Icebones

Silverhair spun around and scuffed the ground. "My calf is all I have. I will not give her up. How can I live?"

But she knew that Kilukpuk was right.

Silverhair listened to Kilukpuk’s wisdom. And she passed on that wisdom to her calf. And, when the time came, she gave her calf to Kilukpuk, and the Lost.

For that one sacrifice alone, we know Silverhair as great a hero as any in the Cycle’s long course. For if she had not, and if she had not taught her calf well, none of us alive today would ever have been born.

Even though, as is the way of the Lost’s clever-clever schemes, many things went wrong, and the calf-Matriarch was kept in a box of cold and dark for much longer than she should have been — so long that before she emerged, generations of mammoths had lived and died on the Sky Steppe…

Well, that was how the Great Crossing was made. But the story is not done.

For Kilukpuk taught Silverhair another truth of the Cycle: that sometimes we ca

The Crossing was hard and dangerous indeed. And Silverhair’s calf would herself have a dread price to pay for making that Crossing.

That calf’s name, as you know, was Icebones.

1

The High Plains

The land was a tortured wilderness: nothing but blood-red rock, rugged, cracked and pitted, under a sky that shone yellow-pink.

And it was dominated by craters.

The largest of them were walled plains, their rims so heavily eroded they were reduced to low, sullen mounds lined up in rough arcs. The smaller craters were sharper, and when the mammoths plowed their way over rim ridges, their neat circular shapes were clearly visible. In places the craters crowded so close together that their walls overlapped and merged, so that the mammoths were forced to climb over one smooth fold in the land after another, like waves on some vast rust-red ocean.

Icebones listened to the rumbling echoes that the mammoths’ footfalls returned from the distorted ground. She sensed giant rubble lying crammed there. She tried to imagine the mighty blows which must have rained down on this land long ago — mighty enough to shatter rock into immense pieces far beneath her feet, mighty enough to make the rock itself rise up in great circular ripples as if it were as fluid as water.

But the land had been shaped by more than the crater-forming blows. In some places the rock had melted and flowed. Craters had been overwhelmed, their walls buried and their interiors flooded with ponds of hard, cold, red-black basalt.

And water had run here, creating cha

Dust lay scattered everywhere, piled up against crater walls or inside their rims and against the larger boulders, streaked light and dark. The dust was constantly reshaped by the wind: each dawn Icebones would peer around as the rocky wilderness emerged from the darkness, startled by how different it looked.

It was as if she was walking through layers of time: everything that had ever happened to this land was recorded here in a rocky scar or wrinkle or protrusion or dust heap.

…Sometimes, toiling across this unforgiving land of rock, thirsty, hungry, weary, sore, Icebones imagined she was old: with eroded molars and aching bones, in a place of moist green, surrounded by calves. Sometimes these waking dreams were so vivid that she wondered if this time of redness and desolation was merely a recollection. Perhaps this was not the vision of a long-dead prophet of the past, but a memory from the unknown future. Perhaps she was that very old Cow, on her last molars, returning to her youth in memory. Perhaps the Icebones she imagined herself to be was only a thing of memory, walking through a remembered land.

But if that was so, she thought dimly, then it must mean she would survive these harsh days, survive to grow old and bear calves… mustn’t it?

Troubled, she walked on, as best she could, waiting for the dream to end, the memory to disperse — for herself to wake up, old and safe and content.

But the dream, or memory, did not end.

So the days wore away on the High Plains, where land and sky glowed red in a great monotonous dialogue.

One day they found a narrow valley where a pool of water had gathered. Trapped under a thin crust of ice, the water was brackish and briny. But it was the first liquid water the mammoths had encountered for days, and they smashed the ice and sucked it up gratefully.

Woodsmoke worked his way along the pond’s rocky edge, exploring the water’s deeper reaches. Suddenly a ledge of eroded rock crumbled beneath him. Rock fragments tumbled into the water, quickly followed by Woodsmoke’s hind legs. He scrabbled at the rocky ground with his trunk and feet, but the crumbling rock offered little purchase. The calf slid into the freezing water until he was submerged save for his head and forelegs.

He trumpeted, his hair floating in the water around him.

The mammoths came ru

Breeze and Autumn fell to their knees beside the calf. They reached under his belly to lift him out with their trunks. Icebones and Spiral hurried to help — but the calf was too heavy to lift out, and it was impossible to get a purchase on his soaked, slippery hair. As they struggled, the calf’s high-pitched bellows echoed from the rocky land around them.

At last Autumn ordered the others back. Carefully she looped her trunk around Woodsmoke’s neck, and drew him toward the pond’s shallower end. When the water was shallow enough for his hind feet to touch the pond bed, he quickly clambered out.

The calf shook himself to rid his fur of stinking pond scum, and his mother hurried close to nuzzle him. But he was frightened and angry. "Why are we in this horrible place? Why don’t we go back to the valley? There was water and stuff to eat…" The mammoths rumbled in unison, seeking to reassure him and persuade him to continue.

Autumn growled to Icebones, "He thinks we were safe in the Gouge. He can’t see that the world is changing, because it has not changed while he is alive. He thinks it will be the same forever."

Icebones, disturbed by the incident, wondered if that was true. What if she hadn’t emerged so suddenly from her mysterious Sleep? What if she didn’t have her memories of the Island and the Old Steppe, of such a very different time and place? Would she even perceive the changes from which she was fleeing — and which had already cost these mammoths so much?

And as the featureless days wore away, and the mammoths grew steadily more weary and cold and hungry and thirsty, darker doubts gathered.

It seemed audacious, absurd, for her to lead her mammoths across this high, silent, dead place. Perhaps it was simpler to suppose that the fault lay in her own head and heart, and not in the world around her. Perhaps she was leading these mammoths — not to salvation — but to their doom.

But then she would think of the dried mud and bones around the ponds of the Gouge, and the wide salt flats that bordered the Ocean of the North. This world was indeed changing for the worse — she was right — and she must continue to confront that truth, and she must gather her strength of body and mind, and work to bring these mammoths to safety, as best she knew how.

One evening, as the dark drew in, Icebones hauled her weary legs up the shallow rim of yet another crater. She was limping, favoring her damaged shoulder, where pain still stabbed.

She reached the summit of a low, eroded rim mountain — and found herself facing a surface so smooth and flat she wondered briefly if it might be liquid water. But her nostrils were full of the tang of red dust. And as she looked more closely she saw rippling dunes, like frozen waves, and sharp-edged boulders littered here and there. There was no motion, no ripple, no scudding wave: this was a lake of dust, not water, and a faint disappointment tugged at her.