Mammoth

by John Varley

  Mammoth

  John Varley

  John Varley

  Mammoth

  This book is dedicated to John and Doris Varley.

  My father, John E. Varley, died on January 13, 2005, at the age of 79, in Big Spring, Texas.

  He was a very good man who led a good life and raised two good daughters, and me. He hated the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, the New York Yankees, and the Texas A&M Aggies, and loved most other Texas teams. He lived to see the Red Sox humiliate the Yankees, and a lot of people didn't.

  FROM "LITTLE FUZZY, A CHILD OF THE ICE AGE"

  Once upon a time in what would one day come to be known as the month of August, many, many years ago, in a place that would one day be known as Manitoba, a herd of mammoths came over the low hills to the south and into a gentle green valley rich with the scent of water.

  There were twenty or twenty-five mammoths in the herd. Maybe thirty. No one is sure. What we do know is that the herd was made up of females of all ages and males younger than fifteen years old.

  Mammoths did not live in families like we do, with a daddy and a mommy and their children, and maybe a granny and a grandpa. Mammoths were like our elephants today, and their families were bunches of sisters and aunts and nieces and young male mammoths.

  When the males reached a certain age they became troublesome, bothering the females all the time... just like boys do today! When this happened, the older female mammoths ganged up on the youngster and pushed him out of the herd so he wouldn't cause so much trouble. The young male would then find his way to a herd of other males.

  The leader of this herd was the oldest and largest female, what scientists call the alpha cow. We'll call her Big Mama.

  Big Mama was old, maybe forty-five, maybe fifty; no one knows for sure because mammoths didn't have calendars and didn't write down their birthdays like we do, so they didn't know how old they were. But Big Mama had seen many winters and many summers, and she had been the alpha cow for many years. She was the wisest and strongest member of the herd, by far, and all the other females respected her without question.

  It had been a hard summer. The places that would one day be called the Mississippi and Missouri river valleys had not seen any rain in many months but there had been plenty of lightning. The prairies were dry and there were many fires. Big animals like mammoths and bison and woolly rhinoceros had to keep moving to find enough food and water. Big Mama had not led her herd this far north in many years, but her memory was good and she kept them moving.

  But others were there before them. They were mammoths, but they were strange, completely covered with hair.

  To understand why this should be strange to Big Mama and her herd, you should know that there was more than one kind of mammoth, all those years ago. (There were also cousins of mammoths, called mastodons, but we don't need to worry about them.)

  There were people back then, and they hunted the mammoths, but we don't know what they called them. Today, we call the two types of mammoth that lived in North America the woolly mammoth and the Columbian mammoth.

  The woolly mammoths stayed mostly in the north, in what we now call Canada.

  The Columbian mammoths stayed mostly in the south, sometimes as far south as what we now call Mexico!

  But there were places where you could have found both kinds of mammoth.

  Mammoths sometimes traveled great distances in search of food. Scientists call this migration. When woolly mammoths and Columbian mammoths met they usually didn't get involved with one another, any more than they concerned themselves with the giant ground sloths or woolly rhinos or giant bison they shared the plains with. You can see a scene very much like this in Africa today, with elephants and rhinos and giraffes and wildebeests grazing in the same areas peacefully, ignoring each other.

  Most of the time the woolly mammoths and Columbian mammoths ignored each other, too.

  But sometimes they didn't.

  5

  [e-book note: Yes, this novel starts with chapter 5! Chapters 2, 3, and 4 come a bit later in the book, with chapter 1 at the very end. Please don't "fix" this, because while pretty odd, it is what the author intended.]

  THE helicopter flew low over a landscape as barren as any to be found on planet Earth. This was Nunavut. It wasn't a province and hardly a territory though they called it that. As far as Warburton was concerned they could give it all back to the Eskimos—which was exactly what Canada had done, back in 1999. Nunavut was 810,000 square miles of nothing much, one-fifth of Canada's land area. Warburton looked out his frosty window and was amazed to see a polar bear loping along a few hundred feet below him. Hunting? Fleeing the helicopter? He was tempted to ask the little Inuit with the brown and weather-beaten face, but realized he could never hope to deal with the man's name. He was introduced to Warburton at the Churchill airport as Charlie Charttinirpaaq, which sounded like a man with a bad cough and a severe case of the hiccups.

  It was damn cold inside, but it didn't seem to bother Charlie. The little Inuit had pushed the hood of his parka back, revealing straight black hair that looked to have been groomed with rendered walrus blubber. His gnarled brown hands were bare. His coat had a handmade and hard-used look to it, but his boots looked like L.L. Beans. He seemed to feel Warburton's gaze, looked across the helicopter and smiled, revealing widely spaced but strong, brown teeth. Didn't they chew reindeer hides to soften them? Or was that just the women? Warburton's own outfit, purchased at Abercrombie & Fitch during his layover in Toronto and guaranteed by the salesman to protect him from a polar blizzard, was providing him no more warmth than a Banlon shirt.

  He looked out his window and saw the first spot of color he had seen for more than five hundred miles. The heavily insulated modular dwellings that had been flown in dangling from the cargo hook of this very helicopter were almost the same color as the snow. But a short distance from them was a large half-cylinder tent, like a Quonset hut, made of blue and red canvas panels, strongly anchored with yellow poly ropes, near the bottom of a large, bare hill. This was Mammoth Seven.

  Warburton saw people emerge from one of the trailers. One looked up and waved. Then they were setting down on a big red X in the middle of a red circle that had been painted on the snow. Warburton and Charlie unfastened their belts and waited for the pilot, another Inuit, to open the door and lower the ramp.

  Once outside, Warburton realized he hadn't really been cold at all inside the damn helicopter. This, now this was cold.

  There were two people hurrying out to meet him, all but indistinguishable in their puffed-up nylon and Gore-Tex outfits, hoods over their heads, eyes hidden by big blue sunglasses against the icy glare. Warburton followed them toward the big pressurized tent looming like some high-tech circus big top a hundred feet up the side of the hill. They trudged up the path and entered through a zipper in its side.

  Inside, hoods off, Warburton recognized Dr. Rostov, formerly of the St. Petersburg Museum of Natural History, now the head of the Mammoth Seven recovery. They were in a square room about the size of a hotel elevator, which he knew from visits to previous mammoth sites to be a sort of air lock. The tent was held up by internal pressure, so the outer and inner doors of the room could not be opened at the same time.

  Rostov started to open the inner door, then cleared his throat. Warburton realized the man was nervous.

  Rostov had just a trace of an accent. He looked the part of a university professor, with an unkempt mane of white hair and a goatee that was more salt and pepper. But his face was almost as weathered as Charlie's, and he had an alarming red nose shaped like a potato. Though his hands were now clad in fur-lined gloves, Warburton knew the doctor had lost the tips of several fingers to frostbite. Being a mammoth hunter in the twenty-first century didn't entail the same ri
sks as it had for our mammoth-hunting ancestors, but it was no picnic, and it took you to climates that could kill just as surely as a wounded and enraged mammoth.

  "It never entered my mind that you would bring me up here as part of a joke, Doctor," Warburton said. Now that the green light had come on over the inner door, Rostov ushered the group inside. The interior was well lit, and not nearly as warm as Warburton had hoped, but at least it was out of the wind.

  "We keep it heated to only about four degrees below zero to protect the specimen," Rostov said. Warburton translated from the Canadian centigrade scale: high to mid twenties.

  In the center of the tent was the excavation into the side of the hill, a rectangular area about twenty by twenty feet. It was well lit by floodlights on tripods. The crew had dug out the mammoth's head and back and most of one side, but those parts were covered with protective cloth. Christian wanted this frozen creature intact, and that meant excavation was a painfully deliberate process, starting with small ice axes, moving to hammers and chisels, getting down to warm brushes and toothpicks before the hairy pelt was reached. And even then, when a section of hide was bared, it was refrozen in distilled water. It would be absurd for this creature to have survived for ten, fifteen thousand years, perfectly preserved to the point that its flesh was probably still edible, and then to have it rot in a few days of digging. The plan was to free the creature from the permafrost and then quickly airlift it to a large refrigerated facility where further actions could be contemplated at leisure.

  "Seven is by far the best and the largest primigenius we have yet investigated," Rostov said. "In fact, it is so large I have begun to wonder if it might be an actual hybrid, possibly with Mammuthus imperiori, which was quite a bit larger than primigenius. The flesh is in wonderful shape. The nuclei we've tested so far have yielded promising DNA, though of course we have yet to reach the sexual organs."

  Warburton had learned a lot about mammoths in the last four years. He always had to learn things to keep up with his boss's newest manias. He knew Mammuthus primigenius was the Latin name for the woolly mammoth. He'd learned a bit about cloning, too, though he had no aptitude for science. But the basic facts were easy enough to absorb. If one wished to re-create a mammoth, one needed some DNA that was reasonably intact. No perfect specimens had ever been discovered, but as the years went by, the criteria for "reasonably intact" had steadily lowered, as new techniques for reassembling genetic material had been discovered and elaborated. Four years ago he had dismissed the whole project as highly unlikely. It hadn't been the first time his boss had pursued a chimera.

  The best mammoth cells to use for cloning would be an egg from a female or a sperm cell from a male. The resulting embryo could then be implanted in a female elephant—not an easy project in itself, as the reproductive cycle of elephants was complicated and not completely understood.

  This was the following Wednesday, and Warburton presumed he was about to be shown something astonishing concerning mammoth reproduction. It wasn't a prospect he relished, but he'd undertaken tasks much less appetizing in his work for Christian.

  One of the things he had not learned was the precise location of mammoth testicles, but he had assumed they were pretty much where they would be on other quadrupeds, like horses, sheep, cattle, and probably elephants, though he had never actually seen an elephant's family jewels. But Rostov didn't take him all the way around the massive beast, but to its left side. The mammoth was sitting more or less upright, with its legs folded under it.

  Now Rostov indicated a lump by the hind legs that did not fit with any picture of a mammoth Warburton could come up with, unless its left hind leg was twisted grotesquely out to one side. The lump was covered with the same protective material that concealed the rest of the mammoth.

  Warburton looked at Rostov, waiting, and Rostov sighed and pulled back the cover.

  The lump was a man.

  He was huddled tight against the side of the mammoth, still partly buried. Only his head and torso had been chipped out of the ice. Most of his face and part of his upper arm had been eaten away, gnawed at by animals. Where Warburton could see the chest, the skin was yellow and shriveled and looked like wax.

  Warburton looked at Rostov again.

  "No joke," the man assured him, with a helpless shrug.

  "How old?"

  "Around twelve thousand years," Rostov said.

  What was left of the man's hair was long and wispy and gray. There were scraps of gray beard lying on his chest. Because of the tissue shrinkage and what Warburton could only think of as an extreme case of freezer burn, it was hard to estimate his age, but he got the impression the man was old. Many of his teeth were missing, or blackened, or brown stumps. But that didn't prove much, did it? Without dental care a young man's teeth could rot out, too, and he supposed the best dental care available where this man had come from was a whack in the mouth with a stone ax.

  "I am not an anthropologist," Rostov said. "What I can see of his clothing is consistent with what I know of the era."

  Warburton didn't think you'd need a Ph.D. to figure that out. What clothing he could see was made from fur and leather. What else would the man be wearing on a mammoth hunt? Spats and a school tie?

  "If you lean over just a bit," Rostov said, "you can just see the top of the head of the second person."

  Second person? Warburton leaned over the corpse—noting it smelled a little like the inside of his refrigerator when he returned from a long trip—and could just make out what might be the top of a human head through a thin rime of ice.

  "You're sure?"

  "Oh, yes. When we got this far we stopped and did a close-range sonogram scan. There is a second person between this one and the mammoth. It is somewhat smaller. Possibly a woman, or a child."

  Two people? Woman or child? Better and better, Warburton thought. Alley Oop and... what was her name? Ooma? Oona? The cartoon strip was a bit before his time, but he had to figure that a Stone Age couple was twice as interesting as a lone mammoth hunter. As for a man and his son or daughter, sheltering behind the massive corpse of a freshly killed woolly mammoth while a savage blizzard froze them solid... well, you couldn't do much better than that.

  And then, because he was a troubleshooter and not really in the business of turning out made-for-cable documentaries or television movies, he thought about what sort of troubles he might be called upon to shoot.

  When you got into the area of North American antiquities there was always the Indian question to consider. A lot of tribes considered the study of any old dead bones, much less a couple of more or less intact corpses, to be grave robbing. What's more, governments lately had begun agreeing with this, and museums were being forced to return bones for proper burial on tribal lands. What was the name of that ten-thousand-year-old skeleton they'd found in Oregon or Washington? Kennebunk Man, something like that? They'd hassled over that one for years. He made a mental note to find out what Canadian law had to say on the subject.

  For the first time, he noticed that the other man who had accompanied Rostov and himself into the pit had an Inuit look about him. Warburton looked at him, then at Charlie, and both of them were looking solemn. Could be a problem, definitely could be a problem.

  "How many people know about this?" Warburton demanded.

  "Just the five of us on the team, Mr. Christian and whoever he told, and you and whoever you told," Rostov replied. "Nobody else? None of you called home and talked about it?"

  "Here's what we do, then. Talk to no one. Not your mom, not your wife. If you think you might make a little money tipping off CNN or Hard Copy, forget about it. I promise you I will make it worth your while, you'll all be getting substantial bonuses. If, on the other hand, you do talk to someone, and I find out... well, Howard Christian has about forty billion dollars, and he could make your lives miserable in ways you can't even begin to imagine. Do you follow me?"

  Charlie and the other Inuit nodded. But Rostov clearly had some
thing else to say.

  "What's the problem?" Warburton asked.

  Rostov reached out and swept away a bit of cloth that had covered the frozen man's left forearm and hand. Warburton saw a gleam of metal. He leaned closer, and saw the man was wearing a wristwatch.

  FROM "LITTLE FUZZY, A CHILD OF THE ICE AGE"

  All those many long years ago, the life of a mammoth was not a bad one.

  Mammoths were the largest animals that walked on the land at that time. There were no predators that could kill them, except when they were very young, and mammoth mothers were very alert to the approach of a big sabertoothed tiger or a lion. (Oh, yes, there were lions in North America in that time, so many years ago! But they didn't bother mammoths.)

  Big Mama's herd were Columbian mammoths, and you may be surprised to learn that they were larger than the woolly mammoths who were their close relatives. They had hair, but it was shorter and lighter than woolly mammoth hair, and they didn't have as much of it. That was because they lived most of their lives in warmer climates, and they had lost the thick pelts their ancestors had. Scientists call this adaptation.

  They also had large ears, like present-day elephants. Woolly mammoths had very small ears.

  Woolly mammoths lived farther north, where it was colder. People think that because we call it the Ice Age, everything was covered with thick glaciers. It is true that vast ice sheets covered parts of North America, but animals as big as mammoths could not survive there. There wasn't enough to eat!

  But there were many places where not much snow fell during the year, and food could be found all the year round. We call these places tundras or steppes. This was the domain of the woolly mammoth.

  Life was not bad for the mammoth females, but for some it was better than for others.

  Life was best of all for Big Mama. She had been the leader, or matriarch, of the herd as long as she could remember, and she had a long memory! None of her sisters or daughters or cousins or nieces or grandchildren ever gave her any trouble. When a male mammoth reached the troublesome age she drove him out. A few whacks from her trunk were always enough to do the trick!