Eggtusk, startled, held his ground and, with a twist of his own mighty tusks, deflected her easily, without harming her.

Owlheart stepped between them angrily. "Enough. Leave her be, Eggtusk."

Eggtusk withdrew, growling.

Owlheart laid her trunk over Snagtooth’s neck, and stroked her mouth and eyes. "He was right, you know. Your teeth are brittle — why do you think you are called Snagtooth in the first place? — and a tusk is nothing but a giant tooth… The best thing to do is to freeze that stump, or otherwise the pulp will grow infected, and we will cake it with clay to stop the bleeding. You two," she said to Lop-ear and Silverhair. "Get on with your digging. It’s all the more important now."

She led Snagtooth away from the others.

With Lop-ear, Silverhair resumed her work, trying to ignore the splashes of tusk pulp and splinters of ivory that disfigured the ground.

At last — after hacking at such cost through a trunk’s length of permafrost — they broke through to seepwater. But the water was low and brackish, so thin it took long heartbeats for Silverhair to suck up as much as a trunkful.

The hole was too deep for the infants’ short trunks to reach the water, so Foxeye and Silverhair let water from their own trunks trickle into the mouths of the young ones. Sunfire was still learning to drink; she spilled more water than she swallowed.

Wolfnose could not bend so easily, and she too had difficulty reaching the water. But she refused any help, proudly; she insisted she had drunk enough by her own efforts, and walked stiffly away.

The mammoths drank as much as the seephole would offer them. But it wasn’t enough, and there was still no sign of the spring thaw.

"We have to go on," said Owlheart solemnly. "Farther west, to the land beneath the glaciers. There, at this time of year, meltwater will be found running over the land. That’s where we must go."

That was a land unknown to Silverhair — and a dangerous place, for sometimes the meltwater would come from the glaciers in great deluges that could carve out a new landscape, stranding or trapping unwary wanderers. That the Matriarch was prepared to take such a risk was a measure of the seriousness of the situation; nevertheless, Silverhair felt a prick of interest that she would be going somewhere new.

They slept before going on.

The short day was soon over. A hard Moon sailed into the sky, lighting up high clouds of ice. The silence of the Arctic night settled on the Family, a huge emptiness broken only by the mewling of Sunfire at her mother’s breast, and Snagtooth’s growled complaints at the pain of her shattered tusk.

Silverhair could feel the cold penetrate her guard hair and underwool, through her flesh to her bones. Perhaps, she thought, this is how it will feel to grow old.

The Moon was still rising when Owlheart roused them and told them it was time to proceed.

Cold, dry nights, lengthening days. Sometimes a dense gray fog would descend on the mammoths, wrapping them in obscurity. Nevertheless, the full summer was approaching. Each night the sun dipped to the horizon, becoming lost in the mist, but the sky grew no darker than a rich blue, speckled with stars.

There came a night when the sun did not set. By day it rolled along the horizon, distorted by refraction and mist; but even at midnight slivers of ruddy light were visible, casting shadows that crossed the land from horizon to horizon, and the sky was filled with a wan glow that lacked warmth but was sufficient to banish the stars. Silverhair knew that the axis of the planet had reached that point in its annual round where it was tipped toward the sun, and there would be no true darkness for a hundred days.

The land, here in the Island’s northern plain, rolled to the horizon with a sense of immensity. There was little snow or ice here; the wind blew too strongly and steadily for that. And it was a flat place. The sparse plants that clung to life — tough grasses resistant to both frost and drought, small shrubs like sagebrush, wormwood, even rhododendron — all grew low, with short branches and strong root systems to resist the scouring effects of the wind. Even the dwarf willows cowered against the ground, their branches sprawled over the rock, dug in.

When the wind picked up, it moaned through the sparse grass with an eerie intensity.

At last the Mountains at the End of the World hove into Silverhair’s view. In the low sunlight the upper slopes of the Mountains were bathed in a vibrant pink glow, which reflected down onto the slopes beneath where blue shadows pooled, the colors mixing to indigo and mauve.

As the land rose toward the Mountains, gathering like a great rocky wave, it became steadily more stony and barren. Here nothing grew save sickly colored lichen, useless for the mammoths to eat.

And the land showed the battle scars left by huge warring forces of the past: giant scratches in the rock, boulders and shattered scree thrown as if at random over the landscape, smooth-sided gouges cut into what soil remained. It was, rumbled Wolfnose, the mark of the ancient ice sheets that had once lain a mile thick over this land.

They approached a dark wall of spruce trees, unexpected so far north. Silverhair wondered if some outcropping of the Earth’s inner warmth was working here to sustain these trees. The Family was forced to push farther north, to skirt the trees and the barren land that surrounded them.

The light changed. It became strange: almost greenish in its unnaturally pale tinge. Looking up, Silverhair saw ice clouds scudding hard across the sky. A flock of ptarmigan in brilliant white plumage took off like a snow flurry and flew toward the Mountains. Their display calls echoed eerily from the rocky walls.

"Storm coming."

She turned, and found the bulk of Eggtusk alongside her.

"And that’s new," he growled, indicating the neck of forest ahead of them. "New since the last time the Family came this way."

"When was that?"

"Before you were born. Every year the forest pushes farther north, like pond scum on the great backside of Kilukpuk. Except that, unlike Kilukpuk, we can’t scrape the land clean on a rock! Bah."

Overhead, the greenish light was obscured by a layer of black, scudding clouds.

As the storm gathered they continued to skirt the forest, heading northeast, until they came to the fringe of the Mountains at the End of the World.

They walked past the eroded foothills of a mountain, which loomed above Silverhair. It was a severe black-brown cone, and glaciers were white ribbons wrapped around it. Yellow sunlight gleamed through the mountain’s deep, ice-cut valleys.

High above her there was a snow avalanche. It poured down the mountain in a mighty, drawn-out whisper, and for a while she was enveloped in dancing flakes. The wind increased, coming through the towering rock pinnacles that rose above her, a keening lament that resonated in her skull. A whir of ice splinters came scuttling across the rock shelf’s surface; with every further step she took, she crunched on crystals.

This was a noisy place. The cliff faces were alive with the crack of ice, the rustle and clatter of falling scree. Silverhair knew this was the voice of rock and ice, the frost’s slow reworking of the upraised landscape.

Her spirit was lifted. The violence of the land exhilarated her.

Such was the clamor of ice and rock and wind from this huge barrier that even with their acute hearing, Silverhair’s Family knew nothing of the land beyond the Mountains at the End of the World. Not even Longtusk himself had been able to glean the secrets of the lands that might lie to the north. Perhaps nothing lay beyond, nothing but mist and sky. But if this truly was the End of the World, Silverhair thought, there could be no better marker than these Mountains.