Later would come the hard work of butchery, and the mastodonts would be employed to carry meat and hide back to the settlement. It would be hard, dull work, and the stink of the meat was repulsive to the mastodonts’ finely tuned senses. But they did it anyhow — as did Longtusk, who always bore more than his share.

After the successful drive, the Fireheads celebrated, and the mastodonts were allowed a few days to rest and recover.

But Longtusk noticed the Shaman, Smokehat, spending much time at the stockade, arguing with the keepers and jabbing his small fingers toward Longtusk.

Walks With Thunder came to him. Thunder walked stiffly now, for arthritis was plaguing his joints.

Longtusk said, "They seem to be planning another hunt."

"No, not a hunt."

"Then what?"

"Something simpler. More brutal… Something that will be difficult for you, Longtusk. The keepers are debating whether you should be allowed to lead this expedition. But the Shaman insists you go."

"You still read them well."

"Better than I like. Longtusk, this is it. The test. The trial the Shaman has been concocting for you for a long time — at least since that incident when you spared the life of the Dreamer."

"I do not care for the Shaman, and I do not fear him," said Longtusk coldly.

"Be careful, Longtusk," Thunder quoted the Cycle. "The art of traveling is to pick the least dangerous path."

Longtusk growled and turned away. "The Cycle has nothing to teach me. This is my place now. I am a creature of the Fireheads — nothing more. Isn’t that what you always counseled me to become?"

Thunder was aghast. "Longtusk, you are part of the Cycle. We all are. Forty million years—"

But Longtusk, the perennial outsider, had spent the long winter since the death of Neck Like Spruce and her calf building his solitary strength. "Not me," he said. "Not any more."

Thunder sniffed the air sadly. "Oh, Longtusk, has your life been so hard that you care nothing for who you are?"

"Hard enough, old friend, that the Shaman with all his machinations can do nothing to hurt me. Not in my heart."

"I hope that’s true," said Thunder. "For it is a great test that lies ahead of you, little grazer. A great test indeed…"

A few days later the keepers assembled the mastodonts for the expedition. Longtusk accepted pack gear on his back, and took his customary place at the head of the column of mastodonts.

The party left the settlement, heading north. Though Crocus still sometimes participated in the drives and other expeditions, this time she was absent, and the expedition was commanded by the Shaman.

Though they followed a well-marked trail that cut across the steppe, showing this was a heavily traveled route, Longtusk had never come this way before. He did not yet know the destination or purpose of the expedition — but, he told himself, he did not need to know. His role was to work, not to understand.

The Dreamer Willow, enslaved by the Fireheads, was compelled to make the journey too. Willow’s clothing was dirty and in sore need of repair, and his broad back was bent under an immense load of dried food and weapons for the hunters. The pace was easy, for the mastodonts could not sustain a high speed for long, but even so the Dreamer struggled. It was obvious his stocky frame was not designed for long journeys — unlike the taller, more supple Fireheads, whose whip-thin legs covered the steppe with grace and ease.

Over the year since his capture Willow had grown increasingly wretched. During the winter, the female Dreamer taken with him had died of an illness the Fireheads had been unable, or unwilling, to treat. Willow was not like the Fireheads. He had grown up in a society that had known no significant change for generations, a place where the most important things in all the world were the faces of his Family around him, where strangers and the unknown were mere blurs, at the edge of consciousness. Now, alone, he was immersed in strangeness, in constant change, and he seemed constantly on the edge of bewilderment and terror, utterly unable to comprehend the Firehead world around him.

It was said that no matter how far the Fireheads roamed they had not come across another of his kind. Longtusk supposed that just as the mammoths had been scattered and driven north by the Firehead expansion, so had the Dreamers; perhaps there were few of them left alive, anywhere in the world.

Longtusk could not release Willow from his mobile prison of toil and incomprehension. But he sensed that his own presence, a familiar, massive figure, offered Willow some comfort in his loneliness. And now, out of sight of the keepers, he let Willow rest his pack against his own broad flank and hang onto his belly hairs for support.

As the days wore away, and they drove steadily northward, the nature of the land began to change.

The air became chill, and the winds grew persistent and strong. Sometimes the wind flowed from west to east, and Walks With Thunder told Longtusk that such immense air currents could circle the planet, right around the fringe of the great northern icecaps.

And sometimes the wind came from the north, driving grit and ice into their faces, and that was the most difficult of all, for this was a katabatic wind: air that had lain over the ice, made cold and dry and heavy, so that it spilled like water off the ice and over the lower lands below.

They reached land recently exposed by the retreating ice. The ice had scoured away the softer soil down to bedrock, and it was a place of moraines of sand and gravel, rock smashed to fragments by the great weight of ice that had once lain here. There was little life — a few tussocks of grass, isolated trees, some lichen — struggling to survive in patches of soil, wind-blown from the warmer climes to the south.

The mastodonts became uneasy, for unlike the Fireheads they could hear the sounds of the icepack: the crack of new crevasses, the thin rattle of glacial run-off rivers and streams, the deep grind of the glaciers as they tore slowly through the rock. To the mastodonts, the icepack was an immense chill monster, half alive, spanning the world — and now very close.

Longtusk knew they could not stay long in this blighted land; whatever the Fireheads sought here must be a treasure indeed.

And it was as night began to fall on this wind-blasted, frozen desert that Longtusk came upon the corpse.

At first he could see only a hulked form, motionless, half covered by drifting dirt. Condors wheeled above, black stripes against the silvery twilight.

A hyena was working at the corpse’s belly. It snarled at the mastodonts, but fled when a hunter hurled a boomerang.

Walks With Thunder was beside Longtusk. "Be strong, now…"

The mastodonts and hunters gathered around the huge, fallen form, awed by this immense slab of death.

It — she — was a female. She had slumped down on her belly, her legs splayed and her trunk curled on the ground before her. She was gaunt, her bones showing through her flesh at pelvis and shoulders, and her hair had come loose in great chunks, exposing dried, wrinkled skin beneath.

It was clear she was not long dead. She might have been sleeping.

But her eye sockets were bloody pits, pecked clean by the birds. Her small ears were mangled stumps. And Longtusk could see the marks of hyena teeth in the soft flesh of her trunk.

"She was pregnant," Walks With Thunder said softly. "See her swollen belly? The calf must have died within her. But she was starving, Longtusk. Her dugs are flaccid and thin. She would have had little milk to give her calf. In the end she simply ran out of strength. They say it is peaceful to go to the aurora that way…"

Longtusk stood stock still, stunned. He had seen no woolly mammoth since his separation from his Family — nothing but imperfect Firehead images of himself.