“Okay, okay,” I said, “Stony and I will try to help you find a safe place for Woolly, okay?”
She looked from me to Stony, and he added his most reassuring bucktoothed grin. Then he handed her a soft leaf from a nearby shrub and gestured toward her face. She took it and blew her nose.
“But first,” I continued, “we need to find a macrauchenia for the Big Game. It’s the only way our clan will even consider letting us back in.”
“Wait,” said Echo, brightening, “you just asked me if Woolly was some kind of monster macrauchenia.”
“Yeah?”
“So let’s bring him back to your clan and say that’s what he is! They’d treat him well then, wouldn’t they?”
I gave the young mammoth an appraising look. He did look like he could take out about five boars at once. “Maybe,” I said. “If he could help win the Big Game, they’d treat him very well. They might even let Stony and me back in the clan.”
“Perfect!” she said. “It’s settled, then.”
I shook my head. “You’re forgetting one absolutely impossible thing. To play in the Big Game, I would actually have to ride that monster.”
Echo smiled, grabbed a handful of Woolly’s hair as if it were a vine, and clambered up his side. “Not impossible,” she said, settling in just behind the young mammoth’s head. “And you could say I’m his trainer. That way I’d get to live with him too.”
“You? With my clan?”
“Well, my clan isn’t going to take me back now that I’ve helped their prisoners escape, are they?” she said. Then she whispered something in Woolly’s ear.
He nodded.
I suddenly remembered how Echo had been croaking back and forth with Froggy when I’d first woken up in the tiny dark cave. Maybe she really could talk to animals. I’d heard tales of my great-great-great-grandparents doing that sort of thing, but they had been monkeys themselves. I had thought I was living in a more advanced era. “Echo,” I said, “do you really think I could ride him?”
She looked from Woolly to me. “You’re going to have to talk to him about that.”
“Talk to him?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to have a conversation with a frog or bird or cat, but talking with a mammoth can be slightly trickier. For one thing, if he doesn’t like you, he can stomp you flat.”
Stony and I watched her shinny down one of Woolly’s legs like it was a mossy tree trunk, and I wondered just when those huge round feet had last trampled someone.
“Not that he would stomp you flat,” she added.
“Of course not,” I muttered.
“Maybe just a little stomp.”
Stony grinned.
“Very funny,” I said.
“We should have some breakfast,” Echo declared. “No one likes training on an empty stomach.”
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll go find us a dodo.”
“Not for me,” she replied. “I don’t eat animals.”
I stared, thinking I must have misheard her.
“It’s wrong!” she said.
“Wrong? Dodos are delicious.”
“Why is everyone around here obsessed with eating dodo birds? You can’t throw a rock without hitting a dead dodo, or someone eating a dead dodo. It’s primitive!”
“Um … they’re delicious.”
“And that’s all you care about?”
“Well,” I admitted, “I have sometimes worried that if we eat too many of them, there won’t be any left.”
Now it was Echo who looked confused. “What do you mean?”
“You know,” I said, “like they will go extinct.”
She half laughed, half snorted. “Dodos will never go extinct! Extinct? Now, that’s ridiculous!”
After taking a drink from the creek, I set off down a sun-dappled boar trail to see what I could forage for us. I followed it toward the shadiest section of the forest at the base of Mount Bigbigbig. Here, in the cold shadow of the mountain, I noticed that even the hardy strangler vines had lost all their blue flowers and had very few leaves left. All the bare branches and vines around me made me feel like I was inside a giant skeleton with no meat on its bones. I wished the rest of my clan could see this part of the forest—maybe it would convince them that something big was happening. Then a tiny burst of color caught my eye. I stooped low in the shadow of a dead tree and saw a single red-and-yellow orchid. Since the arrival of the cold, nearly all the orchids had shriveled and wilted. And yet, somehow, this single blossom had managed to survive in the shadiest part of the jungle. I thought about picking it and painting it, but I didn’t want to risk destroying what might be the last of its kind.
I got up and walked around the rotting trunk. This was the perfect root-cracked soil for finding edible mushrooms.
I gasped. On the other side of the dead tree, leaning against a half-rotted root, was the severed head of a boar.
I gazed at its blank, unseeing, but perfectly intact eyes, oddly fixed in my direction. The rest of the boar was nowhere to be seen, though judging by the head, it must have been enormous. Even more strangely, the head had a large puncture wound through the skull and another identical one through the snout. I knew of no creature with teeth big enough to make holes like that. Unless, I thought, these wounds were made by tusks.
“The beast is near!” whispered a scratchy voice behind me.
I JUMPED SEVERAL feet in the air and swung around. A pair of sprightly blue eyes peeped at me out of a wrinkly, gray-whiskered face. The man was lean, almost heronlike, and his head was as bald and leathery as a snake egg. It was as if all of his hair had crawled off his scalp and formed under his nose into whiskers as gray and bushy as squirrel tails. I took a step backward. I’d never seen him before but I knew in my gut who he must be.
“Crazy Crag,” I said, trying to sound matter-of-fact.
He seemed to wince momentarily at this, but it was so fleeting I couldn’t tell for sure.
“I’m Lug,” I said.
“Dinky Lug!” he chortled.
I stared at him.
“Runty Lug?” he asked, stroking his mustache. “Or … Stunted Lug?”
“My name—”
“Wait, wait, one more guess!” he said, rubbing a pair of strangely gray-smudged hands together. “Is it Little Slug?”
“I don’t like to be called that.”
“Really?”
I nodded, taking the hint. “I guess you prefer to be called just Crag, then?”
“Actually, Crazy Crag has a lot more oomph to it,” he said. “I’ve also heard them call me Cracked Crag, and I have a very special place in my heart for Cuckoo Crag.”
I gawked at him.
“Confusion is good,” he said. “It’s a sign that you might actually be paying attention.”
I inched backward, even more confused.
“Most people just don’t pay attention,” he continued, his blue eyes twinkling. “They don’t notice little changes here and there.” He wiggled his fingers toward a stand of bare gourd trees. “And then—poof!—everything suddenly changes and they discover they’ve been fools all their lives.”
I eyed the bare trees, stripped by the cold. “What do you mean everything changes?”
He grandly waved a hand toward Mount Bigbigbig and the sky. “There’s always something bigger coming around the mountain.”
I felt my eyes pulled back to the two bloody holes in the boar’s head.
“Don’t worry, my piddly pebble!” he chortled. “The beast won’t get you. Not if you stick with Crazy Crag.”
“There’s … a beast?”
“Many!” said Crag, pointing behind me toward a rustling sound.
I whipped around, fists clenched. It was just a little spotted squirrel on a branch. It chittered and scampered off.
Crag giggled.
“That,” I said, trying to regain my composure, “was not funny.”
“Come to my cave,” he said, pointi
ng toward the mountain. “I control the storm light. Beasts don’t like storm light.”
I inched farther back. “I just want to know who killed this boar.”
“What a boring question!” he said, yawning.
“O-kay,” I said, “um, what do you want?”
“A better question. What do you want?”
I glanced at the boar’s head again. “An answer.”
“I’m afraid all I have is questions,” he said, stretching luxuriantly. “Off to my cave now. The question is, do you want to see the storm light that makes the beasts fear you? Especially in the dark.”
“I’d … love to,” I said, taking another step back, “but …”
“Late for lunch?”
“I really gotta go!” I said, taking off.
When I glanced back, Crag was smiling and wiggling good-bye with his gray-smudged fingers. “I’ll see you sooon,” he sang. “When there’s no mooon …”
For a moment, I wondered how his fingers had gotten that dark, rich gray color. It was a hue I had always wanted for my paintings, but I had never been able to find a rock that could produce it.
He turned and strolled up the slope, his song fading out as he disappeared into the foliage. “When there’s a stooorm … one must stay waaarm …”
I had an unsettling feeling that I’d be seeing him sooner than I’d like.
I ran back empty-handed and found Echo by the burbling stream. She was watching the young mammoth use his long, muscular trunk to suck up the water and dump it into his mouth. It was very similar to how a macrauchenia drank, except a jungle llama couldn’t strangle another animal with its tiny trunk. I studied his two wet, sharp tusks, gleaming bright white in the late morning sun. They looked just the right size to have made the wounds in the boar’s head.
“Echo,” I whispered, “what does he eat?”
The mammoth’s big ears seemed to perk up at this.
I took her aside and told her about finding the severed head.
“Woolly wouldn’t touch a boar,” she said. “He’s a plant eater like me.”
“How do you know? Maybe he eats other things when you’re not around.”
“Because his poo isn’t all stinky like a meat eater’s. Believe me,” she said, “we plant eaters know each other.”
I was considering whether to tell her about Crag, when Stony returned. He carried so many bananas and gourds and berries that he looked like a walking fruit basket. Froggy sat on his shoulder, squinting sinisterly at the cloud of cheeky little fruit flies that hovered around them. The frog flicked out a long pink tongue and swallowed the nearest one with a smug little gulp.
After we’d all eaten, Echo suddenly stood up. “Lug,” she said, “Stony, Froggy, and I are going to leave you and Woolly together for a while. If you’re going to ride him in the Big Game, you guys need to get to know each other.”
I shot the young mammoth a suspicious look. “I guess so,” I muttered.
ALONE NOW, WOOLLY and I eyed each other, each waiting for the other to make the first move.
“Hello,” I finally grumbled.
Woolly got up and lumbered off.
WHEN ECHO AND Stony returned they found me alone, finger painting on the wall outside Woolly’s cave. I had found a chunk of red ocher rock, smashed some of it into powder, and added some spit to make it into red dye. They watched as I painted the head of the smallest figure in a scene of four people—two larger and two smaller—sitting around a dining rock.
“Your family?” asked Echo.
I kept my eyes on my work.
“Where’s Woolly?” she asked.
I shrugged. “He hates me,” I finally said. “He’ll never let me ride him.”
“He just doesn’t trust you yet. He’ll warm up.”
“The Big Game is in two days!”
“Maybe if you trusted him more?”
“Why should I?”
“Because you need him.”
“I don’t need anyone,” I said.
“You don’t think you need anyone! That’s your problem.”
I glared at her.
She glared right back at me.
“How,” I finally said, “do you know that?”
“Lug,” she said, “you just told me you don’t need anyone.”
“I just meant … I … wish I didn’t. I wish I could just go and …” I glanced toward the distant cliffs that held my secret art cave. “Never mind.”
She gave me a puzzled look.
Stony grunted and gestured toward the boulder pile. We all turned to look, and through an opening between two boulders, we saw a big brown eye watching us.
“Let’s go,” whispered Echo.
“Why?”
“Just trust me,” she said, gesturing for Stony to come along too.
He followed, and I came trudging after.
“Woolly needs some time alone,” she explained as we walked down the boar trail. “Besides, I want you to show me that boar’s head you found.”
I led them along the trail until we reached the shadow of Mount Bigbigbig. After a little searching in the dim light, I found the dead tree near the solitary orchid.
“For stone’s sake!” I said, scanning the ground. “It was right here, I swear.”
We scoured the area but there was no trace of the boar’s head.
Echo and Stony exchanged skeptical glances. “I bet Crazy Crag took it,” I blurted out.
Stony’s eyes suddenly got very wide.
“Crazy Crag?” said Echo. “Come on, that’s just an old Llama’s Boys legend.”
“No,” I said. “My clan banished him when he was a boy, and he’s still alive.”
“How do you know?”
“Uh … u-um,” I stammered. “I didn’t want to alarm you guys, but … I ran into him when I found the boar’s head.”
Stony’s unibrow shot up.
Echo looked at me like I had more than a few stones loose.
“What?” I said.
Before she could reply, we heard the woodsplintering sounds of something massive running through distant foliage. It was followed by the faint thud of a smaller animal hitting the ground with a muffled squeal. A deathly silence descended. It was as if no bird or insect dared breathe, much less chirp or buzz.
“Something big is out there!” whispered Echo.
“I noticed!” I whispered back.
We stayed in place for a long time until the chirping and buzzing returned. When we finally got back we found Woolly resting on his side in a shady spot by the stream.
I eyed him suspiciously.
How was I supposed to ride a giant beast that I didn’t trust? And if I didn’t ride him, how would I ever see my family again? And if I did ride him, how was I supposed to avoid dying? These were the merry thoughts bouncing around my head as we bedded down in Woolly’s cave that night. The dark reddish walls and the stalactites studding its ceiling made me feel like I was in the cavernous mouth of some great stone-toothed monster. There was old bat guano on the floor but, eerily, no bats—as if the cave had become too creepy even for them. Stony, Froggy, and I slept toward the back, while Echo curled up next to Woolly, closer to the entrance.
The wind woke me in the middle of the night. I had goose bumps on my arms and legs. I glanced over at Echo. Her face seemed dangerously close to those sharp tusks, which gleamed ominously even in the dim moonlight.
“Echo,” I whispered. “Echo?”
No response.
I crawled over and poked her shoulder.
“Sleeping,” she mumbled.
I waited for more, but she kept her eyes closed. “Echo … do you feel like … like it’s been getting really cold lately?” I asked.
“I said sleeping,” she muttered a bit more clearly.
I listened to the gusting wind and shivered. “It’s not right.”
“Oh, for crying out loud.” She pushed up onto an elbow. “Why do you think I’m sleeping next to a woolly mammoth? Did
you need to wake me up for this?”
“Aren’t you worried that it might keep getting colder and colder, until—”
“Until what?” she snapped.
“I don’t know,” I said, “but I have a feeling it won’t be good.”
Echo closed her eyes. “I know it’s been getting a little colder, but I don’t think it’s a big deal. A lot of people in my village have been saying we could use a little cooler weather.”
“This doesn’t feel like weather. It feels like a major change. It’s never gotten this cold before.”
“I’m sure it’ll warm up again.”
“What if it doesn’t?”
“It’s the middle of the night, Lug.”
“Finally,” I muttered, “something we agree on.”
“If you’re so cold, ask Woolly if you can sleep next to him. It’s nice and warm under his fur.”
“And what if he rolls over and crushes us? Did you ever think of that? He’s not some fuzzy little cave cat, you know!”
“Good night, Lug.” She snuggled back into the woolly mammoth and closed her eyes.
I rolled over, grumbling to myself.
I awoke to a scraping sound. I rubbed my stiff limbs in the faint dawn light and saw that Echo, Stony, and Froggy were still asleep. It took me a moment to remember that there had been a woolly mammoth in this cave last night. “Where’d you go, you oversize cave kitty?” I murmured.
I crept over to the entrance and peeked out. What I saw made me pinch myself.
Woolly stood outside the cave, holding the last remains of my lump of red ocher with the tip of his trunk. Near my painting of my family there was now a crude drawing of two mammoths—a larger one and a smaller one—huddled close. I stared for a long time.
“You … and your mother?” I finally asked, trying to hide my amazement.
Woolly turned and looked at me. He gave a slight nod.
I nodded back at him. “And … what about your father?”
This time the young mammoth looked down. It was just a small gesture but there was something heartbreaking about it from such a big, tough-looking beast. I reached out and touched his side, petting his thick reddish-brown fur. It was much softer than I had expected.
Lug, Dawn of the Ice Age Page 4
