Alaska (5 page)

Although Matriarch had made no objection when this old bull first appeared on the scene to care for her daughters three at that time she grew restless when he stayed beyond his welcome period, and by various ways, such as nudging him away from the better grass, she indicated that he must leave the females and their children. When he refused to comply, she grew actively angry, but she could do nothing more than show her feelings, because he weighed half again as much as she, his tusks were enormous, and he was so much taller that he simply overwhelmed her in both size and aggressiveness.

So she had to be content with making noises and venting her displeasure by rapidly thrashing her trunk about.

But one day as she was eying this old fellow, she saw him roughly shove aside a young mother who was instructing her yearling daughter, and this would have been acceptable, for bulls traditionally commandeered the better feeding grounds, but on this occasion it looked to Matriarch as if the bull had also abused the yearling, and this she could not tolerate. With a high, piercing scream she lunged right at the intruder, disregarding his superior size and fighting ability for he could not have bred Matriarch's daughters had he not been able to fend off other less able bulls who had also wished to do so and she was so intent on protecting her young, that she drove the much bigger animal back several paces.

But he, with his greater strength and immense crossing tusks, quickly asserted his authority, and in a punishing counterattack, slashed at her with such great force that he broke her right tusk at about the halfway mark. For the rest of her life she would be an aging mammoth cow with a tusk and a half. Unbalanced, awkward-looking when compared to her sisters, she moved across the steppe with the short, jagged tusk, and the loss of its balancing weight caused her to compensate by tilting her massive head slightly to the right, as if 28

she were peeking with her squinty little eyes at something that others could not see.

She had never been a lovely creature or even a graceful one. She did not have the impressive lines of her elephant forebears, for she was a kind of lumbering triangle, apex at the top of her high-domed head, base along the ground where her feet hit, a vertical coming down in front of her face and trunk, and most distinctive, a long, sloping, ugly drop from high forequarters to a dwarfed rear end. And then, as if to make her appearance almost formless, her entire body was covered with long and sometimes matted hair. If she was a walking triangle, she was also an ambulating shaggy rug, and even the dignity that could have come from her big, graceful tusks was lost because of the broken right one.

True, she lacked grace, but her passionate love for any younger mammoth who fell under her protection endowed her with a nobility of manner, and this huge and awkward creature lent honor to the concept of animal motherhood.

SHE HAD AT HER DISPOSAL IN THESE YEARS WHEN THE ICE

age was at its maximum, a somewhat more hospitable terrain on which to feed her family than the harsher one the mastodons had known. It was still a four-part terrain: arctic desert at the north,, perpetually frozen tundra, steppe rich with grasses, strip with enough trees to be called a woodland or even a forest. However, it was the steppe that had grown in size, until its mixture of edible grasses and nutritious willow shrubs provided ample forage for the mammoths who roamed it.

Indeed, the expanded area proved so hospitable to these huge, lumbering creatures that later scientists who would try to reconstruct what life in Alaska was like twenty-eight thousand years before would give the terrain the descriptive name 'the Mammoth Steppe,'

and no better could be devised, for this was the great, brooding steppe, trapped within the ice castle, which enabled the slope-backed mammoths to exist in large numbers. In these centuries it looked as if the mammoths, along with the caribou and antelope, would always be the major occupiers of the steppe named after them.

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 29

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

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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 31

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 d
ie.
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

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began to disintegrate, continued life on the steppe would be impossible.

Matriarch now had four big matching pairs, but since 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 sabertooth 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.