He walked farther. The trees grew more thickly, short, ancient willows and birches. Soon there were so many of them they covered the ground with a thick matting of branches. He was walking, in fact, on top of a forest. This dry, cold, wind-blasted land was not a place where trees could grow tall.

…He heard a hiss, deep and sibilant, somewhere behind him.

Mammoths’ necks are short and inflexible, and Longtusk had to turn all the way around — slowly, clumsily, heart hammering.

The cat gazed at him, utterly still, silent.

For an instant he felt overwhelmed, his mind reeling, his courage fragmenting. He was almost irritated. The bachelor herd, the smoke, the fire — wasn’t that enough? Must he face this new peril as well?

But he knew he was in deadly danger, and he forced himself to alertness.

The cat was a female, he saw. She seemed huge to Longtusk: not much less than half his own height, rippling muscle under a smooth sheen of brown fur. Her ears were small and forward-pointed, her nose small and black.

And her two saber teeth swept down from her mouth, stained by something dark and crusted. Blood, perhaps. She must already have made a kill, of some prey animal disoriented by the fire. He could smell rotten meat on her breath.

Perhaps she had a family to feed, a brood of brawling sharp-toothed cubs. Cubs hungry for mammoth meat.

The sun, reddened by the smoky air, touched the horizon. Shadows fled across the scorched plains, and ruddy light gleamed deep in the carnivore’s eye sockets.

And those eyes were fixed on Longtusk.

He raised his trunk and trumpeted. The sound rolled across the anechoic plains, purposeless.

The cat spread her claws, long and bright, and they sunk into the ground. Her muscles tensed in great sheets.

Fear clamored in his mind, threatening to drown out thought.

He tried to recall fragments of mammoth lore: that few mammoths are targeted by predators; that Bulls, not yet fully grown and yet driven to depart the Family — Bulls like himself — are the most vulnerable to predators like this cat; that the female cat, driven to provide for her family, is deadlier than the male.

But through all this one stark thought rattled around his awareness: that it is at sunset that the predators hunt.

She sprang. It was very sudden. Spitting, she soared through the air, a blur of muscle heading straight for his face, claws extended.

Blindly he raised his tusks.

She was knocked sideways, spitting and scratching.

…He was bleeding, he realized. There was a series of raked gashes across the front of his trunk, where a paw-swipe had caught him.

Trumpeting, he turned again.

She was crouched low, eyes on him once more, taking step after deliberate step toward him.

The mammoths evolved on open plains, where there is little cover. Under threat from a predator they adopt a ring formation, with the calves and the weak huddled at the center.

But now Longtusk was on his own, with nobody to cover his back, utterly exposed.

He broke away and fled. He couldn’t help it.

She will try to slash your trunk. Avoid this. It will cause you agonizing pain and a great loss of blood. Use your tusks. Bring them down on her head to stun her, or stab her with the sharp tips. If she gets in closer, wrap your trunk around her and squeeze until her back breaks. If she gets beneath you, step on her and crush her skull. Never forget she is afraid too: you are bigger and stronger than her, and she knows it…

It was a comforting theory, and he recalled how he had played with other calves, mimicking attacks and defenses, swiping miniature tusks back and forth. But the reality, of this spitting, stinking, single-minded cat, was very different.

And now he felt a new sharp warmth on his right hind leg. She had gouged him again. The damage was superficial, but he could feel the blood pumping out of him, weakening him. He kept running, but now he was limping.

It had been a deliberate cut. The cat was trying to shorten the chase.

He ran toward a stand of tall trees, sheltered by an outcrop of rock, their branches green-black in the fading light. Perhaps there would be cover here. He ducked into the shadow of the trees, turned -

Suddenly there was a weight on his back, a mass of spitting, squalling fur, utterly unexpected, and then stabs of sharp pain all across his back: long claws digging through his fur and into his flesh.

He trumpeted in panic. He raised his trunk and tusks, but his neck was short and he could never reach so far. The trees, he realized. Their black branches loomed above him. She must have climbed into the branches and dropped down onto him.

On the steppe most trees hugged the ground. Longtusk wasn’t used to trees looming over him. He hadn’t even considered the possibility that the cat might do such a thing.

He felt, through sharpening stabs of pain, that she was digging her claws deeper into him, and her weight shifted. He knew what she was intending; he had seen the cats at work. She was opening her gaping mouth and raising her down-pointing saber teeth. In a moment she would use them to stab down into his helpless flesh, laying open his spine, or even his skull.

Then the pain would start.

She would not kill him quickly, he knew, for that was not the way of the cats; he would lie in blood and black agony, longing for a release to the aurora, while this cat and her foul cubs tore at his flesh -

He raised his trunk and bellowed defiance. No! He had beaten the fire. He would not be destroyed, in this dismal place, by a carrion-breathed cub of Aglu!

He charged straight at the trees. One branch, black and thick, cut across the sky, only a little above his head height.

As the branch struck her the cat yowled. The pain in his back deepened — her claws raked through his flesh as she tried to cling to him — but suddenly the pain’s sharpness eased, and the weight of the cat was gone from his shoulders. Breathing hard, the wounds on his back cold, he whirled around, tusks raised, trunk tucked under his chin for protection.

The cat had vanished.

He trumpeted. His eyes, never strong, helped him little in this fading light. And he could smell nothing — nothing but the metallic stink of his own crusting blood. Probably she had gone downwind of him.

How could she have moved so quickly, so silently? She was, he realized ruefully, much more expert at hunting than he was at being hunted.

The dark was deepening quickly. His thirst seemed to burn at his throat, a discomfort deeper even than the ache of his wounds. And he longed for shelter.

He recalled the outcrop of rock which had provided cover for these trees to grow. Clumsily, his torn leg and back aching, he lumbered around the trees. He came to a sheer wall of sandstone, perhaps twice as tall as he was, smoothly eroded, its base littered by frost-shattered scree, fallen branches and dead leaves. He moved as close to the rock face as he could, and turned to face the plains beyond.

Perhaps he could last through the night here. He might hear the cat approach if she came across the scree or the leaves. And in the morning -

There was liquid movement to his right. She had been hiding in the mound of broken wood and leaves. Now, gazing at him, she prepared to spring again.

He felt trapped in this dark, glacial moment.

He seemed to have time to study the cat’s every detail: the sinuous beauty of her curved, taut muscles, the gaping, bloody maw of her mouth. Blood was crusted on her head, he noticed, a mark of his one minor victory, where he had managed to hurt her by driving her against the tree branch. But her eyes were on him, small and hard, and he could see that she knew she had won. In less than a heartbeat she would reach his soft belly with her claws, and his life would spill out on this lonely rock, far from those who had loved him.