So Longtusk endured, waiting for morning.
The keepers came in the gray light of dawn. They talked softly and cleared their throats to alert the mastodonts of their approach. The mastodonts stirred, rumbling, and there was a rustle of leathery skin against the hobbles that bound their legs.
Most of the mastodonts were Bulls — not really a bachelor herd, for the tree-browsing mastodonts were more solitary than mammoths, Longtusk had found. But there were Families here too, Cows and calves.
The keepers approached their animals, one by one, talking softly. The mastodonts rumbled and whooshed in response, reaching out with their trunks to search the Fireheads’ layers of fur for tidbits of food. It was a display of affection and submission that never failed to embarrass Longtusk.
This morning the fat little keeper the mastodonts called Lemming approached Longtusk, holding out a juicy strip of bark. And, as he always did, Longtusk rumbled threateningly, curled his trunk and backed away as far as the hobbles knotted tightly around his legs would let him.
Lemming wore trousers and leggings of deer skin, moccasins and a broad hat of a tougher leather, and his clothing was stuffed with dry grass to keep him warm. Bits of grass stuck out around his wide, greasy face as he studied Longtusk, peering into the mammoth’s ears and eyes and mouth.
Jaw Like Rock, his hobbles already loosened, came loping over. With a deft movement he snatched the bark from Lemming’s paw and tucked it into his mouth. "Waste of good food," he rumbled as he munched.
"It comes from the paw of a Firehead," Longtusk said.
"So what? Food is food."
"I’m not like you."
"He wasn’t intending you any harm, you know. He was checking your eyes and ears for infection. And he wanted to see your tongue, too." Jaw opened his mouth and unrolled his own tongue, a leathery black sheet of muscle that dripped with saliva. "The keepers know that a healthy mastodont has a nice pink tongue umblemished by black spots, brown eyes without a trace of white, the right number of toenails, strong and sturdy joints, a full face and broad forehead… You have all of that; if you were a mastodont you’d be a prize."
Longtusk growled, impatient with advice.
"You’re the only mammoth we have here, Longtusk. The keepers don’t know what to make of you. Some of them think you can’t be tamed and trained, that you’re too wild. And the Shaman, Smokehat, is jealous of you."
"Jealous? Why?"
"Because the Fireheads used to believe that mammoths were gods. Some of them seem to think you’re a god. And that takes away from the Shaman’s power. Having you around gives even little Lemming a higher status. Don’t you understand any of this, grazer?"
"No," said Longtusk bluntly.
"All I’m saying is that if you give him an excuse, the Shaman will have you destroyed. Lemming is fond of you. But you’re going to have to help him, to give him some sign that you’ll cooperate, or else—"
But now, as if to disprove Jaw’s comforting growl, his own keeper approached: Spindle, thin, ugly and brutal. He lashed at Jaw with his stick, apparently punishing the mastodont for his minor theft of the food.
Jaw didn’t so much as flinch.
"Of course," he rumbled sourly, "not everything’s wonderful here. But there are ways to make life bearable."
And he lifted his fat, scarred trunk and sneezed noisily. A gust of looping snot and bark chips sprayed over Spindle, who fell over backward, yelling.
Jaw Like Rock farted contentedly and loped away.
The mastodonts were prepared for another working day. Their hobbles were removed — or merely loosened, in the case of Longtusk and a few others, mastodonts in musth and so prone to irritability. Longtusk was a special case, of course, and he wore his hobbles with a defiant pride. As they worked the keepers were careful to keep away from his tusks, so much more large and powerful than the strongest mastodont’s.
Ten mastodonts, plus Longtusk, were formed up into a loose line. Walks With Thunder was at the head. Lemming sat neatly on the great mastodont’s neck, his fat legs sticking out on either side of Thunder’s broad head.
Lemming tapped Thunder’s scalp and called out, "Agit!"
Walks With Thunder loped forward, trumpeting to the others to follow him.
The mastodonts obeyed. They were prompted by cries from the keepers — Chai ghoom! Chi! Dhuth!, Right! Left! Stop! — and they were directed by gentle taps of the keepers’ goads: gentle, yes, but Longtusk had learned by hard experience that the keepers also knew exactly where to strike him to inflict a sharp burst of pain, brief and leaving no scar.
Half the mastodonts bore riders. Most of the others carried the equipment the working party would need during the day. Those without riders were led by loose harnesses of rope tied around their heads.
Longtusk, of course, had no rider, and his harness was kept tighter than the rest. Not only that, his trunk was tied to Walks With Thunder’s broad tail, so that he was led along the path like an infant with his mother.
Then they walked slowly out of the Firehead settlement.
The Fireheads had spread far, reshaping the steppe, and they were still building. They had made themselves shelters — like the caves of the Dreamers — but of wood and rock and turf and animal skin. They built huge pits in the ground into which they hurled meat ripped from the carcasses of the creatures they hunted. And the Fireheads had built a great stockade of wood and rock, within which the mastodonts were confined. To Longtusk it was a place of distortion and strangeness, and he was habitually oppressed, crushed by a feeling of confinement and helplessness and bafflement.
But for now they were out of the stockade, and with relief Longtusk found himself on the open steppe. As the sun climbed into a cloud-dusted sky, they soon left behind the noise and stink of the settlement, and walked on steadily south.
The air was misty and full of light. Longtusk saw that it was a mist of life: vast clouds of insects, mosquitoes and blackflies and warble flies and botflies, that rose from the lakes to plague the great herbivores — including himself — and a dreamier cloud of ballooning spiders and wind-borne larvae, riding the breezes to a new land.
Through this dense air the mastodonts walked steadily, their fat low-slung rumps swaying gracefully, their tails swishing and their trunks shooting out from side to side in search of branches and leaves from the few low trees which grew here. After walking for a time they started to defecate together, a long synchronized symphony of dung-making.
Much of the land was bare, a desert of gravel and soils and a few far-flung plants. Here and there he noticed thicker tussocks of grass, speckled with wild flowers, fed by the detritus at the entrances to the dens of the Arctic foxes, and on the slight rises where owls and jaegers devoured their prey, watering the soil with blood. Steppe melt-ponds stood out boldly, bright blue against the tan and green of the plain. In the center of the larger ponds Longtusk could see the gleam of aquamarine, cores of ice still unmelted at the height of summer.
His footsteps crunched on dead leaves, bits of flowers, fragments of twig, a thick layer of it. Some of this material might be years old. And later he came across the carcass of a wolf-killed deer. It had been lightly consumed, and now its meat had hardened, its skin turned glassy. He knew it might lie here for three or four years before being reduced to bones.
On the steppe, away from the Fireheads’ frantic rhythms, time pooled, dense and slow; even decomposition worked slowly here.
He came across a golden plover, sitting on her nest on the ground. She stared back at him, defiant. The birds of the steppe had to build their nests on the ground, as there were no tall trees. Some of them — like buntings and longspurs — even lined their nests with bits of mammoth wool. This plover’s nest was made of woven grass, and it contained pale, darkly speckled eggs. As the mastodonts walked by, the plover got off its nest and ran back and forth, feigning a broken wing, trying to distract these possible predators from the nest itself.