until it had gouged its way across this narrow neck of land to reach the brother ocean to the south, sundering the continents, cutting off the new lands from the old.
And with the Fireheads trapped in the old world, the mammoths would be safe in the new.
But such small calculations scarcely seemed important. Longtusk felt the shuddering of the planet in his bones, a deep, wild disturbance. The Earth was reshaping itself around him, the sea asserting its mighty fluid dominance over the land. Before such mighty forces his life was a flicker, no more significant than droplet of spume thrown up as the water surged through the broken dam.
…And yet he lived, he realized, wondering. They still stood here — the three of them, Willow, Crocus and himself, the Firehead and the Dreamer still clutching his soaked fur.
For a heartbeat he wondered if they might, after all, live through this.
But now Crocus cried out, pointing.
The hillside they stood on was crumbling. Its surface was cracking, falling away into the gray-brown torrent that gushed below. And the exposed gray-black rock was crumbling too, exploding outward, great shards of it being hurled horizontally by the power of the water. Its lower slopes must have been undercut by the flood.
The land itself was disappearing out from under him, faster than any of them could run.
So it is time, he thought.
Willow plucked at his ears. He bent his head, and the Dreamer slid proudly onto his back. Another story was ending here, thought Longtusk: this squat, aged Dreamer was probably the last of his kind, the last in all the world, and with his death his ancestors’ long, patient Dreams would end forever.
Crocus was weeping. She was frightened, like the cub he had once found in the snow, lost and freezing and bewildered. She looked up at Longtusk, seeking comfort.
He wrapped his trunk around her. She curled up in the shelter of his powerful muscles, pulling his long thick fur around her. She closed her eyes, as if sleeping.
…The land disappeared with a soft implosion, startlingly quickly, and there was nothing under his feet.
He was falling, the Dreamer’s legs locked around his neck, Crocus cradled in his trunk. The air gushed around him, laden with noise and moisture.
He could hear the rush of water beneath him, smell its triumphant brine stink as the sea burst across this narrow neck of land, sundering continent from continent.
Is this how it feels to die? Is this how it feels to be born?
Defiantly he lifted his mighty tusks. Milkbreath! Thunder! Spruce!
And then -
7
The Cousins
It was later — much later — before Threetusk truly understood what had happened. And, as he grew older yet, the strange events of those days plagued his mind more and more.
He found her cropping grass with the painful, slow care of the old.
"You look terrible," said Saxifrage, as she always did.
"And, Matriarch or not, you’re just as uppity as when you were a calf and I could lift you in the air with my trunk."
She snorted with contempt. "Like to see you try it now." But she reached up and nuzzled her trunk tip into his mouth.
Her flavor was thin, stale, old — yet deliciously familiar to Threetusk. They had sired four calves together. Threetusk had known other mates, of course — and so, he knew, had Saxifrage — but none of his couplings had given him such warm joy as those with her. And (he knew, though she would never say so) she felt the same way about him.
But Saxifrage was a Matriarch now, and her Family stood close by her: daughters and granddaughters and nieces, calves playing at the feet of their mothers, happy, well-fed and innocent.