Silverhair charged forward. "Eggtusk! Eggtusk!" She could see the dome of his head and the hair of his broad back protruding from the hole. His trumpeting turned to a roar of anguish.
But Snagtooth was tugging at her tail. "Keep back! It’s a kettle hole…"
Silverhair, despite her impatience and fear, knew that Snagtooth was right. It would help no one if she got trapped herself.
She slowed, and took measured steps toward the hole in the ground, testing each footfall. Soon she was walking over the leaves and twigs and grass that had concealed the hole.
Eggtusk was embedded in the hole, a few blades of muddy grass scattered over his back. His trunk lay on the ground, and his great tusks, stained by mud and blood, protruded uselessly before him. He was out of her reach.
As she approached he tried to lift and turn his head. He said, "Don’t come any closer."
"Are you stuck?"
Eggtusk growled wearily. "By Kilukpuk’s snot-crusted nostril hair, what a stupid question. Of course I’m stuck. My legs are wedged in under me. I can’t even move them."
A kettle hole was a hazard of their warming times, Silverhair knew. It formed when a large block of ice was left by a retreating glacier. Sediment would settle over the ice, burying it. Then, as the ice melted, the resulting water would seep away and the sinking sediment, turning to mud, would subside to form a sticky hole in the ground.
Deadly, for any mammoth foolish enough to stray into one. But -
"Eggtusk, kettle holes are easy to spot. Only a calf would blunder into one."
"Thank you for that," he snorted. "Don’t you see? It’s your friend, Skin-of-Ice. Snagtooth was right. That wretched worm did want us to follow him. While we honored his fallen comrade, Skin-of-Ice was preparing this trap for us. And I was fool enough to charge right in…"
He subsided. His breath was a rattle, and he seemed to be weakening. He tried to raise his trunk, then let it flop back feebly to the ground.
Silverhair tried to step forward, but her feet sank deeper into the mud that surrounded the hole. She felt an agitated anger; she had seen too much death this blighted summer. "You aren’t going to do this to me," she cried. "Not yet, you old fool!"
She scrambled back to firm ground and forced herself to think.
She threw branches and twigs over the ground and walked forward on them. Spreading the load helped her keep out of the mud and get a little closer, but in the end her weight was just too great, and each time she got near to Eggtusk she was forced to back up.
Well, if she couldn’t reach Eggtusk, maybe he could get himself out.
She gathered branches and threw them toward Eggtusk’s head. If he could pull them into the pit he might be able to use them to get a grip with his feet.
But even when he managed to grab the branches he seemed too weak, too firmly stuck, to do anything with them.
Despairing, she looked for Snagtooth, seeking help. But Snagtooth was gone: there was no trace of her musk on the wind, no echo of her voice.
But, Silverhair admitted, it wasn’t important. Snagtooth’s mind was almost as impenetrable as a Lost’s, and since her injury that had only worsened. She would be no help anyhow.
And Skin-of-Ice, she noticed, was gone too. Perhaps he had crawled away to die at last. Somehow she suspected it would not be so easy. But she had no time, no energy for him now.
Silverhair brought Eggtusk food, grass and twigs and herbs. But the wind scattered the grass, and Eggtusk’s trunk fingers seemed to be losing their coordination and were having increasing difficulty in grasping the food.
But she kept trying, over and over.
"Do not fret, little Silverhair," he said to her, his voice a bubbling growl. "You’ve done your best."
"Eggtusk…"
He reached out with his trunk as if to stroke her head, but it was, of course, much too far to reach. "Give it up. That Lost has trapped me and killed me. I am already dead."
"No!"
"You have to go back to the Family, tell them what has happened. Owlheart will know what to do… Tell her I’m sorry I didn’t keep my promise to bring you home. And you must tell Croptail that he is the dominant Bull now. Tell him I’m sorry I won’t be there to teach him anymore… Do it, Silverhair. Go…"
"I won’t leave you," she said.
"By Kilukpuk’s mold-choked pores, you always were stubborn."
"And you’ve always been so strong—"
"Should take more than a little hunger to kill old Eggtusk, eh? But it isn’t just that. Watch now."
With infinite difficulty, he rolled his trunk toward him and pushed it below his chin and into the pit, below his body. She could see the muscles of his upper trunk spasm, as if he was pulling at something.
Painfully, carefully, he pulled his trunk out of the pit. He was holding something.
It was a bone, she saw. A rib. It was crusted with dried, blackened blood — and stained with a fresher crimson.
A mammoth rib.
"The bottom of the pit is littered with them," gasped Eggtusk. "They stick up everywhere. Mostly into me. And I think Skin-of-Ice put some kind of poison on them."
"They took it from the yedoma," she said. Or — worse still — from Lop-ear… She felt bile rise in her throat. "They are using our own bones to kill us."
"Oh, these Lost are clever," he said. "Snagtooth was right about that. I couldn’t have dreamed how clever." He let the rib fall to the mud. "Well, little Silverhair. If you’re determined to hang around here, you can help me. There’s something I must do while I still have the strength."
"What?"
"Fetch a rock. As big as you can throw over to me."
She went to an outcrop of rock and obeyed, bringing back a big sandstone boulder. She stood at the edge of the kettle hole, dug her tusks under the rock, and sent it flying through the air toward Eggtusk. It landed before his face, splashing in the mud.
He raised his head, turned it sideways. And then he brought his misshapen tusk crashing against the rock. The tusk cracked, but he showed no awareness of the pain at all.
"Eggtusk! What are you doing?"
"You needn’t try to stop me," he said, breathing hard.
"Why?"
"Better I do it than the Lost. Didn’t you tell me how they robbed the ancient mammoth in the yedoma? I don’t want them doing the same to me."
And again he began to smash his magnificent deformed tusk against the rock, until it had splintered and cracked at the base.
At last it tore loose, leaving only a bloody spike of ivory protruding from the socket in his face.
"Take it," he told Silverhair, his voice thick with blood. "You can reach it. Take it and smash it to splinters."
She was weeping openly now. But she reached out over the mud of the kettle hole, wrapped her trunk around the tusk, and pulled it to her. It was immense: so massive she could barely lift it. Once again she appreciated the huge strength of Eggtusk — strength that was dissipating into the cold mud as she watched.
She lugged the tusk to the outcrop of sandstone, and pounded it until it had splintered and smashed to fragments.
Eggtusk rested for a time. Then he lifted his head again, and started to work on his other tusk.
When he was done, his face was half-buried in the mud, the breath whistling through his trunk; there was blood around his mouth, and pulp leaked from the stumps of his tusks.
"Eggtusk—"
"Little Silverhair. You’re still here? You always were stubborn… Talk to me."
"Talk to you?"
"Tell me a story. Tell me about Ganesha."
And so she did. Gathering her strength, staying the weakening of her own voice, she told him the ancient tale of Ganesha the Wise, and how she had prepared her calf Prima to conquer the cold lands.