This was not the aurora. I am not dead, she realized. My long walk continues.

But with life came hope and fear, and dread settled on her.

She made the lost cry, like a calf. But she couldn’t even hear that.

Thunder cracked. Light flashed in sharp lines above and below her. She felt a shuddering, deep in her belly, as if the ground itself was stirring.

She tried to retreat, to rumble her alarm, but still she could not move.

The close darkness receded. Great hard sheets of blackness, like dark ice, fell away. She was suddenly immersed in pink-red light.

And now the feeling returned to her legs and trunk, belly and back, all in a rush. It was like being drenched suddenly in ice water. She staggered, her legs stiff and remote. She tried to trumpet, but her trunk was heavy, and a thick, briny liquid gushed out of it, like sea water.

When her nostrils were clear she took a deep, shuddering breath. The air was cold and sharp — and thin. It made her gasp, hurting her raw lungs. Her weak eyes prickled, suddenly streaming with salty water. But she rejoiced, for she was whole again, immersed in her body, and the world.

But it was not the world she had known.

The sky was pink, like a dawn, or a sunset.

She was standing on a shallow slope. She ran her soft trunk tip over the ground. It was hard smooth rock, blue-red. Its surface was rippled and lobed, as if it had melted and refrozen.

This broad plain of rock descended as far as she could see, all the way to the horizon. She must be standing on the flank of a giant mountain, she thought. She turned to look up toward the summit, and she saw a great pillar of black smoke thrusting up to the sky, billows caught in their motion as if frozen.

Her patch of rock, soiled by her watery vomit, was surrounded by sheets of dense blackness that lay on the ground. When she touched this black stuff, she found it was hard and cold and lacking in scent and taste, quite unlike the rock in its chilling smoothness. And the sheets had sharp, straight edges. It was the crust of darkness that had contained her when she had woken from her strange Sleep, and it filled her with renewed dread.

She stepped reluctantly over the smooth black sheets, until she had reached the comparative comfort of the solid rock. But the rock’s lobes and ridges were hard under her feet, and every time she took a step she had a strange, dream-like sensation of floating.

Nothing grew here: no herbs, no trees. There was nothing to eat, not so much as a blade of grass.

The air stank of smoke and sulfur. The sun was small and dim and shrunken. The ground shuddered, as if some immense beast buried there were snoring softly in its sleep.

I am in a strange place indeed, she thought. Her brief euphoria evaporated, and disorientation and fear returned.

A contact rumble reached her, resonating deep in her belly. She was not alone: relief flooded her.

She turned sharply. Pain prickled in her knees and back and neck, and in the pads of her feet.

A mammoth was approaching — a Bull, taller than she was.

As he walked his powerful shoulders rose and fell, and his head nodded and swayed, his trunk a tangible weight that pulled at his neck. His underfur was light brown, but yellow-white around his rump and belly. His tough overlying guard hairs were much darker, nearly black on his rump and flanks, but shading to a deep brown flecked with crimson on his forequarters. The hairs that dangled from his trunk and chin and feet were paler, in places almost white. His tusks curled before him, heavy and proud. He walked slowly, languidly, as if dazed or ill.

She could see him only dimly, through air laden with mist and smoke. But she could smell the deep warmth of his layered hair, feel the steady press of his footsteps against the hard ground.

He was mammuthus primigenius: a woolly mammoth, as she was.

She didn’t know him.

The two of them began to growl and stomp, facing each other and turning away, touching tusks and trunks, even emitting high, bird-like chirrups from their trunks. The moist pink tip of his trunk reached out and explored her mouth, scalp and eyes. She ran her own trunk fingers through his long guard hairs, finding the woolly underfur beneath.

In this way, touching and singing and listening and smelling, the two mammoths shared a complex, rich exchange of information.

"…Who are you? Where are you from?"

"My name is Icebones—"

"Do you know where the food is? We’re all hungry here."

She stumbled back, confused. He was hard to understand, his sounds and postures and gestures a distortion of the language she was used to, as if he had come from a different Clan, not related to her own. And his manner was strange — eager, clumsy, more befitting a callow calf than a grown Bull.

She realized immediately, He is frightened.

Discreetly she probed the area of his temple between his eyes and his small ears where he would secrete musth fluid, if it was his time. But she found nothing.

"I don’t know anything about food."

He growled. "But you came out of that." He probed at the black sheets around her.

She didn’t know what to say to him.

Baffled, disturbed, she stepped forward, ignoring the continuing stiffness in her legs, and walked down the featureless slope. The Bull followed her, demanding food noisily, like a calf pursuing his mother.

She reached a shallow ridge. She paused there, raised her trunk and sniffed, studying the world.

She saw how this Mountain’s tremendous shadow spilled across the rocky plains below. Looking beyond the shadow to where the land was still sunlit, she saw splashes of gray-green — the steppe, perhaps, or forest. And beyond that she saw the broad shoulders of two more vast, shallow mountains, pushing above the horizon, mighty twins of the Mountain under her feet, made gray and colorless by distance and mist. Close to the horizon thin clouds glowed, bright blue, stark against the pink sky.

There was a moon in the sky. But it was not the Moon, which had floated above the night lands of the Island. This moon was a small white disc, and it was climbing into the smoky sky as she watched — visibly moving, moment by moment, with a strange, disturbing speed. As it climbed, approaching the sun, it turned into a crescent, a cup of darkness, that finally disappeared.

And then the moon’s shadow passed over the sun itself, a dark spot like a passing cloud.

Icebones cringed.

With her deep mammoth’s senses she could hear the songs of the planet: the growl of earthquakes and volcanoes, the howl of wind and thunder, the angry surge of ocean storms, all the noises of earth, air, fire and water. And she could tell that this world was small, round, hard — and strange.

She raised her trunk higher, trying to smell mammoths, her Family, Silverhair. She could smell nothing but the stink of sulfur and ash.

Wherever she was, however she had got here, she was far from her Family. Without her Family she was incomplete — for a mammoth Cow could no more live apart from her Family than a trunk or leg or tusk could survive if cut off the body.

The Bull continued to pursue her.

She turned on him. "Why are you following me? I am not in oestrus. Can’t you tell that? And you are not in musth."

His eyes gleamed, amber pebbles in pits of wrinkled skin. "What is oestrus? What is musth?"

She growled. "My name is Icebones. What is your name? Where is your bachelor herd?"

"Do you know where the food is? Please, I am very hungry."

She came closer to him, curiosity warring with her anger and confusion. She explored his face with her trunk. How could he know so little? How could he not have a name?