But now she heard the stomping.
It was a deep pounding, surging through the rocky ground. A human would have heard nothing, not even felt the quiver of the ground caused by those great footfalls. But Silverhair recognized it immediately, for the stomping has the longest range of all the mammoths’ means of calling each other.
It was the distinctive footfall of Owlheart herself: it was the Matriarch, calling her Family together. The birth must be near.
When Silverhair had been a calf, the Island had rung to the stomping of mammoths, for there were many Families in those days, scattered across the tundra. Now there was only the remote echo of her own Matriarch’s footfall. But Silverhair — nervous about the birth to come, her curiosity engaged by what she had seen today — did not reflect long on this.
The new spring sun was weak, a red ball that rolled along the horizon, offering little warmth. And already, heartbreakingly soon, it was setting, having shed little heat over the snow that still covered the ground. The last light turned the mountains pink, and it caught Silverhair’s loose outer fur, making it glow, so that it was as if she were surrounded by a smoky halo.
She stole one last glimpse at the strange object in the sea. It had almost passed out of sight anyway, as it drifted away from the headland.
She turned and began her journey back to her Family.
Later she would wonder if it might have been better to have ignored the Matriarch’s call, descended to the shore — and without mercy, destroyed the strange object and the creatures it contained.
2
The Birth
Mammoths wander. Few wander as far as Silverhair did, however.
It took her ten days to cross the Island and return to the northern tundra where her Family was gathered. She was not aware of the way the ground itself shuddered as her feet passed, and the way lemmings were rattled in their winter burrows in the snow. But the rodents were unconcerned, and went about their tiny businesses without interruption. For they knew that the mammoths, the greatest creatures in the land, would do them no harm.
Silverhair knew that the worst of the winter was over: that time of perpetual night broken only by the occasional flare of the aurora borealis, and of the hard winds from the north that drove snow and ice crystals before them. The return of the sun had been heralded by days in which the darkness was relieved by twilight, when the black star pool above had turned to a dome of glowing purple — purple enriched by swathes of blue, pink, even some flashes of green — before sinking back to darkness again, all without a sliver of sunlight.
But every day the noon twilights had grown longer and stronger, until at last the sun itself had come peeking over the horizon. At first it was just a splinter of blinding light that quickly disappeared, as if shy. But at last the sun had climbed fully above the horizon for the first time in more than a hundred days.
In the new light, to the north, she could see the sweep of the Island itself. The tundra was still largely buried in pale snow and ice, with none of the rich marsh green or splashes of flowering color that the growth of summer would bring. And beyond, to the farthest north, she could see the bony faces of the Mountains at the End of the World, looming out of the bluish mist that lingered there, brown cones striped by the great white glaciers that spilled from rocky valleys. The Mountains were a wall of ice and rock beyond which no mammoth had ever ventured.
Along the south coast of the Island, more sheltered, the oily green-black of a spruce forest clung to the rock. The trees were intruders, encroaching on the ancient tundra that provided Silverhair’s Family with the grassy food they needed.
Despite her sense of urgency, Silverhair paused frequently to feed. Her trunk was busy and active, like an independent creature, as it worked at the ground. She would wrap her trunk-fingers around the sparse tufts of grass she found under the snow, cramming the dark green goodies into her small mouth, and grind them between her great molar teeth with a back-and-forth movement of her jaw. The grass, the last of the winter, was coarse, dry, and unsatisfying, as was the rest of her diet of twigs and bark of birches, willows, and larches; with a corner of her mind she looked forward to her richer summer feast to come.
And she would lift her anus flap and pass dung, briskly and efficiently, as mammoths must ten or twelve times a day. The soft brown mass settled to the ice behind her, steaming; it would enrich the soil it touched, and the seeds that had passed through Silverhair’s stomach would germinate and turn the land green.
The Family had no permanent home. They would gather to migrate to new pastures, or when one of their members was in some difficulty. But they would scatter in pairs or small groups to forage for food during the day, or to sleep at night. There was never any formal arrangement about where to meet again — nor was one necessary, for the mammoths were by far the most massive beasts in the landscape, and the authoritative stomping of Owlheart, and the rumbling and calls of the Family gathered together, traveled — to a mammoth’s ears — from one end of the Island to another.
On the eighth day a line of white vapor cut across the deep blue sky, utterly straight, feathering slightly. Silverhair peered upward; the vapor trail was at the limit of her poor vision. There was a tiny, glittering form at the head of the vapor line, like a high-flying bird, but its path was unnaturally straight and unwavering, its wings frozen still. A sound like remote thunder drifted down, even though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
Silverhair had seen such things before. Nobody could tell her what it was, what it meant. After a time, the glittering mote passed out of sight, and the vapor trail slowly dispersed.
On the ninth day Silverhair was able to hear not just the Matriarch’s stomping, but also the rumbles, trumpets, and growls of her people. The deep voices of mammoths — too deep for human ears — will carry far across the land, unimpeded by grassland, snowbanks, even forest.
And in the evening of that day, when the wind was right, she could smell home: the rich, hot odor of fresh dung, the musk stink of wet fur.
On the tenth day she was able to see the others at last. The mammoths, gathered together, were blocky shapes looming out of the blue-tinged fog. Silverhair was something of a loner, but even so, she felt her heart pump, her blood flow warm in her veins, at the thought of greeting the Family.
Warm at the thought — she admitted it — of seeing Lop-ear once more.
The mammoths were scraping away thin layers of snow with their feet and tusks to get at the saxifrage buds below. Molting winter fur hung around them in untidy clouds, and she could see how gaunt they were, after a winter spent burning the fat of the long-gone summer. It had been a hard winter, even for this frozen desert, and standing water had been unusually hard to find. Silverhair knew that when the weather lifted — and if the thaw did not come soon — the Matriarch would have to lead them to seek open water. It would be an arduous trek, and there was no guarantee of success, but there might be no choice.
The Family’s two adult Bulls came to meet her.
Here was powerful old Eggtusk, his ears ragged from the many battles he had fought, and with the strange egg-shaped ivory growth in his tusk that had given him his name. And here, too, was Lop-ear, the younger Bull, with his dangling, parasite-damaged ear. The Bulls launched into their greeting ceremony, and Silverhair joined in, rumbling and trumpeting, excited despite the shortness of her separation.