Alaska by James A. Michener Read Free Book Online Page A

Alaska, we have the actual bones, the hair, the heart, the stomach, and a treasury of knowledge that is incomparable.
    The first of these icy finds seems to have occurred by accident in Siberia sometime in the 1700s, and others have followed at regular intervals thereafter. A remarkably complete mammoth was uncovered near Fairbanks in Alaska not long ago, and we can anticipate others before the end of the century.
    Why has it been the mammoth who has been found in this complete form? Other animals have occasionally been uncovered, but not many and rarely in the excellent condition of the best mammoths. One reason was the substantial numbers of the breed. Another was that the mammoth tended to live in those peculiar areas in which preservation by freezing mud was possible. Also, its bones and tusks were of a size to be noted; many birds must have perished in these areas in these times, but because they had no heavy bones, their skeletons did not survive to keep their skin and feathers in position. Most important, this particular group of mammoths died during a time of glaciation when instant freezing was not only possible but likely.
    At any rate, the woolly mammoth served a unique function, one of inestimable value to human beings; by freezing quickly when it died, it lived on to instruct us as to what life
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    was like in Alaska when the ice castle functioned as a refuge for great animals.
    ON A DAY IN LATE WINTER, TWENTY-NINE THOUSAND
    years ago, Matriarch, a mammoth grandmother, forty-four years old and beginning to show her age, led the little herd of six for which she was responsible down a softly rolling meadow to the banks of a great river later to be known as the Yukon. Lifting her trunk high to sniff the warming air and signaling the others to follow, she entered a grove of willow shrubs that lined the river, and when the others had taken their places beside her, she indicated that they might begin feeding on the sprouting tips of willow branches. They did so with a great deal of noise and movement, for they were glad to escape the meager rations they had been forced to subsist on during the recent winter, and as they gorged, Matriarch gave grunts of encouragement.
    She had in her herd two daughters, each of whom had two offspring, heifer and bull to the elder, bull and heifer to the younger. Severe discipline on these six was enforced by Matriarch, for the mammoths had learned that the survival of their species did not depend very much on the great males with their tremendous showy tusks; the males appeared only in midsummer for the mating period; the rest of the year they were nowhere to be seen, so they took no responsibility for rearing and educating the young.
    In obedience to the instincts of her race, and to the specific impulses which stemmed from her being female, she devoted her entire life to her herd, especially to the young. She weighed, at this time, about three thousand pounds, and to keep alive she required each day some hundred and sixty pounds of grass, lichen, moss and twigs, and when she lacked this ample supply of food she experienced pangs of biting hunger, for what she ate contained only minimum nourishment and passed completely through her body in less than twelve hours; she did not gorge and then ruminate like other animals, chewing her cud until every shred of value was extracted from it. No, she crammed herself with vast amounts of low-quality food and quickly rid herself of its remains. Eating had to be her main preoccupation.
    Nevertheless, if in her constant foraging she caught even a hint that her four grandchildren were not getting their share, she would forgo her own feeding and see to it that they ate first. And she would do the same for young mammoths who were not of her own family but under her care for the moment while their own mothers and grandmothers foraged
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    elsewhere. Even though her stomach contracted in emptiness and pain with warning signals shouting 'Eat or perish!'