Longtusk tm-2

by Stephen Baxter

  He rumbled and raised his huge tusks over her head, meaning to frighten her.

  The calf squealed and ran to her mother, who tucked Splayfoot under her belly. "Will you leave this little one alone?"

  "It wasn’t my fault!" Longtusk protested. "She started it…"

  But Milkbreath had turned away. Splayfoot burrowed at her mother’s chest, seeking her dugs. But Milkbreath had little milk. So, with a deep belch, she regurgitated grass and with gentle kisses fed the warm, pulped stuff to her daughter.

  As she fed, Splayfoot peered out from under a fringe of fur, mocking him silently.

  It wasn’t so long since Milkbreath had fed him that way, murmuring about how important it was for him to eat the food that had been inside his mother’s belly, for it contained marvelous substances that would help him digest. It hardly seemed any time at all.

  And now look at him: pushed away, snapped at, ignored.

  He stomped away, not looking back, not caring which way he went.

  2

  The Bachelor Herd

  He came to a track.

  It was a strip of bare brown ground a little wider than his own body. Where the muddy ground was firm he could see the round print left by the tough, cracked skin of a mammoth’s sole, a spidery, distinctive map.

  He turned and followed the trail, curious to find where it might lead.

  To human eyes the mammoth steppe would have looked featureless. It was an immense plain that swept over the north of Eurasia, across the land bridge of Beringia and into North America. But to a mammoth it was as crowded with landmarks as any human city: rubbing trees, wallows, rich feeding areas, salt licks, water holes. And these key sites were linked by trails worn by centuries of mammoth footsteps, trails embedded deep in the mind of every adult Bull and Cow, patiently taught to the calves of each new generation.

  Indeed, the land itself was shaped by the mammoths, who tore out trees and trampled the ground where they passed. Other creatures lived in the shadow of the mammoths: depending on the trails they made, using the water sources they opened up with their intelligence and strength. Even the plants, in their mindless way, relied on the scattering of their seeds over great ranges in mammoth dung. Without mammoths, the steppe would not have persisted.

  Longtusk stomped through his world, still angry, obsessed. But he thought over the Matriarchs’ conversation: Fireheads and Lost and huge global changes…

  He had never seen the Fireheads himself, but he’d met adults who claimed they had. The Fireheads — said to be ferocious predators, creatures of sweeping, incomprehensible danger — seemed real enough, and every young mammoth was taught at a very early age that the only response to a Firehead was to flee.

  But the Lost were something else: figures of legend, a deep terror embedded at the heart of the Cycle — the nemesis of the mammoths.

  It all seemed unlikely to Longtusk. The mammoths were spread in enormous herds right around the world, and even the great cats feared them. What could possibly destroy them?

  And besides, his curiosity was pricked.

  Why were all these changes happening now? How quickly would they happen? And why did the world have to become a harder place when he was alive? Why couldn’t he have lived long ago, in a time of calm and plenty?

  And, most important of all, why didn’t anybody take him seriously?

  Oh, he knew that there came a time when every Bull became restless with his Family; sooner or later all Bulls leave to seek out the company of other males in the bachelor herds, to learn to fight and strut and compete. But it didn’t do him any good, here and now, to know that; and it drove him crazy when all this was patiently explained to him by some smug, pitying aunt or cousin.

  After an unmeasured time he paused and looked back. Preoccupied, he hadn’t been paying much attention where he walked; now he found he’d come so far he couldn’t see the mammoths any more.

  He heard a thin howl, perhaps of a wolf. He suffered a heartbeat of panic, which he sternly suppressed.

  So he had left them behind. What of it? He was a full-grown Bull — nearly — and he could look out for himself. Perhaps this was his time to leave his Family — to begin the serious business of life.

  Anyhow — he told himself — he was pretty sure he could find his way back if he needed to.

  With a renewed sense of purpose — and with those twinges of fear firmly pushed to the back of his mind — he set off once more.

  He came to a river bank.

  Mammoths had been here recently. The muddy ground close to the river’s edge was bare of life, pitted by footprint craters, and the trees were sparse and uniformly damaged, branches smashed, trunks splintered and pushed over.

  The water was cold. This was probably a run-off stream, coming from a melting glacier to the north. He sucked up a trunkful of water and held it long enough to take off its first chill. Then he raised his trunk and let the water trickle into his mouth.

  He pushed farther along the cold mud of the bank. It wasn’t easy going. The river had cut itself a shallow valley which offered some protection from the incessant steppe winds. As a result spruce trees grew unusually dense and tall here, and their branches clutched at him as he passed, so that he left behind clumps of ginger hair.

  Then, through the trees, he glimpsed a gleam of tusks, a curling trunk, an unmistakable profile.

  It was another mammoth: a massive Bull, come here to drink as he had.

  Longtusk worked his way farther along the bank.

  The Bull, unfamiliar to Longtusk, eyed him with a vague, languid curiosity. He would have towered over any human observer, as much as three meters tall at his shoulder.

  And he towered over Longtusk.

  "My name," the Bull rumbled, "is Rockheart."

  "I’m Longtusk," he replied nervously. "And I—"

  But the Bull had already turned away, his trunk hosing up prodigious volumes of water.

  The Bull’s high, domed head was large, a lever for his powerful jaw and a support for the great trunk that snaked down before him. He had a short but distinct neck, a cylinder of muscle supporting that massive head. His shoulders were humped by a mound of fat, and his back sloped sharply down toward the pelvis at the base of his spine. His tusks curled before him, great spirals of ivory chipped and scuffed from a lifetime of digging and fighting.

  And his body, muscular, stocky, round, was coated by hair: great lengths of it, dark orange and brown, that hung like a skirt from his belly, down over his legs to the horny nails on his swollen pads of feet, and even in long beard-like fringes from his chin and trunk. His tail, raised slightly, was short, but more hair made it a long, supple insect whisk. His ears were small, tucked back close to his head, all but lost in the great mass of hair there.

  Suddenly the ground shuddered under Longtusk’s feet, and the river water trembled.

  More mammoths, a crowd of them, came spilling down the bank, pushing and jostling, clumsy giants. They were all about the same size, Longtusk saw: no Cows, no infants here.

  It was a bachelor herd.

  Longtusk was thrilled. He had rarely been this close to full-grown Bulls. The Bulls kept to their own herds, away from the Cow-dominated Families of mothers and sisters and calves; Longtusk had seen them only in the distance, sweeping by, powerful, independent, and he had longed to run with them.

  And now, perhaps, he would.

  The Bulls spread out along the river bank. Before passing on toward the water, one or two regarded Longtusk: with mild curiosity over his outside tusks, or blank indifference, or amused contempt.

  Longtusk followed, avid.

  For half a day, as the sun climbed into the sky, the Bulls moved on along the river bank, jostling, jousting, drinking and eating.

  Their walk, heavy and liquid, was oddly graceful. Their feet were pads that rested easily on the ground, swelling visibly with each step. Their trunks, heavy ropes dangling from the front of their faces, pulled the mammoths’ heads from side to side
as they swayed. Even as they drank they fed, almost continuously. They pulled at branches of the surrounding trees with their trunks, hauling off great leaf-coated stems with hissing rustles, and crammed the foliage into their small mouths.

  The soughing of their footsteps was punctuated by deep breaths, the gurgle of immense stomachs, and subterranean rumbles from the sound organs of their heads. A human observer would have made little of these deep, angry noises. But Longtusk found it very easy to make out what these Bulls were saying to each other.

  "…You are in my way. Move aside."

  "I was here in this place first. You move aside."

  "…This water is too cold. It lies heavy in my belly."

  "That is because you are old and weak. I, however, am young and strong, and I find the water pleasantly cool."

  "My tusks are not yet so old and feeble they could not crack your skull like a skua egg, calf."

  "Perhaps you should demonstrate how that could be done, old one…"

  Longtusk, following the great Bull Rockheart, was tolerated — as long as he didn’t get in anybody’s way — for he was, for now, too small to be a serious competitor. His tusks were, despite his youth, larger than many of the adults — but they only made him feel self-conscious, as if somehow he wasn’t entitled to such magnificent weapons. He walked along with his head dipped, his tusks close to the ground.

  Being with the Bulls was not like being with his Family.

  Even the language was different. The Cows in the Families used more than twenty different kinds of rumble, a basic vocabulary from which they constructed their extremely complex communications. The Bulls only had four rumbles! — and those were to do with mockery, challenge and boasting.

  His Family had been protective, nurturing — a safe place to be. But the bachelor herds were looser coalitions of Bulls, more interested in contest: verbal challenges, head butts, tusk clashes. The Bulls were constantly testing each other, exploring each other’s strength and weight and determination, establishing a hierarchy of dominance.

  This mattered, for it was the dominant Bulls who mated the Cows in oestrus.

  Right now, Longtusk was at the very bottom of this hierarchy. But one day he would, of course, climb higher — why, to the very top…

  "You have stepped on the hair of my feet."

  Longtusk looked up at a wall of flesh, eyes like tar pits, tusks that swept over his head.

  He had offended Rockheart.

  The great Bull’s guard hairs — dangling from his belly and trunk, long and lustrous — rippled like water, trapping the light. But loose underfur, working its way out through the layers of his guard hair in tatters around his flanks, made him look primordial, wild and unfinished.

  Longtusk found himself trembling. He knew he should back down. But some of the other males nearby were watching with a lofty curiosity, and he was reminded sharply of how the Matriarch had watched his humiliation by his infant sister earlier.

  If he had no place in the Family, he must find a place here. His Family had taught him how to live as a mammoth; now he must learn to be a Bull. And this was where it would begin.

  So he stood his ground.

  "Perhaps you have trouble understanding," Rockheart said with an ominous mildness. "You see, this is where I take my water."

  "It is not your river alone," Longtusk said at last. He raised his head, and his tusks, long and proud, waved in the face of the great Bull.

  Unfortunately one curling tusk caught in a tree root. Longtusk’s head was pulled sideways, making him stagger.

  There was a subterranean murmur of amusement.

  Rockheart simply stood his ground, unmoving, unblinking, like something which had grown out of this river bank. He said coldly, "I admire your tusks. But you are a calf. You lack prowess in their use."

  Longtusk gathered his courage. He raised his tusks again. They were indeed long, but they were like saplings against Rockheart’s stained pillars of ivory. "Perhaps you would care to join me in combat, so that you may show me exactly where my deficiencies lie."

  And he dragged his head sideways so that his tusks clattered against Rockheart’s. He felt a painful jar work its way up to his skull and neck, and the base of his tusks, where they were embedded in his face, ached violently.

  Rockheart had not so much as flinched.

  Longtusk raised his tusks for another strike.

  With a speed that belied his bulk Rockheart stepped sideways, lowered his head and rammed it into Longtusk’s midriff.

  Longtusk staggered into icy mud, slipped and fell sprawling into the water.

  He struggled to his feet. The hairs of his belly and trunk dangled under him in cold clinging masses.

  The Bulls on the river bank were watching him, tusks raised, sniggering.

  Rockheart took a last trunkful of water, sprayed it languidly over his back, and turned away. His massive feet left giant craters in the sticky mud as he walked off, utterly ignoring Longtusk and his struggles.

  And now Longtusk heard a familiar, remote trumpeting… "Longtusk! Longtusk! Come here right now!…"

  "There’s your mother calling you," brayed a young Bull. "Go back to her teat, little one. This is no place for you."

  Longtusk, head averted, humiliated, stomped out of the river and through the stand of trees. Where he walked he left a trail of mud and drips of water.

  That was the end of Longtusk’s first encounter with a bachelor herd.

  He could not know it, but it would be a long time before he would see one of his own kind again.

  Not caring which way he went, Longtusk lumbered alone over the steppe, head down, ripping at the grass and herbs and grinding their roots with angry twists of his jaw.

  He couldn’t go back to the herd. And he wasn’t going back to his Family. Not after all that had happened today. Not after this.

  He didn’t need his Family — or the Bulls who had taunted him. He was Longtusk! The greatest hero in the world!

  Why couldn’t anybody see that?

  He walked on, faster and farther, so wrapped up in his troubles he didn’t even notice the smoke until his eyes began to hurt.

  3

  The She-Cat

  Startled, he looked up, blinking. Water was streaking down the hairs of his face.

  Smoke billowed, acrid and dark; somewhere nearby the dry grass was burning.

  Every instinct told him to flee, to get away from the blaze. But which way?

  If she were with him, his mother would know what to do. Even a brutal Bull like Rockheart would guide him, for it was the way of mammoths to train and protect their young.

  But they weren’t here.

  Now, through the smoke, he saw running creatures, silhouetted against the glow: thin, lithe, upright. They looked a little like cats. But they ran upright, as no cat did. And they seemed to carry things in their front paws. They darted back and forth, mysterious, purposeful.

  Perhaps they weren’t real. Perhaps they were signs of his fear.

  He felt panic rise in his chest, threatening to choke him.

  He turned and faced into the smoke. He thought he could see a glow there, yellow and crimson. It was the fire itself, following the bank of smoke it created, both of them driven by the wind from the south.

  Then he should run to the north, away from the fire. That must be the way the other mammoths were fleeing.

  But fire — sparked by lightning strikes and driven by the incessant winds — could race across the dry land. Steppe plants grew only shallowly, and were easily and quickly consumed. Mammoths were strong, stocky, round as boulders: built for endurance, not for speed. He knew he could never outrun a steppe firestorm.

  What, then?

  Through his fear, he felt a pang of indignation. Was he doomed to die here, alone, in a world turned to gray and black by smoke? — he, Longtusk, the center of the universe, the most important mammoth who ever lived?

  Well, if he wanted to live, he couldn’t wait around for
somebody else to tell him what to do. Think, Longtusk!

  The smoke seemed to clear a little. Above him, between scudding billows of smoke, the sun showed a spectral, attenuated disc.

  He looked down at his feet and found he was standing in a patch of muddy ground, bare of grass and other vegetation. It was a drying river bed, the mud cut by twisted, braided channels. There was nothing to burn here; that must be why the smoke was sparse.

  He looked along the line of the river. It ran almost directly south. No grass grew on this sticky, clinging mud — and where the dry driver snaked off into the smoke, the glow of the fire seemed reduced, for there was nothing to burn on this mud.

  If he walked that way, southward into the face of the smoke, he would be walking toward the fire — but along a channel where the fire could not reach. Soon, surely, he would get through the smoke and the fire, and reach the cleaner air beyond.

  He quailed from the idea. It went against every instinct he had — to walk into a blazing fire! But if it was the right thing to do, he must overcome his fear.

  He raised his trunk at the fire and trumpeted his defiance. And, dropping his head, he began to march stolidly south.

  The smoke billowed directly into his face, laced with steppe dust: hot grit that peppered his eyes and scraped in his chest. And now the fire’s crackling, rushing noise rose to a roar. He felt he would go mad with fear. But he bent his head and, doggedly, one step at a time, he continued, into the teeth of the blaze.

  At last the fire roared around him, and the flames leaped, dazzling white, as they consumed the thin steppe vegetation. Only a few paces away from him grass and low trees were crackling, blackening. Tufts of burning grass and bark scraps fluttered through the air. Some of them stuck to his fur, making it smolder, and he batted them away with his trunk or his tail.