Mammoth (Dawn of Mammals Book 5) Read online

  “Are you up?” a voice said. Laina.

  “I’m awake,” said Claire. Others mumbled sleepily.

  “It’s forty-five minutes before dawn by my watch. And we have a moon to work by,” Laina said.

  Claire’s said, “Okay, let’s get going.”

  Hannah had taken to hanging her flashlight from a stick imbedded at the top of the walls of the temporary shelters. She sat up, groped for it and managed to flick it on.

  They all donned their capes, used as blankets for the night. “Leave the rest in the shelter,” Claire said. “We need to travel light for the hunt. Weapons, mittens, cape, rope, knives. Your water bottle in case it takes all day to do this, especially you three who’ll be in front.”

  They crawled out and got themselves organized in no time. Hannah clipped the flashlight back on her pack so it’d charge all day but left the pack leaning against the shelter. She had some first aid stuff in the pack, too, the dull needle, thread, and the healing reeds from the last place. None of it would do a thing for someone who was stepped on by an angry mammoth, but she felt better for tucking it in her pocket.

  The moon was just on the fat side of a quarter, waning, she now knew from Rex’s explanation of the phases. It cast light over the snowscape. She could even see the mammoths, standing. Were they on the move? The humans closed on the herd, and not a single mammoth moved, not even a twitch. They must sleep standing up. She hoped they didn’t set a nighttime watch as humans did, with one of them staring at the approaching humans right now.

  Claire stopped everyone a bit more than a quarter mile from the mammoths. Ted draped himself with the antelope hide and walked on. When he reached the herd, he moved in closer than Hannah would have had the courage to approach. Every few steps, he settled down and let the hide cover him completely. He waited to see if the mammoths were disturbed. When they weren’t, he moved another few steps in.

  Claire said, “Laina, Rex, go on, move ahead of us. But not nearly as close as Ted is. Just be ready to go.”

  “Maybe we should kill one now, before they wake up,” Laina said.

  “If you could do it in one throw, I’d say yes. But I doubt you can. Injured, it’ll call out. The others will wake. The three of you will be in trouble. I want one to be apart from the others before you attack, if possible. But you go on and decide. We’ll back you up, no matter what the three of you do. It’s all going to be your call now—yours and Ted’s.”

  Laina and Rex crept up on the herd. They hadn’t moved thirty steps before one of the mammoths began to stir. Rex stopped walking but Laina did not. After a moment’s hesitation, Rex hurried to catch up to her.

  “Far enough, far enough,” Dixie murmured, when they had gotten a hundred yards ahead.

  Soon after she said that, Laina came to the same decision. Rex’s posture suggested he was happy to stop. Ted held himself still, far ahead of them, hunkered under the hide. Hannah wondered if he was terrified or excited or what he might be feeling.

  The rest of them back here were tense, the feeling almost palpable in the waiting group of four. Even Jodi, who had been distracted by thoughts of Zach all along, was now intently focused on the scene ahead.

  The mammoths all woke, and then they began what seemed to be a morning ritual, moving slowly among one another, touching trunks, bumping shoulders. Taking a head count? Who knew. They might be as smart as elephants of the 21st century, or they might be twice as smart. The youngsters began to romp with each other. The little one let out a sound that was almost a giggle, or between a giggle and a whale song, a happy sound. The young ones ranged out from the herd a couple hundred yards, but on the far side, giving Laina and Rex no chance to try and kill one.

  As the mammoths lumbered around, Hannah was happy it wasn’t her up there. It was scary enough back here.

  The herd began to move, in a tight grouping at first. They seemed to have some destination in mind, as they didn’t stop at all to browse for nearly two hours. Ted kept moving in their wake, scuttling along under his hide cover. Laina and Rex kept back at a distance calculated to not bother the mammoths. The final group of four humans trailed, safely remote.

  Two hours in, with the sun several degrees above the horizon, the animals began to browse. As they continued to, they drifted away from one another, but not far enough for the hunting plan to go into action. They needed one animal isolated enough that they could have a minute or two of trying to kill it before the others saw, turned, and charged.

  The baby mammoth soon grew tired of browsing. Its mom had let it nurse for five minutes but had shut that off. The baby left its mother to try to entice the other youngster into playing, but that one was old enough that browsing held more interest. The baby darted around, feinting at its potential playmate, darting back, but the older youngster kept its head down, eating what its own mother dug up for it. The baby finally gave up, its posture showing its dejection. Bored, it went searching for something else to entertain it.

  It wandered off to the side, to the left of the group, but still ahead of the rearmost herd members. Ted crawled over in the baby’s direction. He hadn’t gotten more than a few feet when his movement drew the eye of the bored baby mammoth. It trotted right toward him. Ted stopped, and then he scuttled back, toward Laina and Rex, trying to draw the curious little mammoth with him.

  It worked.

  Laina had a spear already loaded in her atlatl. She watched, arm raised. The baby slowed as it approached Ted, cautious now. When it was about two adult mammoth paces from Ted, Laina let loose the spear. It flew straight and true, hitting the chest of the baby mammoth and sinking in.

  Ted leapt up, shedding the hide, and ran right to the mammoth’s side. Instead of throwing his first spear, he was close enough to ram it right into the side of the beast. It was taller than Ted by half, and had the baby but known it, it only needed to turn and step on him, and Ted would no longer be a threat. Ted darted back, well aware of that danger.

  Rather than defending itself, the baby squealed in pain. The baby turned, just as Laina managed to launch another spear. The spear caught it as it turned, in the opposite side as Ted’s spear. Ted ran in again and punched a fourth spear through the mammoth’s belly. Again it screamed.

  Hannah’s eyes sought the mother. It was already lumbering toward the hunters. It raised its head and bugled an alarm. All the mammoths had turned, and two split off to follow her.

  They picked up speed.

  “Move!” Hannah yelled at the hunting team, waving her arms.

  They heard her, and Rex said, “Split up,” to the others. Ted couldn’t resist jabbing one more spear into the baby mammoth, but by the time he let go of it, Laina was running hard, to the left, back the way she had come from but angled away from the other humans.

  “What should we do?” Jodi said. “Go in?”

  “No,” Claire said, her voice tight. “Three at risk are enough. In fact, we should back up.” But she made no move to.

  Ted ran to the right and into a low patch of ground. He must have hit some ice, for he slid about twelve yards. Ted being Ted, he not only kept his balance but managed to execute a turn as he slid and launched a final spear at the baby mammoth. It missed, but it was an impressive move.

  Rex wasn’t moving fast at all. He was backpedaling, straight toward the group. He now had Laina’s atlatl in his hands and was loading it. With the net? Hannah thought so.

  The mother came up to the baby and nosed it. Blood trickled down its side. Its mother made a distressed sound, its trunk moving over its offspring’s flanks. It found a spear and yanked it out. More blood poured out.

  Hannah heard a sound that made her turn. Dixie was crying, biting back sounds. Hannah went to her, hand out. “Dixie?”

  “That poor mama,” she said. “Poor baby.” And the tears poured down her face faster and faster. She bit her lips against making any noise. A choking sound escaped anyway.

  Hannah put her arm around Dixie’s shoulder and turned her a
way from the scene, but she craned her own head around to keep watching. One of the sentinel mammoths was going for Rex. Laina and Ted were both gaining distance from the herd, but it’d be several more minutes before they could run out of the range of the sprinting mammoths. As weak as she was from hunger, Hannah didn’t think the hunters could be better off. Would they have enough energy either to avoid a focused charge by the massive beasts? She feared for their lives.

  Rex stopped, raised the atlatl, aimed, and waited longer than Hannah would have been able to bear with an angry mammoth bearing down on her. He moved his arm in a smooth motion, as if testing his aim. Then his arm drew back a second time, and he let fly. The fishing net flew out, past the distressed mother and bleeding baby, and it deployed, a giant wing of twisted rope. It hit a charging mammoth in the chest, and Hannah thought at first it had failed in its aim, but as the net dropped, it did what obviously Rex had hoped it would. The fat forelegs tangled in the net, and the mammoth tripped.

  It fell down on two knees, and its momentum tried to send its hindquarters over its head. But physics wouldn’t allow for that much weight to be launched far off the ground. The back end twisted and fell with a thump they could hear. The mammoth tried fighting off the rope.

  And Rex was sprinting back in their direction.

  “We should scatter,” Claire said. “There’s still one up and running.” As she said this, Rex looked over his shoulder, saw the potential pursuit, and veered away from them.

  “No, stay still,” Claire amended. “Don’t draw attention to yourself and they might not know we’re here.”

  Dixie let out another sob, and Hannah tightened her grip on the shaking shoulders. “It’s okay, Dixie. Really. It’ll be okay.”

  But she could hear the frantic squeals of the baby mammoth and the panicked sounds of the mother just as well as Dixie could. There was no doubt of the emotion in those noises, that the beasts were feeling something much like humans would in the same situation. Hannah could see why Dixie would feel such empathy—though the pregnancy hormones might be boosting that feeling. Hannah herself felt a sting of sympathy for the mother mammoth, but she also felt hungry. More than hungry. On the verge of starvation. And that was stronger in Hannah’s heart, hardening it to the plight of mother and child.

  She wanted to eat. She needed to eat. And so did Dixie, and Dixie’s growing fetus, and everyone else in the group. Rex was outpacing the charging mammoth for now, and then Ted came into her line of sight, coming around in a big loop back toward Rex. None of the animals were even looking at Laina, who looked back over her shoulder, saw that was the case, and dropped like a rock, lying flat on her belly, going still. If Hannah hadn’t known she was there, she might have thought she was another rock in the landscape, or a long-dead animal.

  The charging mammoth closed the distance to Rex. Ted came up behind it. He stopped and heaved a spear, but it fell short.

  “I’m going to run,” Claire said.

  “For Rex?” Jodi said.

  “No, that way. Just try to give it more than one target to consider. You all stay still.” And with that, Claire went sprinting in yet another direction.

  Jodi muttered, “I feel so useless.”

  She had taken the sentiment right out of Hannah’s brain. All they were doing was watching while everyone else took on the risk.

  Ted yelled, but not his yelling or Claire’s sprinting or anything was deterring the mammoth from going after Rex.

  “I can’t just sit here,” Jodi said.

  “We don’t even have spears,” Hannah said, for the three attackers had taken them all. But she too wanted to run for Rex to try and help him.

  The mother mammoth let out a terrible sound, jerking Hannah’s attention back to her. As the cry faded, the baby mammoth fell to the ground. The mother screamed. There was no other word for the sound.

  It distracted the charging mammoth. Rex kept running. Ted turned and ran away again. He stooped and gathered up something—the fresh hide he had been wearing—and as the charging mammoth ran to the distraught mother, Ted flung the hide over himself again and made himself small beneath it.

  When it was clear no one was being pursued, everybody stopped where they were. Jodi, Dixie, and Hannah were the only grouping. The others were scattered over the landscape. Rex’s hands were on his thighs and he was bent over, probably trying to catch his breath. Claire stood still, halfway between Hannah and Rex.

  The animal that had been tripped up was still kicking and flailing at the net. Finally he broke enough of the ropes to be free of them. He lurched to his feet, stamping the front ones one by one, ridding himself of the last of the entanglement. He seemed fine, and none the worse for being tripped up. He walked over to the mother mammoth and touched her face with his trunk. Then he examined—Hannah had no better word for it—the downed baby. She thought she could see its sides moving. But it had stopped making noise.

  She was glad Nari wasn’t here to see this. There’d likely be two sobbing women. It was a pitiful sight, as the mammoth that had been chasing Rex joined its extended family. They touched each other, and they examined the baby. Their trunks on its body were like comforting hands, stroking it.

  It took a long time to die.

  Chapter 16

  Hannah was sitting, as everyone was now, when the first sentinel mammoth left the mother’s side. It returned to the core group, which had moved off, and touched every member. Communication? Comfort? Hard to say, but it was something, something so close to human behavior that it stirred more sympathy. It’d take a hard-hearted person not to be moved. Even near-starvation couldn’t dampen all of her empathy for the family’s loss.

  The second sentinel left the mother’s side, but the mother wouldn’t leave her baby. The little one was still now, its flanks not moving at all. She thought the sentinels leaving meant it was dead, but the mother did not leave. Noon came and went, and the afternoon wore on, and still it stood watch over the baby.

  Hannah said, “We’re going to have to overnight here at this rate.”

  “Might as well start a shelter,” Jodi said. “I won’t feel so useless if I do.”

  “We all will, you, me and Dixie.”

  “Here?”

  “Out of sight of them, I think. A bit farther back along our trail.”

  Dixie had stopped crying long ago, but she had remained quiet since then. Thinking, mourning, regretting—maybe all of those and more.

  “C’mon, Dixie. It’ll feel good to do something useful.”

  “I won’t help butcher it,” she said.

  “That’s fine. There are plenty of us for that job. Claire can find you something else useful to do.” Hannah didn’t add that they’d need Dixie to pull her share of the load of meat. There were hundreds of pounds of meat down there, and nearly three weeks left here in the ice age. They’d need it. Hannah distracted herself from her troubled feelings by doing more calorie calculations while she hiked back with the other women, finding a spot with deep snow and behind a pile of rocks. It was as protected a place as they were likely to find nearby.

  They set to digging a foundation and rolling snowballs for the walls of their shelter.

  “What if it’s too close to the mammoth herd?” Jodi said.

  “We’ll build another farther back, I guess,” Hannah said.

  “Wasted energy, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but maybe this one will be safe. They seem to have forgotten about us.”

  Claire walked up a half-hour later and joined in the work.

  Hannah said, “They didn’t see you moving?”

  “I don’t know that they see all that well this far,” Claire said. “I didn’t move steadily. Moved, stopped. Tried to look like a grazing animal. I started walking almost as soon as you did.”

  “I guess we should have thought of that too,” Hannah said.

  “They weren’t watching you at all,” Claire said. “I probably went overboard.”

  “Better safe t
han sorry. Everyone is okay?”

  “Probably cold. Ted less than the others, I’d imagine, with the hide over his head.”

  “The mother’s still standing over the dead one?”

  “Yeah. She’s not moving at all. She has to one day, right?”

  “Yeah. I suspect the herd won’t let her stay there long, even if she wants to. They need a lot of calories, being that big. They have to keep browsing, and that means moving on.”

  “I never felt bad about a hunt before.”

  “I was thinking the same thing. We never saw grief in the animals we killed before.”

  Jodi joined the conversation. “I’m glad it’s the last thing we’ll have to kill here.”

  Dixie said, “I’m sorry if you don’t like this, Claire, but I’m never killing a young animal again. Not a baby, not like that. I won’t be part of it.”

  “You won’t have to be,” Claire said, though her expression was perplexed. “If Laina gets the time jump right, we’ll be home in three weeks. The hardest hunt for food you’ll have to do is picking between McDonald’s and Dairy Queen.”

  Jodi said, “I don’t know. I might take up hunting. Bow hunting, maybe. That’s a thing, right?”

  “Yeah,” Claire said. “I guess my dad won’t be able to veto my hunting any more. I probably know more than he does in most ways.”

  “It might be different hunting deer that know about humans,” Hannah said. She grunted with the effort of rolling the last big snowball into place. “Not that I’m an expert on any of it.”

  “We’re all experts in a way. Laina seriously so. There aren’t many 21st century hunters, not in North America, who have her hours of trapping or hunting or tanning hides,” Claire said. “Maybe some native people way up in Canada do.”

  They continued talking about hunting in general as they worked. Dixie kept silent after she’d made her announcement. Hannah felt for her. She wondered if it was possible to explain to her in this condition that Hannah had felt much the same way about Garreth—protective, maternal—and that his death had made her flip out and punch Dixie. Perhaps it was best not to bring it up. And if she did bring it up, it should be only to apologize again, not to lecture or try to teach Dixie some lesson or excuse her own behavior.