Matriarch moved about the steppe as if it had been created for her use alone. It was hers, but she conceded that for a few weeks each summer she required the assistance of the great bulls who otherwise kept to themselves on their own feeding grounds.
But after the birth of the young she knew that the survival of the mammoths depended upon her, so it was she who chose the feeding grounds and gave the signal when her family must abandon grounds about to be depleted in a search for others more rich in foodstuffs.
A small herd of mammoths like the one she commanded might wander, in the course of a year, over more than four hundred miles, so she came to know large parts of the steppe, and in the pilgrimages she supervised she became familiar with two perplexities, which she never solved but to which she did accommodate. The richer parts of this steppe provided a variety of edible trees whose ancestors the vanished mastodons might have known larch, low willow, birch, alder but recently, in a few choice spots protected from gales and where water was available, a new kind of tree had made its tentative appearance, beautiful to see but poisonous to eat. It was especially tempting because it never lost its leaves, long needlelike affairs, but even in winter when the mammoths had little to eat they avoided it, because if they did eat the attractive needles they fell sick and sometimes died.
It was the largest of the trees, a spruce, and its distinctive aroma both attracted and repelled the mammoths. Matriarch was bewildered by the spruce, for although she dared not eat its needles, she noticed that the porcupines who shared these forests with her devoured the poisonous leaves with relish, and she often wondered why. What she did not notice was that while it was true that the porcupines did eat the needles, they climbed high in the trees before doing so. The spruce, just as clever in protecting itself as the animals that surrounded it, had devised a sagacious defensive strategy.
In its copious lower branches, which a voracious mammoth could have destroyed in a morning, the spruce concentrated a volatile oil which rendered its leaves unpalatable/
This meant that the high upper branches, which the mammoths could not reach even with their long trunks, remained palatable.
In the few places where the spruce trees did thrive, they figured in the second riddle.
From time to time during the long summers when the air was heavy and the grasses and low shrubs tinder-dry, a flash would appear in the heavens followed by a tremendous crashing sound, as if a thousand trees had fallen in one instant, and often thereafter fire would start in the grass, mysteriously, for no reason at all. Or some very tall spruce would be riven, as if a giant tusk had ripped it, and from its bark a wisp of smoke would issue, and then a little flame, and before long the entire forest would be ablaze and all the grassy steppe would erupt into flame.
At such moments, and Matriarch had survived six such fires, the mammoths had learned to head for the nearest river and submerge themselves to their eye-level, keeping their trunks above the water for air. For this reason lead animals, like Matriarch with her brood, tried always to know where the nearest water stood, and when fire exploded across their steppe they retreated to this refuge, for they had learned that if the fire ever completely surrounded them, escape would be improbable. Over the centuries a few daring bulls had broken through the fatal rim, and it was their experience which had taught the mammoths their strategy for survival.
Late one summer, when the land was especially dry, and darts of light and crashing sounds filled the air, Matriarch saw that fire had already started near a large stand of spruce trees, and she knew that before long the trees would burst forth in tremendous gusts of flame, trapping all living things, so with speed and force she herded her charges back to where she knew a river waited, but the fire spread so swiftly that it engulfed the trees before she could rush clear of them. Overhead she heard the oils in the trees explode, sending sparks down into the dry needles below. Soon both the crowns of the trees and the needled carpet below were aflame, and the mammoths faced death.
In this extremity, with acrid smoke tormenting her, Matriarch had to decide whether to lead her herd back out from among the trees or straight ahead toward the waiting river, and it could not be claimed that she reasoned: If I do turn back, the grass fire will soon entrap us. But she did make the right decision. Bellowing so that all could hear, she headed right for a wall of flame, broke through and found a clear path to the river, where her companions plunged into the saving water while the forest fire raged around them.
But now came the perplexing part, because Matriarch had learned that terrifying though the fire had been, she must not abandon this ravaged area, for fire was one of the best friends the mammoths had and she must now teach her young how to capitalize upon it. As soon as the actual flames abated and they would consume several hundred square miles before they died completely she led her charges back to the spot at which they had nearly lost their lives, and there she taught them how to use their tusks in stripping lengths of bark from the burned spruce trees. Now, purified by the fire which had driven off noxious oils, the spruce was not only edible but a positive delicacy, and the hungry mammoths gorged upon it. The bark had been toasted specifically for them.
When the fire was totally dead in all parts, Matriarch kept her herd close to the burned-over areas, for the mammoths had learned that rather quickly after such a conflagration, the roots of tenacious plants whose visible growth had been burned off sped the production of new shoots, thousands of them, and these were the finest food the mammoths ever found. What was even more important, ashes from the great fires fertilized the ground, making it more nutritious and more friable, so that young trees would grow with a vigor they would otherwise not have known. One of the best things that could happen to the Mammoth Steppe, with its mixture of trees and grass, was to have a periodic fire of great dimension, for in its aftermath, grasses, shrubs, trees and animals prospered.
It was puzzling that something as dangerous as fire, which Matriarch had barely escaped many times, should be the agency whereby she and her successors would grow strong.
She did not try to solve this riddle; she protected herself from the dangers and luxuriated in the rewards.
In these years some mammoths elected to return to the Asia they had known in their early years, but Matriarch had no inclination to join them. The Alaska which she now knew so well was a congenial place which she had made her own. To leave would be unthinkable.
But in her fiftieth year changes began to occur which sent tremors, vague intimations, to her minute brain, and instinct warned her that these changes were not only irreversible, but also a caution that the time might be approaching when she would feel driven to wander off, leaving her family behind, as she sought some quiet place in which to die. She had, of course, no sense of death, no comprehension that life ended, no premonition that she must one day abandon her family and the steppes on which she found such ease. But mammoths did die, and in doing so they followed an ancient ritual which commanded them to move apart, as if by this symbolism they turned over to their successors the familiar steppe, and its rivers, and its willow trees.
What had happened to signal this new awareness? Like other mammoths, Matriarch had been supplied at birth with a complex dental system which would provide her, over the long span of her life, with twelve enormous flat composite teeth in each jaw.
These twenty-four monstrous teeth did not appear in a mammoth's mouth all at one time, but this posed no difficulty; each tooth was so large that even one pair was adequate for chewing. At times as many as three pairs of these huge things might exist, and then chewing capacity was immense. But it did not remain this way for long, because as the years passed, each tooth moved irresistibly forward in the jaw, until it actually fell from the mouth, and when only the last two matching teeth remained in position, the mammoth sensed its days were numbered, because when the last pair began to disintegrate, continued life on the steppe would be impossible.
Matriarch now had four big matching pairs, but sinc
e she could feel them moving forward, she was aware that her time was limited.
WHEN THE MATING SEASON BEGAN, BULLS FROM FAR Distances started to arrive, but the old bull who had broken Matriarch's right tusk was still so powerful a fighter that he succeeded, as in past years, to defend his claim on her daughters. He had not, of course, returned to this family year after year, but on various occasions he had come back, more to a familiar area than to a particular group of females.
This year his courtship of Matriarch's daughters was a perfunctory affair, but his effect upon the older child of the younger daughter, a sturdy young bull but not yet mature enough to strike out on his own, was remarkable, for the young fellow, watching the robust performance of the old bull, felt vague stirrings. One morning, when the old bull was attending to a young female not of Matriarch's family, this young bull unexpectedly, and without any premeditation, made a lunge for her, whereupon the old bull fell into a tantrum and chastised the young upstart unmercifully, butting and slamming him with those extremely long horns that crossed at the tips.
Matriarch, seeing this and not entirely aware of what had occasioned the outburst, dashed once again at the old bull, but this time he repelled her easily, knocking her aside so that he could continue his courtship of the strange heifer. In time he left the herd, his duty done, and disappeared as always into the low hills footing the glacier. He would be seen no more for ten months, but he left behind not only six pregnant cows but also a very perplexed young bull, who within the year should be doing his own courting. However, long before this could take place, the young bull wandered into a stand of aspen trees near the great river, where one of the last saber-tooth cats to survive in Alaska waited in the cratch of a larch tree, and when the bull came within reach, the cat leaped down upon him, sinking those dreadful scimitar teeth deep into his neck.
The bull had no chance to defend himself; this first strike was mortal, but in his death agony he did release one powerful bellow that echoed across the steppe. Matriarch heard it, and although she knew the young bull to be of an age when he should be leaving the family, he was still under her care, and without hesitating, she galloped as fast as her awkward hair-covered body would permit, speeding directly toward the saber-tooth, who was crouching over its dead prey.
When she spotted it she knew instinctively that it was the most dangerous enemy on this steppe, and she knew it had the power to kill her, but her fury was so great that any thought of caution was submerged. One of the young mammoths for whom she was responsible had been attacked, and she knew but one response: to destroy the attacker if possible, and if not, to give her life in an attempt. So with a trumpeting cry of rage she rushed in her clumsy way at the saber-tooth, who easily evaded her.
But to its surprise she wheeled about with such frenzied determination that it had to leave the corpse on which it was about to feed, and as it did so it found itself backed against the trunk of a sturdy larch. Matriarch, seeing the cat in this position, threw her entire weight forward, endeavoring to pin it with her tusks or otherwise impede it.
Now the broken right tusk, big and blunt, proved an asset rather than a liability, for with it she did not merely puncture the saber-tooth, she crushed it against the tree, and as she felt her heavy tusk dig into its rib cage, she bore ahead, unmindful of what the fierce cat might do to her.
The stump had injured the saber-tooth, but despite its broken left ribs it retained control and darted away lest she strike again. But before the cat could muster its resources for a counterattack, she used her unbroken left tusk to batter it into the dust at the foot of the tree. Then, with a speed it could not anticipate or avoid, she raised her immense foot and stomped upon its chest.
Again and again, trumpeting the while, she beat down upon the mighty cat, collapsing its other ribs and even breaking off one of the long, splendid saber-teeth. Seeing blood spurting from one of its wounds, she became wild with fury, her shrieks increasing when she saw the inert body of her grandson, the young bull, lying in the grass.
Continuing in her mad stomping, she crushed the saber-tooth, and when her rage was assuaged she remained, whimpering, between the two dead bodies.
As in the case of her own destiny, she was not completely aware of what death was, but the entire elephant clan and its derivatives were perplexed by death, especially when it struck down a fellow creature with whom the mourner had been associated.
The young bull was dead, of that there could be no doubt, and in some vague way she realized that his wonderful potential was lost. He would not come courting in the summers ahead; he would fight no aging bulls to establish his authority; and he would sire no successors with the aid of Matriarch's daughters and granddaughters. A chain was broken, and for more than a day she stood guard over his body, as if she hoped to bring it back to life. But at the close of the second day she left the bodies, unaware that in all that time she had not once looked at the saber-tooth. It was her grandson who mattered, and he was dead.
Because his death occurred in late summer, with decomposition setting in immediately and with ravens and predators attacking the corpse, it was not fated that his body be frozen in mud for the edification of scientists scores of thousands of years later, but there was another death that occurred during the last days of autumn which had quite different consequences.
The old bull that had broken Matriarch's tusk, and had been a prime factor in the death of the young bull, strode away from the affair looking as if he had the strength to survive for many mating seasons to come. But the demands of this one had been heavy. He had run with more cows than usual and had been called upon to defend them against four or five lusty younger bulls who felt that their time to assume control had come. For an entire summer he had lusted and fought and eaten little, and now in late autumn his vital resources began to flag.
It began with dizziness as he climbed a bank leading up from the great river. He had made such treks repeatedly, but this time he faltered and almost fell against the muddy bank that impeded his progress. Then he lost the first of his remaining four teeth, and he was aware that two of the others were weakening. Even more serious was his indifference to the approaching winter, for normally he would have begun to eat extravagantly in order to build his reserves of fat against the cold days when snow fell. To ignore this imperative call of 'Feed thyself, for blizzards are at hand!' was to endanger his life, but that is what he did.
On the day of the first snowfall, a whipping wind blowing in from Asia and icicles of snow falling parallel to the earth, Matriarch and her five family members saw the old bull far in the distance, at what would later be known as the Birch Tree Site, his head lowered, his massive tusks resting on the ground, but they ignored him. Nor were they concerned about his safety; that was his problem and they knew he had many options from which to choose.
But when they saw him again, some days later, not moving toward a refuge or to a feeding ground, just standing there immobile, Matriarch, always the caring mother, started to move toward him to see if he was able to fend for himself. However, when he saw her intruding upon his satisfactory loneliness, he withdrew to protect it, not hurriedly, as he might have done in the old days, but laboriously, making sounds of protest at her presence. She did not force herself upon him, for she knew that old bulls like him preferred to be left alone, and she last saw him heading back toward the river.
Two days later, when thick snow was falling and Matriarch started edging her family toward the alder thickets in which they customarily took shelter during the long winters, her youngest granddaughter, an inquisitive animal, was off by herself exploring the banks of the river when she saw that the same bull who had spent much of the summer with them had fallen into a muddy crevice and was thrashing about, unable to extricate himself. Trumpeting a call for help, she alerted the others, and before long Matriarch, her daughters and her grandchildren were streaming toward the site of the accident.
When they arrived, the position of the old bull was so hop
eless, mired as he was in sticky mud, that Matriarch and her assistants were powerless to aid him. And as both the snow and the cold increased, they had to watch helplessly as the tired mammoth struggled vainly, trumpeting for aid and succumbing finally to the irresistible pull of the mud and the freezing cold. Before nightfall he was tightly frozen into his muddy grave, only the top of his bulbous head showing, and by morning that too was buried under snow. There he would remain, miraculously upright for the next twenty-eight thousand years, the spiritual guardian of the Birch Tree Site.
MATRIARCH, OBEDIENT TO IMPULSES THAT HAD ALWAYS animated the mammoth breed, remained by his grave for two days, but then, still puzzled by the fact of death, she forgot him completely, rejoined her family, and led them to one of the best spots in central Alaska for passing a long winter. It was an enclave at the western end of the valley which was fed by two streams, a small one that froze quickly and a much larger one that carried free water most of the winter. Here, protected from even the worst winds, she and her daughters and grandchildren remained motionless much of the time, conserving body warmth and slowing digestion of such food as they could find.
Now once more her broken tusk proved useful, for its rough, blunt end was effective in ripping the bark from birch trees whose leaves had long vanished, and it was also helpful in brushing away snow to reveal the grasses and herbs hiding below. She was not aware that she was trapped in a vast ice castle, for she had no desire to move either eastward into what would one day be Canada or southward to California. Her icy prison was enormous in size and she felt in no way penned in, but when the frozen ground began to thaw and the willows sent forth tentative shoots, she did become aware how she could not have explained that some great change had overtaken the refuge areas which she had for so many years dominated. Perhaps it was her acute sense of smell, or sounds never heard before, but regardless of how the message reached her, she knew that life on the Mammoth Steppe had been altered, and not for the better.