E )   M A Y , 1 9 4 3   -   A   M A M M O T H ,   I N D I G I R K A   R I V E R

During his time spent recuperating in chu’uhk, Peter recorded the following remarkable story: “The villagers tell me the weather has been unseasonably warm, swelling the river with all manner of detritus unthawed from the mountains to the north. They take me down to see for myself. The stream is tearing away the soft sodden bank like chaff, so that it is dangerous to go near the brink. On a lull in the conversation we hear, under our feet, a sudden gurgling and movement in the water under the bank. One of the men gives a shout and points to a singular shapeless mass which is rising and falling in the swirling stream - a huge black horrible object bobbed up out of the water. We see a colossal elephant’s head, armed with mighty tusks, its long trunk waving uncannily in the water, as though seeking something it had lost. Breathless with astonishment, I behold the monster hardly twelve feet away, with the whites of his half-open eyes showing. ‘A mammoth! A mammoth!’ someone shouts.”

In Siberia, mammoths were often seen as a food source, particularly during desperate times, and sometimes even by those studying them! The following story, told by a paleontologist imprisoned for claiming that this most Soviet of extinct beasts had, in fact, originated in North America, illustrates the point: “We heard of a discovery of prehistoric fauna found in a frozen stream. Apparently the expedition consisted of scientists, escaped from the gulag that had contained them for so long but in a state of complete famishment. Coming upon the frozen stream, a naturalist in the bunch identified the animal they had discovered in the ice as a specimen of the now-extinct dwarf mastodon family; however, having no way to preserve the find and overcome by hunger, they broke the ice that encased the beast and devoured it with relish on the spot, saving only the bones for later study.” (see plate 16)