…Silverhair… Silverhair…

A mammoth stood before her, tugging at her trunk.

She pulled back impatiently. "Go away," she mumbled. She had had enough of meddling ghosts.

But this mammoth was small, and it seemed to hop about before her, touching her trunk and mouth and tusks. Silverhair, is it really you? Silverhair… Silverhair…

"Silverhair."

It was her nephew. Croptail. And beyond him she could see the great boulder shape of Owlheart, a cloud of flesh and fur and tusk.

She could smell them. They were real. Relief flooded her, and a great weakness fell on her, making her tremble.

She looked around, meaning to warn Owlheart about the strange, upright-walking animal. But for now, it had vanished.

Foxeye stroked her back and touched her mouth and trunk, and brought her food and water. Owlheart tended her wounds, stripping off the mud Silverhair had plastered there, washing the deepest of the cuts and covering them once more with fresh mud. She laid her trunk against Silverhair’s belly hair, listening to the small life that was growing within. Even Croptail helped, in his clumsy way.

But the little one, Sunfire, was too young even to remember her aunt; the calf stood a few paces away from this battered, bloody stranger, her eyes wide as the Moon.

Later, Silverhair would marvel at Owlheart’s patience. The Matriarch must have been bursting with questions. Yet, as the sun completed many cycles in the sky, Owlheart allowed Silverhair to reserve all her energy for recovery.

Silverhair tried to understand what had happened to her on the long walk home, but even as she tried to recall fragments of it, they would slip away, like bees from a flower.

She did wonder, though, why there hadn’t been a fourth ghost out there helping her: a young Bull with a damaged ear…

At last Owlheart came to her.

"You know you’ve been lucky. A couple of those wounds on your legs were down to the very bone. But now you’re healing. Kilukpuk must be watching over you, child."

Silverhair raised her trunk wearily. "I wish she’d watch a bit more carefully, then."

"How much do you remember?"

"Everything — I think — until those Lost captured me and tied my legs to the stakes. After that it gets a little blurred. Until Snagtooth…"

"Start at the beginning."

And so, in shards and fragments, Silverhair told the Matriarch her story.

When she was done, Owlheart was grim. "It is just as it says in the Cycle. It was like this in the time of Longtusk, when the Lost would wait for us to die, then eat our flesh, and shelter from the rain in caves made of our skin, and burn our bones for warmth. And they will not stop there. They will take more and more, their twisted hunger never sated."

"Then what should we do?" Owlheart raised her trunk and sniffed the air. "For a long time we have been sheltered, here on this Island, where few Lost ever came. But now they know we are here, we can only flee."

"Flee? But where?"

Owlheart turned her face away from the sun, and the ice-laden wind whipped at her fur.

"North," she said. "We must go north, as mammoths always have."

The migration began the next day.

Owlheart allowed many stops, for feeding and resting and passing dung; and when the midnight sun rolled along the horizon, they slept. But when the mammoths moved, Owlheart had them sweep across the tundra at a handsome pace. They ran in the thin warmth of the noon sun, and they ran in the long shadows of midnight.

Foxeye shepherded her calf Sunfire, coaxing her to feed and pass dung and sleep. Croptail strayed farther afield. He would dash ahead of the rest, pawing at the grass and rock with his trunk, and run in wide circles around the group as if to deter any wolves. Owlheart caught Silverhair’s eye, and an unspoken message passed between the Cows. He’s following his instinct. What he’s doing is the right thing for a young Bull. But keep an eye on him; he’s no Eggtusk yet.

It was the height of summer now. The air above the endless bogs hummed with millions of gnats, midges, mosquitoes. The mosquitoes would hover in smoke-like dancing columns before homing in on a mammoth’s body heat with remarkable accuracy, until their victim was smothered by an extremely uncomfortable cloak of insect life. Blackflies were almost as much of a pest as mosquitoes, for they seemed able to penetrate the most dense layers of fur in their search for exposed skin — not just the soft parts, but even the harder skin of Silverhair’s feet. They would stab their mouthparts through the skin to suck out the blood that sustained them, and the poison they injected into Silverhair’s skin to keep the blood flowing freely caused swelling and intolerable itching.

But even the mosquitoes and flies were but a minor irritant to Silverhair, as her strength gradually returned. Mammoths are not designed to be still. Silverhair found that the hours of easy movement, her muscles strengthening and her wounds healing, smoothed the pain out of her body. Even her digestion improved as the steady, normal flow of food and water though her body was restored; soon her dung passed easily and was rich and thick once more.

And as they ran, it was as if more ghosts clustered around her: this time not just two or three or four mammoths, but whole Families, young and old, Bulls and calves, running together as smoothly as the grass of the tundra ripples in the wind. It seemed to Silverhair that their rumbles were merging, sinking into the ground, as if the whole plain undulated with the mammoths’ greeting calls.

But then the ghosts would fade, and Silverhair would be left alone with her diminished Family: just three Cows, one immature Bull, and a suckling infant, where once millions of mammoths had roamed across the great plains.

And so, once again, the Family approached the Mountains at the End of the World.

Sheets of hard black volcanic rock thrust out of the soil. No trees grew here; nothing lived but straggling patches of grass and lichen that clung to the frost-cracked rocks. The last of the soil was frozen hard, as if winter never left this place, and the rock itself was slick with ice.

At last they reached the lower slopes of the Mountains themselves. Rock rose above them, dwarfing even Owlheart, the tallest of the mammoths; Silverhair could see how the rock face had been carved and shattered by frost. The clamor of ice and shattering rock was deafening for the mammoths, making it impossible for them to sense what might lie beyond.

They walked in the lee of the Mountains, until they came to a great glacier. It lay in a valley gouged through the rock, just as a mammoth’s tongue lies in her jawbone. The ice at the glacier’s snout lay in graying, broken heaps across the frozen ground. Beyond, to the north, the glacier was a ribbon of dazzling white, a frozen river that disappeared into the mist of the Mountains; and it seemed to draw the staring Silverhair with it.

Foxeye said, "We shouldn’t be here. This isn’t a place for mammoths. The Cycle says so…"

"There is a way through the Mountains," said Owlheart.

"How do you know?" asked Foxeye.

Owlheart said, "Wolfnose — my Matriarch — once told me of a time when she was but a calf, and the Matriarch then had memories of long before… There was a Bull calf with more curiosity than sense. Rather like you, Silverhair. He went wandering off by himself. He followed a glacier into the Mountains, and he said it broke right through the Mountains to the northern side. Although he didn’t follow it to its end…"

Suddenly Owlheart’s audacious plan was clear to Silverhair. She stood before the glacier, awed. "So this is a path broken through the Mountains by the ice. Just as mammoths will break a path through a forest."