By the low sunlight she could see the pack ice that still lingered in the Channel, ghostly blue. She could smell the sharp salt brine of the sea; and the lapping of the water on the shingle was a soothing, regular sound, so different from the days of clamor she had endured. But the cliff alongside her was steep and obviously impenetrable, even were she fully fit.
She came to a place where the cliff face had crumbled and fallen in great cracked slabs. Perhaps a stream had once run there.
She turned and began to climb up the rough valley, away from the beach.
It was difficult, for the big stones were slippery with kelp fronds. The ropes that bound her hind legs snagged and caught at the rocks…
Something exploded out of the sky.
She trumpeted in alarm. She heard a flapping like giant wings — but wings that beat faster than any bird’s. And there was light, a pool of illumination that hurtled the length of the beach.
Silverhair cowered. Air gushed over her, as if from some tamed windstorm, washing over her face and back; the air stank like a tar pit.
The source of the beam was a thing of straight lines and transparent bubbles, with great wings that whirled above it. It was a great bird, of light and noise.
The Lost had forgotten Silverhair. They went running toward the light-bird, waving their paws.
Carefully, still hobbled by the ropes on her hind legs, Silverhair limped away toward the heart of the Island.
She found a stream, trickling between an outcrop of broken, worn rocks. The first suck of water was so cold and sharp, it sent lances of pain along her dry, inflamed nostrils. She raised her trunk to her mouth. She coughed explosively; her dry throat expelled every drop of the water. When the coughing fit was done, she tried again. The water seemed to burn her throat as it coursed toward her stomach, but she swallowed hard, refusing to allow her body to reject this bounty.
She used her tusks to get the ropes off her hind legs, and then bathed her wounds. The rope burns had indeed turned brown and gray with poison. She washed them clean and caked them with the thin mud she managed to scrape from the bed of the stream.
She cast about for grass. She found it difficult to grasp the tussocks that grew sparsely there, so stiff had her abused trunk become. The grass felt dry, and her tongue, swollen and sore, could detect no flavor.
Another dry, racking cough, and the grass, half-chewed, was expelled.
But she did not give up. There was a calf in her belly, sleeping calmly, trusting her to nurture it to the moment of its birth and then beyond. If she must train herself to live again, she would do it.
So she found more grass and kept trying, until she managed to keep some food in her stomach.
When she had eaten, she found a natural hollow in the ground. She reached over her shoulder for the skins, and she laid the pathetic remnants at the base of the hole.
She spent long heartbeats touching the skins with her trunk, trying to Remember Eggtusk, and the ancient mammoths from whom these skins had been stolen. But the strange, odorless texture of the Lost lay over the skins; and the way they had been scraped and dried, punctured, and stitched together made them seem deeply unnatural.
There was little of Eggtusk left here.
When it was done she limped around the hollow, rumbling her mourning, and she poked at the low mound of remains.
She longed to stay there, and she longed to sleep.
She could feel her strength dissipating, even as she stood here. She had to return to the Family: to tell them what had become of Snagtooth and mighty Eggtusk, and to help Owlheart with whatever the Matriarch decided they must do.
She turned to the north and began the long walk home.
She was a boulder of flesh and bone and fur that stomped stolidly over the blooming summer land, ignoring this shimmering belts of flowers, oblivious to the lemmings she startled from their burrows. As she walked, the warm wind from the south blew the last of her winter coat off her back, so that hair coiled into the air like spindrift from the sea.
She might have looked sullen, for she walked with her head lowered. But such is the habit of mammoths; Silverhair was inspecting the vegetation for the richest grass, which she cropped as often as she could manage.
But the food clogged in her throat as if it were a ball of hair and dirt. Her dung was hard and dry, sharp with barely digested grass. And the cold, though diminishing as the summer advanced, seemed to pierce her deeply.
Her sleep was fragmented, snatches she caught while shivering against rock outcrops, fearful of wolves and Lost.
The world map in her head was now more of a curse than a blessing. She could imagine the scope and rocky sweep of the Island, sense — from their contact rumbles and stamping — where the Family was clustered, far to the north.
She was just a pebble against this bitter panorama. And her own mind and heart — cluttered with the agonizing memories of Eggtusk and Snagtooth and Lop-Ear, and with dread visions of the Lost and their light-bird, and with hopes and fears for the growing child inside her — were dwarfed, made insignificant by the pitiless immensity of the land.
As the sun wheeled in the sky she felt as if her contact with the world was loosening, as if the heavy pads of her feet were leaving the ground; she was a mammoth turning as light as the pollen of the tundra flowers that bloomed around her.
A storm descended.
A black cloud closed around her. The wind seemed to slap at her, each gust a fresh, violent blow. Her fur was plastered against her face. The ice dust hurled by the wind was sharp, and dug into her flesh. She could see barely more than a few paces; she was driving herself through a bubble of light that fluctuated around her.
The storm blew out. But her strength was severely sapped.
She felt she could march no more.
She stopped, and let the sun’s warmth play on her back.
After the storm, the sky was cloaked with a thin overcast. The sun’s light was diffused, so that the air shimmered brightly all around her, and nothing cast a shadow. The sun, high to the north, shone dimly through the haze, and was flanked by a ghostly pair of sun dogs, reflections from ice crystals in the air.
The shadowless light was opalescent, strange and beautiful.
She wasn’t sure where she was, which way she should go. But she could smell water; there was a stream, and pools of ice melt, and the grass grew thickly.
It was a good place to stay. Perhaps her dung would help this place flourish.
On a ground carpeted with bright yellow Arctic daisies, she sank to her knees. The pain in her legs ceased to clamor. She would feed soon, and drink. But first she would sleep.
She rested her tusks on the ground and closed her eyes. She could feel the spin of the rocky Earth that bore her through space, sense it carry her beneath the brightness of the sun.
But a deeper cold lay beneath, a cold that sucked at her.
Something made her open her eyes.
She saw a strange animal, standing unnaturally on its hind legs, brandishing a stick at her. In its paws it held something that glittered like ice, small and sharp.
She felt a nudging around her body, under her spine and at her buttocks.
Irritated, she raised her head.
A huge Bull was trying to dig his tusks under her belly. By the oozing sores of Kilukpuk’s cracked and bleeding moles, but you’re a heavy great boulder of a Cow, little Silverhair. Come — on — come —
She tried to ignore him. After all, he wasn’t real. "Go away," she said.
But we can’t, you see, child. Another mammoth — this time a massive, ancient Cow who moved stiffly, as if plagued by arthritis — stood at her other side. It isn’t your day to die. Don’t you know that? Your story isn’t done yet. And she tugged at Silverhair’s tusks with her trunk.