Red Wolf did to the body what had been done to Running Fox’s. He crushed the eyeballs between two stones he dug from the snow. He slit the belly and laid more stones among the entrails. He tied wrists and ankles with thongs of wolverine leather. He drove a spear through the chest and out the back, as deeply into the ice beneath as he could. He danced around the corpse while he called on his namesake, the Father of Wolves, to send more wolves—and foxes, weasels, owls, ravens, all manner of carrion eaters—to devour it.
“Now it is done,” he said. “Come.”
He felt exhausted himself; but he would walk as long as he was able before he slept. When morning came, he and Broken Blade ought to spy a landmark, such as a distant mountain, and find their way home.
They set forth across the steppe, beneath the spirit fires.
IX
To Wanda Tamberly, over the months the old rogue mammoth had come to be like a friend. She almost hated to bid him goodbye. But now he’d given her what information he could, which might well include a key to the entire history of Beringia. If she hoped to learn more about other aspects, she’d better get busy on them. “Already” her superiors wanted her elsewhere and elsewhen. It was with difficulty, as messages went to and fro across space-time, that she had persuaded them to let her spend just a bit more lifespan here, finish out the season and observe one last interstadial spring. She suspected that they suspected her real reason was to see, in daily detail, how her Tulat would fare.
Not that genuine science did not remain to be done, man-centuries’ worth of it. She had heard that civilian researchers made studies of their own, both pastward and futureward of this period. But they came from civilizations uptime of hers, too alien for her ever to work with them. She was of the Patrol, whose concern was with things impinging directly on human affairs.
There were advantages to that, she often reflected. The real comprehension of an ecology lay in its foundations, geology, meteorology, chemistry, microbes, plants, worms, insects, humble small vertebrates. She got to trail the big glamorous creatures near the top of the food chain. Of course, she too must gather a lot of nitty-gritty data. In a general way, she oversaw the activities of the tiny robots that scuttled beetlelike about, sampling, observing, passing information on to the computer in her dome. But she also followed slot, examined scat, watched from a distance or from a blind, punted around lakes, mingled with herds; and that was fine, fun, real.
I’ll be sorry to leave for good. Although—her spine tingled—next assignment, Crô-Magnon Europe?
She had made this trip alone. Wanayimo guides were often invaluable, much better than any Tulat before them, but must not be exposed to really high tech. Loaded with camp gear, her timecycle rose on antigravity till it hung high. Instruments gave her a final look around. Their sensitivity and versatility were part of the reason that she, all by herself, could report on an entire region after a couple of years’ work. Overleaping miles, piercing mists, amplifying light, they spotted single animals and brought views as magnified as she wanted before her eyes. Musk oxen stood back to the wind, a hare lolloped through drifting snow, a ptarmigan took wing, and yonder wandered and grumbled the old mammoth….
Upon the vast white land, his shagginess was dark as the cliffs rearing northward. His one tusk scuffed snow off moss and his trunk grubbed the fodder. It was sparse, but the best that a solitary male, defeated in fight and driven from his fellows, could find. Sometimes Tamberly had thought that mercy required she shoot him. No, he was providing an important clue; and now that she had it, well, leave him in his gaunt pride. Who knew, he might survive into summer and fill his belly again.
“Thanks, Jumbo,” she called across the wind. She believed she had discovered why his kind were growing scarce in Beringia, while continuing common in both Siberia and North America. Though the land bridge was still hundreds of miles wide, rising sea level had shrunk it, even as encroaching birch scrub changed the nature of the steppe. She hadn’t known that these elephantines were so dependent on specific conditions. Elsewhere, related species occupied a variety of habitats. But the rogue had not gone south to the seaboard woods and grasslands, he had gone north to scrape out a marginal existence under the mountains.
This in turn bore implications that excited Ralph Corwin. Although the Paleo-Indians hunted game of every sort, mammoth was the prize. In Beringia they’d wipe out the already threatened herds of any given area in the course of a few generations; it is another myth that primitive man lives in harmonious balance with the life around him. The presence of mammoth farther east would then draw adventurous persons onward sooner than would otherwise have been the case, in spite of today’s Alaska being for the most part pretty desolate.
Therefore, probably the migration into America went more quickly than he had supposed, and later waves of it had a distinctly different character from their predecessors…. However, this couldn’t account for the Cloud People moving away as early as next year….
The wind swirled and bit. Vapors blew around her, gray rags. Let’s get back and put our feet up with a nice hot cuppa. Tamberly set controls and activated.
In her dome she dismounted, shoved the hopper into its place amidst the kipple, and switched off the antigrav. The machine thumped a few inches down onto the floor. She rubbed her bottom. Hoo boy, the saddle was cold! Next job, if it’s Ice Age too, first I put in for heating coils.
As she stripped, sponge-bathed, donned loose clothes, she wondered what to do about Corwin. Presumably he was elsewhere. Were he in his own place, his timecycle would have registered this arrival of hers and he’d doubtless have popped right over with an invitation to a drink and dinner. It would be hard to decline gracefully when she’d been gone for ten days. So far she’d managed to get him talking about himself, which diverted his attention and was, she admitted, by no means uninteresting. Sooner or later, though, he was pretty sure to make a serious pass, and in that she was posolutely not interested. How to avoid an unpleasant scene?
Too bad Manse isn’t an anthropologist. He’s comfort-able to be with, like an old shoe—a shoe that’s hiked a lot of very strange trails, and stayed sturdy. I wouldn’t need to worry about him. If perchance he did make a pass—Hey, I’m not blushing, am I?
She brewed her tea and settled down. A voice at the entrance broke through: “Hullo, Wanda. How’ve you done?”
I guess he was just down in the village. Damn. “Okay,” she called. “Uh, look, I’m awfully tired, lousy company. Could I rest up till tomorrow?”
“’Fraid not.” The solemnity sounded honest. “Bad news.”
An icicle stabbed. She got to her feet. “Coming.”
“I think you’d best step outside. I’ll wait.” And only the wind sounded.
She scrambled into wool socks, down-lined pants, boots, parka. When she emerged, the wind cut at her. It drove ice-dust low across the ground. Sinking behind southern hills, the sun ignited a multitudinous hard glitter in the drift. Also dressed for the weather, Corwin and Red Wolf stood side by side. Their countenances were stark.
“Good fortune to you,” Tamberly greeted through the whistling.
“Good spirits travel with you,” the Cloud man answered as formally and flatly.
“This tale is for Red Wolf to tell,” Corwin stated in the same language. “He told me he should. When I knew you had returned, I fetched him.”
Tamberly looked into the hunter’s eyes. They never wavered. “Your friend Aryuk is dead,” he declared. “I slew him. It was necessary.”