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MAMMOTH

John Varley

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.

Sure enough, on that fine day in what would be August, they came into a land bursting with

green shrubs and grass and trees with tasty leaves just waiting to be pulled down by the clever trunks

of the mammoths.

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.

Warburton hated helicopters. And he hated large helicopters even more than he hated small

ones. The one he was sitting in now was a Sikorsky HB-53F, the civilian version of the military Sea

Stallion, probably the largest passenger-carrying chopper outside of Russia. It could be configured to

carry fifty soldiers with full combat gear. This one had only two rows of seats bolted to the floor up in

the front, the rest of the cavernous interior was empty. With so little cargo the Sikorsky's range was

enormous, more than enough to make it from Churchill, where the Air Canada flight had dumped him,

to the site known to only a handful of people as Mammoth Seven.

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.

"Now, I know what your first reaction is going to be," Rostov said. "It was my first reaction, too.

You're going to think this is some kind of joke."

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 risks 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.

But maybe it could be done, and that was why orders had come from Mr. Christian to

concentrate on the rear of the giant corpse, to gain access to the testicles. Or, as Christian had put it

in a phone call to Rostov that Warburton had overheard, "I want that bull's balls by next Monday,

Doctor, or I'll find somebody else to dig 'em out."

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?

His mind was racing now. He worked for Howard Christian, who was a complex man of many

interests, but none of them exceeded his interest in money, so Warburton immediately was thinking of

ways to turn this into a lot of cash. A mummified Stone Age man? Good money to be made, no

question. Get National Geographic out here, have them document the removal, show the film on

Discovery Channel or PBS.

"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?"

They all shook their heads.

"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 something 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!

Life was good for the mammoth children, too. Mammoth mothers loved their children and took

care of them for a long time, just as human mothers do. Mammoth children were also looked after

and protected by all the other grown-up members of the herd.

Life was good... but there was an awkward age for mammoths, just as there is for children,

known as adolescence. At about the age of fifteen a female mammoth was no longer a child, but not

really an adult yet, either.

At that age a female mammoth's thoughts would start to turn to male mammoths, to falling in

love, and to having babies.

But mammoth society was arranged according to what scientists call a social hierarchy, or

what chicken farmers call a pecking order. That means that one mammoth was on top of the

hierarchy—Big Mama—one was in second place, one in third place, and so on.

And that means somebody was on the bottom. That summer it was a seventeen-year-old female

named Temba.

6

MATTHEW Wright sat in his aluminum canoe and tried to think like a trout.

He was on Clear Lake, some dozen or so miles south of Mount Hood, in Oregon. He had been

told to relax. Take it easy. Take a few months off, find a hobby, something to take your mind off your

work. Because, frankly, Matt, people have been remarking about some of your behavior. No, you

haven't stripped naked and painted yourself blue and run through the Student Union shouting about

the end of the world, but you have been acting... well, a little unusual.

Matthew didn't precisely remember who it was that first suggested trout fishing as a suitable

avocation for a scientist on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

"Breakdown? Breakdown?" he muttered. "A long, long ways from a breakdown. I saw A

Beautiful Mind, too. That was a breakdown. All I was having was panic attacks."

One of Matthew's colleagues had commented, after seeing some of his preparations for his

future hobby, that if Matt had decided to take up snowboarding, step one would have been to

redesign snow, from the molecular level upward, and one day we'd all wake up to find that snow was

half as cold and twice as slippery as it had been before. Matthew Wright was just that kind of guy, the

kind who always starts from basics and goes logically from there.

Step one, in trout fishing, was to understand trout. How does a trout experience the universe?

What does he see? What does he think?

To find out, Matt first went to Safeway and bought a trout, which he then dissected. He learned

a lot, including the fact that fish had hard, clear, spherical lenses in the middle of their eyes.

He read what others had learned about trout fishing. Where did they like to hide? What times of

day, what water temperature, what atmospheric conditions made the difference between fish that

were biting and fish that sulked in deep pools?

Using all the data he had collected he wrote a computer program, a virtual trout, in which he

could adjust twenty-seven variables. After a long series of runs on the computer he had charts of

optimum conditions. He could then cast a virtual fly into his program, and see if his cyber-trout was

interested enough to bite.

After a few weeks he bought a metal canoe, a twenty-five-foot trailer, a tackle box for his

specialized flies, and a rod and reel. He set out into the wilderness along a road that used to be part of

the Oregon Trail, only in reverse, feeling pleasantly like William Clark or Meriwether Lewis.

At Clear Lake he launched his canoe and paddled out to the middle of the lovely little body of

water. He opened his laptop and lowered a thermometer into the water, consulted a dandy little

handheld weather station from the Oregon Scientific Company, and entered all the resulting data into

his computer. The result immediately appeared on the screen: lure 14. He removed that lure—a gaudy

one with two long red feathers and a bit of Christmas tree tinsel, one of his favorites—from the tackle

box and tied it to the end of the clear nylon line, and prepared to make his first cast.

He figured that, if he did catch a trout, it would have cost him no more than a few thousand

dollars per pound. But that wasn't the point, was it? He was doing this to relax, and he had to admit,

just rowing out to the center of the lake was relaxing. Matt was a city boy, not used to such silence, to

trees so green and thick, to the sweet smell of the mountain air.

He waved the line back and forth over his head as he'd seen casters do in one of the videos he

studied, letting out more and more line. Then he cast it out before him.

The hook caught in the shoulder of his REI canvas fisherman's vest, barely missing his ear. The

length of line he'd carefully paid out fell down all around him, like spider silk.

"Story of my life," he muttered. "Great on theory, poor on execution."

He was still trying to untangle himself when he heard the sound of an approaching helicopter. He

waited while the noisy machine turned abruptly and hovered over the middle of the lake. He could just

make out someone in the back looking at him through a big pair of binoculars. Then the chopper flew

off to the east, toward where Matt knew there was a clearing large enough for a helicopter to land.

He stowed his rod and reel and started paddling for shore.

The helicopter's engine had died by the time he reached shore, and as he pulled the boat up on

the sand, a large, balding, powerfully built man in an expensive-looking gray suit was picking his way

through the low shrubs and patches of mud that surrounded the shallow lake. Matt started toward

him, indifferent to the mud on his L.L. Bean heavy-duty fishing boots.

"You must be the guy I talked to on the phone, Mr. Warburton," Matt said. "And I'm still not

interested."

"Be that as it may," the man said, stopping a few yards from Matt, "I have to make my pitch.

You hung up on me."

"Then pitch. I can give you five minutes. As you can see, I'm pretty busy."

Warburton looked momentarily confused. Then he shrugged it off.

"I spoke to some of your colleagues at the university, and it seems you're not that interested in

money. You already have your full professorship. So it's a problem, since everybody I ask about

finding the top man in the country concerning the physics of time immediately tells me it's Matthew

Wright. No second place."

"Then you do have a problem," Matt said.

"I am prepared to offer you your own private lab with a research budget of ten million dollars

yearly. No more faculty committees to satisfy, no pressure to publish, no agenda, no hindrance at all

to exploring in any direction you choose. After you've addressed the job we're hiring you for, of

course."

"I already have most of that," Matt said. "And the project would be...?"

"As I said on the phone, I can't tell you that until you've signed a secrecy agreement. This would

be in effect whether or not you took the job. We are prepared to pay you one hundred thousand

dollars simply to go with me this afternoon and examine certain artifacts that have come into the

possession of the company I work for. Then you take the job or you don't take it; the hundred grand

is yours either way."

Matt was going to take the job. He had known he would take it from the moment he hooked his

jacket, before Warburton's helicopter even landed. But there was no sense jumping the gun, nor in

giving up his negotiating advantage.

"We're not talking about the Company, are we? As in the Central Intelligence—"

"No, I can tell you that much. It's a private company."

"And what did you say the salary would be?" He laughed at the expression on Warburton's face.

"Who told you I don't need money, anyway? Everybody needs money. That's why they call it

money."

"I believe it was Professor Wellburn."

"Of course. Old Wellybelly has hated me since I got the Hawking Chair. I'd like a salary of...

two million dollars a year."

Warburton, who had been authorized to offer another ten million, tried to look as if the demand

was a bitter pill to swallow. After a suitable time frowning, he nodded.

"Done. I have a man aboard who will pack up your gear and drive your—"

John Varley - Mammoth

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