With trunk raised, Spiral was staring fixedly toward the west. Icebones squinted, trying to make her poor eyes work better.
Over the green-gray floor of the Gouge lay a fine white line. It crossed the valley from one side to the other, like a scratch through a layer of lichen.
"It is the fallen bridge."
"Yes," said Spiral, "and that is where Shoot lies, crushed like an egg. Should we go back and look for her corpse? That is your way, isn’t it? The wolves and birds will have taken the meat and guts and eyes by now. But if the bones are not too scattered—"
"Stop this," Icebones snapped, with all the Matriarchal command she could muster. "You must not think of your sister in death. Think of her."
Spiral reached forward with her trunk, as if seeking the ghost of her vanished sister. Hesitantly she said, "She was — funny. She was loyal. She always stuck by me. Sometimes that would annoy me. Some of the Lost thought she was cuter than me and would give her attention…"
"I can see how that would irritate you," Icebones said gently.
Spiral had the grace to snort, mocking herself. "She followed me. Me. And I betrayed her trust by leading her to her death."
Icebones groped for something to say. "Sometimes we have no choice about how we act. Sometimes, we cannot save even those we love. That is what the Cycle tells us, over and over." And that hard fact would be the most unpalatable truth of all for these untutored mammoths, if they ever had to face it.
But Spiral was still distant, wounded, and the Cycle seemed a dusty abstraction.
Icebones thought, Thunder, Autumn, Spiraclass="underline" all of them suffused by guilt, agonized by the mistakes they felt they had made. It was because they had always been under the care of the Lost. It was because they had never had to act for themselves.
Wisdom must be earned, through pain and loss. That was what these mammoths were struggling to learn.
The mammoths were beginning to stir, blowing dust from their trunks. The calf, revived and excited, bumped against their legs.
They reached a new, steep slope of loose talus. It was more difficult to climb down, but it delivered them to the warmer, moister air more quickly, and they pushed forward with enthusiasm.
Abruptly they emerged onto a broad terrace. Stepping forward stiffly, relieved to be on flat ground again, Icebones immediately felt a soft crackle beneath one foot pad. It was the sprawled-out branch of a dwarf birch. Looking ahead, she could see that the ground was littered with patches of open water.
The mammoths fanned out, emitting grunts of pleasure as they found tufts of grass and clumps of herbs.
Icebones walked to the crumbled lip of the terrace, and found herself in a strange world.
The Gouge’s mighty walls ran roughly straight, but they were complex even from this perspective, full of great scraped-out bays separated by knife-sharp ridges. Everywhere she saw landslides: rock skirts, sloping sharply, leaning against the walls. In one place, she saw, a giant landslide had swept right across the wide Gouge floor and come washing up against the far wall.
The walls were so tall they rose up above the clouds. And they were still visible even at the horizon, as if a notch had been taken out of the very planet.
Thin, high cries fell on her like snowflakes. Peering up, she saw geese flying away from the sun in a vast, crowded formation, skimming through the strip of sky enclosed by the walls. The wall itself was pocked with ledges and pits where birds nested: guillemots, murres, kittiwakes and gulls. The birds flew back and forth against the cliff face, their wings flashing bright against the huge wall’s brooding crimson.
Below the level of this terrace, the steppe-like terrain gave way to a forest of spruce, pine, aspen: cold-resistant trees so tall they seemed to be straining to reach the sky. And beyond them she saw the glimmer of water. It was the canal, the straight-line cut through the Gouge’s deepest part. Alongside the canal more trees grew, but these were fat, water-rich broadleaf trees, oak and elm and maple, basking in the comparative warmth of those depths. She glimpsed a sea of shining black washing along the valley — a herd of migrant animals: bison, reindeer, maybe even horses.
The air over these deeper parts of the Gouge floor shone pink-gold, full of moisture and dust, and the green and blue of water and life overlaid the strong red color of the underlying rock, making a startling contrast. But the thin scraping of life was utterly overwhelmed by the mighty geology that bounded it. And every sound she heard, every rumble that came to her through the ground, was shaped by those tremendous cliffs.
This was a walled world.
Woodsmoke came running floppily before her, his fuzzy-haired head bobbing up and down, his trunk exploring the ground as he ran. "Which way? Which way, Icebones? Which way?"
Icebones peered east, away from the setting sun. Her shadow fled along the ground before her, straight along the Gouge floor, a thing of spindly legs and stretched-out body — just like a native-born mammoth, she thought.
She scratched the calf’s scalp with her trunk fingers. "Follow your shadow, Woodsmoke."
The calf lolloped away, trumpeting his excitement, and his thin cries echoed from the Gouge’s mighty walls.
3
The Walled World
The Gouge’s floor was carved by lesser valleys and twisting ridges. Lakes pooled, linked by the cruel gash of that central canal. The lakes were crowded with reeds and littered with ducks and geese. Around their shores forests grew, mighty oaks that stretched up so high their upper branches were lost in mist.
The mammoths would come down to the lakes’ gravelly beaches to sip water that was mostly free of salt, even if it fizzed uncomfortably in Icebones’s trunk. But the lower ground was softer and frequently boggy, and nothing grew there but bland uninterrupted grasses, or tall coniferous trees, neither of which provided food that sustained mammoths well. They generally kept to higher ground, where grew a rich mosaic vegetation of grass, herbs, shrubs and trees, providing a healthy diet.
They often glimpsed other animals: Icebones recognized reindeer, horses, bison and musk oxen, lemmings and rabbits, and she saw the spoor of creatures who fed off the grazing herds, like wolves and foxes. The smaller animals seemed about the size she recalled from the Island. But the reindeer and horses were very tall, with spindly legs that scarcely seemed capable of supporting their weight.
The long-legged rabbits could bound spectacularly high into the air. But they fell back with eerie slowness, making them tempting targets for diving raptor birds.
For a while an arctic fox followed the mammoths, sniffing their dung. The fox was in his winter coat, a gleaming white so intense it was almost blue. The fox moved with anxious, purposeful movements over a network of trails, undetectable to Icebones. He was no threat to the mammoths, but the fox was an efficient scavenger of food, a hunter of lemmings and eggs and helpless chicks who might fall from a cliff-side nest. Somehow she found it reassuring to see this familiar rogue prospering in this peculiar landscape.
But still, though the Gouge was crowded with life compared to the upper plains from which they had descended, on the higher ground they passed lakes that had dried up, leaving only bowls of cracked mud. Even here, in this strange walled world, the tide of life was inexorably receding.
Icebones inspected one such mud bowl gloomily. It was churned by many hoof marks, and littered with bits of bone, cracked and scored by the teeth and beaks of scavengers. When the water had vanished, animals, dying of thirst, had congregated here to die — and had then provided easy meat for the predators. She tried to imagine the scenes here as adult jostled with adult, fighting for water, maddened by thirst, and the young and old and weak were pushed aside. And she wondered if any of these bits of well-chewed bone had once belonged to mammoths.