Longtusk watched them.

The males would seek out meat. With their long blackened sticks they hunted smaller animals like reindeer and red deer. They generally ignored the larger animals, like horses and aurochs. But they would often scavenge meat from an animal brought down by some more fierce predator, chasing away the hyenas and condors, slicing at the carcass with pieces of stone they held in their paws.

The males ate their meat out in the field, taking little back to the caves. Longtusk realized that like mammoth Bulls they did not provide food or protection for their cubs. That was the job of the females. Slowed by their young, often laden with infants clamped to their breasts, the females did not travel as far as the males, and so did not eat so well. They would hunt with small sticks, seeking out game like rabbits or birds. But their principal foodstuff, plucked from the lake, was aquatic plants like cattails.

The females were as strong and stocky as the males, for they worked even harder in their relentless drive to sustain and protect themselves and their cubs.

As wide as he traveled, Longtusk saw no other groups of Dreamers. This small Clan in their caves seemed utterly isolated, cut off from the rest of their kind. And yet that seemed unimportant to them. They were immersed in their small world, in themselves, in each other; they had no need for a wider web of social contacts like the mammoths’ Clans.

All this Longtusk saw in glimpses, as the Moon cycled in the sky. But as a growing mammoth he was not exactly inconspicuous; and whenever the Dreamers saw him they would shout and jab sticks and hurl rocks until he went away. They were not mammoth hunters by habit, but Longtusk knew they could easily kill him if they chose, or if he seemed threatening enough. He recoiled from their weapons, and their hostility — a hostility that seemed shared by all except Willow.

Willow remained with the females and their brood. But he seemed somehow distanced, older than the rest of the infants, often the subject of an irritable cuff from one female or another. Perhaps that was why Willow’s behavior was different from the others, why he had been moved to risk his own life to save a mammoth’s. Longtusk wondered if Willow, like Longtusk himself, was reaching a cusp, preparing to leave his mother and her sisters and seek out the male hunter groups.

The strange idea that he and Willow might have something in common was obscurely comforting.

As winter drew in, the nights grew long and deep, the days brief.

There was a spate of early snow storms. The air here was sucked dry by the icecap, and there was little fresh snow. But ground blizzards, with old snow picked up by heavy winds, frequently occurred. So, when it snowed, it was usually in the midst of a ferocious wind storm that might persist for days.

Longtusk endured the blizzards. He felt the snow’s weight gather on his back, but he knew he was protected. His body generated its own heat by slowly burning the fat reserves he had stored up during the summer. That heat was trapped with remarkable efficiency by his shell of fur and guard hairs — so well, in fact, that snow that fell on his back did not melt.

Still, in the worst of the weather, he could do nothing but stand in his shell of snow and endure. Any movement would have burned up the fat reserves whose primary use was keeping him alive. But even so, despite his hoarding of his reserves, he felt himself being depleted, bit by bit, as the winter drew in.

When the weather relented, Longtusk traveled even farther than before in search of food.

In some places the wind kept patches of sun-cured summer grass free of heavy snow. When he uncovered the ground to feed, he was followed by Arctic hares or ptarmigan, seeking willow buds and insects.

But the land had emptied. The migrant animals like the deer had gone far south to warmer climes, and the Arctic foxes had retreated to sea ice, living exclusively from the remnants of polar bear kills. Some life persisted, nevertheless. There were lemmings that burrowed beneath the snow, ptarmigans that dove into drifts for insulation, even plants that managed to flourish in pockets of warm air beneath the ice.

In these days of darkness and cold and windblown snow, everything was slowed. To extend a trunk tip or open an eye, unprotected by fur, could lead to agonizing pain. Any bit of moisture would turn to crystals, creating an ice fog; when he walked a cloud hung over him, shining with light.

Once he saw a snowy owl gliding silently past, and its breath trailed after it in the air.

One fiercely cold day he walked along the river valley near the Dreamers’ caves, seeking water. But he found the river here had run dry.

The river had iced over. But the ice crust had broken and fallen in, and the valley floor beneath was dry. The river had first frozen over, but then the watershed farther upstream had frozen, and the water beneath the ice crust had stopped flowing. The river had drained away, leaving the unsupported crust above.

Longtusk climbed down to the river bed, the bones of fish crunching beneath his feet, grubbing for water in the cold mud.

He followed the dry bed until he reached the lake, and there, at last, he drank deeply.

But a few days later, the lake froze over.

Longtusk bent to the water’s edge and tried to crack the ice with his tusks. The ice splintered and starred as he scraped. But close to the bank, where the ice clung to the muddy bottom, there was too little water beneath to satisfy his thirst. And he knew that if he ventured farther out the ice could crack under him, and he could become trapped in the mud, even drown.

He walked along the shore, seeking a place he knew where the water ran over big chunks of black rock. But even this waterfall had frozen over; great lumps and streamers of white ice clung to the rocks.

He could survive on little food — but he needed water.

He lacked a detailed knowledge of this landscape. He had no idea where he might find frozen-over ponds whose crusts might be thin enough to break with his tusks; nor did he have the skills to discover new water sources for himself.

He was cut off from the wisdom of the Clan. He knew he had much to learn about the land and how to survive — and nobody was here to teach him.

For days, lacking any better idea, he survived on nothing but dribbles of muddy, half-frozen lake bed ooze, and his strength dwindled further.

But then, when he returned hopefully to the lake, he found a wide area of it had been cleared of ice. Without hesitation Longtusk splashed out into the water, ignoring its sharp cold as it soaked into the hair of his legs. He dipped his trunk into the clear liquid and sucked it up gratefully.

The break in the ice was suspiciously neat, a half-disc like a waning Moon. Its inner rim looked chipped and scarred — as if by the paw of a Dreamer.

This cleared pool was not natural; it must be the work of his only friend, the Dreamer cub Willow, who must have seen his distress and decided to help him. Despite the chill of the brief winter day, Longtusk felt warmed.

But soon the winter’s cold bit harder.

A savage wind from the north, spilling off the flanks of the ice sheet itself, howled across the battered, exposed land. Dust closed around him, shutting out the brief slivers of daylight. This storm brought little snow, but it drove great billows of dust and sand from the pulverized lands uncovered by the retreating ice.

This was an age of savage weather, dominated by the huge masses of cold air that lingered over the immense polar ice sheets, driven to instability by the accelerating warming of the climate. This hard, dry storm, Longtusk knew, might last for months.

He saw no sign of the Dreamers. They must have been sheltering in their caves.