Silverhair felt the rocks under her feet, as if her legs were burrowing like tree trunks to anchor her to the ground that sustained them all. And slowly, the Cycle’s calm teaching reached her.
She remembered how Wolfnose had shown her the Plain of Bones. She felt the great turning rhythms of the Earth. Her mind opened up, as if she held the topology of the whole Earth in her mind, and she saw far beyond the now, to the farthest reaches of past and future.
Her own long life, in the midst of all that epic sweep, was no more than the brief spring blossoming of a tundra flower. And Lop-ear, the same. Yet they mattered: just as each flower contributed to the waves of white and gold that swept across the tundra, so she and Lop-ear were inextricable parts of the greater whole.
And the most important thing in the whole world was Lop-ear’s warmth in her belly: the possibility, still, that she might conceive his calf.
"…To the Lost there is only the here and now," Eggtusk was saying. "They are a young species — a couple of Great-Years, no more — while we are ancient. They have no Cycle. They are just sparks of mind, isolated and frightened and soon extinguished. They never hear the greater rhythms, and never find their place in the world. That is why they disturb so much of what they touch. They are trying to forget what they are. They are dancing in the face of oblivion…"
Silverhair raised her head. She could feel the salt tears brim in her eyes. "But it was my fault."
"Lop-ear was much smarter than you are," Eggtusk said gently. "You couldn’t have made him do anything he didn’t want to do. Even I couldn’t, and I fought him to prove the point — much as I regret that now, by Kilukpuk’s cracked and festering nipples!"
"But I didn’t even perform the Remembering for him."
"No. Well, we can’t very well leave him like that." Eggtusk laid his trunk on her head, and scratched behind her ear. "Do you know where you are?"
She looked around at the featureless tundra. "No," she admitted.
"You’re far from the Family. Far from anywhere. You’ve been wandering, Silverhair. Wandering, but not eating, by the look of you. When you didn’t return, Owlheart sent me to find you. It wasn’t easy."
"I — thank you, Eggtusk."
"Never mind that. You must eat and sleep, young Silverhair. For we have a walk ahead of us. Back to the south."
For the first time since she had lost Lop-ear, her spirits lifted. "To Lop-ear."
"Yes."
"I’m surprised Owlheart let you go."
"I had to promise we’d come back in one piece. Oh, and…"
"Yes?"
He bent so only she could hear. "I had to take Snagtooth with me."
The three mammoths set off at midnight. There was a layer of cloud above, but the pale orange sun hung above the horizon in a clear strip of sky.
Heading south, the mammoths walked slowly, frequently pausing to pass dung and to feed. Despite Silverhair’s urgent wish to return to Lop-ear’s bones, Eggtusk insisted they eat their fill. They were coming into the richest season of the year, the time when the mammoths must lay in their reserves of fat, without which they cannot survive the next winter. As Eggtusk said to Silverhair, "I’d lick out the crusty lichen from between Kilukpuk’s pus-ridden toes before I’d let you starve yourself to death. What use would that be to Lop-ear, or any of us? Eh?"
So under his coaxing and scolding, she cropped the grass and flowers, and the fresh buds of the dwarf willows whose branches barely grew high enough to cover her toes.
Snagtooth continued to be a problem. A growing one, in fact.
Though the stump of her smashed tusk had healed over — a great blood-red scar had formed over the gaping socket — Silverhair saw her banging her head against rock outcrops, as if trying to shake loose the pain of the tusk root. Snagtooth had a great deal of difficulty sleeping; even the back-and-forth movement of her jaw when eating seemed to hurt her.
And Snagtooth was not one to suffer in silence.
She complained, snapped, and refused to do her fair share of digging, even expecting Silverhair and Eggtusk to find her rich clumps of grass and rip them out and carry them to her ever-open mouth. Silverhair could see why Owlheart had taken the opportunity to send her away from Foxeye and the calves for a while.
"I put up with it because I can see she is suffering," grumbled Eggtusk to Silverhair. "Perhaps she has an abscess."
If so, it was bad news; there was no way to treat such an agonizing collection of poison in the mouth, and Snagtooth would simply have to hope it cleared up of its own accord. If it didn’t, it could kill her.
Poor Eggtusk, meanwhile, was having his own trouble with warble flies. Silverhair could see maggots dropping out of red-rimmed craters in his skin, heading for the ground to pupate. Unnoticed, the flies must have laid eggs in his fur last summer. The eggs quickly hatched and the maggots burrowed into Eggtusk’s tissue, migrating around the body before coming to rest near the skin of his back. Here they would have continued to grow through the winter and spring in a cavity filled with pus and blood, breathing through an airhole gnawed in the skin. The eruption of the full-grown larvae was a cause of intense irritation to Eggtusk, who, despite his colorful cursing, was helpless to do anything about it.
Meanwhile the season bloomed around them. As the height of the brief summer approached, the tundra exploded with activity, as plants, animals, birds, and insects sought to complete the crucial stages of their annual lives in this brief respite from the grip of winter. The flowers of the tundra opened: white mountain avens, yellow poppies, white heather, crimson, yellow, red, white and purple saxifrage, lousewort, pink primulas, even the orange marigolds. All these flowers had started their cycle of growth as soon as the snow melted. And birds were everywhere. Snow buntings caught crane flies to feed their chicks. Skuas hunted the fledglings of turnstones and sanderlings. As she passed a cliff, Silverhair saw barnacle geese fledglings taking their first tentative steps from their parents’ nests far above. That meant jumping. The chicks’ stubby wings flapped uselessly, and they fell to the bottom of the cliff. Many chicks died from the fall, and others, trapped in scree, were snapped up by the eager jaws of Arctic foxes.
The silence of the winter was long gone. The air was filled with birdsong — larks and plovers, the haunting calls of loons, irritable jaeger cries — and the buzz of insects, the bark and howls of foxes and wolves. All of it was laced with an occasional agonized scream as some predator attained its goal.
It was a furious chorus of mating and death.
Through the flat, teeming landscape, Silverhair and the others walked stolidly on. When they found a rock face where they could shelter, they slept, as the summer sun scraped its way around the horizon, and the sky faded again to its deepest midnight blue.
Once, Silverhair woke to find herself staring at a snowy owl, a mother perched on her nest with her brood of peeping chicks.
The mother was a white bundle of feathers, standing out clearly against gray shale. Her mate coursed over the rough vegetation, searching for lemmings to bring to his nest. The owl chicks had been born at intervals of three or four days, and the oldest chick was substantially bigger than the smallest. Silverhair knew that if some disaster occurred and the owls’ food supply was threatened, the largest owlet would eat its smallest sibling — and then the next smallest — then the next.
It was brutal. But it was the owls’ way of assuring that at least one youngster would survive the harshest times. The little tableau of beauty and cruelty seemed to summarize the world, this cruel summer, to Silverhair.