The Boy at the End of the World Read Online Free PDF

drew closer, Fisher began to see them differently. They weren’t just things that a lost people had built. They were places where people had lived. And maybe lived still.
    He was absorbed in these thoughts when he nearly tripped over a bone. It was huge, a few feet long, and thick as the trunk of a medium-sized tree. Fisher’s brain asked three questions:
    1. What can I make with it?
    2. What kind of animal does it belong to?
    3. What killed it?
    Motioning for Click to be quiet, he padded ahead, his senses sharp now. More bones littered the forest floor. They were scattered, probably by hungry scavengers, but Fisher could tell they belonged to more than one individual animal.
    Flies fed on sticky blood. Some of the bones displayed scorch marks. Whatever had befallen them had happened recently.
    Fisher gripped his spear and crouched, scanning ahead and peering up the slopes along the stream. He saw and heard nothing capable of inflicting this kind of damage on such large beasts.
    And then, with near silence, the largest living creature he had ever seen came from the shadows behind the trees on the other side of the stream. It locked eyes with Fisher, and Fisher’s breath caught in his throat.

CHAPTER   6
    The tops of the creature’s broad, hunched shoulders came up to Fisher’s chest. Four thick legs supported its bulk. Wrinkled, gray-brown skin showed through its patchy scrub of brown fur. And where its nose should have been hung a great hoselike thing, swaying near the ground like a relaxed arm.
    The animal resembled the dead elephants he’d seen in the Ark, but this creature wasn’t quite an elephant. Its head and lumpy shoulders were wrong, and its ears were just tiny flaps. But what else could it be? Fisher stared at its legs, and then at the sticky, scorched bones on the forest floor. It had to be related to the dead creatures.
    No, not just dead.
    Killed.
    â€œWhat are you?” Fisher whispered.
    The animal snuffled.
    â€œI believe it is a mammoth,” said Click, coming up beside Fisher. “A juvenile pygmy mammoth, to be specific.”
    â€œAnd the bones?”
    Click whirred a few seconds. “Adult mammoth remains, yes.”
    Fisher drew his eyes from the mammoth long enough to glance at the sky. Those scorch marks made him think that whatever had killed the mammoths was the same thing that destroyed his birthing place.
    Fisher tightened his grip on his spear. “Were the mammoths from the Ark?”
    â€œNo,” Click said. “The species went extinct many hundreds of thousands of years ago. Even before the rise and fall of human civilization.”
    When every individual of a kind of animal was dead, the species was extinct. Extinct meant big failure.
    But this creature was so very alive. Fisher could smell its pungent animal scent from across the stream. He could hear its breath as its chest ballooned and shrank. And its warm brown eyes were extraordinary. The mammoth’s stare bore into Fisher, as if it was thinking about him and trying to figure him out as much as Fisher was trying to figure it out.
    Fisher knew he should kill the mammoth now. Big and powerful-looking, it was clearly the stronger animal. If it chose to attack, it would trample him without effort. It would impale him on its curving tusks.
    And there was a lot of meat on the mammoth. A lot of protein. Fisher could feed on it for weeks.
    Yes, kill it now , thought Fisher, before it kills me . That’s what survival meant.
    The mammoth made another loud snuffle before dipping its trunk into the stream. Transfixed, Fisher watched it shoot water into its mouth.
    Fisher would have to work quickly: a sharp spear thrust to its heart, or where he guessed its heart was. If he was wrong, he’d just wound the animal, make it angry.
    Fisher watched. The sun inched up the sky as the morning wore on. The mammoth used its tusks to feed, scraping up grasses and roots from the forest floor.