The Industry of Souls

by Booth, Martin

  ‘What do you think that is, comrades? I shall tell you. It is the remnant of the largest mammal ever to roam the land. What you are looking at, comrades, is the last two metres of the right tusk of a female hairy mammoth.’

  With that, he snapped the torch off with all the showmanship of a ringmaster in the Russian State Circus.

  * * *

  We were reluctant to retire to our beds that night. The freedom of being able to loll about the stove without being jostled by the blatnye and our fellow zeks was one to savour as long as possible. Somehow, even our rations tasted better.

  For long periods, we did not speak. The oil lamps glimmered and, way out on the dark landscape, an Arctic fox barked intermittently, sounding like an old man with a rough cough.

  ‘At least it’s not a satellite with a strontium-90 payload,’ Avel observed, putting down his latest chess piece, a bishop he had started shaping from a lump of anthracite he had carefully selected for its consistent density from the fuel box and polished with a square of discarded cloth he had discovered under his bunk.

  ‘What’re they after, though?’ Ylli pondered, ever suspicious of the seemingly most innocuous motives of officialdom. ‘I mean, what can you learn of use from a dead elephant?’

  ‘This isn’t just an exercise in scientific progress,’ Kostya answered, ‘not just a search for knowledge. It’s for the glory of the USSR. It’s a piece of jingoistic oneupmanship. The next time Solovyov goes to an international symposium, he’ll stand up and declare, “We in the Soviet Union have dug up a mammoth.” The Americans will get cross. They’ll start searching Alaska like crazy. You know of the Space Race. What we are doing is contributing to the Mammoth Race.’

  ‘That may be true. Probably is,’ Titian concurred, ‘but they’ll find much of use. For example, what the animal ate.’

  ‘Who cares what a dead elephant ate ten thousand years ago!’ Dmitri retorted.

  ‘From its diet,’ Titian began to expound, the academic in him coming to the fore, ‘we can tell what the environment was like, what plants grew here, what the climate was like…’

  I let my mind wander for a moment, losing the thread of their conversation. It was several minutes before I was jolted back to the present by Kirill holding out the pot of coffee which had been simmering on the stove plate.

  ‘What are you thinking, Shurik?’ he asked as he refilled my mug.

  ‘I was wondering,’ I replied, ‘if in ten thousand years, someone else will come along over the tundra and dig me up: and I was trying to guess what conclusions they might draw from their find.’

  Kirill laughed quietly and ran his eye disapprovingly up and down me.

  ‘Judging by you, Shurik, they’ll have a pretty poor opinion of modern man. Dressed in grimy clothes, with lice in what little hair he has not shaved off, crabs on his bollocks, dirt under his fingernails with a mulch of cabbage and potato in his guts.’

  ‘With coffee,’ I added, raising my mug in thanks and sipping from it.

  ‘That’ll confuse them,’ Avel said. ‘A shitty diet with a luxury tropical plant added to it.’

  ‘This all pre-supposes you’ll be buried just under the surface,’ Dmitri remarked. ‘What if you buy it half a kilometre down on Gallery D.’

  ‘D for Dzerzhinsky, first Chief of the Cheka,’ Kirill butted in.

  ‘Or they chuck you in a pit of quicklime?’ Kostya added.

  ‘In that case,’ Dmitri said, ‘the secret of your belly and your balls will be safe for eternity.’

  Avel opened the door on the stove. The heat of the fire seared out. I could feel it burning my face. He tossed in some anthracite, first checking for any useful pieces he might carve, and slammed the door shut with his foot.

  ‘They’ll learn nothing of the truth,’ Titian said after a few moments, holding his hands out to the stove which, now the anthracite was catching, was beginning to glow a dull orange around the firebox. ‘Nothing of the real history of this place. Of us. All they will have to judge us by will be a few artefacts which they will interpret in the light of their own time. If they have no prison camps, how will they know of life here, now? They cannot. History is a lie. It never happened. We only think it happened as we believe it did.’

  ‘And what of books?’ Ylli argued.

  ‘Books rot,’ I said.

  ‘Or can be burned,’ Avel added.

  ‘What does it matter? History is written by winners, not losers,’ Titian remarked. ‘You don’t read history books filled with defeats and failures. Only victories and successes.’

  Dmitri leaned back, his chair creaking as he tipped it onto its rear legs.

  ‘History. Death. Quicklime. Winners and losers. Who gives a shit!’ he rebuked us. ‘We’re the losers. History’s fucked us up good and proper. And who cares if we go into a pit of acid or the incinerator at the top of shaft K – for Khruschev, King of the KGB. Listen: three men are walking through the countryside. It’s a sunny day. One’s called Titian, one’s called Ylli, one’s called Shurik.’

  He paused and scanned his assembled audience, grinned and winked. Kirill and I exchanged looks: Dmitri, ever indomitable, ever laughing when the odds were long or the dice loaded.

  ‘They talk of this and that,’ he started. ‘Rounding a corner in the road, they come across a field of sheep. One of the sheep has seen sweet, new grass on the side of the road and stuck its head through the fence to eat it. But it’s got its forequarters stuck between two posts. The three of them stop and gaze at the sheep. “I wish that was Tatania Alexandrovna, the farmer’s wife,” says the first one, wistfully. “No,” exclaims the second with a dreamy look in his eyes, “I wish it was Ekaterina Vasilyevna, the nurse at the clinic.” “I wish it was dark,” says the third.’

  To punctuate the punch line, he slapped his hands together. His palms cracked like a pistol shot.

  ‘Who’s who?’ Ylli asked after our chuckling had subsided.

  Dmitri grinned again and said urbanely, ‘My friend, which one would you like to be?’

  For a while longer, we sat about the stove, laughing and talking and listening to Dmitri as the Arctic fox wandered off, its barking fading away. Ahead of the others, I lay on my bunk and tugged the blanket up to my chin, the last I heard being Avel’s chuckle and Dmitri’s voice before I drifted off into a sleep which, for the first night in more years than I could recall, was utterly without dreams.

  * * *

  The first day, we dug an oblong trench on the top of the bank, six metres by four and down almost as far as the carcass. The next day, excavation began in earnest.

  Our spades and pick-axes put aside, we were handed triangular bricklayer’s trowels with which we were instructed not to dig but to scrape the soil back, bit by bit. It was frozen solid but, as soon as it was opened to the air, it became friable and crumbled quite easily: it was like digging in compacted crushed ice. Dr. Solovyov and his colleague, Dr. Nedelko, stood over us every moment we were at our toil, guiding us, watching the ground as we edged, centimetre by centimetre, down to the mammoth. Even the guards and the two expedition staff – Spasskiy, the half-track driver and a cook-cum-jack-of-all-trades called Fedin – assembled at the edge of the trench to observe developments.

  Halfway through the second day, the southerly wind picked up. Nedelko studied his thermometer.

  ‘We need ice,’ he ordered Fedin. ‘Get to it.’

  ‘Ice?’ Ylli repeated incredulously from the bottom of the trench. ‘The dirt down here’s frozen solid.’

  ‘But as you uncover it, comrade,’ Solovyov explained, somewhat impatiently, ‘it may thaw. That we cannot allow. The mammoth must stay well below zero at all times.’

  In one of the supply tents there was an ice-making machine. Fedin started it up. A black puff of diesel scarred the sky before it reached the top of the river bank to be diffused by the wind. It seemed a gross and cynical violation of the ancient landscape to so pollute it and for the reason of making ice in one of the coldest
places on the planet.

  At around noon, I was first to expose the mammoth. The beast was lying horizontally on its side and I uncovered it at a point midway between its legs and about halfway down its body from the spine. Everyone crowded round at my discovery.

  ‘Give me your trowel,’ Solovyov ordered. I stood up and handed it to him whereupon he knelt where I had been and commenced carefully scraping away at the soil to ratify that what I had revealed was, in fact, mammoth and not something else.

  ‘That’s it,’ he confirmed after a few minutes. ‘You’re all more or less down to it. Go very slowly from here on. A millimetre at a time. No clumsy digging, no hurrying.’

  We continued scraping. Soon, every one of us had our own patch of rock hard carcass before us. The skin was leathery in appearance, rough and covered in a thick layer of bristly hairs. Over about an hour, I uncovered an area fifty centimetres square. At last, Solovyov called a halt and crouched beside us.

  ‘So, comrades,’ he said, ‘what do you think of it?’ He was unable to contain his ebullience, had to share it, even with prisoners.

  ‘Remarkable,’ I admitted. ‘How old is it?’

  ‘Around 22,000 years. Soil samples taken from the bank during the summer suggest that age when subject to carbon dating.’

  ‘How did it die?’ Kirill asked.

  ‘That is what we want to know,’ Nedelko replied. ‘We have found other mammoths in the Soviet Union. In that respect, this one is not unique. Indeed, this is number 30 something. But the others have all died from obvious natural causes. The last I excavated in Poluostrov Taimyr had got stuck in a tar pit. The one before that, on Ostrov Komsomolets, was crushed by a fall of rocks from a cliff. But this one…’

  ‘What’s so special about this one, comrade doctor?’ Dmitri asked.

  ‘This one,’ Solovyov answered, standing up and looking down at the areas of exposed skin, ‘was not crushed by stone, or drowned in a pond, or sucked into a tar pit. It is, from its size, not a fully mature adult so we doubt it died of old age. It might be diseased, in which case we may learn why the species went extinct, or it might have died in a fight with other mammoths.’

  ‘But that assumption,’ Nedelko cut in, ‘is not likely. We know from studies of modern elephants that whilst they do fight from time to time, they rarely fight to the death.’

  ‘So?’ Ylli said.

  ‘So think,’ prompted Solovyov curtly. He was clearly exasperated by our ignorance or lack of imagination. ‘How do animals die – especially land animals – if they do not succumb to disease, die of senility or have an accident?’

  We stood for a moment puzzling the scientists’ quandary: then the possibility dawned on us.

  ‘How will you tell, comrade doctor?’ Kirill asked at length.

  ‘Tell what?’ Ylli said, who had not yet arrived at our deduction.

  ‘Tell if it was hunted,’ I told him.

  ‘A bloody great mammoth like that!’ Ylli retorted. ‘By what? A sabre-toothed tiger would have a problem.’

  ‘Perhaps there are spear wounds,’ Solovyov said quietly, answering Kirill’s initial question and ignoring Ylli’s importunate outburst. ‘Perhaps we shall find arrowheads. Axe marks. Who knows?’

  Even Ylli was silent now as we all stared at the square of exposed prehistoric creature.

  Avel’s voice was not much above a whisper. ‘So we’re not the first poor sods to slave away up here,’ he said.

  ‘Internal exile goes back a long way,’ mused Titian.

  The sun went down and the air chilled. Fedin piled crushed ice over the carcass as a precaution and we retreated to our tent. We were, I remember, subdued that night. The wonder of uncovering the mammoth was somehow diminished by the thought that we were not just touching an extinct creature but that we were, through it, possibly in tactile communication with humanoids who had lived out their lives in these barren wastes long before we were sentenced to join them.

  For three more days, we worked on the mammoth. As more and more of it was unearthed, the more astounding became our discovery. The creature was almost perfectly preserved. It might have been an unbutchered carcass hanging in a cold store. Although somewhat desiccated, the flesh was firm, the hairs of the shaggy coat pliable and the toe nails, when we reached the end of the first leg, were as polished as cow’s horn. It might have been dead twenty-two months, not twenty-two millennia.

  Despite being frozen, on the fifth day it started to give off an odour. It was not unpleasant, not the pungent perfume of putrefaction, but a delicate animal scent such as one might come across in a stable or byre, a mixture of bestial sweat, masticated vegetation and steaming dung.

  By the end of day six, we had uncovered the entire right side of the mammoth, one of its tusks bending up into the air like an exposed root. The only part of its anatomy which seemed to be damaged beyond reconstitution was its eye which had collapsed. Now half exposed, the two scientists started their work of investigating the creature’s demise. Using butchery saws and sharp knives, they began to open the carcass along a line of incision running from behind its ear to the inside of the rear leg.

  At first, they slit through the skin which they folded back or sliced off. The subcutaneous layers of fat were yellow, the colour of tallow or bees’-wax. Beneath that, the muscle tissue was dark red, almost black, striated and shot through with streaks of light grey gristle. This was cut away in blocks and stored in insulated boxes of ice. When Nedelko finally made an incision into the body cavity, the smell we had experienced increased tenfold. As the two men tunnelled into the carcass, samples from internal organs were taken – the lungs like huge grey sacks of stiff india-rubber foam, the liver the colour of ebony, the heart a maroon black, the intestines a dull military olive, the stomach layered with veins. All the time they worked, crushed ice was piled onto the mammoth. When it melted or was crushed under our boots, it became tinged with the delicate dark scarlet of the creature’s blood.

  All the while, the southerly wind kept air temperatures only a few degrees below zero. Every evening, Nedelko spent twenty minutes at the radio transmitter in the half-track, conversing with the meteorologists, confirming that the weather was not going to change. At night, we could hear the ice on the river shifting, expanding and contracting with eerie creaks and screams.

  With the excavation finished, for it was decided not to attempt to dig out beneath the carcass, we were set to other tasks. Titian and I were put in charge of storing samples in bottles of formaldehyde or methyl alcohol, labelling them and putting them in compartmentalised boxes for the journey back to civilisation. Kirill and Avel were responsible for carrying the samples to us from the excavation and ensuring we knew what they were. Ylli was set the task of helping Fedin keep up the supply of crushed ice whilst Dmitri was instructed to remove the exposed tusk and saw off four of the teeth, leaving them in situ in the jaw bone. Kostya, meanwhile, assisted with the actual dissection, holding back sections of flesh, dumping the gurry in a pile a hundred metres off.

  At last, in the middle of day nine, Nedelko received a radio message that the winter was on its way back with a vengeance, driving the high pressure back south. Solovyov declared the investigation was to draw to a close. They had cut right through to the left side, taken out most of the viscera in the front two-thirds of the carcass and were satisfied that they had sufficient samples to keep them busy for some months.

  We stood around the edge of what we no longer saw as a palæontological trench but the grave of an awesome beast and gazed down upon the mutilated body. None of us spoke. It was a solemn moment. The low Arctic sun shone in our faces, the ground hard under our feet. The wind carried a vague hint of the threatening resumption of winter.

  ‘What’s going to happen to it now?’ Kostya said, breaking our silence.

  Solovyov replied, ‘You’re going to re-bury it in ice and soil. If our study of the samples turns up anything puzzling, we may need to return for more. As for the detritus we have dumped
over there,’ he pointed to the heap of intestines and organs, ‘we shall incinerate it. Spasskiy,’ he turned to the half-track driver, ‘get a jerry can of gasoline.’

  When the heap of orts was thoroughly soaked in petrol, Solovyov ran a trail back a safe distance and, striking a match, tossed it onto the ground. We watched as the flames raced towards the pile and exploded. A dense cloud of steam and oil billowed into the sky. The odour of burning flesh drifted over to us to taint our nostrils.

  ‘We never found if it was hunted or not, comrade doctor,’ Kirill remarked as Solovyov and his colleague returned to the excavation site.

  ‘It would seem not,’ Solovyov said. ‘We found no indications and there were no internal injuries. Not that I expected any. You would be hard put to bring down such a beast with a Kalashnikov, never mind a bone club and a wooden spear. Of course, the left side might show injury.’

  ‘To kill it outright would have been beyond primitive man’s abilities,’ Nedelko added. ‘They couldn’t bring such a creature down in one. They would have to wound it severely and follow it until it bled to death. That would probably mean hitting it from all sides. And the right was undamaged. Current thinking has it that when man hunted the mammoth, he killed it by driving it into a pit.’

  Once more, we looked down on the carcass in the trench. Fedin was already starting to dump ice on the creature’s forequarters.

  ‘I want about twenty centimetres of ice over the whole thing,’ Solovyov ordered, ‘just in case. When you’ve done that, start shovelling the earth. But don’t throw it down. You’re not burying it but protecting it. Let the soil fall gently from your spades. We don’t want it damaged.’

  With that, he and Nedelko headed back towards the tents, deep in conversation. They were already planning their laboratory research programme.

  ‘Well, you just going to stand there?’ Fedin asked sarcastically. ‘You heard him. Come on and fetch ice.’

  Ylli and Dmitri slid down the bank and followed Fedin en route for the ice-maker.