The narrow ice bridge back to the pack ice had collapsed, stranding her here.
And there was a monster on the ice floe.
The monster seemed to have stepped from behind a pressure ridge, where it had been hidden from her view — and she from its. It was smaller than she was — much smaller. It was, perhaps, about the size of a small seal. It had four legs. It was standing on its hind legs, like a seal balancing on its tail.
But this was no seal.
Its legs were long: longer, in proportion, even than a mammoth’s. It was skinny — surely it could not withstand the cold with so little fat to insulate it — and it didn’t have any fur, not even on its shiny, hairless, skull-like head. In fact, it seemed to have nothing to protect it but a loose-fitting outer skin.
Its ears were small, and startlingly like a mammoth’s. Its eyes were set at the front of its head, like a wolf’s — a predator’s eyes, the better to hunt with. And those binocular eyes were fixed on Silverhair, in fear or calculation.
It was clutching things in its forelegs. In one paw it held something shiny, like a shard of ice. In the other was something soft that dripped blood. It was the liver of a walrus, she recognized. And there was blood all around the monster’s small mouth.
A child of Aglu, then.
She must show no fear. What would Longtusk have done in such a situation?
She lowered her head so her tusks would not seem a threat, and she spoke to the creature. "I am called Silverhair," she said. "And you—"
Its predator’s eyes were wide, its gaze fixed on her, its small, hairless face wreathed in steam. There was frost on its shining dome of a head. It was a male, she decided, for she could see no sign of dugs.
"I will call you ‘Skin-of-Ice,’ " she said.
She took a step toward the creature, meaning to touch him with her trunk, as mammoths will when they meet; perhaps she would go through the greeting ritual with him.
But he cried out. He raised the glittering, sharp thing in his paw, and backed away.
The wind picked up abruptly, and ice crystals whirled around her face. The floe rocked, and she stumbled.
When she looked again, the monster had gone.
She caught one last glimpse of him, hopping nimbly across the widening leads, heading for the shore far from Silverhair and Lop-ear.
The wind began to blow more strongly through the Channel. The sea became choppy, and as it drifted through the Channel the ice floe began to break up. Soon Silverhair found herself stranded in a mass of loose ice that was drifting rapidly eastward.
Suddenly she was in peril.
But now Lop-ear was calling her, with a deep rumble that easily crossed the ice and water to her. "This way! This way!"
She saw that a smaller floe had nudged alongside the floe she rode. It was even more fragile than the one she was riding — but it was closer to the shore.
Not allowing herself to hesitate, she marched briskly across the narrow lead to the smaller floe.
Behind her the ice at the floe’s edge crumbled into fragments.
This floe, much smaller than the first, was spinning slowly, and heaving from side to side in the heavy swell as the current swept it along. Then another floe came bumping alongside with a crunch of smashing ice; she hurried forward onto it, and found herself a little closer again to land.
So she worked her way, floe by floe, across the ice, following a complex path that she hoped would lead her to the shore.
At the edge of one floe, a herd of walrus were gamboling among the loose ice. They completely ignored her. It was a mixed group, mothers with calves of various ages, and one massive male with long, curved tusks protruding from his small face. Some of the walruses had their tusks hooked to the edge of the ice as they rested, to save themselves from sinking as they slept. The stink of walrus was almost overpowering, for it seemed they had been defecating on the same floe all winter. The walrus scratched hoarfrost from their bodies with surprisingly gentle flippers, and occasionally turned over in great heaps of pinkish blubbery flesh, their long ivory tusks glinting in the sun.
With their warty skin, wide mustaches, and tiny heads atop their long, ponderous bodies, Silverhair found it hard to think of the walrus as anything but spectacularly ugly.
She wondered sadly if one of this comfortable family had fallen victim to Skin-of-Ice. Perhaps they didn’t know about it yet.
Silverhair skirted the walrus carefully.
Her progress was agonizing — one step forward, another back — and she lost track of the time she had spent here, inching across the treacherous ice.
Brown mist, blown from over the open water, swirled around her, making it hard to keep to her chosen track. The loose floes spun around, crashed and tilted, and she felt as if the whole world, of ice and sea and land, were in motion. More than once she stepped through rotten ice, and her feet took more dunkings in the icy water, and the fur on her legs was soon heavy and stiff with ice.
If she couldn’t get back to the shore, these separating floes would eventually be blown out to sea. There — the Cycle taught — she would suffer death by starvation or thirst — if the floes did not crumble and drown her — and if killer whales did not ram their snouts through the thinning ice to reach her.
But gradually, she realized, she was working her way, floe by floe, step by step, back toward the shore. Lop-ear ran along faithfully, calling out the floes he spotted, evidently determined he would not abandon her.
At last, as she neared the landfast ice and got away from the fastest-flowing water, the swell subsided and the rolling of the floes became more bearable.
And she found herself on a hard, unyielding surface.
For a moment she stood there, unable to believe it was over, that she had reached the land. In fact, she felt giddy, so used had she become to standing on a surface that tipped and heaved beneath her. But Lop-ear’s trunk was soon over her head, touching her mouth and cooing reassurance.
With relief, she trotted away from the ice’s edge.
She turned and saw the floe that had so nearly carried her to her death. There was the anonymous hulk of distorted wood. And there, just visible as black dots on the ice, were the droppings she had made as she had circled the shrinking floe.
But now frost-smoke and the mist off the sea closed around the floe, and it was carried away to invisibility.
5
The Tusk
The Family was a small, bulky knot in the landscape, dark on dark. But Silverhair could hear the mammoths’ rumbles and chirrups, kindly or complaining in turn; she could feel the deep sound passing through the frozen earth as those great feet lumbered back and forth; and she could smell the rich, welcoming smell of wet mammoth fur, a rich stink that carried on the wind. She could even smell the moist, slightly stale aroma of the milk her sister was producing for her new calf.
And as they approached the Family, Silverhair saw that the Matriarch was preparing for a migration.
Owlheart was moving among her charges, gathering and encouraging them with gentle slaps of her trunk. Silverhair’s sister, Foxeye, was gathering her calves around her. Foxeye herself looked unsteady on her feet, weakened by the long trial of her pregnancy and the birth. Sunfire, the new baby, stayed close to her mother, nestling in the long hairs of Foxeye’s belly. The calf’s milk tusks were already budding at her cheeks, white as Arctic flowers. Silverhair heard Foxeye murmuring the ancient tale of Kilukpuk’s Calves to her, and she remembered how her own mother — when Silverhair wasn’t much older than Sunfire was now — had made her swear the ancient Oath of Kilukpuk. And there was little Croptail, scarcely more than an infant himself, his baffled resentment of his new sister visible even from afar.