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

she would first attend to her young, and only when they had been provided with grass and twigs would she browse the birch tips and harvest the good grasses with her noble trunk.
    This characteristic, which separated her from the other mammoth grandmothers, had developed because of her monomaniacal affection for her children. Years ago, before her youngest daughter had borne her first offspring, a onceprepotent older bull joined her herd during the mating season, and for some inexplicable reason, when the mating was completed, he remained with the herd when normally he should have left to join the other bulls who foraged by themselves until the next mating season came around.
    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