She kept these reflections to herself — but she sensed from Autumn’s reflective silence that the older Cow at least understood this.
But meanwhile the walking was steady, the weather on the Gouge floor calm, the grazing good. The mammoths gradually became more confident, their bellies filling, and the steady rhythms of life banished their lingering grief over the loss of Shoot.
The calf helped, of course.
His scrawny little body filled out, becoming almost burly. His newborn’s hair was growing out, his underfur thicker, his coarser overfur longer. But his hair was still a bright pink-brown, much lighter than that of adult mammoths. He would gallop on stiff legs, leaving an uneven set of clumsy tracks — only to come to a sudden halt, trunk raised to sniff the air, his low forehead wrinkled with concentration. Or he would scoop up loose grass, suck, sniff, blow out dust, and run about as if trying to explore every detail of the ground they crossed. He picked dust and earth and insects from his thickening coat, and with wide-eyed curiosity he would pop each item into his mouth, more often than not spitting it out again.
He was still dependent on his mother’s milk, but Icebones made sure he was happy to be cared for by the others. Spiral, in particular, relished looking after him — so much so, in fact, that Icebones sometimes wondered if she was growing jealous that he wasn’t her own.
Though Icebones never spoke it out loud, all of this was a preparation against the dire possibility that Woodsmoke might lose his mother. No mammoth was more vulnerable than a calf without a mother.
But for now, Woodsmoke was secure and happy, and busy with his exploration of the intriguing world in which he found himself.
One day the calf began to play with a lemming that had, unwisely, not retreated to its burrow as the mammoths’ heavy footfalls approached.
"That lemming is not happy," commented Thunder.
Icebones recalled the Cycle. "No animal likes to be disturbed."
Thunder rumbled deeply. "You often quote your Cycle. But how do you know the Cycle is true?"
She noticed he was walking stiffly. He held his head high. And his legs were stiff, as if sore. Everything about him seemed larger than usual. And, she thought, there was an odd smell about him: something sweet, pervasive, sharp.
He went on, "You didn’t live in the times of long ago when herds of mammoths darkened the steppe. You never met Longtusk or Ganesha or Kilukpuk or any of the rest. Perhaps it is all the murmurings of calves, or foolish old Bulls."
She bridled at that. No mammoth should speak so disrespectfully of the Cycle, the heart of mammoth culture. But then, she reminded herself, Thunder had been brought up in ignorance. It wasn’t his fault, and it was her role to put that right.
"Thunder, you must understand that every mammoth alive today is descended from survivors: mammoths who mastered the world well enough to reach adulthood and raise healthy calves, who grew up in their turn. The Cycle is the wisdom of that great chain of survivors, accumulated over more generations than there are stars in the sky."
"But this is a different place. You say that yourself. Perhaps no mammoths lived here before the Lost brought us. What use is the Cycle to us?"
"While we live, we must not be afraid to add to the Cycle. Ganesha taught us that, and Longtusk. The Cycle will never be complete. Not while mammoths live and learn. There is completeness only in extinction…"
But she felt that such comfort, embedded in the Cycle itself, was thin.
And perhaps Thunder was right.
This Sky Steppe was itself a part of the Cycle. But whereas the rest of the Cycle was a memory of the past, the Sky Steppe had always been a vision of the future: a glittering, succulent promise of days to come.
Sometimes, when this small red world seemed so strange, she wondered if perhaps nothing around her was real. Maybe she was living in a moment embedded in the vision of a mammoth long dead — Kilukpuk herself, perhaps. And in that case she was part of that dream too. She was living thoughts, just a concoction of memories and dreams, with no more life than the reconstructed bones of the mammoth on the Fire Mountain.
But now Woodsmoke brayed and yelled, "I am a great Bull. I will mate you all, you Cows!" His thin cries and milky scent, and the iron stink of the dust he kicked up, were sharp intrusions of reality into her maundering.
The calf started dancing in a tight circle around the lemming. The little rodent sat as if frozen, clearly wishing this huge monster would go away. Then Woodsmoke made a mock charge, head lowered. The lemming, snapping out of its trance, turned tail and shot across the ground, a muddy brown blur, until it reached a hole and disappeared.
Woodsmoke’s mother cuffed him affectionately and tucked him under her belly, where the great Bull was soon seeking out his mother’s milk.
Thunder growled. "That little scrap is mocking me."
"He is playing at what he will become."
"But he was threatening a lemming."
"He has to start somewhere. If there were other calves here, he would wrestle with them and stage little tusk-clashes. It is all part of his preparation for the battles he must wage as an adult."
Thunder growled again. "Perhaps. But when that wretched calf approaches me, reaching up with his grass-blade trunk to wrestle, I want to throw him out of the Gouge…"
Suspicious now, she sniffed at the ground over which Thunder had walked, smelling his urine, which was hissing slightly as it settled into the red dust. And she probed at the thick hair before his ears with her trunk fingers. She found a dark, sticky liquid trickling from his temporal gland.
"Thunder — you are in musth!"
He rumbled deeply. It was the musth call, she realized. Without understanding it he was calling to oestrus Cows, if any had been here to listen. "I thought I was ill."
"Not ill." She stroked the temporal glands on both sides of his head. They were swollen. "You are sore here." Gently she lifted his trunk and had him coil it so it rested on its tusks. "That will relieve the pressure on one side of your face at least."
"Icebones, what is happening to me? I roam around this Gouge listening, but I don’t know what for. The Cows keep their distance from me — even you.
It was true, she realized. She had responded to his calls without thinking. She said carefully, "Musth means that you are ready to mate. Your smell, and the rumbles you make, announce your readiness to any receptive Cows. The aggression you feel is meant to be turned on other Bulls, for Bulls must always fight to prove they are fit to sire calves. But here there are no Bulls for you to fight — none save Woodsmoke, and you have shown the correct restraint."
He growled, "But there are Cows."
"None of us is in oestrus, Thunder," she said gently. "You will learn to tell that from the smell of our urine. None of us is ready."
She felt his trunk probe at her belly. "Not even you?"
"Not even me, Thunder. I am sorry." Again she was struck by the fact that she had still not come into oestrus, had felt not so much as a single twinge of that great inner warmth in all the time she had been here. "Don’t worry. In a few days this will pass and you will feel normal again."
He grunted. "I hope so."
In fact she suspected that even if one of the Cows were in oestrus, right here and right now, still Thunder would fail to find himself a mate. He was clearly young and immature, and no Cow would willingly accept a mating with such a Bull. If there were other Bulls here he wouldn’t even get a chance, of course. For his first few musth seasons Thunder would simply be overpowered by the older, mature Bulls.