The days were still cruelly short, but nevertheless lengthening, with the sun’s brief arc above the horizon extending with each day that passed. The weather remained clear and bitterly cold. Wind whipped across the empty ground, blowing up particles of ice so small and hard and dry they felt like grit when they got into Silverhair’s eyes.
One day, when the sun was at its height and bathing the frosty ground with a spurious gold, Owlheart called a halt. The mammoths dispersed to scrape grass from the hard ground and drop dung.
The calves found the energy to play. Sunfire pestered her older brother, placing her trunk in his mouth to test the grass he was eating, rubbing against him and even collapsing in a heap beside him. At times they chased each other, mounting mock charges and wrestling with their trunks.
Foxeye wearily admonished Croptail to be careful with his sister, but Silverhair knew such play was important in teaching the calves to develop their own abilities — and most important, to learn about each other, for it was the bond between Family members that was the most important weapon of all in their continued survival. Anyhow, the calves’ cheerful play warmed the dispirited adults.
Poor Wolfnose stood stiffly, away from the others, her great legs visibly trembling.
Owlheart called Silverhair, Lop-ear, and Snagtooth to her.
Owlheart began digging at the ground. She broke the crusted surface with her tusks and forefeet, scooping the debris out of the way with her trunk. Owlheart’s left tusk was much more worn than the right, a good deal shorter, and its tip was rounded and grooved. Most mammoths favor their right tusk as their master tusk, but Owlheart, unusually, preferred the left, and that showed in the unevenness of the wear.
"The winter has been dry," said Owlheart as she dug. "Perhaps the thaw will come soon, but we are thirsty now. But here, in this place, there is water to be found — liquid, for most of the year. This is a place where the inner warmth of the Earth reaches to the surface and keeps the water beneath from freezing, even when the world is as cold as a corpse’s belly…"
Now, looking around more carefully, Silverhair saw the ground was pitted by a series of shallow craters: pits dug in the ground by mammoths of the past.
"Remember this place," Owlheart said. "For it is a place of Earth’s generous warmth, and water; and it may save your life."
Silverhair turned, scanning the horizon. She raised her trunk and let the hairs there dangle in the prevailing wind. She studied the sky, and scraped with her tusks at the ground. She let the scents and subtle sounds of the landscape sink into her mind.
She was remembering. Even as Owlheart spoke, she was adding a new detail, exquisite but perhaps vitally important, to the map of scents and breezes and textures that each mammoth carried in her head.
"Now, help me dig," said Owlheart.
Silverhair, Lop-ear, and Snagtooth stepped forward, took their places around the preliminary hole dug by their Matriarch, and began to work at the ground.
The ground was hard: even to the stone-hard tusks of mammoths, it offered stiff resistance. Save for the occasional peevish complaint by Snagtooth, there was no talking as they worked: only the scrape of tusk and stamp of foot, the hissing of breath through upraised trunks.
They worked through the night, taking breaks in turns.
As the night wore on — and as there was little sign of water, and they became steadily more exhausted — Silverhair had a growing sense of unease.
Owlheart was not a Matriarch who welcomed debate about her decisions. Nevertheless, as Owlheart took a break — standing to pass her dung a little way away from the others — Silverhair summoned up the courage to speak to her.
Owlheart was evidently weary already from her work, and her pink tongue protruded from her mouth.
"You’re thirsty," said Silverhair.
"Yes. A paradox, isn’t it? — that the work to find water is making me thirstier than ever."
"Matriarch, Foxeye is still weak, Croptail is weaning and vulnerable to the wolves, Wolfnose can barely walk. The digging is exhausting all of us…"
The Matriarch’s great jaw ceased its fore-and-back motion. "You’re right," she said.
"…What?"
"We’re in no fit state to have set off on an expedition like this. That’s what you’re leading up to, isn’t it? But I wonder if you realize what peril we are in, little Silverhair. Where water vanishes, sanity soon follows. That’s what the Cycle teaches. Thirst maddens us. Soon, without water, we would turn on each other… I have to avoid that at all costs, for we would be destroyed.
"Perhaps if we had stayed where we were, the thaw might have come to us before we all died of thirst. But that was not my judgment," Owlheart growled. "And that is the essence of being Matriarch, Silverhair. Sometimes there are no good choices: only a series of bad ones."
"And so we are forced to stake all our lives on the bounty of a seephole," Silverhair protested.
"The art of traveling is to pick the least dangerous path." That was another line from the Cycle, a teaching of the great Matriarch, Ganesha the Wise.
Owlheart turned away, evidently intent on resuming her interrupted feeding.
But still Silverhair wasn’t done. She blurted, "Maybe the old ways aren’t the right ways anymore."
Owlheart snorted. "Have you been talking to Lop-ear again?"
Silverhair was indignant. "I don’t need Lop-ear to tell me how to think."
"The defiant one, aren’t you? Tell me what has brought on this sudden doubt."
Silverhair spoke to the Matriarch again of the monster she had encountered on the ice floe. "So you see, if there is such a strange creature in the world, who knows what else there is to find? The world is changing. Anyone can see that. It’s why the winters are warmer, why the good grass and shrubs are harder to find. But maybe there’s some good for us in all this. If we only go searching — listen with open ears — we might discover—"
Owlheart cut her off with a slap of her trunk, hard enough to sting. "Listen to me carefully. There is nothing for us in what you saw at the coast — nothing but misery and pain and death. Do you understand?"
"Won’t you even tell me what it means?"
"We won’t talk of this again, Silverhair," said Owlheart, and she turned her massive back.
There was a commotion at Silverhair’s feet. Gloomy, frustrated, she looked down. She saw a little animated bundle of orange hair, smelled the warm cloying aroma of milk. It was Sunfire. The calf trotted over to the Matriarch’s fresh dung and began to poke into the warm, salty goodies with her trunk. Soon she was totally absorbed. Silverhair, watching fondly, wished she could be like that again, trotting after her own concerns, in a state of blissful, unmarked innocence.
Eggtusk came up. His giant, inward-curving tusks loomed over her, silhouetted against the sky. For a while he walked with her.
She saw that they had become isolated from the rest of the Family. And with a flash of intuition, she saw why he had approached her. "Eggtusk—"
"What?"
"The thing I saw on the ice floe, in the south. You know what it is, don’t you?"
He regarded her. His words, coming deep from the hollow of his chest, were coupled with the unnatural stillness of his great head. It made her feel small and weak.
"Listen to me very carefully," he said. "Owlheart is right. You must not go there again. And pray to Kilukpuk that your monster did not recognize you, that it does not track you here."
"Why? It looked weaker than a wolf cub."