But she was saying, "Threetusk — smell."

Wearily he raised his trunk and sniffed the air.

There was water, and grass, and the dung of many animals.

They blundered forward.

They came to a ridge. He stepped forward cautiously.

The land fell away before him, a steep wall of tumbled rocks. To his left, a waterfall thundered. It was glacier melt: the ghost of snows that might have fallen a Great-Year ago, now surging into the land below.

And that land, he saw, was green.

Pools glimmered in the light of the low sun. He saw clouds of birds over some of the pools, so far away they might have been insects. The land around the pools, laced by gleaming streams, was steppe: coarse grass, herbs, lichen, moss, stunted trees.

And there were animals here, he saw dimly: horses, what looked like camels — and, stalking a stray camel, a pack of what appeared to be giant wolves.

"We made it," he said, wondering. "The end of the corridor. We had to battle through the breath of Kilukpuk herself. But we made it. We have to tell Longtusk — tell him he was right."

Horsetail looked at him sadly. "Where Longtusk has gone, I don’t think even a contact rumble would reach him." She sniffed at the ground, probing with her trunk. "We need to find a way down from here…"

Threetusk looked back, troubled. The journey had been so hard that it had been some time since he had thought of the defiant old tusker they had left behind.

What had become of Longtusk?

Cautiously, Longtusk walked forward onto the ice dam. In places the ice, melting, had formed shallow pools; some of these were crusted over, and more than once a careless step plunged his foot into cold, gritty water.

He reached the center of this wall of ice, where it was thinnest — and weakest.

The ice dam was old.

On its dry southern side its upper surface was gritty and dirty, in places worn to a grayish sheen by years of rain. Its northern side had been hollowed out by lapping water, so that a great lip of ice hung over a long, concave wall. The ice under the lip gleamed white and blue, and more ice, half-melted and refrozen, gushed over the lip to dangle in the air, caught in mid-flow, elaborate icicles glistening.

He could feel the groan of this thinning dam under the weight of the water — a weight that must be rising, inexorably, as the sea level rose, spilling into the lake. The ice dam settled, seeking comfort, like a working mastodont laboring under some bone-cracking load. But there was little comfort to be had.

Instability — yes, he thought; that was the key.

A memory drifted into his mind: how Jaw Like Rock had taken that foolish keeper — what was his name? Spindle? — riding on his back standing up. Jaw had stopped dead, and stood square on the broken ground. Spindle had tried to keep his balance, but without Jaw’s assistance he was helpless, and he had fallen.

It had been funny, comical, cruel — and relevant. For the water of the lake was poised high above the lower land, contained only by this fragile dam, just as the keeper’s weight had been suspended over Jaw.

Strange, he hadn’t thought of old Jaw for years…

"…Baitho! Baitho!"

Fireheads were approaching Longtusk, stepping onto the narrow rim of this worn ice dam. And one was calling to him in a thin, high voice.

On his back Willow hissed, full of hatred and fear.

Longtusk could see them now. There was a knot of Firehead hunters with their thick, well-worked clothing thrown open, exposing naked skin to the warmth of the air. Most of them had held back on the rocky ridge. But two Fireheads were coming forward to meet him, treading carefully over the ice dam, holding each others’ paws.

And beyond the Fireheads, snaking back to the west, there was a column of mastodonts. Longtusk could hear the low rumbles of their squat, boulder-like bodies, feel the soft pound of their big broad feet on bare rock.

Ignoring the Fireheads, he sent out a deep contact rumble. "Mastodonts. I am Longtusk."

Replies came as slow pulses of deep sound, washing through the air.

"Longtusk. None here knows you."

"That is true. We are young and strong, and you must be old and weak."

"But we know of you."

The voices were colored by the rich, peculiar accent of the mastodonts, brought with them all the way from the thick forests of their own deep past.

"Walks With Thunder," Longtusk called. "Is he with you?"

"Walks With Thunder has gone to the aurora."

"It was a magnificent Remembering."

"He died well…"

He growled, and a little more sadness crowded into his weary heart. But perhaps that was all he could have hoped for, after so long.

"Longtusk. There are legends of your courage and strength, of your mighty tusks. My name is Shoulder Of Bedrock. Perhaps you have heard of my prowess as a warrior. I would welcome sharpening my tusks on yours…"

He rumbled, "I regret I have not heard of you, Shoulder of Bedrock, though I have no doubt your fame has spread far. I would welcome a contest with you. But I fear it must wait until we meet in the aurora."

The mastodonts rumbled their disappointment.

"Until the aurora," they called.

"Until the aurora…"

The two Fireheads approached him. One wore a coat of thick mammoth hide, to which much black-brown fur still clung, and it — no, he — wore a hat of bone from which smoke curled into the air. And the other, smaller, slighter, wore a coat that gleamed with the blue-white of mammoth ivory.

The male was Smokehat, of course. The Shaman’s face was a weather-beaten, wizened mask, etched deep by resentment and hatred. The Shaman’s tunic was made of an oddly shaped, almost hairless piece of hide. It had two broad holes, a flap of skin sewn over what looked like the root of a trunk, and its hair had been burned away in patches, exposing skin that was pink and scarred…

It was a face, Longtusk realized — the face of a mammoth, pulled off the skull, the trunk cut away and stretched out so that empty eye holes gaped. And not just any face: that swathe of purple-pink hairless scarring was unmistakable. This was a remnant of Pinkface, the Matriarch of Matriarchs.

This one brutal trophy, brandished by Smokehat, told him all he needed to know about the fate of the mammoths in the old land to the west.

And with the Shaman was Crocus, Matriarch of the Fireheads, the only Firehead in all history to ride a woolly mammoth. Her hair blew free in the slight wind — once fiery yellow, now a mass of stringy gray, dry and broken. Longtusk felt a touch of sadness.

There was a sharp pain at his cheek, a gush of warm blood. He looked down in disbelief.

Smokehat’s goad, long and bone-tipped, was splashed with Longtusk’s blood. The Shaman had slapped him as if he were an unruly calf.

"Baitho!" On your knees…

Longtusk reached down with his trunk, plucked the goad from the Shaman’s paw, and hurled it far into the dammed lake.

The Shaman was furious. He waved a bony fist in Longtusk’s face with impotent anger.

But now a stream of golden fluid arced from over Longtusk’s head and neatly landed on the Shaman’s bone hat. Smokehat, startled, stood stock still. The burning embers in his hat started to hiss, and thick yellow fluid trickled down his face.

There was a bellow of guttural triumph from Longtusk’s back. It was Willow, of course. With surprising skill, he was urinating into the Shaman’s hat.

The Shaman, howling with rage, dragged the hat from his head and threw it to the ground. He jumped up and down on it, smashing the bones and scattering the embers. But then he yelped in pain — perhaps he had trodden on a burning coal or a shard of bone — and he fled, limping and yelling, acrid urine trickling over his bare scalp.