"To help my sister."
The Matriarch shook her great head. "More than that. You must learn. Soon you will be ready for estrus, ready for a calf of your own. And that calf will depend on you — for its whole life, at first — and later, for the lore and wisdom you can teach it. We don’t come into the world fully made, like the birds and the mice. We have to learn how to live. And it will be up to you to teach your calf. There is no greater responsibility. But you cannot teach if you do not learn yourself." Owlheart stepped back. "And if you do not learn, you will never become the great Matriarch I think you could be."
At that, Silverhair’s mouth dropped open, and her pink tongue rolled out with surprise. "Me? A Matriarch?"
It was the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard.
But Owlheart held her gaze. "It is your destiny, child," she said sadly. "Don’t you know that yet?"
3
The Walk South
Mammoths sleep for only a few hours at a time. During the long nights of winter — and during the Arctic summer, when the sun never sets — they sleep not to a fixed pattern but whenever they feel the need.
So when Silverhair woke, the Moon was still high in the sky, bathing the frozen land in blue light. But soon the short spring day would return. She heard a snow bunting call — a herald of spring — and a raven croaked by overhead.
Silverhair remembered the great mystery she had confronted, and — despite the new calf, despite Owlheart’s rumblings — her curiosity was like a pull on her tail, dragging her south again.
Lop-ear was a little way away from the Family, digging in a patch of snow for frozen grass. Silverhair shook frost from her outer guard hair and went to him.
For fear of disturbing the others she silently wrapped her trunk around his and tugged. At first he was reluctant to move; Bull or not, he didn’t have quite the powerful streak of curiosity that motivated Silverhair. But after a few heartbeats he let Silverhair lead him away.
Lop-ear spoke with high-pitched chirrups of his trunk that he knew would not carry back to the Family. "Look at Owlheart."
Silverhair turned to look back at the Family. She could see the massive dark forms of Owlheart and Wolfnose looming protectively over Foxeye and her new calf. And she could see Owlheart’s eyes, like chips of ice in that huge brown head: an unblinking gaze, fixed on her.
"They don’t call her Owlheart for nothing," Lop-ear murmured.
Silverhair shivered. She remembered Owlheart’s admonitions: she should stay and spend time with her sister and the calf. But the pull of curiosity in her was too strong. She knew she had to go and explore what she had found on that remote coast.
So she turned away, and the two of them walked on, heading south.
There was ice everywhere, beneath the starry sky. The ridged ice and snowdrifts seemed to flow smoothly under their feet.
Silverhair walked steadily and evenly. Her bulk was dark and huge, herself and Lop-ear the only moving things in all this world of white and blue and black. She walked with liquid grace, her head nodding with each step, her trunk swaying before her, its great weight obvious. When she ran, her footsteps were firm, her powerful legs remaining stiff beneath her great weight, her feet swelling slightly as they absorbed her bulk.
They battled through a storm.
The snow and fog swirled around them, matting their hair with freezing moisture, at times making it impossible for them to see more than a few paces ahead. But Silverhair knew the storm was the last defiant bellow of the dying winter, and she kept her head down and used her bulk to drive herself forward across a tundra that was like a frozen ocean.
They walked by night, when the only light came from the Moon, which cast a glittering purple glow on the fields of ice and snow. At such times the world was utterly still and silent, save for their own breathing.
To a watching human, Silverhair would have looked something like an Asian elephant — but coated with the long, dark brown hair of a musk ox — round and solid and dark and massive, looking as if she had sprouted from the unforgiving Earth itself.
From the ground under her tree-trunk legs to the top of her broad shoulders — as a human would have measured her — Silverhair was seven feet tall. She was fifteen years old. She could expect to continue growing until she was twenty-five or thirty, until she reached the height of eight or nine feet attained by Owlheart, the Matriarch of the Family. But at that, she would be dwarfed by the biggest of the Bulls — like crusty old Eggtusk, who stood all of eleven feet tall at the shoulder.
Her head was large, with a high dome on her crown. Her face, with its long jaw, was surprisingly graceful. Her shoulders had a high, distinctive hump, behind which her back sloped markedly from front to rear — unlike the horizontal line of an elephant’s back.
Her body was a machine designed to combat the cold.
The layer of fat under her skin — thick as a human forearm — kept her warm through the lightless depths of the Arctic winter. Her ears and tail were small, otherwise those thin, exposed organs would be at risk from frostbite — but the long hairs that extended from her fleshy tail would let it serve as an effective fly-swat in the mosquito-ridden months of the short summer. There was even a small flap of skin beneath her tail, to seal her anus from the cold.
Her ears had an oddly human shape. Her eyes, too, were small like a human’s, and buried deep in a nest of wrinkled skin, shielded from the worst of the weather by thick lashes.
Her tusks were six feet long. Sprouting from their deep sockets at the front of her face, the tusks twisted before her in a loose spiral, their tips almost touching before her. The undersides of both her tusks were worn, for she used them to strip bark and dig up plants — and, in the depths of winter, her tusks served as a snowplow to dig out vegetation for feeding, or even as an icebreaker to expose water to drink in frozen ponds. The bluish ivory of the tusks was finely textured, with growth rings that mapped her age.
Her trunk, six feet long, served her as her nose, hand, and arm, and was her main feeding apparatus. It was a tube of flesh packed with tiny muscles, capable of movement in any direction, even contraction and extension like a telescope. It had two finger-like extensions at its tip for manipulating grass and other small objects. As it worked, the trunk’s surface folded and wrinkled, betraying the complexity of its structure.
A heavy coat of fur covered her body. Over a fine, downy underwool, her guard hairs were long, coarse, and thick, springy and transparent — more like lengths of fishing line than human hair. The hair on her head was just a few inches long. But it hung down in a longer fringe under her chin and neck, and at the sides of her trunk. From her flanks and belly hung a skirt of guard hair almost three feet long, giving her something of the look of a Tibetan yak.
Her coat was dark orange-brown, like a musk ox’s. And in a broad cap between her eyes lay the patch of snow-white fur that had given Silverhair her name.
Silverhair was Mammuthus primigenius: a woolly mammoth.
Ten thousand years before, creatures like Silverhair had populated the fringe of the retreating northern ice caps — right around the planet, through Asia from the Baltic to the Pacific, across North America from Alaska to Labrador. But those days were gone.
The isolation of this remote island, off the northern coast of Siberia, had saved Silverhair and her ancestors from the extinction that had washed over the mainland, claiming her Cousins and many other large animals.
But now the mammoths were trapped here, on the Island.
And Silverhair and her Family were the last of their kind, the last in all the world.