Silverhair tm-1 Page 10

  Silverhair, breathing hard, returned to Wolfnose. "If she returns I will kill her."

  Wolfnose said, "No. She has her place, as we all do. She probably has cubs to feed."

  "She has been chewing on the corpse of this Bull!"

  Wolfnose trumpeted mockingly. "And what difference does that make to him now? He has belonged to the wolves for a long time; in fact, longer than you think, little Silverhair…"

  Silverhair returned to her inspection of the ravaged corpse. "I don’t recognize him. He must be from a Family I never met."

  "You don’t understand yet," Wolfnose said gently. "Perhaps he was grazing at the soft edge of a gully or a river bluff. Perhaps he lost his footing, became trapped. The wolves would work at him, and in time he would die. But then, at last, he would be enveloped by the soil, saturated by water, frozen by winter’s return.

  "But the river mud that destroyed him also preserved him.

  "For you see, if your body happens to be sealed inside ice, it can be saved. The ice, freezing, draws out the moisture that would otherwise rot your flesh… If you were sealed here, Silverhair, although your spirit would long have flown to the aurora, your body would live on — as long as it remained inside the ice, it would be as well preserved as this."

  "How long?"

  Wolfnose said. "I don’t know. How can I know? Perhaps Great-Years. Perhaps longer…"

  Silverhair was stunned.

  She could reach down with her trunk and touch the hair of this Bull’s face. The Bull might have been dead only a few days. Yet — could it be true? — he was separated from her by Great-Years.

  "Now," said Wolfnose. "Look with new eyes; lift your trunk and smell…"

  Silverhair, a little bewildered, obeyed.

  And now that her eyes and nostrils were accustomed to the stink of the ancient corpse beside her, she saw that this landscape was not as it had seemed.

  It was littered with bones.

  Here was a femur, a leg bone, thrusting defiantly from the ground. Here was a set of ribs, broken and scattered, split as if some scavenger had been working to extract the marrow from their cores. And there a skull protruded from the ground, as if some great beast were burrowing upward from within the Earth.

  Wolfnose said, "The bones and bodies are stored in the ground. But when the ice melts and they are exposed — after Great-Years of stillness and dark — there is a moment of daylight, a flash of activity. The wolves and birds soon come to take away the flesh, and the bones are scattered by the wind and the rain. And then it is done. The ancient bodies evaporate like a grain of snow on the tongue. So you see, you are fortunate to have witnessed this rare moment of surfacing, Silverhair."

  "We should Remember the one in the yedoma," Silverhair said.

  "Of course we should," said Wolfnose. "For he has no one left to do it for him."

  And so the two mammoths touched the vacant skull with their trunks, and lifted and sorted the bones. Then they gathered twigs and soil and cast them on the ancient corpse, and touched it with the sensitive pads of their back feet, and they stood over it as the sun wheeled around the sky. They were trying to Remember the spirit that had once occupied this body, this Bull with no name who might have been the ancestor of them both, just as they would have done had they come upon the body of one of their own Family.

  Silverhair imagined the days of long ago — perhaps when the crushed corpse she had seen had been proud and full of life — days different from now, days when the Clan had covered the Island, days when Families had merged and mingled in the great migrations like rivers flowing together. Days when mammoths had been more numerous, on the Island and beyond, than pebbles on a beach.

  She was standing on a ground filled with the bodies of mammoths, generations of them stretching back Great-Years and more, bodies that were raised to the surface, to glimmer in the sun and evaporate like dew. For the first time in her life she could see the great depth of mammoth history behind her: forty million years of it, stretching back to Kilukpuk herself in her Swamp, a great sweep of time and space of which she was just a part.

  Like the bones of this long-dead Bull, her soul was merely the fragment of all that mystery that happened to have surfaced in the here and now. And like the Bull, her soul would be worn away and vanished in an instant.

  Silverhair felt the world shift and flow around her, as if she herself was caught up by some great river of time.

  And she was proud, fiercely proud, to be mammoth.

  When they were done the two mammoths turned away from the setting sun, side by side, and prepared for the long walk back to their Family.

  At the last moment, Wolfnose stopped and turned back. "Silverhair — what of the tusks?"

  Somehow Silverhair had not noticed the Bull’s tusks, one way or another. She trotted back to the yedoma.

  The tusks were missing; there was no sign of them, not so much as a splinter. But the tusks had not been snapped away by whatever accident had befallen this Bull, for the stumps in the skull were sharply terminated in clean, flat edges.

  She returned to Wolfnose and told her this.

  For the first time, she detected fear in the voice of the old one. "Then the Lost have been here."

  "…What?"

  "I know what you saw on the ice floe in the south, Silverhair," Wolfnose said gravely. "Perhaps they came in search of flesh, like the wolf…"

  "What do the Lost want with tusks?"

  "There is no understanding the Lost," said Wolfnose bluntly. "There is only fleeing. Come. Let us return to Owlheart and the others."

  Their shadows stretching ahead of them, the two mammoths walked together.

  9

  The Hole Gouged Out of the Sky

  Silverhair was impatient during the long journey back to the Family.

  It struck her as a paradox that visiting a place of death and desolation like the Plain of Bones should leave her feeling so invigorated. But that was how she felt — as Wolfnose had surely intended.

  And — besides all the philosophy — she was young, and the days of spring were bright and warming, and the tundra flowers were already starting to bloom bright yellow amid the last scraps of snow and the first green shoots of new grass. Just as the Cycle promised, she felt she was shedding her cares with the worn-out layers of her winter coat.

  Perhaps this would be the year that she would, for the first time, sing the Song of Estrus: when her body would produce the eggs that could form a calf. She remembered the ache in her empty dugs as she had watched Foxeye suckle Sunfire for the first time. Now she could feel the blood surge in her veins, as if drawn by the sun.

  She wanted to become pregnant: to bear her own calf, to shelter and feed and raise it, to teach it all she knew of the world, to add her own new thread to the Cycle’s great and unending coat.

  And her thoughts were full of Lop-ear. She longed to tell him what she had seen on the Plain of Bones, what it had meant to her…

  She longed, bluntly, just to be with him once more.

  She trotted across the thawing plains, her head full of warm, blood-red dreams of the young Bull.

  Wolfnose had more difficulty.

  Even at the best of times her pace was no match for Silverhair’s. The pain in her legs and back was obvious. It took her much longer than Silverhair to feed and to pass dung, and her lengthening stops left Silverhair fretting with impatience.

  Thus they proceeded, Wolfnose warring with her own failing body, Silverhair torn between eagerness for the future and responsibility for the past.

  At last they came in sight of the Family.

  It was a bright morning, and at the center of a greening plain, the Family looked like a series of round, hairy boulders dotted over the landscape. The smell of their dung and their moist coats was already strong, and Silverhair could feel the rumble of their voices as they called to each other. The mammoths were not beautiful — never had the ambiguous gift of the great Matriarch Ganesha to her daughter Prima been mo
re evident to Silverhair — but it was, in her eyes, the finest sight she could have seen.

  She raised her trunk and trumpeted her joyous greeting and — quite forgetting Wolfnose — she charged across the tundra toward the Family.

  Here came Lop-ear, that damaged ear dangling unmistakably by his head, running to meet her.

  Their meeting was so vigorous, she was almost knocked over. They bumped their foreheads, ran in circles, defecated together, and spun around. He was like a reflection in a melt pond, a reflection of her own resurgent youth and vigor.

  This is our time, she thought as she spun and danced. This is our summer, our day.

  And it seemed perfectly natural that he should run behind her, rear up on his hind legs, place his forelegs on her back, and rest his great weight against her.

  But she was not in estrus, and he was not in musth, and — for now — the mounting was only a playful celebration.

  They faced each other; Silverhair touched his scalp and tusks and mouth.

  "I missed you," he said.

  "And I you. You won’t believe what Wolfnose showed me…" She began to recount all she had seen in the Plain of Bones, the ancient carcasses of mammoths just like themselves, swimming out of the ice after a Great-Year’s sleep.

  But though he listened intently, and continued to stroke her trunk with his, she could see that his eyes were empty.

  After a time she drew back from him. He reached for her again, but she pushed him gently away.

  "Something’s wrong. Is it what Owlheart said, about having something of the Lost in you?"

  "No. Or at least, not just that. I’m confused, Silverhair. I’m happy to see you, glad the spring has come again. Part of me wants to jump about like a calf. But inside, I feel as if a giant black winter cloud is hanging over me."

  She scuffed at the ground, trying to retain that sense of wondrous optimism with which she had returned home. "I don’t understand…"

  "Silverhair, if you were singing the Song of Estrus now — who would mount you?"

  And with that question she saw his concern. For there were only two Bulls here who might come into musth: Eggtusk and Lop-ear. They’d fought once already; they might easily kill each other fighting over her.

  Or over Owlheart, or Foxeye, or even Snagtooth, if their turn came.

  Lop-ear said, "And even if we resolve our dominance fights without killing each other — even if all the Cows become pregnant by one or other of us — what then?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "What of the future? When Sunfire and Croptail and any other calves grow up — and themselves come into estrus and musth — who is to mate with them?" He spun, agitated, his trunk raised as if to ward off invisible enemies. "Already his mother is pushing Croptail away. That’s as it should be. Soon, in a few years, he will want to leave the Family and search for other Bulls, join a bachelor herd. Just as I did, just as Eggtusk did. But Croptail can’t join the Bulls, for there are no other Bulls. He can’t join a bachelor herd, for there is no herd — none that we have met for a long time, at any rate. And when he is in musth, there will be no Cows but his own sisters and aunts and cousins."

  She reached out to try to calm him. "Lop-ear—"

  But he spun away from her. "Oh, Kilukpuk! I have this stuff rattling around in my skull all day and all night. I want to stop thinking!"

  She was chilled by his words, even as she strove to understand. To think so clearly about the possibilities of the future, of change, is not common in mammoths; embedded in the great rhythms of time, the mammoths live in the here and now. But Lop-ear was no ordinary mammoth.

  She took hold of his trunk and forced him to face her. "Lop-ear — listen to me. Perhaps you’re right in all you say. But you are wrong to despair. When we were trapped by the fire and the runoff, you found a way to save us. It wasn’t a teaching from the Cycle; it wasn’t something the Matriarch showed you. It was a new idea.

  "Now we are facing a barrier even more formidable than that stream. There is nothing to guide us in the Cycle. There is nothing the Matriarch can advise us to do. It’s up to us, Lop-ear. We have to seek out the new, and find a way to survive."

  "It’s impossible."

  "No. As Longtusk said, ‘Only death is the end of possibility.’ What we must do is look for answers where nobody has looked before."

  "Where?"

  She hesitated, and the vague determination that had long been gathering in her crystallized. "If Eggtusk is right — that the Lost have come to this Island — then that’s where we must go."

  "The Lost? Silverhair, are you rogue?"

  "No. Just determined. Maybe the Lost aren’t the monsters of the Cycle anymore. Maybe there’s some way they can help us." She tightened her grasp on his trunk. "We must go south again. Are you with me?"

  For long heartbeats he stared into her eyes. Then he said, "Yes. Oh, Silverhair, yes. I’ll follow you to the End of the World—"

  There was an alarmed trumpeting.

  Silverhair released Lop-ear’s trunk and they both whirled, trunks held aloft.

  Owlheart was running. "Wolfnose! Wolfnose!"

  Silverhair looked back to the west, the way she had come.

  Wolfnose, trailing Silverhair’s footsteps, had fallen to her knees.

  Her heart surging, Silverhair ran after her Matriarch.

  Silverhair, driven by guilt, was first to reach Wolfnose.

  The old Cow’s belly and chest were resting against the ground, her legs splayed, and her trunk was pooled before her. Shanks of winter fur were scattered around her. Her eyes were closed, and it seemed to Silverhair that Wolfnose was slowly subsiding, as if the blood and life were leaking out of her into the hard ground.

  She reached out and ran her trunk over the old Cow’s face. The skin looked as rough as bark, but it was warm and soft to the touch, and she could hear the soft gurgle of Wolfnose’s breathing.

  Wolfnose opened her eyes. They were sunk in pools of black, wrinkled skin. "Oh, little Silverhair," she said softly.

  "Are you tired?"

  "Oh, yes. And hungry, so hungry. Perhaps I’ll sleep now, and then feed a little more…"

  She started to tip over.

  Silverhair rushed to Wolfnose’s side. Wolfnose’s great weight settled against her flank, slack and lifeless, and Silverhair staggered, barely able to support her.

  But now the others were here: Lop-ear, Owlheart, and Eggtusk. Silverhair saw that Owlheart had, with remarkable calm and foresight, carried a trunkful of water with her. She offered dribbles of it to Wolfnose, and Silverhair saw Wolfnose’s pink, cracked tongue uncurl and lap at the cool, clear liquid.

  Wolfnose’s eyes flickered open once more. She raised a trunk, so heavy it looked as if it was stuffed with river mud, and she laid it over Owlheart’s scalp. "You’re a good daughter, Grassfoot…"

  The Matriarch said, "I’ll be a better one when you’re on your feet again."

  Wolfnose shuddered, and a deep, ominous gurgling sounded from her lungs. Silverhair listened in horror; it was as if something had broken inside Wolfnose.

  Wolfnose closed her eyes, and her trunk fell away from Owlheart’s head.

  Owlheart stepped back, staring at her mother in dismay.

  When Eggtusk saw that Owlheart was giving up, he roared defiance. "By Kilukpuk’s piss-soaked hind leg, you’re not done yet, Cow!"

  He ran around Wolfnose and pushed his head between her slack buttocks. Then he dug his heels into the ground and heaved. The massive body rocked. Eggtusk looked up and bellowed to Silverhair and Lop-ear. "Come on, you lazy calves. Don’t just stand there. Push!"

  Lop-ear and Silverhair glanced at each other. Then they braced themselves and pushed at Wolfnose’s sides.

  Even after the trials of the winter — during which she had shed more fat than was good for her — Wolfnose was a mature Cow, and very heavy. Silverhair could feel Wolfnose’s ribs grinding as they shoved the slack body upward.

  But between them, t
hey managed to lift her off the ground. Wolfnose’s legs straightened out, like cracking tree branches, and her feet settled on the ground.

  "That’s it!" Eggtusk bellowed. "Hold her now!"

  But there was no strength in those old legs. Silverhair staggered sideways as Wolfnose’s bulk slid against her body.

  Eggtusk cried out, "No!"

  It was too late. Wolfnose slumped to the ground, this time falling on her side.

  Eggtusk began pushing at Wolfnose’s buttocks once more. "Come on! Help me, you dung-heaps! Help me…"

  But Wolfnose could not stand again.

  Eggtusk crashed to his knees before her. Wolfnose’s eyes, flickering open and closed, swiveled toward him. Eggtusk lifted Wolfnose’s limp trunk onto his tusks. He draped the trunk over his head and put his own trunk into her mouth.

  A watching human would have been startled by the familiarity of his choking cries, and the heaving of his chest.

  This was love, Silverhair thought, awed. A love of an intensity and depth and timelessness she had never imagined possible. She knew that she would be privileged if, during her life, she ever received or gave such devotion.

  And she had never suspected it existed between Eggtusk and Wolfnose.

  But Owlheart came to him now. "No more, Eggtusk." And Owlheart wrapped her trunk around his face.

  Lop-ear was at Silverhair’s side.

  "Oh, Lop-ear," Silverhair said, and her own vision blurred as fat, salty tears welled in her eyes. "If she hadn’t walked with me all that way to the Plain of Bones — if I hadn’t been so careless as to rush her back, to leave her behind so thoughtlessly — all I wanted was to get back, and—"

  "Hush," he said. "She wanted to take you to the Plain."

  "I could have said no."

  "And treated her with disrespect? She wouldn’t have wanted that. It’s nobody’s fault. It is her time." And he twined his trunk in hers, and held her still.

  Wolfnose lifted her trunk, shuddered, and slumped. Her breath sighed out of her in a long growl, like a final contact rumble.

  Then she was still.