Stephen Baxter - Mammoth 2 - Longtusk

Longtusk

Stephen Baxter

To my niece, Jessica Bourg

Prologue

A vast sheet of ice sits on the North Pole: immense, brooding, jealously drawing the moisture

from the air. Glaciers, jutting from the icecap like claws, pulverize rock layers and carve out fjords

and lakes. South of the ice, immense plains sweep around the planet, darkened by herds of mighty

herbivores.

The ice has drawn so much water from the oceans that the very shapes of the continents are

changed. Australia is no island, but is joined to southeast Asia. And in the north, America is linked to

Asia by a neck of land called Beringia, so that a single mighty continent all but circles the North Pole.

The ice is in retreat, driven back by Earth's slow thaw to its millennial fastness at the poles. But it

retreats with ill grace, gouging at the land, and all around the planet there are catastrophic climatic

events of a power and fury unknown to later ages. And, retreat or not, the sites of the cities of the

future—Chicago, Boston, Edinburgh, Stockholm, Moscow—still lie dreaming under kilometers of ice.

The time is sixteen thousand years before the birth of Christ. And every human alive wakes to

the calls of mammoths.

Part 1: Nomad

The Story of Longtusk and the She-Cat

Who was Longtusk?

I'll tell you who Longtusk was (Silverhair said to her daughter, Icebones). He was the greatest

hero of the Cycle—and the only Bull hero in all the Cycle's long history.

My Matriarch used to say I had a little of Longtusk's spirit in me too. And I don't know why you

think that's so funny, Icebones. I wasn't always so old and frail as this...

Tell you a story? Another?

Very well. I'll tell you how Longtusk defeated Teeth-of-Death, the she-cat.

This is a story of long ago, when the world was new and rich and cold, and there were no Lost,

anywhere. The mammoths were the strongest and wisest of all the animals, so much so that the others

grew to rely on their strength, and the way they remade the landscape, everywhere they went.

The mammoths were the Matriarchs of the world. Everybody agreed.

Well, almost everybody.

Teeth-of-Death was a she-cat. In fact she was the ruler of the saber-tooth cats, for she was the

strongest and most agile, her teeth and claws the longest and sharpest, her mind the most inventive,

her cruelty the most relentless.

Every animal feared the saber-tooth cats. Every animal feared Teeth-of-Death. Every animal

save the mammoths.

The mammoths were too big, too powerful. Oh, the cats could bring down a mammoth from

time to time, but only the very young or the very old or the very sick. It was not an honorable

business. In fact, as they glided back and forth on their great migrations, the mammoths barely noticed

the cats even existed.

This, of course, drove Teeth-of-Death insane with jealousy and hurt pride.

Now, as you know, when he was a young Bull Longtusk left his Clan and traveled far and wide:

from north to south, even across the seas and the lakes and the ice. Everywhere he went he gained in

wisdom and stature; everybody he met was impressed by his bearing and grace; and he had

adventures which have never been forgotten.

And it was this Longtusk, Longtusk the nomad, who happened upon Teeth-of-Death.

The great cat confronted Longtusk. She said, "This cannot go on."

Longtusk had been feeding on a rich stand of willow. He looked down his trunk to see what was

making so much noise, and there was the spitting, agitated cat. He asked reasonably, "What can't go

on?"

"Either you rule the Earth, or I do. Not both."

"Don't you think there are more important things to worry about than that?"

"No," Teeth-of-Death snapped. "Ruling is the most important thing. More important than life."

"Nonsense," said Longtusk. "If it makes you happy, I hereby pronounce you the world's most

fearsome animal. There. Now we don't have to argue, do we?" And he turned to walk away. For,

you see, he was wise as well as brave, and he knew that an unnecessary fight should not be fought.

But that would not do for the she-cat.

With an agile bound she ran before Longtusk and confronted him. "No," she said. "I cannot live

while I know in my heart that you do not respect me."

She was surely an intimidating sight: an immense cat with jaws spread wide, sharp teeth gaping,

claws that with a single swipe could disembowel even an adult Bull mammoth—if she ever got the

chance.

"You are very foolish," said Longtusk. But he faced her warily, for he knew he must meet her

challenge.

And so it began. When news of the contest spread, all the animals of the world gathered around,

pushing and staring.

Teeth-of-Death attacked Longtusk three times.

The first time she leaped at his face, reaching for his eyes and trunk. But Longtusk simply raised

his tusks and pushed her away.

For her second attack Teeth-of-Death clambered up a spruce tree. She leaped down onto

Longtusk's back and tried to use her great saber teeth to gouge into his flesh. He could not reach her

with his trunk to dislodge her. But she could not bite through his fur and skin. After a time he simply

walked beneath a low tree and let its branches scrape the cat from his back, and that was that.

For her third attack Teeth-of-Death hid in a bank of snow. She had decided that when Longtusk

came close enough she would leap at him again, trying to reach the soft flesh of his belly or trunk. It

was a clever strategy and might have succeeded, even against a hero so strong as Longtusk, for cats

are adept at such deception. But, obsessed with her ambition, Teeth-of-Death forced herself to lie still

in her snowdrift for several days, waiting for her opportunity.

And when Longtusk at last came by Teeth-of-Death was cold, half-starved, exhausted.

She sprang too early, made too much noise. To fend her off, Longtusk simply swept his great

tusks and let their tips gouge furrows in Teeth-of-Death's beautiful golden coat.

They faced each other, Longtusk barely scratched, Teeth-of-Death bleeding and exhausted.

Longtusk said, "Let us reach an agreement."

Teeth-of-Death said warily, licking her wounds, "No agreement is possible."

For answer, he went to the snowdrift where she had been hiding. He scraped away the snow

and the hard ice that lay beneath, revealing bare earth. Then he dug deeper, and he exposed another

layer of ice, hidden beneath the dirt.

"The ice comes and goes in great waves," he said. "This old ice was covered with dirt before it

had time to melt. Now the ice has come again and covered over the land. So here we have two layers

of ice in the same place, one on top of each other."

The cat hissed, "What relevance has this?"

"Here is my suggestion," he said. "We will share the world, just as these ice layers share the

same patch of ground. But, just like these ice layers, we will not touch each other.

"You cats eat the meat of animals. We mammoths do not hunt; we do not covet your prey—"

"Ah," said the cat. "And you eat the plants and grass and trees, which we do not desire. Very

well. We will share the world, as you suggest." But her eyes narrowed.

And so it was concluded.

But when Longtusk was turning to go, the cat mocked him. "I have tricked you," she said. "I will

eat the finest meat. You, however, must eat dirt and scrub. What kind of bargain is that? You are a

fool, Longtusk."

And Longtusk reflected.

The she-cat thought she had won: and in a way she had. She would become the steppe's ruling

animal, its top predator. But Longtusk knew that though its food may be richer, a predator needs

many prey to survive. Even a mighty herd of deer could support only a few cats, and the numbers of

the she-cat's cubs would always be limited.

But the steppe was full of dirt and scrub, as she had called it. And Longtusk knew that thanks to

his bargain it was his calves, the mammoths, who would grow in number until they filled the steppe,

even to the point where they shaped it for their needs.

"Yes," he said gently. "I am a fool." And he turned and walked away.

...I know what you are thinking, Icebones. Is the story true? Are any of the stories of Longtusk

true? It seems impossible that one mammoth could cram so many acts of impossible heroism and

matchless wisdom into one brief lifetime.

Well, perhaps some of the stories have become a little embellished with time. They are after all

stories.

But I know this. Longtusk was real. Longtusk encountered great danger—and in the end,

Longtusk sacrificed his life to save his Clan.

He was the greatest hero of them all.

1

The Gathering

The greatest hero of them all was twelve years old, and he was in trouble with his mother. Again.

Yellow plain, blue sky; it was a fine autumn afternoon, here on the great steppe of Beringia. The

landscape was huge, flat, elemental, an ocean of pale grass mirrored by an empty sky, crossed by

immense herds of herbivores and the carnivores that preyed on them. Longtusk heard the hiss of the

endless winds through the grass and sedge, the murmur of a river some way to the west—and, under

it all, the unending grind and crack of the great ice sheets that spanned the continent to the north.

And mammoths swept over the land like clouds.

Loose wool hung around them, catching the low sunlight. He heard the trumpeting and clash of

tusks of bristling, arguing bachelors, and the rumbles of the great Matriarchs—complex songs with

deep harmonic structure, much of it inaudible to human ears—as they solemnly debated the state of

the world.

This was the season's last gathering of the Clan, this great assemblage of Families, before the

mammoths dispersed to the winter pastures of the north.

And Longtusk was angry, aggrieved, ignored. He worked the ground as he walked, tearing up

grass, herbs and sedge with his trunk and pushing them into his mouth between the flat grinding

surfaces of his teeth.

He'd gotten into a fight with his sister, Splayfoot, over a particularly juicy dwarf willow he'd

found. Just as he had prized the branches from the ground and had begun to strip them of their

succulent leaves, the calf had come bustling over to him and had tried to push him away so she could

get at the willow herself. His willow.

In response to Splayfoot's pitiful trumpeting, his mother had come across: Milkbreath, her belly

already swollen with next year's calf. And of course she'd taken Splayfoot's side.

"Don't be so greedy, Longtusk! She's a growing calf. Go find your own willow. You ought to

help her, not bully her..."

And so on. It had done Longtusk no good at all to point out, perfectly reasonably, that as he

had found the little tree it was in fact his willow and the one in the wrong here was Splayfoot, not

him. His mother had just pushed him away with a brush of her mighty flank.

The rest of the Family had been there, watching: even Skyhump the Matriarch, his own

great-grandmother, head of the Family, surrounded by her daughters and granddaughters with their

calves squirming for milk and warmth and comfort. Skyhump had looked stately and magnificent,

great curtains of black-brown hair sweeping down from the pronounced hump on her back that had

given the Matriarch her name. She had rumbled something to the Cows around her, and they had

raised their trunks in amusement.

They had been mocking him. Him, Longtusk!

At twelve years old, though he still had much growing to do, Longtusk was already as tall as all

but the oldest of the Cows in his Family. And his tusks were the envy of many an adult Bull—well,

they would be if he ever got to meet any—great sweeping spirals of ivory that curved around before

him until they almost met, a massive, tangible weight that pulled at his head.

He was Longtusk. He would live forever, and he was destined to become a hero as great as any

in the Cycle, the greatest hero of them all. He was sure of it. Look at his mighty tusks, the tusks of a

warrior! And he raised them now in mock challenge, even though there was no one here to see.

Couldn't those foolish Cows understand? It was just unendurable.

But now he heard his mother calling for him. Grumbling, growling, he made his way back to her.

The Cows had clustered around Skyhump, their Matriarch, and were walking northward in a

loose, slow cluster. They grazed steppe grass as they walked, for mammoths must feed for most of

the day, and they left behind compact trails of dung.

The Clan stretched around him as far as the eye could see, right across the landscape to east

and west, a wave of muscle and fat and deep brown hair patiently washing northward. Skyhump's

small Family of little more than twenty individuals—Cows with their calves and a few young

males—was linked to the greater Clan by the kinship of sisters and daughters and female cousins.

Where they passed, the mammoths cut swathes through the tall green-gold grass, and the ground

shuddered with their footsteps.

Longtusk felt a brief surge of pride and affection. This was his Clan, and it was, after all, a

magnificent thing to be part of it—to be a mammoth.

But now here was his mother, shadowed by that pest Splayfoot, and his sense of belonging

dissipated.

Milkbreath slapped his rump with her trunk, as if he were still a calf himself. "Where have you

been?... Never mind. Can't you see we're getting separated from the Family? We have to hear what

she has to say."

"Who? Skyhump?"

Milkbreath snorted. "No. Pinkface. The Matriarch of Matriarchs. Don't you know anything?...

Never mind. Come on!"

So Longtusk hurried after his mother.

They joined a cluster of Cows, tall and old: Matriarchs all, slow and stately in their years and

wisdom. He was much too short to see past them.

But his mother was entranced. "Look," she said softly. "There she is. They say she is a direct

descendant of the great Kilukpuk. They say she was burned in a great blaze made by the Fireheads,

and she was the only one of her Family to survive..."

He could still see nothing. But when he shut out the noise—the squeal of calves, the constant

background thunder of mammoths walking, eating, defecating—he could hear the Matriarchs rumbling

and stamping at the ground, debating, sharing information that might sustain a few more lives through

the coming winter.

Longtusk spoke quietly, with soft pipings of his trunk. "What are they saying?"

"They're talking about the changes." His mother's small ears stuck out of her hair as she strained

to listen.

"What changes?"

"You're too young to understand," she snapped irritably.

"Tell me."

She growled, "To the north the ice is shrinking back. And to the south the forests are spreading,

more trees every year."

He had heard this before. "We can't live in the forests—"

"Not only that, there's talk that the Fireheads aren't too far to the south. And where the

Fireheads go the Lost can't be far behind..."

Fireheads and Lost. Monsters of legend. Longtusk felt cold, as if he had drunk too much ice

water.

...But now, without warning, the Matriarchs shifted their positions, like clouds exposing the sun.

And he saw the Matriarch of Matriarchs.

She was short, her tusks long and smooth. And her face was a grotesque mask: pink and naked

like a baby bird's wing, free of all but a few wisps of hair.

Longtusk burst out, "She's too young!"

The Matriarchs stirred, like icebergs touched by wind.

Milkbreath grabbed his trunk, angry and embarrassed. "Wisdom comes to all of us with age. But

some are born wise. Wouldn't you expect that the Matriarch of Matriarchs, the wisest of all, would be

special? Wouldn't you?"

"I don't know..."

"You're so much trouble to me, Longtusk! Always wandering off or getting under my feet or

fighting with your sister or embarrassing me—sometimes I wish you were still in my belly, like this little

one." She stroked the heavy bulge under her belly fur.

Longtusk fumed silently.

Splayfoot came galloping up to him. His sister was a knot of fat and orange fur, with a trunk like

a worm and tusks like lemming bones, and her face was rounded and smoothed-out, as if unfinished.

This was her first summer, and her new-born coat of coarse underfur and light brown overfur was

being replaced by thicker and longer fur—though it would be her second year before her coarse

guard hairs began to appear. "You're so much trouble, Longtusk," she squeaked up at him gleefully.

She started butting his legs with her little domed forehead. "I'll be Matriarch and you won't. Then I'll

tell you what to do!"

He rumbled and raised his huge tusks over her head, meaning to frighten her.

The calf squealed and ran to her mother, who tucked Splayfoot under her belly. "Will you leave

this little one alone?"

"It wasn't my fault!" Longtusk protested. "She started it..."

But Milkbreath had turned away. Splayfoot burrowed at her mother's chest, seeking her dugs.

But Milkbreath had little milk. So, with a deep belch, she regurgitated grass and with gentle kisses fed

the warm, pulped stuff to her daughter.

As she fed, Splayfoot peered out from under a fringe of fur, mocking him silently.

It wasn't so long since Milkbreath had fed him that way, murmuring about how important it was

for him to eat the food that had been inside his mother's belly, for it contained marvelous substances

that would help him digest. It hardly seemed any time at all.

And now look at him: pushed away, snapped at, ignored.

He stomped away, not looking back, not caring which way he went.

2

The Bachelor Herd

He came to a track.

It was a strip of bare brown ground a little wider than his own body. Where the muddy ground

was firm he could see the round print left by the tough, cracked skin of a mammoth's sole, a spidery,

distinctive map.

He turned and followed the trail, curious to find where it might lead.

To human eyes the mammoth steppe would have looked featureless. It was an immense plain

that swept over the north of Eurasia, across the land bridge of Beringia and into North America. But

to a mammoth it was as crowded with landmarks as any human city: rubbing trees, wallows, rich

feeding areas, salt licks, water holes. And these key sites were linked by trails worn by centuries of

mammoth footsteps, trails embedded deep in the mind of every adult Bull and Cow, patiently taught

to the calves of each new generation.

Indeed, the land itself was shaped by the mammoths, who tore out trees and trampled the

ground where they passed. Other creatures lived in the shadow of the mammoths: depending on the

trails they made, using the water sources they opened up with their intelligence and strength. Even the

plants, in their mindless way, relied on the scattering of their seeds over great ranges in mammoth

dung. Without mammoths, the steppe would not have persisted.

Longtusk stomped through his world, still angry, obsessed. But he thought over the Matriarchs'

conversation: Fireheads and Lost and huge global changes...

He had never seen the Fireheads himself, but he'd met adults who claimed they had. The

Fireheads—said to be ferocious predators, creatures of sweeping, incomprehensible

danger—seemed real enough, and every young mammoth was taught at a very early age that the only

response to a Firehead was to flee.

But the Lost were something else: figures of legend, a deep terror embedded at the heart of the

Cycle—the nemesis of the mammoths.

It all seemed unlikely to Longtusk. The mammoths were spread in enormous herds right around

the world, and even the great cats feared them. What could possibly destroy them?

And besides, his curiosity was pricked.

Why were all these changes happening now? How quickly would they happen? And why did

the world have to become a harder place when he was alive? Why couldn't he have lived long ago, in

a time of calm and plenty?

And, most important of all, why didn't anybody take him seriously?

Oh, he knew that there came a time when every Bull became restless with his Family; sooner or

later all Bulls leave to seek out the company of other males in the bachelor herds, to learn to fight and

strut and compete. But it didn't do him any good, here and now, to know that; and it drove him crazy

when all this was patiently explained to him by some smug, pitying aunt or cousin.

After an unmeasured time he paused and looked back. Preoccupied, he hadn't been paying

much attention where he walked; now he found he'd come so far he couldn't see the mammoths any

more.

He heard a thin howl, perhaps of a wolf. He suffered a heartbeat of panic, which he sternly

suppressed.

So he had left them behind. What of it? He was a full-grown Bull—nearly—and he could look

out for himself. Perhaps this was his time to leave his Family—to begin the serious business of life.

Anyhow—he told himself—he was pretty sure he could find his way back if he needed to.

With a renewed sense of purpose—and with those twinges of fear firmly pushed to the back of

his mind—he set off once more.

He came to a river bank.

Mammoths had been here recently. The muddy ground close to the river's edge was bare of life,

pitted by footprint craters, and the trees were sparse and uniformly damaged, branches smashed,

trunks splintered and pushed over.

The water was cold. This was probably a run-off stream, coming from a melting glacier to the

north. He sucked up a trunkful of water and held it long enough to take off its first chill. Then he raised

his trunk and let the water trickle into his mouth.

He pushed farther along the cold mud of the bank. It wasn't easy going. The river had cut itself a

shallow valley which offered some protection from the incessant steppe winds. As a result spruce

trees grew unusually dense and tall here, and their branches clutched at him as he passed, so that he

left behind clumps of ginger hair.

Then, through the trees, he glimpsed a gleam of tusks, a curling trunk, an unmistakable profile.

It was another mammoth: a massive Bull, come here to drink as he had.

Longtusk worked his way farther along the bank.

The Bull, unfamiliar to Longtusk, eyed him with a vague, languid curiosity. He would have

towered over any human observer, as much as three meters tall at his shoulder.

And he towered over Longtusk.

"My name," the Bull rumbled, "is Rockheart."

"I'm Longtusk," he replied nervously. "And I—"

But the Bull had already turned away, his trunk hosing up prodigious volumes of water.

The Bull's high, domed head was large, a lever for his powerful jaw and a support for the great

trunk that snaked down before him. He had a short but distinct neck, a cylinder of muscle supporting

that massive head. His shoulders were humped by a mound of fat, and his back sloped sharply down

toward the pelvis at the base of his spine. His tusks curled before him, great spirals of ivory chipped

and scuffed from a lifetime of digging and fighting.

And his body, muscular, stocky, round, was coated by hair: great lengths of it, dark orange and

brown, that hung like a skirt from his belly, down over his legs to the horny nails on his swollen pads

of feet, and even in long beard-like fringes from his chin and trunk. His tail, raised slightly, was short,

but more hair made it a long, supple insect whisk. His ears were small, tucked back close to his head,

all but lost in the great mass of hair there.

Suddenly the ground shuddered under Longtusk's feet, and the river water trembled.

More mammoths, a crowd of them, came spilling down the bank, pushing and jostling, clumsy

giants. They were all about the same size, Longtusk saw: no Cows, no infants here.

It was a bachelor herd.

Longtusk was thrilled. He had rarely been this close to full-grown Bulls. The Bulls kept to their

own herds, away from the Cow-dominated Families of mothers and sisters and calves; Longtusk had

seen them only in the distance, sweeping by, powerful, independent, and he had longed to run with

them.

Stephen Baxter - Mammoth 2 - Longtusk

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