Silverhair

"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 ca

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. U

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 a

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.

The mother owl beat her broad wings slowly, and stared at Silverhair with great sulfur-yellow eyes.

As the endless day wore toward its golden noon, they drew nearer the place where Lop-ear had fallen.

They reached the low ridge near the south coast. Silverhair remembered this place. It was here she had shared Lop-ear’s warmth — here they had encountered the Lost with his thunder-stick — and here she had last seen the body of Lop-ear, like a squat, fur-coated boulder.

The body was gone.

But there were Lost here.

Eggtusk led the two Cows behind an eroded outcrop of rock. The mammoths huddled together uncertainly. Eggtusk raised his trunk cautiously over the rock; the hair of his trunk streamed behind his head.

The mammoths had not been seen. The Lost didn’t seem very observant; none of them was maintaining a watch for wolves — or mammoths, come to that.

The Lost were sitting in a loose circle on the ground. There were six of them. Three of them carried thunder-sticks, like the one that Skin-of-Ice had used against Lop-ear. And one of them — Silverhair could never forget that smooth, u

The Lost surrounded the carcass of what looked like a fox. They were drinking a clear fluid from flasks, which they passed from paw to paw. They sat u

They were like wolves, she thought. Predators, working at a downed prey. But then, they were not like wolves, for they did not work at the fox’s body with their teeth and claws as wolves will. Rather, they had ice-claws — as she called them, for they were made of something that gleamed like sea ice — ice-claws that they held in their paws, and used to cut into the fox’s passive body.

The Lost were grimy, listless, steeped in misery. They seemed to bicker and snap at each other, sometimes descending into clumsy fights.

All but Skin-of-Ice. He sat apart from the rest, thunder-stick on his lap, watching the others coldly.

Silverhair felt a cold, hard determination gather inside her. All her naive dreams of finding some opportunity to work with the Lost had evaporated with the blows inflicted on Lop-ear. These are my enemy, she thought. I will not live in a world that contains them, and I will oppose them to my dying breath.

But to do that, I must understand them.

"We’re in no danger here," said Eggtusk in a soft rumble, inaudible to the Lost. "I’m sure they can’t see us. According to the Cycle, the Lost have poor hearing and smell, and we’re downwind of them. And besides, three grown mammoths against six — or sixty — of those ski