MAMMOTH Book 1: Silverhair
January 1999

Silverhair, standing tall on the headland, was cupped in a land of flatness: a land of far horizons, a land of blue and grey, of fog and rain, of watery light no brighter than an English winter twilight.

It was the will of Kilukpuk, of course, that Silverhair should be the first to spot the Lost. Nobody but Silverhair - Silverhair the rebel, the Cow who behaved more like a musth Bull, as Owlheart would tell her - nobody but her would even have been standing here, alone, on this headland at the south-western corner of the Island, looking out to sea with her trunk raised to test the air.

The dense Arctic silence was abruptly broken by the evocative calls of birds. Silverhair saw them on the cliff below her, prospecting for their colony: the first kittiwakes, arriving from the south. It was a sign of life, a sign of spring, and she felt her own spirits rise in response.

A few paces from Silverhair, in a hollow near the cliff edge, a solid bank of snow had gathered. Now a broad, claw-tipped paw broke its way out into the open air, and beady black eyes and nose protruded. It was a polar bear: a female. The bear climbed out, a mountain of yellow-white fur. Lean after consuming her body fat over the winter, her long, strong neck jutted forward; her muscles, long and flowing, worked as she glided over the crusted snow.

The bear saw Silverhair. She fixed the huge mammoth with a glare, quite fearless.

Then she stretched, circled and clambered back in through the narrow hole to the cubs she had borne during the winter, leaving a hind leg waving in the air.

Amused, Silverhair looked to the south.

The black bulk of a spruce forest obscured her view of the coast itself - and of the mysterious Nest of Straight Lines which stood there, a place which could be glimpsed only when the air was clear of fog or mist or snow, a sinister place which no mammoth would willingly visit. But Silverhair could see beyond the forest, to the ocean itself.

Here and there blown snow snaked across the landfast ice that fringed the Island's coast. Two pairs of black guillemots, striking in their winter plumage, swam along the sea edge, mirrored in the calm water. Pack ice littered the Channel that lay between Island and Mainland. The ice had been smashed and broken by the wind; the glistening blue-white sheet was pocked by holes and leads exposing black, surging water.

Away from the shore the sea, of course, remained open, as it did all year round, swept clear of ice by the powerful currents that surged there. Frost-smoke rose from the open water, turned to gold by the low sun. And beyond the Channel, twilight was gathering on that mysterious Mainland itself. It was the land from which - according to mammoth legend recorded in the Cycle - the great hero Longtusk had, long ago, evacuated his Family to save them from extinction.

And as the day waned she could see the strange gathering of lights, there on the Mainland: like stars, a crowded constellation, but these lights were orange and yellow and unwinking, and they clung to the ground like lichen. Silverhair growled and squinted, but her vision was poor. If only she could smell that remote place; if only it sent out deep contact rumbles rather than useless slivers of light.

And now heavy storm clouds descended on that unattainable land, obscuring the light.

In the icy breeze, the air crackled in her nostrils, and her breath froze in the fur that covered her face.

That was when she saw the Lost.

She didn't know what she was seeing then, of course.

All she saw was something adrift on the sea between Island and Mainland. At first she thought it was just an ice floe; perhaps those unmoving shapes on top of the floe were seals, resting as they chewed on their monotonous diet of fish and birds.

But she had never seen seals sitting up as these creatures did, never seen seals with fins as long and splayed as those - never heard voices, floating over the water and the shore of ice and rock, as petulant and peevish as these.

Even the 'ice floe' was strange, its sides and one end straight, the other end coming to a point like a tusk's, its middle hollow, cupping the seal-like creatures inside. Whatever it was, it was drifting steadily closer to the Island; it would surely come to ground somewhere south of the spruce forest, and spill those squabbling creatures on the shore there.

She knew she should return to the Family, tell them what she had seen. Perhaps Owlheart or Eggtusk, in their age and wisdom - or clever Lop-ear, she thought warmly - would know the meaning of this. But she had time to watch a little longer, to indulge the curiosity that had already caused her so much trouble during her short life.

... But now she heard the stomping.

It was a deep pounding, surging through the rocky ground. A human would have heard nothing, not even felt the quiver of the ground caused by those great footfalls. But Silverhair recognised it immediately, for the stomping has the longest range of all the mammoths' means of calling each other.

This was the distinctive footfall of Owlheart herself: it was the Matriarch, calling her Family together. The birth must be near.

When Silverhair had been a calf, the Island had rung to the stomping of mammoths, for there were many Families in those days, scattered across the tundra. Now there was only the remote echo of her own Matriarch's footfall. But Silverhair - nervous about the birth to come, curiosity engaged by what she had seen today - did not reflect long on this.

The new spring sun was weak, a red ball that rolled along the horizon offering little warmth. And already, heartbreakingly soon, it was setting, having shed little heat over the snow which still covered the ground. The last light turned the mountains pink, and it caught Silverhair's loose outer fur, making it glow, so that it was as if she was surrounded by a smoky halo.

She stole one last glimpse at the strange object in the sea. It had almost passed out of sight anyway, as it drifted away from the headland.

She turned and began her journey back to her Family.

Later she would wonder if it might have been better to have ignored the Matriarch's call, descended to the shore - and, without mercy, destroyed the strange object and the creatures it contained.

Chapter 2

The Birth

Mammoths wander. Few wander as far as Silverhair did, however.

It took her ten days to cross the Island and return to the northern tundra where her Family was gathered. She was not aware of the way the ground itself shuddered as her feet passed, and the way lemmings were rattled in their winter burrows in the snow. But the rodents were unconcerned, and went about their tiny businesses without interruption. For they knew that the mammoths, the greatest creatures in the land, would do them no harm.

Silverhair knew that the worst of the winter was over: that time of perpetual night broken only by the occasional flare of the aurora borealis, and of the hard winds from the north that drove snow and ice crystals before them. The return of the sun had been heralded by days in which the darkness was relieved by twilight, when the black star pool above had turned to a dome of glowing purple - purple enriched by swathes of blue, pink, even some flashes of green - before sinking back to darkness again, all without a sliver of sunlight.

But every day the noon twilights had grown longer and stronger, until at last the sun itself had come peeking over the horizon. At first it was just a splinter of blinding light that quickly disappeared, as if shy. But at last the sun had climbed fully above the horizon, for the first time for more than a hundred days.

In the new light, to the north, she could see the sweep of the Island itself. The tundra was still largely buried in pale snow and ice, with none of the rich marsh green or splashes of flowering colour that the growth of summer would bring. And beyond, to the farthest north, she could see the bony faces of the Mountains at the End of the World, looming out of the bluish mist that lingered there, brown cones striped by the great white glaciers that spilled from rocky valleys. The Mountains were a wall of ice and rock beyond which no mammoth had ever ventured.

Along the south coast of the Island, more sheltered, the oily green-black of a spruce forest clung to the rock. The trees were intruders, encroaching on the ancient tundra which provided Silverhair's Family with the grassy food they needed.

Despite her sense of urgency, Silverhair paused frequently to feed. Her trunk was busy and active, like an independent creature, as it worked at the ground. She would wrap her trunk-fingers around the sparse tufts of grass she found under the snow, cramming the dark green goodies into her small mouth, and grind them between her great molar teeth with a back-and-forth movement of her jaw. The grass, the last of the winter, was coarse, dry and unsatisfying, as was the rest of her diet of twigs and bark of birches, willows and larches; with a corner of her mind she looked forward to her richer summer feast to come.

And she would lift her anus flap and pass dung, briskly and efficiently, as mammoths must ten or twelve times a day. The soft brown mass settled to the ice behind her, steaming; it would enrich the soil it touched, and the seeds that had passed through Silverhair's stomach would germinate and turn the land green.

The Family had no permanent home. They would gather to migrate to new pastures, or when one of their members was in some difficulty. But they would scatter in pairs or small groups to forage for food during the day, or to sleep at night. There was never any formal arrangement about where to meet again - nor was one necessary, for the mammoths were by far the most massive beasts in the landscape, and the authoritative stomping of Owlheart, and the rumbling and calls of the Family gathered together, travelled - to a mammoth's ears - from one end of the Island to another.

On the eighth day, a line of white vapour cut across the deep blue sky, utterly straight, feathering slightly. Silverhair peered upward; the vapour trail was at the limit of her poor vision. There was a tiny, glittering form at the head of the vapour line, like a high-flying bird, but its path was unnaturally straight and unwavering, its wings frozen still. And a sound like remote thunder came drifting down, even though there wasn't a cloud in the sky.

Silverhair had seen such things before. Nobody could tell her what it was, what it meant. After a time, the glittering mote passed out of sight, and the vapour trail slowly dispersed.

On the ninth day Silverhair was able to hear, not just the Matriarch's stomping, but also the rumbles, trumpets and growls of her people. The deep voices of mammoths - too deep for human ears - will carry far across the land, unimpeded by grassland, snow banks, even forest.

And in the evening of that day, when the wind was right, she could smell home: the rich hot smell of fresh dung, the musk stink of wet fur.

On the tenth day she was able to see the others at last. The mammoths, gathered together, were blocky shapes looming out of the blue-tinged fog. Silverhair was something of a loner, but even so she felt her heart pump, her blood flow warm in her veins, at the thought of greeting the Family.

Warm at the thought - she admitted it - of seeing Lop-ear once more.

The mammoths were scraping away thin layers of snow with their feet and tusks to get at the saxifrage buds below. Moulting winter fur hung around them in untidy clouds, and she could see how gaunt they were, after a winter spent burning the fat of the long-gone summer. It had been a hard winter, even for this frozen desert, and standing water had been unusually hard to find. Silverhair knew that when the weather lifted - and if the thaw did not come soon - the Matriarch would have to lead them to seek open water. It would be an arduous trek, and there was no guarantee of success, but there might be no choice.

The Family's two adult Bulls came to meet her.

Here was powerful old Eggtusk, his ears ragged from the many battles he had fought, and with the strange egg-shaped ivory growth in his tusk that had given him his name. And here, too, was Lop-ear, the younger Bull, with his dangling, parasite-damaged ear. The Bulls were launching into their greeting ceremony, and Silverhair joined in, rumbling and trumpeting, excited despite the shortness of her separation.

The three mammoths raised their trunks and tails and ran and spun around. They urinated and defecated in a tight ring, their dung merging in a circle of brown warmth on the ground. Old Eggtusk was the clumsiest of the three, of course, but what he lacked in elegance he made up for in his massive enthusiasm.

And now they touched each other. Silverhair clicked tusks with Eggtusk, and - with more enthusiasm - touched Lop-ear's face and mouth, wrapping her trunk over his head and rubbing at his scalp hair. She found the musth glands in his cheeks and slowly snaked her trunk across them, reading his subtle chemical language, while he rubbed her forehead; and then they pulled back their trunks and entangled them in a tight knot.

A human observer would have seen only three mammoths dancing in their baffling circles, trumpeting and growling and stomping, even emitting high-pitched, bird-like squeaks with their trunks. Perhaps, with patience, she might have deduced some simple patterns: the humming sound that indicated a warning, a roar that was a signal to attack, the whistling that meant that one of the Family was injured or in distress.

But mammoth speech is based not just on the sounds mammoths make - from the ground-shaking stomps, through low-pitched rumbles, bellows, trumpets and growls, to the highest chirrups of their trunks - but also on the complex dances of their bodies, and changes in how they smell or breathe or scratch, even the deep throb of their pulses. All of this makes mammoth speech richer than any human language.

"... Hello!" Silverhair was calling. "Hello! I'm so glad to see you! Hello!"

"Silverhair," Eggtusk growled, failing to mask his pleasure at seeing her again. "Last back as usual. By Kilukpuk's mite-ridden left ear, I swear you're more Bull than Cow."

"Oh, Eggtusk, you can't keep that up." And she laid her trunk over Eggtusk's head and began to tickle him behind his ear with her delicate trunk-fingers. "Plenty of mites in this ear too."

He growled in pleasure and shook his head; his hair, matted with mud, moved in great lanks over his eyes. "You won't be able to run away when you have your own calf. You just bear that in mind. You should be watching and learning from your sister."

"I know, I know," she said. But she kept up her tickling, for she knew his scolding wasn't serious. A new birth was too rare and infrequent an event for anyone to maintain ill humour for long.

Rare and infrequent - but not so rare as what she'd seen on the sea, she thought, remembering. "Lop-ear. You've got to come with me." She wrapped her trunk around his and tugged.

He laughed, and flicked back his lifeless ear. "What is it, Silverhair?"

"I saw the strangest thing in the sea. To the south, from the headland. It was like an ice floe - but it wasn't; it was too dark for that. And there were animals on it - or rather inside it - like seals -"

Lop-ear was watching her fondly. He was a year older than Silverhair. Although he wouldn't reach his full height until he was forty years old, he was already tall, and his shoulders were broad and strong, his brown eyes like pools of autumn sunlight.

But Eggtusk snorted. "By Kilukpuk's snot-crusted nostril, what are you talking about, Silverhair? Why can't you wander off and find something useful - like nice warm water for us to drink?"

"The animals were cupped inside the floating thing, for it was hollow, like -" She had no language to describe what she'd seen. So she released Lop-ear's trunk and ripped a fingerful of trampled grass from the ground. Carefully, sheltering the blades from the wind, she cupped the grass. "Like this!"

Lop-ear looked puzzled.

Eggtusk was frowning. "Seals, you say?"

"But they weren't seals," she said. "They had four flippers each - or rather, legs - that were stuck out at angles, like broken twigs. And heads, big round heads ... You do believe me, don't you?"

Eggtusk was serious now. He said, "I don't like the sound of that. Not one bit."

Silverhair didn't understand. "Why not?"

But now, from the circle of Cows, Foxeye, her sister, cried out.

Lop-ear pushed Silverhair's backside, gently, with his trunk. "Go on, Silverhair. You can't stay with us Bulls. Your place is with your sister."

And so Silverhair, with a mix of fascination and reluctance, walked to the centre of the Family, where the Cows were gathered around her sister.

At the heart of the group was massive Owlheart - Silverhair's grandmother, the Matriarch of them all - and like a shadow behind her was Wolfnose. Wolfnose, Owlheart's mother, had once been Matriarch, but now she was so old that her name, given her for the sharpness of her sense of smell as a calf, seemed no more than a sad joke.

And before Owlheart's tree-trunk legs was a Cow, lying on her side on the ground. It was Foxeye, Silverhair's sister, who was close to birthing.

Owlheart lifted her great head and fixed Silverhair with a steady, intense glare; for a few heartbeats Silverhair saw in her the ghost of the patient predator bird after whom the Matriarch had been named. "Silverhair! Where have you been?" She added such a deep rumble to her voice that Silverhair felt her chest quiver.

"To the headland. I was just -"

"I don't care," said Owlheart. Given the question it wasn't a logical answer. But then, Silverhair reflected, if you're the Matriarch, you don't have to be logical.

Now Snagtooth - Silverhair's aunt, Owlheart's daughter - was standing before her. "About time, Silverhair," she snapped, and she spat out a bit of enamel that had broken off the misshapen molar that was growing out of the left side of her mouth. Snagtooth was tall for a Cow: big, intimidating, unpredictably angry.

"Leave me alone, Snagtooth."

Croptail came pushing his way between Snagtooth's legs to Silverhair. "Silverhair! Silverhair!" Croptail was Foxeye's first calf. He was a third-molar - on his third set of teeth - born ten years earlier. He was a skinny, uncertain ball of orange hair with a peculiar stub of a tail. Kept away from his mother during the birth, he looked lost and frightened.

"I'm hungry, Silverhair." He pushed his mouth into her fur, looking for her nipples.

Gently she tried to nudge him away. "I can't feed you, child."

The little Bull's voice was plaintive. "But momma is sick."

"No, she isn't. But when she has the new baby, you'll have to feed yourself. You'll have to find grass and -"

But Snagtooth was still growling at Silverhair. "You always were unreliable. My sister would be ashamed."

Silverhair squared up to her sour-eyed aunt. "Don't you talk about my mother."

"I'll say what I like."

"It's only because you can't have calves of your own, no matter how many Bulls you take. That's why you're as bitter as last summer's bark. Everybody knows it -"

"Why, you little -"

Owlheart stepped between them, her great trunk working back and forth. "Are you two Bulls in musth? Snagtooth, take the calf."

"But she -"

Owlheart reared up to her full height, and towered over Snagtooth. "Do not question me, daughter. Take him."

Snagtooth subsided. She dug an impatient trunk into the mat of fur under Silverhair's belly, and pulled out a squealing Croptail.

At last, Silverhair was able to reach Foxeye. Her sister was lying on her side, her back legs flexing uncomfortably, the swell in her belly obvious. Her fur was muddy and matted with dew and sweat.

Silverhair entwined her trunk with her sister's. "I'm sorry I'm so late."

"Don't be," said Foxeye weakly. Her small, sharp eyes were, today, brown pools of tears, and the dugs that protruded from the damp, flattened fur over her chest were swollen with milk. "I wish mother was here."

Silverhair's grip tightened. "So do I."

The pregnancy had taken almost two full years. Foxeye's mate had been a Bull from Lop-ear's Family - and that, Silverhair thought uneasily, was the last time any of them had seen a mammoth from outside the Family. Foxeye had striven to time her pregnancy so that her calf would be born in the early spring, with a full season of plant growth and feeding ahead of it before the winter closed around them once more. It had been a long, difficult gestation, with Foxeye often falling ill; but at last, it seemed, her day had come.

The great, stolid legs of Owlheart and Wolfnose stood over Foxeye, and Silverhair felt a huge reassurance that the older Cows were here to help her sister, as they had helped so many mothers before - including her own.

Foxeye's legs kicked back, and she cried out.

Silverhair stepped back, alarmed. "Is it time?"

Owlheart laid a strong, soothing trunk on Foxeye's back. "Don't be afraid, Silverhair. Watch now."

The muscles of Foxeye's stomach flexed in great waves. And then, with startling suddenness, it began.

A pink-purple foetal sac thrust out of Foxeye's body. The sac was small, streamlined like a seal, and glistening with fluid. As it pushed in great surges from Foxeye's pink warmth it looked more like something from the sea, thought Silverhair, than mammoth blood and bone.

One last heave, and Foxeye expelled the sac. It dropped with a liquid noise to the ground.

Owlheart stepped forward. With clean, confident swipes of her tusks she began to cut open the foetal sac and strip it away.

Foxeye shuddered once more. The afterbirth was expelled, a steaming, bloody mass of flesh. Then Foxeye fell back against the hard, cold ground, closing her eyes, her empty belly heaving with her deep, exhausted breaths.

Silverhair watched, fascinated, as the new calf emerged from its sac. The trunk came first, a thin, dark rope. Then came the head, for a moment protruding almost comically from the sac. It was plastered with pale orange hair, soaked with blood and amniotic fluid, and it turned this way and that. Two eyes opened, and they were bright pink disks; then the tiny mouth popped moistly open under the waving trunk.

"Her eyes," Silverhair said softly.

Wolfnose, her great-grandmother, was stroking and soothing Foxeye. "What about her eyes?"

"They're red."

"So they should be. Everything is as it should be, as it has been since Kilukpuk birthed her last Calves in the Swamp."

The baby was a small bundle of bloody, matted fur, sprawled on the grass. She breathed with wet sucking noises, and her breath steamed; she let out a thin wail of protest and began to scrabble at the ground with her stumpy legs.

Owlheart's trunk tapped Silverhair's flank. "Help her, child."

Silverhair stepped forward nervously. She lowered her trunk and wrapped it around the calf's belly. Her skin was hot, and slick with birthing fluid that was already gathering frost.

With gentle pulling, Silverhair helped the infant to stagger to her feet. The calf looked about blindly, mewling.

An infant mammoth, at birth, is already three feet tall. A human baby's body weighs less than the mammoth's brain.

"She wants her first suck," Owlheart said softly.

With gentle tugs Silverhair guided the stumbling infant forward.

Foxeye knelt and stood, uncertainly, so that her pendulous dugs hung down before the calf. Silverhair slid her trunk under the calf's chin, and helped the calf roll her tiny trunk onto her forehead. Soon the baby's pink mouth had found her mother's nipple.

"Red eyes," said Foxeye. "Like the rising sun. That's her name. Sunfire."

Then Silverhair, with Owlheart and Wolfnose, stood by the calf and mother. They kept the infant warm with their bodies, and used their trunks to clean the baby's hair, as she stood amid the rich hair of her mother's belly, protected by the palisade of their huge legs around her. After a time Foxeye moved away from the reaching calf, encouraging her to walk after her. And, as she watched the infant suckle, Silverhair felt an odd pressure in her own empty dugs.

At the end of the long night, with the deep purple of dawn seeping into the eastern sky, Silverhair broke away from the Cows so she could feed and pass dung.

Wolfnose came wandering over the uneven tundra.

Silverhair, moved by an obscure concern, followed her great-grandmother.

The old Cow, her hair clumpy and matted, tugged fitfully at the trampled grass. But the co-ordination of her trunk fingers was poor, and the wiry grass blades evaded her. Even when she managed to drag a fingerful from the hard, frozen ground and crammed it in her mouth, Silverhair could see that much of the crushed grass was spilling from her mouth, and a greenish juice trickled over her lower lip.

Silverhair, tenderly, reached forward and tucked the grass back into Wolfnose's mouth.

Wolfnose was so old now that the two great molars in her jaw - her last set - were wearing down, and soon they would no longer be able to perform the job of grinding her food for her. Then, no matter what the Family did for her, Wolfnose's ribs and backbone would become even more visible through her sagging flesh and clumps of hair. And, if the wolves spared her, her rheumy eyes would close for the last time.

It would be a time of sadness. But it was as it had been since the days of Kilukpuk.

Wolfnose was mumbling, even as her great jaw scraped ineffectually at the grass. "Too long," she said. "Too long."

"Too long since what?" Silverhair asked, puzzled.

"Since the last birth. That whining Bull-calf who's always under my feet -"

"Croptail."

"Too long ..."

Mammoths do not have clocks, or wrist-watches, or calendars; they do not count out the time in arbitrary packages of seconds and days and years, as humans do. But nevertheless the mammoths know time, on a deep level within themselves. They can measure the slow migration of shadows across the land, the turning faces of Arctic poppies, the strength of air currents. So massive are mammoths that they can feel the turn of the Earth on its axis, the slow pulse of the seasons as the Earth spins in its stately annual dance, making the sun arc across the sky - and, so deep and long are their memories, they are even aware of the greater cycles of the planet. There is the Great-Year, the twenty-thousand-year nod of the precessing axis of the spinning planet. And the mammoths know even the million-year cycle of the great ice sheets, which lap against the mountains like huge frozen waves.

So Silverhair knew time. She knew how she was embedded in the great hierarchy of Earth's rhythms.

And she knew that Wolfnose was right.

Wolfnose said, "One infant, and one half-starved calf. It's not enough to keep the Family going, Grassfoot."

Grassfoot had been the name of Silverhair's mother - Wolfnose's granddaughter - who, when Silverhair was herself still an infant younger than Croptail was now, had died. Calling Silverhair 'Grassfoot' was a mistake Wolfnose had made before.

"I know," said Silverhair sadly. "I know, great-grandmother." And, tenderly, she tucked more grass into the old Cow's trembling mouth.

After a time Owlheart came forward. Her huge head loomed over Silverhair, so close that the Matriarch's wiry hair brushed Silverhair's brow. She pulled Silverhair away from Wolfnose.

"I know you're no fool, child," rumbled Owlheart. "Sometimes I think you're the smartest, the best of us all."

Silverhair was startled; she'd never been spoken to like that before.

"But," the Matriarch went on, "I want you to understand that there is nowhere so important for you to be, right now, as here, at the time of this, our first new birth for many seasons. Never mind headlands. Never mind plausible young Bulls, even. Do you know why you must be here?"

"To help my sister."

The Matriarch shook her great head. "More than that. You must learn. Soon you will be ready for oestrus, ready for a calf of your own. And that calf will depend on you - for its whole life, at first - and later, for the lore and wisdom you can teach it. We don't come into the world fully made, like the birds and the mice. We have to learn how to live. And it will be up to you to teach your calf. There is no greater responsibility. But you cannot teach if you do not learn yourself." Owlheart stepped back. "And if you do not learn, you will never become the great Matriarch I think you could be."

And at that, Silverhair's mouth dropped open, and her pink tongue rolled out with surprise. "Me? A Matriarch?"

It was the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard.

But Owlheart held her gaze. "It is your destiny, child," she said sadly. "Don't you know that yet?"

Copyright © 1999 S Bradshaw & S Baxter
Most recent revision September 12th, 1999