Alaska by James A. Michener Read Free Book Online

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    dominated the landscape long after the much larger mastodon had vanished. Like all other animals of the early period, the mastodon had been subject to attack by the ferocious sabertooth, but with the gradual extinction of that killer, the mammoth's only enemies were the lions and wolves that tried to steal young calves. Of course, when a mammoth grew old and feeble, packs of wolves could successfully chivvy it to death, but that was of no consequence, for if death had not come in that form, it would have in some other.
    Mammoths lived to fifty or sixty years, with an occasional tough customer surviving into its seventies, and to a marked degree it was the animal's nature of death that has accounted for its fame. On numerous occasions in Siberia, Alaska and Canada so numerous that statistical studies can be made mammoths of both sexes and all ages stumbled into boggy pits where they perished, or were overcome by sudden floods bearing gravel, or died at the banks of rivers into which their carcasses fell.
    If these accidental deaths occurred in spring or summer, predators, especially ravens, quickly disposed of the cadavers, leaving behind only stripped bones and perhaps long strings of hair, which soon vanished. Accumulations of such bones and tusks have been found at various places and have proved helpful in reconstructing what we know about the mammoth.
    But if the accidental death took place in late autumn or early winter, there was always the possibility that the body of the dead animal would be quickly covered with a heavy layer of sticky mud that would freeze when hard winter came. Thus the corpse would be preserved in what amounted to a deep-freeze, with decay impossible.
    Most often, one has to suppose, spring and summer would bring a thaw; the protective mud would lose its ice crystals; and the dead body would decompose. Disintegration of the corpse would proceed as always, except that the freezing would have postponed it for a season.
    However, on rare occasions, which could become quite numerous over a time span of a hundred thousand years, that first immediate freezing would for some reason or other become permanent, and now the dead body would be preserved intact for a thousand years, or thirty thousand, or fifty. And then, on some day far distant when humans ranged the valleys of central Alaska, some inquisitive man would see emerging from a thawing bank an object that was neither bone nor preserved wood, and when he dug into the bank he would find himself facing the total remains of a woolly mammoth that had perished in that bank thousands of years ago.
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    When the accumulation of viscous mud was carefully cleaned away, a remarkable object would be revealed, something unique in the world: a whole mammoth, long hair in place, great tusks twisting forward and meeting at the tips, stomach contents in the condition they were when it last grazed, massive teeth in such perfect condition that its age at death could be accurately calculated within five or six years. It was not, of course, a standing animal, plump and clean within a case of blue ice; it was flat, plastered with mud, disgracefully dirty, with leg joints beginning to come apart, but it was a complete mammoth, and it revealed to its discoverers a volume of information.
    This next point is important. We know about the great dinosaurs who preceded the mammoth by millions of years because their bones have over the millennia been invaded by mineral deposits which have preserved the most intimate structure of the bone.
    What we have are not real bones, but petrified ones, like petrified wood, in which not an atom of the original material remains. Until a recent find in far northern Alaska, no human being had ever seen the bone of a dinosaur, but everyone could see in museums the magically preserved petrifications of those bones, photographs in stone of bones long since vanished.
    But with the mammoths preserved, by freezing in Siberia and