We know their true name. They are already in the Cycle. Driven by emptiness inside, they will never stop until they have covered the Earth, and no animal is left alive but them — heap upon heap of them, with their painted faces and their tools and their weapons. They are the demons we use to scare our calves; they are the nemesis of the mammoths. They are the Lost…
Saxifrage said, "Some day in the future the ice will return, and the steppe will spread across the planet once more. It will be a world made for mammoths. But will there be any mammoths left alive to see it?"
The young mammoth’s tusks clashed with the gomphothere’s, a sharp, precise ivory sound. The gomphothere trumpeted and disappeared into the forest.
Epilogue
On this world, a single large ocean spans much of the northern hemisphere. There are many smaller lakes and seas confined within circular craters, connected by rivers and canals. Much of the land is covered by dark green forest and by broad, sweeping grasslands and steppe.
But ice is gathering at the poles. The oceans and lakes are crawling back into great underground aquifers. Soon the air will start to snow out.
The grip of the ice persisted for billions of years before being loosened, it seemed forever. And yet it comes again.
This is the Sky Steppe.
This is Mars.
The time is three thousand years after the birth of Christ. And in all this world there is no human to hear the calls of the mammoths.
Afterword
The picture drawn here of the processes which led to the extinction of the mammoths and other Ice Age fauna is largely based on the careful studies of Gary Haynes and others; see Haynes' Mammoths, Mastodons and Elephants (Cambridge University Press, 1991) and Peter Ward's The Call of Distant Mammoths (Copernicus, 1997). Details of human cultural involvement with mammoths may be found in Mammoths by Adrian Lister and Paul Bahn (Macmillan, 1994). A fine reference on human Ice Age culture is Bahn's Journey Through the Ice Age (Weidenfeld Nicolson, 1994). A good reference on the strange world of the Ice Age, with its land bridges and ice corridors, is After The Ice Age by E.C. Pielou (University of Chicago Press, 1991).
The idea of humans taming mammoths or mastodonts in such ancient times is speculative but not impossible. We have records that elephants have been tamed since 2000 B.C. in the Indus Valley and China, and used in war since 1100 B.C.
A valuable source on Neanderthals and their culture is James Shreeve's The Neanderthal Enigma (Penguin, 1995). It's sadly unlikely that any Neanderthals survived as late as the period in which this book is set. But hominid fossils are hard to find, and much of Beringia is now submerged by the ocean…
Any errors, omissions or misinterpretations are of course my responsibility.
Stephen Baxter
Great Missenden
May 1999