Remarkable to think that the last time he saw him, Thunder had actually been younger than Longtusk was now. How on Earth had he got so old? Where had the years gone? And…
And he was maundering again, and now the calf was nipping at his toes.
Saxifrage said, "Longtusk is going to mate with me when I’m old enough."
Horsetail rumbled her embarrassment, flapping her small ears.
Longtusk said, "I’m flattered, Saxifrage. But you’ll have to find someone closer to your own age, that’s all."
"Why? Mother says you’re a great hero and will go on forever, like the rocks of the nunatak."
Again Horsetail harrumphed her embarrassment.
"Your mother’s right about most of that," said Longtusk wryly. "But — not forever. Look." He kneeled down before the calf, ignoring warning stabs of pain from his knees, and opened his mouth. "What’s in here?"
Saxifrage probed with her trunk at his teeth and huge black tongue. "Grass. A bit of old twig stick under your tongue—"
"My teeth, calf," he growled. "Feel my teeth."
She reached in, and he felt the soft tip of her trunk run over the upper surfaces of his long lower teeth.
He said, "Can you feel how worn they are? That’s because of all the grass and herbs and twigs I’ve eaten."
"Everybody’s teeth get worn down," said Saxifrage, wrinkling her trunk. "You just grow more. My mother says—"
"But," said Longtusk heavily, "I’ve gotten so old I don’t have more teeth to grow. This is my last set. Soon they will be too worn to eat with. And then…"
The calf looked confused and distressed. He reached out and stroked the topknot of her scalp with his trunk.
She said, "Will you at least try to keep from dying until I’m big enough? I wouldn’t have thought that was too much to ask."
Longtusk eyed Horsetail; that was one of her favorite admonitions, he knew. "All right," he said. "I’ll try. Just for you."
"Now come on," said Horsetail, tugging at her calf’s trunk. "Time for a drink. And you really mustn’t bother the Patriarch so much."
"I told you," he said. "She wasn’t bothering me. And don’t call me Patriarch. I’m just an old fool of a Bull. That Patriarch business was long ago…"
But Horsetail was leading her calf to a stream which bubbled from the rocks; a group of mammoths was already clustered there, their loosening winter coats rising in a cloud around them. "Whatever you say, Patriarch."
Longtusk growled.
Now there was a tug at his belly furs. He turned, wondering which calf was troubling his repose now.
It was the old Dreamer, Willow. Standing there in his much-patched skins, with grass crudely stuffed into his coat and hat, Willow was aged, bent almost double, his small face a mass of wrinkles. But, with a gnarled paw, he still stroked Longtusk’s trunk, just as he had when they’d first met as calf and cub.
And Longtusk knew what he wanted.
Longtusk turned slowly, sniffing the air. After all these years he had learned to disregard the pervading stink of sulfur which polluted the air around this nunatak. There was little wind, and though there was a frosty sharpness to the air, there was no sign that the weather was set to change.
All in all, it was a fine day for their annual trek.
Rumbling softly, with Willow limping at his side, Longtusk set off.
Longtusk climbed a shallow rise, away from the glen where the mammoths fed. At first he walked on soil or rock, but soon his feet were pressing down on ice and loose snow.
The going got harder, the slope steepening.
At first Willow was able to keep up, limping alongside the mammoth with one paw wrapped in Longtusk’s belly hair. But soon his wheezing exhaustion was obvious.
They paused for breath. Longtusk turned, looking back over the nunatak and the life sheltered there.
From afar, the mammoths were a slow drift of dark points over a field of tan grasses. Occasionally the long guard hairs of a mature Bull would catch the light, glimmering brightly. Their movements were slow, calm, dense, their attitudes full of attention. They were massive, contemplative, wise: beautiful, he thought, wonderful beautiful animals.
The nunatak was everything he could have hoped for, that fateful day when he took his leave of his own Family. But still -
But still, how brief life had been. Like a dream, or the blossoming of a spring flower on the steppe — a splash of color, a burst of hope, and then…
Willow stroked his trunk absently, bringing him back.
He’d been maundering again. Morbid old fool.
With considerable effort on both their parts, Willow managed to clamber onto his back. Longtusk couldn’t help but recall the liquid grace with which Crocus, the Firehead cub, had once flowed onto his back, how they had run and pranced together.
With a deep rumble he turned away and headed up the cold, forbidding slope. His breath steamed, and his aging limbs tired quickly.
The old Dreamer was already snoring gently.
Soon Longtusk neared the crest of a ridge. The snow thinned out, and he found himself walking on rock that was bare or covered only by a scattering of snow. The land flattened out, and he stood atop the ridge, breathing hard.
He was standing on the rim of a crater.
He stepped forward cautiously. It was a great bowl, cut into the Earth, like the imprint of an immense foot. The rim curved around the huge dip in the land to close on itself, a neat circle.
The crater wall, coated with snow and ice, was sculpted to smoothness by the wind, like the sweep of a giant sand dune. The shadows were subtle and soft, white shading to blue-gray — save at the rim itself, where a layer of bare brown rock was exposed. The winds off the ice sheet kept this curving ridge swept clear of new snow falls, so that ice could not form. He let his eye be drawn to the crater’s far side, where there had been an avalanche, and the smooth snow surface was marked by great ripples descending toward the crater’s base.
The floor of the crater was surprisingly flat. He knew there was a lake down there. In the brief summer it would melt, turning into a placid pond of blue-gray water, cupped by the crater, visited by birds — in fact, the geese who had guided him here to the nunatak. If a mammoth were down there now, walking across that frozen surface, she would look no larger than a grain of sand, dwarfed by this immense structure of rock and ice.
Longtusk raised his trunk and trumpeted, high and thin. His voice echoed from the iced-over walls of the crater, and pealed out over the frozen lands around the nunatak.
Willow stirred on his back, grumbling, and subsided back to sleep, clinging to Longtusk’s fur instinctively.
Longtusk walked a little farther around the crater’s rim. He came to a broad ridge in the icebound land, leading away from the crater. He walked this way now, feeling for the firm places in the piled-up snow.
Soon he saw what he was looking for. It was a splash of coal-black darkness, vivid against the snow that surrounded it. This was another crater, but little more than ten or fifteen paces wide. And further craters lay beyond, dark splashes on the snow, as if some wounded, rocky giant had limped this way.
He let himself slide over crunching rubble into the small crater. The rock was warm under his thick footpads. Where snow fell from his coat it melted quickly, and steam wisped up around him. The rock here was fragmented, crumbled. It was jet black, sharp-edged, and the fragments he picked up had tiny bubbles blown into them, like the bones of a mammoth’s skull.
This crater did not have a neat rounded form, no cupped lake in its base. The walls here were just crude piles of frothy black rock. In places he could see flat plates of rock which lay over drained hollows, like the remnants of broken eggs. Everything was sharp-edged, new. This small crater was obviously much younger than its giant cousin nearby. Perhaps these small frothy rocks, frozen fragments of the Earth’s chthonic blood, were the youngest rocks in the world.