Perhaps this would be the year that she would, for the first time, sing the Song of Estrus: when her body would produce the eggs that could form a calf. She remembered the ache in her empty dugs as she had watched Foxeye suckle Sunfire for the first time. Now she could feel the blood surge in her veins, as if drawn by the sun.
She wanted to become pregnant: to bear her own calf, to shelter and feed and raise it, to teach it all she knew of the world, to add her own new thread to the Cycle’s great and unending coat.
And her thoughts were full of Lop-ear. She longed to tell him what she had seen on the Plain of Bones, what it had meant to her…
She longed, bluntly, just to be with him once more.
She trotted across the thawing plains, her head full of warm, blood-red dreams of the young Bull.
Wolfnose had more difficulty.
Even at the best of times her pace was no match for Silverhair’s. The pain in her legs and back was obvious. It took her much longer than Silverhair to feed and to pass dung, and her lengthening stops left Silverhair fretting with impatience.
Thus they proceeded, Wolfnose warring with her own failing body, Silverhair torn between eagerness for the future and responsibility for the past.
At last they came in sight of the Family.
It was a bright morning, and at the center of a greening plain, the Family looked like a series of round, hairy boulders dotted over the landscape. The smell of their dung and their moist coats was already strong, and Silverhair could feel the rumble of their voices as they called to each other. The mammoths were not beautiful — never had the ambiguous gift of the great Matriarch Ganesha to her daughter Prima been more evident to Silverhair — but it was, in her eyes, the finest sight she could have seen.
She raised her trunk and trumpeted her joyous greeting and — quite forgetting Wolfnose — she charged across the tundra toward the Family.
Here came Lop-ear, that damaged ear dangling unmistakably by his head, running to meet her.
Their meeting was so vigorous, she was almost knocked over. They bumped their foreheads, ran in circles, defecated together, and spun around. He was like a reflection in a melt pond, a reflection of her own resurgent youth and vigor.
This is our time, she thought as she spun and danced. This is our summer, our day.
And it seemed perfectly natural that he should run behind her, rear up on his hind legs, place his forelegs on her back, and rest his great weight against her.
But she was not in estrus, and he was not in musth, and — for now — the mounting was only a playful celebration.
They faced each other; Silverhair touched his scalp and tusks and mouth.
"I missed you," he said.
"And I you. You won’t believe what Wolfnose showed me…" She began to recount all she had seen in the Plain of Bones, the ancient carcasses of mammoths just like themselves, swimming out of the ice after a Great-Year’s sleep.
But though he listened intently, and continued to stroke her trunk with his, she could see that his eyes were empty.
After a time she drew back from him. He reached for her again, but she pushed him gently away.
"Something’s wrong. Is it what Owlheart said, about having something of the Lost in you?"
"No. Or at least, not just that. I’m confused, Silverhair. I’m happy to see you, glad the spring has come again. Part of me wants to jump about like a calf. But inside, I feel as if a giant black winter cloud is hanging over me."
She scuffed at the ground, trying to retain that sense of wondrous optimism with which she had returned home. "I don’t understand…"
"Silverhair, if you were singing the Song of Estrus now — who would mount you?"
And with that question she saw his concern. For there were only two Bulls here who might come into musth: Eggtusk and Lop-ear. They’d fought once already; they might easily kill each other fighting over her.
Or over Owlheart, or Foxeye, or even Snagtooth, if their turn came.
Lop-ear said, "And even if we resolve our dominance fights without killing each other — even if all the Cows become pregnant by one or other of us — what then?"
"What do you mean?"
"What of the future? When Sunfire and Croptail and any other calves grow up — and themselves come into estrus and musth — who is to mate with them?" He spun, agitated, his trunk raised as if to ward off invisible enemies. "Already his mother is pushing Croptail away. That’s as it should be. Soon, in a few years, he will want to leave the Family and search for other Bulls, join a bachelor herd. Just as I did, just as Eggtusk did. But Croptail can’t join the Bulls, for there are no other Bulls. He can’t join a bachelor herd, for there is no herd — none that we have met for a long time, at any rate. And when he is in musth, there will be no Cows but his own sisters and aunts and cousins."
She reached out to try to calm him. "Lop-ear—"
But he spun away from her. "Oh, Kilukpuk! I have this stuff rattling around in my skull all day and all night. I want to stop thinking!"
She was chilled by his words, even as she strove to understand. To think so clearly about the possibilities of the future, of change, is not common in mammoths; embedded in the great rhythms of time, the mammoths live in the here and now. But Lop-ear was no ordinary mammoth.
She took hold of his trunk and forced him to face her. "Lop-ear — listen to me. Perhaps you’re right in all you say. But you are wrong to despair. When we were trapped by the fire and the runoff, you found a way to save us. It wasn’t a teaching from the Cycle; it wasn’t something the Matriarch showed you. It was a new idea.
"Now we are facing a barrier even more formidable than that stream. There is nothing to guide us in the Cycle. There is nothing the Matriarch can advise us to do. It’s up to us, Lop-ear. We have to seek out the new, and find a way to survive."
"It’s impossible."
"No. As Longtusk said, ‘Only death is the end of possibility.’ What we must do is look for answers where nobody has looked before."
"Where?"
She hesitated, and the vague determination that had long been gathering in her crystallized. "If Eggtusk is right — that the Lost have come to this Island — then that’s where we must go."
"The Lost? Silverhair, are you rogue?"
"No. Just determined. Maybe the Lost aren’t the monsters of the Cycle anymore. Maybe there’s some way they can help us." She tightened her grasp on his trunk. "We must go south again. Are you with me?"
For long heartbeats he stared into her eyes. Then he said, "Yes. Oh, Silverhair, yes. I’ll follow you to the End of the World—"
There was an alarmed trumpeting.
Silverhair released Lop-ear’s trunk and they both whirled, trunks held aloft.
Owlheart was running. "Wolfnose! Wolfnose!"
Silverhair looked back to the west, the way she had come.
Wolfnose, trailing Silverhair’s footsteps, had fallen to her knees.
Her heart surging, Silverhair ran after her Matriarch.
Silverhair, driven by guilt, was first to reach Wolfnose.
The old Cow’s belly and chest were resting against the ground, her legs splayed, and her trunk was pooled before her. Shanks of winter fur were scattered around her. Her eyes were closed, and it seemed to Silverhair that Wolfnose was slowly subsiding, as if the blood and life were leaking out of her into the hard ground.
She reached out and ran her trunk over the old Cow’s face. The skin looked as rough as bark, but it was warm and soft to the touch, and she could hear the soft gurgle of Wolfnose’s breathing.