Longtusk

by Stephen Baxter

  It was Willow. And, with one fur-wrapped paw, the Dreamer cub was tugging at Longtusk's trunk, urging him to follow.

  Longtusk had almost reached the blank numbness of death, and it had been comfortable. If he returned to the land of life, he would face all its complexities: choices, hardship, pain. If only Willow let him alone... Just a little longer...

  But you are Longtusk. Surely the greatest hero of them all is destined for a better death than this: alone, ignored, frozen by the mindless wind. Take your chance, Longtusk!

  His trunk-fingers slipped into Willow's palm.

  IT WAS DIFFICULT TO WALK. His joints had become stiff, so deeply had the cold penetrated them. And when he moved out of the shelter of the rocks, the wind battered him unhindered.

  But it wasn't easy for the Dreamer cub either. He felt Willow stagger, but the cub pulled himself upright against Longtusk.

  They seemed to walk for a very long time.

  At last they reached a place where the wind was diminished. And Longtusk felt a deep warmth radiating over his face and chest.

  He was in the mouth of one of the caves. Willow was standing beside him, pulling off his furs in great frosty grit-laden bundles.

  The cave was a well of red light and warmth. Flaps of animal skin had been fixed over this cave mouth. Perhaps they were supposed to drape over the entrance, keeping its warmth inside, like the flap of skin over a mammoth's anus.

  The warmth came from fire, he realized suddenly: a fire that burned, smokily, in a circle of stones.

  He recoiled, instinctive fear rising anew in him. But behind him, the Beringian night howled its fury.

  There was no place for him out there. Despite the fire, he forced himself to stay still.

  There were many Dreamers here: females, males, infants. They lay on the floor of the cave, fat and sleepy, all of them slabs of muscle. The females clustered together with their infants away from the males, who lay on their backs snoring. Some were naked; others wore light skins around their shoulders and waists. Their bare skin looked greasy, as if it had been coated by the fat of some dead animal — perhaps to keep in their bodies' warmth.

  One of the dozing males stirred, perhaps disturbed by the wind that leaked in through the open skins. It was Stripeskull, his red and yellow scalp unmistakable.

  His eyes grew large as he saw a mammoth standing in the cave entrance, immense tusk shadows striped over the walls.

  With surprising grace Stripeskull rolled to his feet and barked out guttural noises. Other males woke up, blinking and rubbing their eyes; when they saw Longtusk they quickly got to their hind legs, grabbing sticks of wood and sharp stones.

  ...Then the males fell back, making retching noises and waving their paws before their faces.

  Longtusk realized that he had just defecated, as mammoths do many times a day, barely conscious of it. He looked back. His dung was a pile of tubular bricks, acrid, immense. He tried to push it outside the cave. But he succeeded only in smearing the hot, sticky stuff over the cave floor.

  Willow was going forward to meet Stripeskull. They jabbered at each other in a fast, complex flow; they made gestures too with their heads and paws. It was obviously a language, Longtusk realized, like the mammoths' language of trumpets, growls, stomps and postures. But he had absolutely no idea what they were saying to each other. Perhaps even the frequent cuffs about the head which Stripeskull delivered to Willow were like the mammoths' subtle code of touch and rubbing. But from the way Willow was rubbing his head it was obvious the blows were also meant to hurt.

  Lacking any alternative, exhausted, Longtusk stood in the cave mouth and awaited his fate.

  At last Willow came to him. He reached out to Longtusk's trunk, and pushed.

  Longtusk understood. He let himself be moved back out of the cave. He wasn't welcome here; it had only been a childish impulse of Willow's to bring him here in the first place.

  So he must suffer the wind's bony embrace once more. He felt a stab of resentment at the pain he would have to endure before he regained that numb acceptance...

  But Willow was pulling at his trunk. He looked down. The Dreamer cub was hauling as hard as he could, his feet scraping along the ground, trying to halt the retreating mammoth.

  Longtusk stopped. He was out of the cave itself, beyond the curtain of skins, but still inside its mouth. It was enough to shelter him from the wind, and the heat that leaked out of the cave seeped into his bones.

  Willow held up a twig of dried wood. Longtusk had time to grab it before the cub was snatched out of sight by a glaring Stripeskull, who pulled closed the skins, shutting Longtusk out in the dark.

  Longtusk munched on the twig, and — standing in the mouth of the cave, on ground imprinted by splayed Dreamer feet, bathed by stray fire warmth — he slipped easily into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  5

  The Cave

  THE STORM PERSISTED.

  Willow brought him water in a sack of skin. Longtusk drank greedily, despite a lingering stink of bison. But a mammoth is a large animal and the load of water — almost too much for Willow to carry — was downed in a couple of heartbeats.

  Willow tried bringing him food. At first he produced scraps of meat, dried and salted. The stench was horrifying, and Longtusk shied back.

  After that Willow brought him dried grass. There was a lot of grass in the cave; the Dreamers scattered it over the cave floor and pulled it into rough pallets to sleep on. The grass was stale and stank of the Dreamers and their fire, but it rapidly filled up his belly.

  After a few days he noticed the Dreamers going out, wrapped in their furs, bringing back loads of his dung. During his brief glimpses through the parted skins, Longtusk saw that they burned the dried dung in their wide, flat hearth — along with grass, wood, bone and even bat guano, scraped from great dry heaps at the back of the cave.

  The hearth — a disk of blackened earth, lined with flat stones — was the centerpiece of the cave. The adults took turns to check on the burning embers, piling on more fuel, or blowing on the glowing lumps of dung and wood and bone. The low fire kept the Dreamers alive, and maintaining it was their single most important activity.

  The cave walls were pale rock, and the fire's ruddy light would glimmer from the fleshy stone, casting strange and colorful shadows.

  Generally the Dreamers lived as mammoths do, Longtusk observed. The adult males kept to their own society away from the females. The males seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time belching, farting and scratching their testicles. The females grunted at each other continually and watched over their cubs with a sort of irritable affection.

  Once a female came into oestrus. She walked provocatively past the indolent males, who rose from their slumbers with growls of interest. A brief contest of shouting and wrestling resolved itself in favor of Stripeskull, and he took the female by the paw and led her to the back of the cave.

  The coupling of these two muscle-bound creatures was noisy and spectacular. Afterward the pair of them returned to the hearth, sweating and exhilarated.

  Most of the males carried pointed sticks, Longtusk saw. The biggest, strongest males — like Stripeskull — had the proudest sticks. Youngsters like Willow and old, bent, toothless adults had to make do with shorter sticks, some of them broken discards. But even the infants would toddle back and forth waving tiny sharpened branches and yelling.

  The sticks were like the tusks of mammoth Bulls, Longtusk realized: not just useful tools, but weapons to be cherished and displayed.

  One day Longtusk saw where the sticks came from.

  At the back of the cave had been stacked some saplings, slim and straight. Stripeskull took one of these, stripped it of its branches and bark with stone scrapers, and then whittled down one end to a point with more chips of stone. Then he laid the sharpened end into the fire until it charred, and scraped it some more until it was fine and sharp.

  He tested it by ramming it into animal carcasses hanging at the back
of the cave. The exposure to fire, far from destroying the stick as Longtusk would have expected, had made it harder and more able to penetrate.

  He realized now that he owed his life to this strange ingenuity — that and the courage of the cub, Willow.

  But the Dreamers were capable of much stranger miracles than merely sharpening sticks.

  Longtusk watched as Stripeskull took a nodule of creamy flint. He had gathered it from the river bank, where it had been washed down from chalk deposits upstream. Stripeskull sat near the hearth and laid around him other blocks of stone and bits of bone. Using one of the heavy stones, wrapped in his paw, Stripeskull began to chip at the flint block. Soon he was surrounded by a scattering of fine flakes — but he had turned his rough block of flint into a core shaped like a fat lemming, Longtusk thought, flat on the bottom and rounded on the top. Then he rubbed and ground the rim of the core, flattening it.

  What came next seemed to demand great care. He turned the core over, finally selecting a spot. Then he cupped it in one paw, raised the leg bone of a deer in the other, and gave the core a single sharp whack.

  When he lifted the flint out of his paw, he left behind a round flake, very fine, its exposed surface smooth as new ice. He inspected it critically, tapped a few flakes off its edge, and tested its sharpness by rubbing it over his leg, shaving off a small patch of fur.

  Then he put it to one side, returned to his core, and continued work. When he was done, he had turned a lump of unpromising flint into half a dozen fine stone blades.

  He was evidently trying to teach the cub, Willow, how to work the flint. Like a mammoth calf trying to dig out his first waterhole, Willow tried to ape Stripeskull's actions. But his flint nodules just smashed and chipped, and Willow, frustrated, threw away the debris in disgust. The next day Stripeskull would sit with him, patiently, to try again.

  After watching all this, Longtusk found a flint nodule just outside the cave mouth. Nearby he saw a scattering of broken flint flakes. He picked up the nodule in his trunk-fingers and turned it over and over. He tried to recall what he had seen, how these objects had been shaped by the ingenuity of Stripeskull. But already the memory of that mysterious magic was slipping from his mind.

  Mammoths too could change the world: destroying trees, digging for water, clearing snow. But they would never learn to shape the things around them with the command of these strange, clumsy, upright Dreamers.

  The Dreamers put the stones to use in every corner of their cave.

  At the back of the cave hung the butchered carcasses of many animals — deer, reindeer, horse and bison — and their skins were stretched out to dry with stones and sticks. Sometimes one of the adults would scrape a skin with a slice of rock, over and over, working the skin to a supple smoothness. Longtusk marveled at the way the Dreamers' powerful muscles worked, and the stone responded to their huge, dextrous fingers.

  And there were even finer uses for the stones. All of the Dreamers used stone flakes to cut the hair that dangled from their heads, or to scrape their faces. Every few days Stripeskull himself would use one of his flint slices to scrape smooth the hair on his head. Then he would splash the raw skin with cold water, and draw lumps of ochre, bits of red and yellow rock, across his scalp to renew his gaudy coloring.

  IT WAS OBVIOUS FROM the powerful physique of all the Dreamers, males, females and cubs, that everybody here was expected to work hard throughout their lives. Many of them showed signs of old injury. But the old, the very young, the sick and the frail were cared for.

  One small cub, though, was very sickly, much skinnier than others of its height. Longtusk saw how she had trouble feeding herself, despite her mother's increasingly frantic assistance.

  There came a day when the cub would not stir from her pallet of grass. Her mother struggled to wake her, and she even tried to suckle the cub, though her breasts were flaccid and empty of milk.

  At last the mother gave up. She came to the mouth of the cave. She tipped back her great head on its low, thick neck and raised the limp body of her cub to a stormy sky.

  The other females gathered close to the distressed one, comforting her with strokes and caresses. The younger cubs pulled away to the corners of the cave, wide-eyed. The adult males, awkwardly, kept away from the females — all save two of them, who began to dig a deep hole in the ground.

  When the hole was done, deep and straight-edged, Stripeskull clambered into the pit with the body of the female cub. The little one had been washed, her hair shaved and tidied. The grieving mother dropped dried flowers over the body, and Stripeskull sprinkled powdered ochre, a red mist that floated gently down into the pit.

  Then the Dreamers began to sing — all of them, adults and all but the smallest cubs — a strange, deep ululation that rolled endlessly like a river, smooth and sad.

  Longtusk understood. These Dreamers, in their own way, were Remembering the cub, just as mammoths have always Remembered their own dead.

  Longtusk saw that the walls of the grave pit, deep and sheer, were made up of complex layers of debris: rock, flint flakes, blackened ashy dust, bone splinters. Such detritus could only have been laid down by the Dreamers themselves. The Dreamers must have inhabited this cave — on this undistinguished river bank, making their unchanging hearths and tools — for generation upon generation upon generation: an unimaginably long time, reaching into their deepest past. Perhaps there were more bones buried deep here — bones a hundred thousand years deep, likewise scattered with flowers and ochre flakes — here in this trampled ground, where these strange creatures had dreamed away the unchanging millennia.

  And still they sang.

  Did they sing of a time when their kind had covered the world? Did they sing of their loss, their diminution to dwindling, isolated groups like this?

  Did they sing of their future — and their fear?

  Longtusk slipped away from the cave mouth and walked off, ignoring the driving dust, until he could hear the Dreamers' song no more.

  THE DUST STORM PASSED, and the cold began to ease its grip.

  Heavy rain pounded the land, and glacial run-off poured along the river valley, threatening floods. The ground in front of the cave turned into a sink of oozing mud, and the adult Dreamers, slipping and sliding in the mess, complained profusely.

  Longtusk knew the time was approaching when he must leave the relative security of this place. Perhaps when the weather was better he could even strike out north, and seek his Family.

  So, his winter fur beginning to blow loose in a cloud around him, he took to traveling increasing distances from the cave. He was half-starved, his fat depleted, severely weakened by the harshest winter of his life.

  But he still breathed. And, despite the rain and the continuing cold, life was returning to the land. The low, wind-battered trees were sprinkled with buds, full of the optimism of the new season, and the first crocuses and jonquils were showing, bright yellow and purple. Day by day, as he fed on the new growth, his strength returned.

  In fact, he found he himself had grown during the bleak cold of winter. His tusks were longer still, heavier, thicker. He flashed them in the air, parrying imaginary opponents, even though there was nobody to see.

  One day he found a place where a carpet of new grass, thin green shoots, was pushing through the matted remains of last year's growth. Contentedly he began to graze.

  He heard a soft mewling, like a wounded cat, coming from behind a low outcrop of hard black rock.

  Pricked by curiosity, he walked over to see.

  At first sight he thought it was a Dreamer cub. It was a female, wearing the ragged remains of cut and shaped skins. She was smaller in height than Willow, so presumably younger. She seemed in distress; she was huddled over on herself, clutching her spindly forelegs to her chest, and she was crying.

  He ran his trunk tip over her limbs.

  She was like a Dreamer, yes. But she was much thinner, her limbs weaker but more graceful. Even her head was a different shap
e, with a flat face, a prominent chin, a protruding forehead — no heavy eye ridges — and a compact skull. Her body seemed bare of hair: all except her head, where there was a tangled, dirty mane of fine yellow hair.

  She wore something around her neck. He bent to see. Little white objects had been punctured with holes, and then strung together on what looked like a strip of sinew.

  They were teeth: tiny mammoth teeth, drawn from a very new calf, perhaps even an unborn.

  He rumbled in dismay.

  At the noise, the cub's eyes flickered open. They were a startling blue, like steppe melt-pools. When she saw the mountain of muscle and fat and hair over her, tusk shadows looming, she yelped and tried to pull away. But she was weak, and she was trapped by the cleft of rock.

  Now he could see quite how ill she was. The fingers on her paws were dead white, and her lips looked blue. But she was not shivering: the cold had penetrated deep into her body, and without help this mite would soon surely die.

  He reached down with his trunk, meaning to stroke her, but she wailed feebly, unable to move.

  He moved back a few paces. There was a small stand of crocuses glowing in the lee of the rock. With his delicate trunk-fingers, he plucked out a single fat yellow bloom. He carried it to the female, and dropped it on her chest.

  She seemed a little less frightened. She tried to close her paw over the flower.

  Gently he wrapped his trunk under the cub and lifted her up. She was light as a feather, and her limbs dangled, unresisting. But she had managed to keep hold of her flower. He began to walk, slowly and steadily, toward the cave of the Dreamers.

  After a time the cub seemed to lose her fear. She gathered pawfuls of his long trunk hairs and burrowed into them. Soon she was asleep, wrapped in the warm strength of the mammoth's trunk.

  THE DREAMERS REACTED with confusion.

  This was a stranger — not one of their Clan — not even one of their kind. At first the adults seemed to have difficulty even seeing the limp cub, as if she was a thing a shadows, only half-glimpsed, too strange to comprehend. But the young were fascinated, and they clustered around, lifting aside his trunk fur to see the sleeping cub.