Longtusk Read online

  The aurora moved steadily north, breaking up into isolated luminous patches, like clouds.

  AT LAST THE DAYS BEGAN to lengthen, and the pale ruddy sun seemed to leak a little warmth, as if grudgingly.

  Life returned to the steppe.

  The top layers of the frozen ground melted, and fast-growing grasses sprouted, along with sedges, small shrubs like Arctic sagebrush, and types of pea, daisy and buttercup. The grasses grew quickly and dried out, forming a kind of natural hay, swathes of it that would be sufficient to sustain, over the summer months, the herds of giant grazing herbivores that lived there.

  Early in the season a herd of bison passed, not far away. Longtusk saw a cloud of soft dust thrown high into the air, and in the midst of it the great black shapes crowded together, with their humpback shoulders and enormous black horns; their stink of sweat and dung assailed Longtusk's acute sense of smell. And there were herds of steppe horses — their winter coats fraying, stripes of color on their flanks — skittish and nervous, running together like flocks of startled birds.

  In this abundance of life, death was never far away. There were wolves and the even more ferocious dholes, lynxes, tigers and leopards: carnivores to exploit the herbivores, the moving mountains of meat. Once, near an outcrop of rock, Longtusk glimpsed the greatest predator of them all — twice the size of its nearest competitor — a mighty cave cat.

  And — serving as a further sign of the relentless shortness of life — condors and other carrion eaters wheeled overhead, waiting for the death of others, their huge out-folded wings black stripes against the blue sky.

  Work began again. The mastodonts were put to digging and lifting and carrying for the Fireheads.

  Longtusk was still restricted to crude carrying. Those who had shared his chores last season were now, by and large, tamed and trained and trusted, and had moved on to more significant work. Of last year's bearers, only Longtusk remained as a pack animal.

  What was worse, during the winter he had grown. Towering over the immature, restless calves he had to work with — his mighty tusks curling before him, useless — he endured his work, and the taunts of his fellows. But a cloud of humiliation and depression gathered around him.

  Longtusk realized, with shock, that he was another year older, and he had withstood yet another cycle of seasons away from his Family. But compared to the heavy brutal reality of the mastodonts around him, his Family seemed like a dream receding into the depths of his memory.

  He was surrounded by restraints, he was coming to realize, and the hobbles and goads of the keepers were only the most obvious. These mastodonts had lived in captivity for generations. None of them even knew what it was to be free, to live as the Cycle taught. And his own memories — half-formed, for he had been but a calf when taken — were fading with each passing month.

  And besides, he didn't want to be alone, an outsider, a rogue, a rebel. He wanted to belong. And these complacent, tamed mastodonts were the only community available to him. The keepers knew all this — the smarter ones — and used subtle ploys to reinforce the invisible barriers that restrained the mastodonts more effectively than rope or wood: pain for misbehavior, yes, but rewards and welcoming strokes when he accepted his place.

  If he could no longer imagine freedom, a life different from this, how could he ever aspire to it?

  So it was that when Walks With Thunder came to him and said that the keeper, Lemming, was going to make an attempt to teach him to accept a rider, Longtusk knew the time had come to defy his instincts.

  LEMMING SNAPPED, "Baitho! Baitho!"

  Walks With Thunder murmured, "He's saying, Down. Lower your trunk, you idiot. Like this." And Thunder dipped his trunk gently, so it pooled on the ground.

  Longtusk could see that all over the stockade mastodonts were turning toward him. Some of the Fireheads were pausing in their tasks to look at him, their spindly forelegs akimbo; he even spotted the blonde head of the little cub, Crocus, watching him curiously.

  Longtusk growled. "They want to see the mammoth beaten at last."

  "Ignore them," Walks With Thunder hissed. "They don't matter."

  The Firehead raised his stick and tapped Longtusk on the root of his trunk.

  Longtusk rapped his trunk on the ground, and as the air was forced out of the trunk it emitted a deep, terrifying roar.

  Lemming fell back, startled.

  "Try again," Thunder urged.

  I have to do this, Longtusk thought. I can do this.

  He lowered his head and let his trunk reach the ground, as Thunder had done.

  "Good lad," said Thunder. "It's harder to submit than to defy. Hang onto that. You're stronger than any of us, little grazer. Now you must prove it."

  The Firehead stepped onto Longtusk's trunk. Then he reached out and grabbed Longtusk's ears, his tipped stick still clutched in his paw.

  Longtusk, looking forward, found he was staring straight into the Firehead's small, complex face.

  This, he realized, is going to take a great deal of forbearance indeed.

  "Utha! Utha!" cried Lemming.

  "Now what?"

  "He's telling you to lift him up."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Just do it."

  And Longtusk pushed up with his trunk, lifting smoothly.

  With a thin wail the Firehead went sailing clean over his rump.

  Walks With Thunder groaned. "Oh, Longtusk..."

  The Firehead came bustling round in front of him. He was covered in mastodont dung, and he was jumping up and down furiously.

  "At least he had a soft landing," Longtusk murmured.

  "Baitho!"

  "He wants to try again," Walks With Thunder said. "Go ahead, lower your trunk. That's it. Let him climb on. Now take it easy, Longtusk. Don't throw him — lift him, smoothly and gently."

  Longtusk made a determined effort to keep the motions of his trunk even and steady.

  But this time Lemming was thrown backward. He completed a neat back-flip and landed on his belly in the dirt.

  Other Fireheads ran forward. They lifted him up and started slapping at his furs, making great clouds of dust billow around him. They were flashing their small teeth and making the harsh noise he had come to recognize as laughing: not kind, perhaps, but not threatening.

  But now the other keeper, Spindle, came forward. His goad, tipped with sharp bone, was long and cruel, and he walked back and forth before Longtusk, eyeing him. He was saying something, his small, cruel mouth working.

  "Take it easy, Longtusk," Walks With Thunder warned.

  "What does he want?"

  "If Lemming can't tame you, then Spindle will do it. His way—"

  Suddenly Spindle's thin arm lashed out toward Longtusk. His goad fizzed through the air and cut cruelly into the soft flesh of Longtusk's cheek.

  Longtusk trumpeted in anger and reared up, as high as his hobbles would allow him. He could crush Spindle with a single stamp, or run him through with a tusk. How dare this ugly little creature attack him?

  But the Firehead wasn't even backing away. He was standing before Longtusk, forelegs extended, paws tucked over as if beckoning.

  "Don't, Longtusk," Walks With Thunder rumbled urgently. "It's what he wants. Don't you see? If you so much as scratch Spindle, they will destroy you in an instant. It's what he wants..."

  Longtusk knew Thunder was right. He growled and lowered his tusks, glaring at Spindle.

  The Firehead, tiny teeth gleaming, lashed out once more, and again Longtusk felt the goad cut deep into his flesh.

  But suddenly it ceased.

  Longtusk looked down. The girl-cub, Crocus, was standing before him. She seemed angry, distressed; tears ran down her small face. She was tugging at Spindle's foreleg, making him stop. Her father, Bedrock, and the Shaman Smokehat were standing behind her.

  Spindle was hesitating, his blood-tipped goad still raised to Longtusk.

  At last Bedrock gestured to Spindle. With a snort of disgust the keeper
threw his goad in the dirt and stalked away.

  Now Crocus stood before Longtusk, gazing up at him. She was growing taller, just as he was, and an elaborate cap of ivory beads adorned her long blonde hair, replacing the simple tooth necklace circle she had worn when younger. She seemed afraid, he saw, but she was evidently determined to master her fear.

  "Baitho," she said, her voice small and clear. Down, down.

  And Longtusk, the warm blood still welling from his face, obeyed.

  She stepped onto his trunk, reached forward, and grabbed hold of his ears.

  He raised his trunk, gingerly, carefully.

  Thunder was very quiet and still, as if he scarcely dared breathe. "Right. Lower her onto your back. Gently! Recall how fragile she is... imagine she's a flower blossom, and you don't want to disturb a single petal."

  Rumbling, working by feel, Longtusk did his best. He felt the cub's skinny legs slide around his neck.

  "How's that?"

  Walks With Thunder surveyed him critically. "Not bad. Except she's the wrong way around. She's facing your backside, Longtusk. Try again. Let her off."

  Longtusk lowered his hind legs. Crocus skidded down his back, landing with a squeal in the dirt.

  "By Kilukpuk's hairy navel," Walks With Thunder groaned, and Bedrock stepped forward, anxious.

  But Crocus, though a little dusty, was unharmed. She trotted around to Longtusk's head once more. She pulled her face in the gesture he was coming to recognize as a smile, and she patted the blood-matted hair of his cheek. "Baitho," she said quietly.

  Again he lowered his trunk for her.

  This time he got her the right way around. Her legs wrapped around his neck, and he felt her little paws grasping at the long hairs on top of his head. She was a small warm bundle, delicate, so light he could scarcely feel her.

  Rumbling, constrained by his hobbles, Longtusk took a cautious step forward. He felt the cub's fingers digging deeper into his fur, and she squealed with alarm. He stopped, but she kicked at his flanks with her tiny feet, and called out, "Agit!"

  "It's all right," Walks With Thunder said. "She's safe up there. Go forward. Just take it easy, Longtusk."

  So he stepped forward again.

  Crocus laughed with pleasure. Keepers ran alongside him — as did Bedrock, still wary, but grinning. The watching mastodonts raised their trunks and trumpeted in salute.

  But the Shaman, ignored by the Fireheads and their leader, was glaring, quietly furious.

  IT WAS ALL A QUESTION of practice, of course.

  By the end of that first day Longtusk could lift the little Firehead onto his back, delivering her the right way around, almost without effort. And by the end of the second day he was starting to learn what Crocus wanted. A gentle kick to the left ear — maybe accompanied by a thin cry of Chi! — meant he should go left. Chai Ghoom! and a kick to the right ear meant go right. Agit! meant go forward; Dhuth! meant stop. And so on.

  By the end of the third day, Longtusk was starting to learn subtler commands, transmitted to him through the cub's body movements. If Crocus stiffened her limbs and leaned back he knew he was supposed to stop. If she leaned forward and pushed his head downward he should kneel or stoop.

  Crocus never used a goad on him.

  It wasn't all easy. Once he spied an exceptionally rich clump of herbs, glimpsed through the branches of a tree. He forgot what he was doing and went that way, regardless of the little creature on his back — who yelped as the branches swept her to the ground. Alternatively if Longtusk thought the path he was being told to select was uncomfortable or even dangerous — for instance, if it was littered with sharp scree that might cut his footpads — he simply wouldn't go that way, regardless of the protests of the cub.

  After many days of this the keeper, Spindle, came to him, early in the morning.

  Spindle raised his goad. "Baitho! Baitho!"

  Longtusk simply glared at him, chewing his feed, refusing to comply.

  The beating started then, as intense as before, and Longtusk felt old wounds opening on his cheek. But still he would not bow to Spindle.

  Nobody else, he thought. Only the girl-cub Crocus.

  At last Crocus came running with the other keepers. With sharp words she dismissed Spindle. Then, with Lemming's help, she applied a thick, soothing salve to the cuts Spindle had inflicted on Longtusk's cheek and thighs.

  Without waiting for the command, Longtusk lowered his trunk and allowed her to climb onto his back once more.

  Although Longtusk's workload didn't change, he became accustomed to meeting Crocus at the beginning or end of each day. She would ride him around the mastodont stockade, and Longtusk learned to ignore the mocking, somewhat envious jeers of the mastodonts. As she approached he would coil and uncoil his trunk with pleasure. Sometimes she brought him tidbits of food, which he chewed as she talked to him steadily in her incomprehensible, complex tongue.

  She seemed fascinated by his fur. Longtusk had a dense underfur of fine woolly hair that covered almost all his skin. His rump, belly, flanks, throat and trunk were covered as well by a dense layer of long, coarse guard hair that dangled to the ground, skirt-like. The guard hair melded across his shoulders with a layer of thick but less coarse hairs that came up over his shoulders from low on the neck.

  Crocus spent a great deal of time examining all this, lifting his guard hairs and teasing apart its layers. As for Longtusk, he would touch Crocus's sweet face with the wet tip of his trunk, and then rest against her warmth, eyes closed.

  Eventually Crocus's visits became a highlight of his day — almost as welcome as, and rather less baffling than, his occasional meetings with the young mastodont Cow, Neck Like Spruce.

  Once he took Crocus for a long ride across the bare steppe. They found a rock pool, and Longtusk wallowed there while Crocus played and swam. The sun was still high and warm, and he stretched out on the ground. She climbed onto his hairy belly and lay on top of him, soothed by the rumble of his stomach, plucking his hair and singing.

  Even though he knew he remained a captive — even though her affection was that of an owner to the owned — and even though the growing affection between them was only a more subtle kind of trap, harder to break than any hobbles — still, he felt as content as he had been since he had been separated from his Family.

  But he was aware of the jealous glares of Spindle and Smokehat.

  Longtusk grew impatient with all these obscure mental games, the strange obsessions of the Fireheads. But Thunder counseled caution.

  "Be wary," he would say, as the mastodonts gathered after a day's work. "You have a friend now. She recalls you once saved her life. And that's good. But you're also acquiring enemies. The Shaman is jealous. It is only the power of her father, Bedrock, which is protecting you. Life is more complicated than you think, little grazer. Only death is simple..."

  3

  The Settlement

  THE FIREHEADS' NUMBERS WERE growing, with many young being born, and they worked hard to feed themselves.

  As spring wore into summer, Firehead hunters began making journeys into the surrounding steppe. The hunters looked for tracks and droppings. What they sought, Longtusk was told, was the spoor of wolves, for that told them that there was a migrant herd somewhere nearby, tracked by the carnivores.

  And at last the first of the migrants returned: deer, some of them giants, their heads bowed under the weight of their immense spreads of antlers.

  The deer trekked enormous distances between their winter range in the far south, on the fringe of the lands where trees grew thickly, and their calving grounds on the northern steppe. The calving grounds were often dismal places of fog and marshy land and bare rock. But they had the great advantage that most predators, seeking places to den themselves, would fall away long before the calving grounds were reached. And when the calves were born the deer would form into vast herds in preparation for the migration back to the south: enormous numbers of them, so many a single herd might str
etch from horizon to horizon, blackening the land.

  To Longtusk these great migrations, of animals and birds, seemed like breathing, a great inhalation of life.

  And the Fireheads waited for the migrant animals to pass, movements as predictable as the seasons themselves, and prepared to hunt.

  ONE DAY, LATE IN THE SUMMER, Crocus walked with her father and the Shaman to the bone stockpile, a short distance from the mastodont stockade.

  Longtusk, still not fully trusted, wasn't allowed anywhere near this grisly heap of flensed bones, gleaming in the low afternoon sun.

  Crocus walked around the pile, one finger in her small mouth. She ran her paws over clutches of vertebrae, and huge shoulder blades, and bare leg bones almost as tall as she was. At last she stopped before a great skull with sweeping tusks. As the skull's long-vacant eye sockets gaped at her, the cub rubbed the flat surfaces of the mammoth's worn yellow teeth.

  Longtusk wondered absently what that long-dead tusker would have made of this.

  Crocus looked up at her father and the Shaman, talking rapidly and jumping up and down with excitement. This skull was evidently her choice. Bedrock and Smokehat reached down and, hauling together, dragged the skull from the heap. It was too heavy for them to lift.

  Then, his absurd headdress smoking, the Shaman sang and danced around the ancient bones, sprinkling them with water and dust. Longtusk had seen this kind of behavior before. It seemed that the Shaman was making the skull special, as if it was a living thing he could train to protect the little cub who had chosen it.

  When the Shaman was done, Bedrock gestured to the mastodont trainers. Lemming and the others walked through the stockade and selected Jaw Like Rock and another strong Bull. Evidently they were to carry the skull off.

  But Crocus seemed angry. She ran into the stockade herself, shouting, "Baitho! Baitho!"

  Longtusk lowered his trunk to the ground and bent his head. With the confidence of long practice she wriggled past his tusks, grabbed his ears and in a moment was sitting in her comfortable place at his neck. Then, with a sharp slap on his scalp, she urged him forward. "Agit!"