"The winter has been dry," said Owlheart as she dug. "Perhaps the thaw will come soon, but we are thirsty now. But here, in this place, there is water to be found — liquid, for most of the year. This is a place where the inner warmth of the Earth reaches to the surface and keeps the water beneath from freezing, even when the world is as cold as a corpse’s belly…"

Now, looking around more carefully, Silverhair saw the ground was pitted by a series of shallow craters: pits dug in the ground by mammoths of the past.

"Remember this place," Owlheart said. "For it is a place of Earth’s generous warmth, and water; and it may save your life."

Silverhair turned, scanning the horizon. She raised her trunk and let the hairs there dangle in the prevailing wind. She studied the sky, and scraped with her tusks at the ground. She let the scents and subtle sounds of the landscape sink into her mind.

She was remembering. Even as Owlheart spoke, she was adding a new detail, exquisite but perhaps vitally important, to the map of scents and breezes and textures that each mammoth carried in her head.

"Now, help me dig," said Owlheart.

Silverhair, Lop-ear, and Snagtooth stepped forward, took their places around the preliminary hole dug by their Matriarch, and began to work at the ground.

The ground was hard: even to the stone-hard tusks of mammoths, it offered stiff resistance. Save for the occasional peevish complaint by Snagtooth, there was no talking as they worked: only the scrape of tusk and stamp of foot, the hissing of breath through upraised trunks.

They worked through the night, taking breaks in turns.

As the night wore on — and as there was little sign of water, and they became steadily more exhausted — Silverhair had a growing sense of unease.

Owlheart was not a Matriarch who welcomed debate about her decisions. Nevertheless, as Owlheart took a break — standing to pass her dung a little way away from the others — Silverhair summoned up the courage to speak to her.

Owlheart was evidently weary already from her work, and her pink tongue protruded from her mouth.

"You’re thirsty," said Silverhair.

"Yes. A paradox, isn’t it? — that the work to find water is making me thirstier than ever."

"Matriarch, Foxeye is still weak, Croptail is weaning and vulnerable to the wolves, Wolfnose can barely walk. The digging is exhausting all of us…"

The Matriarch’s great jaw ceased its fore-and-back motion. "You’re right," she said.

"…What?"

"We’re in no fit state to have set off on an expedition like this. That’s what you’re leading up to, isn’t it? But I wonder if you realize what peril we are in, little Silverhair. Where water vanishes, sanity soon follows. That’s what the Cycle teaches. Thirst maddens us. Soon, without water, we would turn on each other… I have to avoid that at all costs, for we would be destroyed.

"Perhaps if we had stayed where we were, the thaw might have come to us before we all died of thirst. But that was not my judgment," Owlheart growled. "And that is the essence of being Matriarch, Silverhair. Sometimes there are no good choices: only a series of bad ones."

"And so we are forced to stake all our lives on the bounty of a seephole," Silverhair protested.

"The art of traveling is to pick the least dangerous path." That was another line from the Cycle, a teaching of the great Matriarch, Ganesha the Wise.

Owlheart turned away, evidently intent on resuming her interrupted feeding.

But still Silverhair wasn’t done. She blurted, "Maybe the old ways aren’t the right ways anymore."

Owlheart snorted. "Have you been talking to Lop-ear again?"

Silverhair was indignant. "I don’t need Lop-ear to tell me how to think."

"The defiant one, aren’t you? Tell me what has brought on this sudden doubt."

Silverhair spoke to the Matriarch again of the monster she had encountered on the ice floe. "So you see, if there is such a strange creature in the world, who knows what else there is to find? The world is changing. Anyone can see that. It’s why the winters are warmer, why the good grass and shrubs are harder to find. But maybe there’s some good for us in all this. If we only go searching — listen with open ears — we might discover—"

Owlheart cut her off with a slap of her trunk, hard enough to sting. "Listen to me carefully. There is nothing for us in what you saw at the coast — nothing but misery and pain and death. Do you understand?"

"Won’t you even tell me what it means?"

"We won’t talk of this again, Silverhair," said Owlheart, and she turned her massive back.

There was a commotion at Silverhair’s feet. Gloomy, frustrated, she looked down. She saw a little animated bundle of orange hair, smelled the warm cloying aroma of milk. It was Sunfire. The calf trotted over to the Matriarch’s fresh dung and began to poke into the warm, salty goodies with her trunk. Soon she was totally absorbed. Silverhair, watching fondly, wished she could be like that again, trotting after her own concerns, in a state of blissful, unmarked innocence.

Eggtusk came up. His giant, inward-curving tusks loomed over her, silhouetted against the sky. For a while he walked with her.

She saw that they had become isolated from the rest of the Family. And with a flash of intuition, she saw why he had approached her. "Eggtusk—"

"What?"

"The thing I saw on the ice floe, in the south. You know what it is, don’t you?"

He regarded her. His words, coming deep from the hollow of his chest, were coupled with the unnatural stillness of his great head. It made her feel small and weak.

"Listen to me very carefully," he said. "Owlheart is right. You must not go there again. And pray to Kilukpuk that your monster did not recognize you, that it does not track you here."

"Why? It looked weaker than a wolf cub."

"Perhaps it did," said Eggtusk sadly. "But that little beast was stronger than you, stronger than me — than all of us put together. It was the beast which the Cycle tells us can never be fought."

"You mean—"

"It was a Lost, little one. It was a Lost, on our Island. Now do you see?" Eggtusk seemed to be trembling, and that struck a deep dread into Silverhair’s heart, for she had never seen the great Eggtusk afraid of anything before…

Snagtooth screamed.

"Circle!" snapped the Matriarch.

Almost without thinking, Silverhair found herself joining the others in a tight circle around Snagtooth, with the calves cowering inside and the adults arrayed on the outside, their tusks and trunks pointing outward, huge and intimidating, ready to beat off any predator or threat.

But Silverhair knew there were no predators here — nobody, in fact, but Snagtooth herself.

Snagtooth raised her head from the scraped-out hole. Her right tusk was snapped off, almost at the root where it was embedded in her face. Instead of the smooth spiral of ivory she had carried before, there was now only a broken stump, its edge rimmed by jagged, bone-like fragments. A dark fluid dripped from the tusk’s hollow core; it was pulp, the living core of the tusk. The skin around the tusk root was ripped and bleeding heavily.

Each of the mammoths felt the pain of the break as if it were their own. Sunfire, the infant, squealed in horror and burrowed under her mother’s skirt of hair.

Eggtusk lowered his trunk and reached into the hole in the ground. With some effort, he pulled out the rest of the broken tusk. "She trapped it under a boulder that was frozen in the ground," he said. "Simple as that. By Kilukpuk’s hairy anus, what a terrible thing. You always were too impatient, Snagtooth—"

Snagtooth howled. With tears coursing down the hair on her face, she made to charge him, like a Bull in musth, with her one remaining tusk.