She trumpeted her defiance at the light-bird. As soon as the lethal hail diminished she would charge.
But she heard a deeper rumbling, from above her head.
A great sheet of rock fell away from the chasm wall above the cave opening. Dust swirled over her. Then a huge chunk of the cave’s roof separated and fell. She was caught in a vicious rain of rocks that pounded at her back and head, and the air became so thick with dust, she could barely breathe.
Still she tried to press forward. But the falling rock drove her back, pace by pace, and the light of the chasm was hidden.
The last thing she heard was Foxeye’s desperate, terrified wail. "You promised me, Silverhair! You promised me!…"
Then, at last, Silverhair was sealed up in darkness and silence.
18
The Cave of Salt
Alone in the dark, Silverhair dug at the fallen boulders until she could feel the ivory of her tusks splintering against the unyielding rock, and blood seeped along her trunk from a dozen cuts and scrapes.
But the rocks, firmly wedged in place, were immovable.
She sank to her knees and rested her tusks on the invisible, uneven ground.
The calves had been captured — perhaps even now they were being butchered by the casually brutal Skin-of-Ice and his band of Lost. What was left for her now?
In the depths of her despair, she looked for guidance. And she found it in the last orders of her Matriarch.
She must seek out her Cousins: the other Families that had made up the loose-knit Clan of the Island, a Clan that had once been part of an almost infinite network of mammoth blood alliances that had spread around the world. Her way forward was clear.
But what, a small voice prompted her, if there were no more Families to be found? What if the worst fears of Wolfnose and Lop-ear had come true?
She tried to imagine discovering such a terrible thing: how she would feel, what she would do.
She would simply have to cope, find a way to go on. For now, she had her orders from the Matriarch, and she would follow them. And besides, she had a promise to her sister to keep.
But first she had to get out of this cave.
With new determination she got to her feet, shook off the dust that had settled over her coat, and turned her head, seeking the breeze.
The cave was utterly dark.
She moved with the utmost caution, her trunk held out before her. Her progress was slow. The floor was broken and uneven, the passage narrow and twisting, and she was afraid she might stumble over jagged rock or tumble into an unseen ravine.
And fear crowded her imagination. Mammoths, creatures of the open tundra, are not used to being enclosed; Silverhair tried not to think about the weight of rock and ice and soil that was suspended over her head.
But the echoes of her footsteps, crunching on ancient gravel, gave her a sense of a passageway stretching ahead of her. And there was the breeze: the slightest of zephyrs, laden with the sour stink of brine, somehow worming its way through cracks in the ground to this buried place.
And the breeze grew stronger, little by little, as she progressed.
But the passageway took her downward.
As she moved deeper into the belly of the Earth, the air began to grow warmer. She heard the slow dripping of water from the walls, felt the channels those tiny drips had carved in the rock at her feet over the Great-Years. She licked the droplets from the wall. The water was cool and only a little salty, but there wasn’t enough of it to quench her thirst.
At first the rising heat was comfortable — preferable, anyhow, to the dry, deathly chill of the ice chasm. Suspended here in the dark, she tried to imagine she was feeling the sun on her back, rather than the soulless, sourceless heat of deep rock.
But soon the warmth became less pleasant. She felt her heart race. She spread her ears as far as they would go, lifted her tail and opened her anus flap, opened her mouth and extended her tongue — all to let her body heat escape into this cloying air.
On she walked, deeper and deeper into the dark, and still the heat gathered.
At last the breeze felt a little cooler, and the quality of the echoes from the tunnel ahead changed. Underfoot the ground sloped, suddenly, much more sharply downward.
She stopped.
She sensed the passage broadening into a wider cave. The mouth of her tunnel was set a little way above the floor of the cave. She extended her head and trunk into the empty space beyond the tunnel. The air felt much cooler, and she dropped her ears and anus flap.
With great care she worked her way down a shallow slope of scree to the floor of the cave.
She was still in complete darkness, but she could sense the great dome of the cave’s ceiling far above her, like the roof of some giant mouth.
The breeze seemed to be coming from the opposite side of the cave. But she felt wary of striking out into the darkness.
So she began to feel her way along the wall.
The soft, gritty rock was extensively scratched and scoured. She ran the sensitive tip of her trunk over furrows and grooves.
They were unmistakably the marks of mammoth tusks.
The scrapings of tusks were everywhere, even — she suspected — higher than she could reach herself. She imagined huge old Bulls reaching high up with their gigantic tusks to bring down fresh rock for their Families.
When she ventured a few paces away from the wall, she found the uneven floor littered with mammoth dung. It was obvious that the whole of this cavern had been shaped by the working of mammoths, over generations. But when she picked up some of the dung and broke it open, it crumbled, dry as dust. It was very old, and it was evident that no mammoth had been here for many years.
She used her own tusk to scrape free pebble-sized lumps of rock from the wall. She picked them up, tucked them in her mouth, ground them to sand with her huge teeth, and swallowed them. The rock’s flavor was deliciously sharp: perhaps born from an ancient volcano, this loose, ash-like rock evidently was rich in salt and other minerals the mammoths needed.
The reason for the mammoths’ presence in the cave was clear. Mammoths need salt and other minerals, as do other animals. But their tongues are not long enough to reach around their trunks and tusks to reach salt-licks, exposed outcroppings of salty minerals. So they dig them up, using their tusks to loosen the earth. This whole cavern system might once have been a simple seam of soft, salty rock into which the mammoths had dug, until at last they had shaped this giant cave and the tunnels that led to it.
Silverhair held fragments of the rock on her tongue, relishing the salty taste and the rich, ancient mammoth smell of the place, as if she were tasting the living past itself. She walked on, surrounded by the workings of her ancestors, obscurely comforted.
At last she came to a heap of scree. The fresh breeze seemed to spill from a hole somewhere above her head. It must be another tunnel.
She clambered onto the scree. Her feet scrabbled to get a foothold in the unstable mass; it took several efforts before she had raised herself sufficiently to get her forelegs over the lip of the tunnel. Then it was a simple matter to pull herself all the way in.
She turned her back on the salt cave and marched on, into the darkness.
She felt the tunnel floor rising. The walls closed around her uncomfortably; if she took a step to either side she brushed against warm rock. But, as she climbed, she felt a delicious, welcoming chill return to the air. The breeze she had followed continued to strengthen.
And, ahead of her now, she made out splinters of green-blue light.
Gradually, as her eyes adapted, she saw that the pale green glow was outlining the walls and floor and roof of her tunnel. She could even make out the larger boulders on the floor, and she was able to press forward with confidence.