When the hole was done, deep and straight-edged, Stripeskull clambered into the pit with the body of the female cub. The little one had been washed, her hair shaved and tidied. The grieving mother dropped dried flowers over the body, and Stripeskull sprinkled powdered ochre, a red mist that floated gently down into the pit.

Then the Dreamers began to sing — all of them, adults and all but the smallest cubs — a strange, deep ululation that rolled endlessly like a river, smooth and sad.

Longtusk understood. These Dreamers, in their own way, were Remembering the cub, just as mammoths have always Remembered their own dead.

Longtusk saw that the walls of the grave pit, deep and sheer, were made up of complex layers of debris: rock, flint flakes, blackened ashy dust, bone splinters. Such detritus could only have been laid down by the Dreamers themselves. The Dreamers must have inhabited this cave — on this undistinguished river bank, making their unchanging hearths and tools — for generation upon generation upon generation: an unimaginably long time, reaching into their deepest past. Perhaps there were more bones buried deep here — bones a hundred thousand years deep, likewise scattered with flowers and ochre flakes — here in this trampled ground, where these strange creatures had dreamed away the unchanging millennia.

And still they sang.

Did they sing of a time when their kind had covered the world? Did they sing of their loss, their diminution to dwindling, isolated groups like this?

Did they sing of their future — and their fear?

Longtusk slipped away from the cave mouth and walked off, ignoring the driving dust, until he could hear the Dreamers’ song no more.

The dust storm passed, and the cold began to ease its grip.

Heavy rain pounded the land, and glacial run-off poured along the river valley, threatening floods. The ground in front of the cave turned into a sink of oozing mud, and the adult Dreamers, slipping and sliding in the mess, complained profusely.

Longtusk knew the time was approaching when he must leave the relative security of this place. Perhaps when the weather was better he could even strike out north, and seek his Family.

So, his winter fur beginning to blow loose in a cloud around him, he took to traveling increasing distances from the cave. He was half-starved, his fat depleted, severely weakened by the harshest winter of his life.

But he still breathed. And, despite the rain and the continuing cold, life was returning to the land. The low, wind-battered trees were sprinkled with buds, full of the optimism of the new season, and the first crocuses and jonquils were showing, bright yellow and purple. Day by day, as he fed on the new growth, his strength returned.

In fact, he found he himself had grown during the bleak cold of winter. His tusks were longer still, heavier, thicker. He flashed them in the air, parrying imaginary opponents, even though there was nobody to see.

One day he found a place where a carpet of new grass, thin green shoots, was pushing through the matted remains of last year’s growth. Contentedly he began to graze.

He heard a soft mewling, like a wounded cat, coming from behind a low outcrop of hard black rock.

Pricked by curiosity, he walked over to see.

At first sight he thought it was a Dreamer cub. It was a female, wearing the ragged remains of cut and shaped skins. She was smaller in height than Willow, so presumably younger. She seemed in distress; she was huddled over on herself, clutching her spindly forelegs to her chest, and she was crying.

He ran his trunk tip over her limbs.

She was like a Dreamer, yes. But she was much thinner, her limbs weaker but more graceful. Even her head was a different shape, with a flat face, a prominent chin, a protruding forehead — no heavy eye ridges — and a compact skull. Her body seemed bare of hair: all except her head, where there was a tangled, dirty mane of fine yellow hair.

She wore something around her neck. He bent to see. Little white objects had been punctured with holes, and then strung together on what looked like a strip of sinew.

They were teeth: tiny mammoth teeth, drawn from a very new calf, perhaps even an unborn.

He rumbled in dismay.

At the noise, the cub’s eyes flickered open. They were a startling blue, like steppe melt-pools. When she saw the mountain of muscle and fat and hair over her, tusk shadows looming, she yelped and tried to pull away. But she was weak, and she was trapped by the cleft of rock.

Now he could see quite how ill she was. The fingers on her paws were dead white, and her lips looked blue. But she was not shivering: the cold had penetrated deep into her body, and without help this mite would soon surely die.

He reached down with his trunk, meaning to stroke her, but she wailed feebly, unable to move.

He moved back a few paces. There was a small stand of crocuses glowing in the lee of the rock. With his delicate trunk-fingers, he plucked out a single fat yellow bloom. He carried it to the female, and dropped it on her chest.

She seemed a little less frightened. She tried to close her paw over the flower.

Gently he wrapped his trunk under the cub and lifted her up. She was light as a feather, and her limbs dangled, unresisting. But she had managed to keep hold of her flower. He began to walk, slowly and steadily, toward the cave of the Dreamers.

After a time the cub seemed to lose her fear. She gathered pawfuls of his long trunk hairs and burrowed into them. Soon she was asleep, wrapped in the warm strength of the mammoth’s trunk.

The Dreamers reacted with confusion.

This was a stranger — not one of their Clan — not even one of their kind. At first the adults seemed to have difficulty even seeing the limp cub, as if she was a thing a shadows, only half-glimpsed, too strange to comprehend. But the young were fascinated, and they clustered around, lifting aside his trunk fur to see the sleeping cub.

Some of the males came at Longtusk with their pointed, blackened sticks, as they hadn’t for some months, as if he had brought them threat in the form of this helpless cub. The females were solicitous. As soon as they realized what distress this strange cub was in, they lifted her away from Longtusk and took her toward the hearth. There they stripped away her ragged skins, rubbed grease into her skin, and huddled around her, sandwiching the cub between their own great bodies.

Willow came up to Longtusk. He rubbed Longtusk’s trunk fur affectionately, and Longtusk realized that Willow, at least, thought he had done the right thing -

Somebody screamed.

It was one of the female Dreamers, an old woman, her face twisted by an ancient burn. She was pointing at the three of them: the strange female cub, Willow and Longtusk, over and over, jabbering and growling, frightened.

She sees something, Longtusk realized, chilled. Something about the three of us.

Suddenly the cave walls, solid rock, seemed to melt away, the Dreamers dispersing like smoke, until there was only the three of them, alone, locked together. She sees the end of my life. She thinks we will die together, we three: the yellow-haired cub, Willow, and me.

But how can anybody know the future? And what strange fate could make such a thing happen?…

The old female stumbled away, scared, shouting.

And there was a howl of outrage.

Blood was pouring down Stripeskull’s foreleg, where a stick protruded from his flesh. With a yell of anger and pain he dragged the stick out of his body, ripping the wound wider.

This was no simple stick of sharpened wood, Longtusk realized immediately. It had feathers attached to its base — and it was tipped, not by fire-hardened wood, but by a flake of flint, sharpened to a point much finer than any the Dreamers could manufacture.