“The man agreed. The mammoth let him strike a killing blow.
“When the mammoth was dead, the man brought his wife to butcher the carcass. ‘We can’t leave the tusks here,’ the woman said. ‘Look at how huge they are, how perfectly curved.’
“ ‘I promised,’ said the man. But the woman wouldn’t listen. She chopped the tusks out of the mammoth’s skull. They took everything home: the flesh, the skin covered with tawny curling hair, the tusks.
“After that, the woman had trouble sleeping. The mammoth came to her, wearing his flesh and skin, but with two bloody wounds where his tusks should have been. ‘What have you done?’ he asked. ‘Why have you stolen the only things I asked to keep?’ Gradually, lack of sleep wore the woman down. Finally, she died. Soon after that, her husband visited another village and saw a maiden of remarkable beauty. ‘What will you take for her?’ he asked the girl’s father, who was an old man, still handsome and imposing, except for his missing teeth.
“ ‘Your famous mammoth tusks,’ the old man said.
“The warrior was reluctant, but he had never seen a woman like this one; and she seemed more than willing to go with him. Grudgingly, he agreed to the bargain, went home and returned with the mammoth tusks. The old man took the splendid objects and caressed them. ‘I will use them to frame my door,’ he said. This was a Mandan or Hidatsa village, as I forgot to mention. Our neighbors along the Missouri often took tusks from drowned mammoths and used them as frames for the doors of their log and dirt houses. We didn’t, of course, since we lived in tipis in those days.
“The warrior and his new wife took off across the plain. At their first camp, the warrior said, ‘I want to have sex with you.’ He’d been thinking about nothing else for days.
“ ‘You people!’ said the maiden. ‘You never learn!’ Rising, she turned into a white mammoth. Her fur shone like snow in the moonlight, as did her small female tusks. ‘You asked for help from my kinsman, then took the only things he wanted to keep, though he was willing to give you everything else, even his life. Now he has his tusks back. You will get nothing more from me.’ She turned and moved rapidly over the prairie.”
“If we aren’t supposed to kill mammoths and take their tusks, how do you have that one on your lap?” I asked when I was ten and full of questions, which I had learned to ask in an experimental school in Minneapolis.
“The point of the story,” said Grandmother, “is to ask permission, listen to the answer with respect and keep the promises you make. The tusk on my lap is from a juvenile. One of our ancestors may have killed it before it joined a male group; if it was female, then it died of injury or drought, and our ancestor scavenged the tusks.
“If it was a young cow, then our ancestor may have made a mistake by carving a hunting scene on the tusk. But I don’t know any stories about the ancestor; most likely he didn’t come to harm, as he would have, if he’d done something seriously wrong.” It was hard to tell with grandmother, because of her irony, if she meant a statement like this. On the one hand, she was a scientist and a woman who believed that much harm happened in the world and went unpunished. On the other hand, she took the old stories seriously. “There is more than one way to organize knowledge; and more than one way to formulate truth; and with time and patience, persistence and luck, justice can prevail.”
There was a story about the fate of Meriwether Lewis, which Grandmother told me. He came back from his journey a famous man, who became governor of the Missouri Territory; but despair overtook him. He died of suicide at the age of 35, alone while traveling along the Natchez Trace. On a scrap of paper in his pocket were his last words. ‘Mammoths,’ he wrote in an agitated scrawl. ‘Indians.’ That was all, though – being Lewis – he misspelled both ‘mammoth’ and ‘Indian.’
“What does the message mean?” I asked.
“Who can say?” my grandmother replied. “Maybe it was a warning of some kind. ‘Treat mammoths as I have done, and you will end like me.’ Or maybe he was drunk. He had a problem with alcohol and opium. In any case, no one paid attention. More white people came up the Missouri – scientists, explorers, traders, hunters, English noblemen, Russian princes. They all shot mammoths; or so it seemed to our ancestors, who watched with horror. We tried to warn the Europeans, but they didn’t listen. Maybe they didn’t care. At some point, we realized they had an idea of the way our country ought to be: full of white farmers on farms like the ones in Europe, though our land is nothing like England or France. The mammoths would be gone and the bison and us. If you look at the paintings done along the Missouri in the 19th century, it always seems to be sunset. The small mammoth herds, the vast bison herds, the Indians are always heading west into the sunset, vanishing from the plains.
“Some of the tusks went to hang on walls in England and Moscow. Others went to museums in the east, along with entire skeletons and skins. The American Museum of Natural History in New York has a stuffed herd in their Hall of Mammoths. I’ve seen it. You ought to go some day.
“As the century went on, the Europeans began to take animals alive. In almost every case, these were calves whose mothers had been shot. Mammoth Bill Cody had two in his Wild West show. Sitting Bull used to visit with them, during the year the great Lakota spent with the show. People say he talked with them, while they curled their trunks around his arms and searched in his clothing for hidden food. We don’t know what they told him. He came away looking sad and grim.
“By the end of the 19th century, the only mammoths left were in circuses and zoos, except for a small herd in the Glacier Park area. At most, four hundred animals were left. The ones in circuses were calves. The ones in zoos were a mixture of old and young, though all had grown up in captivity. Their culture – which they used to learn from elders, as did we – was gone, except in the Glacier Park herd, which still preserved some of its ancestral wisdom. In this, the Glacier mammoths were like our neighbors the Blackfoot. Louis W. Hill, the son of the Empire Builder, encouraged the Blackfoot to maintain their old ways, in order to present tourists coming out on the Great Northern Railroad with an authentic western experience. Historians have said many bad things about the Hill family, but they protected the mammoths and the Blackfoot from the rest of white civilization.
“White Bison Calf Woman’s warnings were proved true. As the mammoths disappeared, so did the far more numerous bison. By century end, only a few hundred of them remained, though they had roamed the west in herds of millions; and we all know what happened to Indians. Because I don’t like being angry, I am not going to recount that story. In any case, I’m talking about mammoths.
“At this point, the story turns to my own grandmother, who was your great-great-grandmother. Her first name was Rosa, and her real last name was Red Mammoth, but she was adopted by missionaries when she was very young and took their name, which was Stevens. They sent her east to school, and she studied veterinary medicine, becoming the first woman to receive a DVM from her college. Although Rosa had little experience with Indian culture, she had good dreams. In one of these a mammoth came to her, a white female.
“ ‘I want you to devote your life to mammoth care,’ the animal said. ‘We have reached the point where anything could kill us: a disease gotten from domestic animals, ailments caused by inbreeding, or a change of heart among white men. What if Louis W. Hill decides there is a better way to promote his railroad? In addition, most of us no longer know how to behave.’
“ ‘I certainly want to work with large animals,’ Rosa said. ‘But I was thinking of cattle and horses, not mammoths. I know nothing about them.’
“ ‘You can learn,’ the mammoth said. ‘What you don’t find out from the herd in Glacier can be discovered by studying elephants, who are our closest relatives. If we are not saved, the bison will die as well; and I don’t hold out a lot of hope for Indians. These white people are crazy. There’s no way to farm the high plains or to raise European cattle on them. This country is too dry and cold. Yes, the white
people can come here and ruin everything – overgraze the prairie, drain the rivers or fill them with poison, mine and log the sacred Black Hills. Once they have finished, they will have to leave or live like scavengers in the wreckage they have made. The only way to make a living here is through bison and us.’ As you might be able to tell, Granddaughter, the mammoth was angry. Like their relatives the elephants, mammoths can feel grief and hold serious grudges.
“Rosa was no fool. It was pretty obvious this was no ordinary dream. The white mammoth was some kind of spirit. She agreed to the animal’s request. Because she was Lakota and had a college degree, she was able to get a job at Glacier Park. This was in 1911, when the park had just opened and the famous tourists lodges were not yet built.
“She spent three years at Glacier. The job proved frustrating. The herd wasn’t growing. The animals ranged too far, maybe in response to tourists, who wanted nothing more than to photograph these spectacular and shy animals. Once out of the park, ranchers shot them, claiming that the mammoths stampeded cattle. In the park, they were occasionally shot by poachers and even by park rangers, if they went into musth, which is a reproductive frenzy, more common among males than females.
“The animals were less fertile than elephants. Rosa couldn’t tell if this was a natural difference between the two species; or if it was due to inbreeding or stress. The fact that mammoths seized cameras whenever they were able, flung them to the ground and stamped on them, suggested that part of the problem was stress. She was unable to convince the park administration to outlaw cameras.
“Finally, discouraged and thinking of leaving her job, she had another dream. A woman wearing a white deerskin dress came to her. The woman was middle aged and obviously Indian, her skin dark, her hair straight and black. Her dress had white beadwork over the shoulders. She had on white moccasins, decorated like her dress with white beadwork. Long earrings made of ivory hung from her ears. ‘This isn’t working,’ she told Rosa.
“ ‘I know,’ Rosa replied.
“ ‘We need a new plan,’ the woman continued. ‘Do you know about the mammoths which have been found frozen in ice in eastern Russia?’
“ ‘Yes.’
“ ‘Learn everything you can about them. They died thousands of years ago, but have been preserved well enough so flesh and skin and hair remains. Maybe it will be possible to revive them someday. White men are ingenious, especially when it comes to doing things that are unnatural.’ The woman paused. Rosa blinked, and the woman became a mammoth with snow-white fur and ice-blue eyes. The mammoth waved her trunk back and forth in the air like a conductor directing an orchestra. Her pale eyes seemed to look into the far distance. The dream ended.”
My grandmother got up and went to the bathroom, then took iced tea out of her refrigerator. It had lemon juice already in it, along with sugar and mint from her garden. She poured us both glasses and sat down again in her rocker. The tusk was back hanging on her wall, along with other mementos which she had tacked up: pictures of relatives, including my mom and dad, a bunch of postcards of places in the Black Hills. Not Mount Rushmore, but Spearfish Canyon and the Needles Road and Crazy Horse monument. Lastly, there was a necklace of silver beads hanging from a nail. A tiny, beautifully carved mammoth hung from the necklace, made of pipestone with turquoise eyes.
We sipped the tea. Grandmother rocked.
“What happened next?” I asked.
“To Rosa? She went to Russia, taking the eastern route via China since World War I had begun. Louis W. Hill funded her trip. He was worried about the Glacier Park mammoths, too. In his own strange way – the way of an entrepreneur, who must possess what he loves and make money from it, if possible – he loved his Blackfoot and their mammoths.
“Rosa ended in Siberia in a town with a name I can’t remember now, though it’s on the tip of my tongue. Maybe it’ll come to me. Old age, Emma! It comes to all of us, and even gene tech can’t repair all the damage! The houses were built of logs, and the streets were dirt. It was like being in the Wild West, she told me, except this was the wild east. The people were drunk Russians and brown-skinned natives, who looked like Indians or Inuit. It was easy to see where we Indians had come from, Rosa told me. The native people drank also. It’s a curse that goes around the North Pole and among all native peoples. Pine forest rose around the town. The trees were huge and dark and shut out the sky. Rosa said that’s what she missed most in Siberia, the sky. Our kinfolk, the Dakota, were driven out of pine forest by the Ojibwa, who were armed with European guns. The Dakota are still angry about this. Rosa said, in her opinion the pine forest was no loss; though the sugar maples and wild rice lakes might be something to mourn.
“She was in Siberia through most of the war, studying with a Russian scientist who was an expert on frozen mammoths. He was a young man, but he’d lost toes to frostbite and walked with a limp and a cane, so the Russian army wasn’t interested in him. A small fellow, Rosa told me, no taller than she was, wiry, with yellow hair and green eyes slanted above cheekbones that looked Indian. Sergei Ivanoff.
“This is the hardest part of Rosa’s story to tell,” my grandmother said. “I’ve never been to Siberia, and Rosa kept her own counsel about much that happened there. I imagine them in a log cabin, lamps glowing in the midwinter darkness, studying the mammoth tissues that they’d found. Sergei had brought equipment with him from the west, so they could stain the tissue and examine it under microscopes.
“As far as she and Sergei could determine, given the primitive science of the time, all the tissue they examined had been damaged – most likely by the process of freezing, then thawing, then freezing again. Ice is a remarkable solid, less dense than its liquid form. As the water in the mammoth cells froze, it expanded. The cells’ walls ruptured; the delicate natural machinery within was broken past any repair they could imagine.
“For the most part, they were able to ignore the war. Travel was interrupted, but neither of them was planning to travel. Sergei wanted more scientific supplies, but he was too poor to order them. Rosa sent letters to Louis W. Hill, asking for more money. They weren’t answered. She didn’t know if Hill had received them. In 1917 the war led to the famous Russian Revolution. This happened in the far west, in places like St. Petersburg. Only rumors reached them in their cabin. The local trappers and hunters said, Tsar Nicholas had died and been replaced with a new tsar named Lenin-and-Trotsky.
“One evening soldiers arrived on horses. They heard them coming, shouting to each other.
“Sergei said, ‘Take our notes and hide. I’ll deal with this.’
“Her arms full of paper, Rosa darted behind their cabin. It was winter, snow falling thickly. A mammoth carcass, thousands of years old, lay in a shack. Rosa climbed in among the ancient bones and skin. She crouched down, shivering. Did voices speak, muffled by the snow? She wasn’t certain. At last the silence was broken by two loud, sharp noises like doors slamming.
“ ‘Aaay,’ Rosa whispered. In her mind she prayed to her foster family’s deity, the God of Episcopalians. The door to the shack opened. A man spoke in a language she didn’t understand: Russian.
“She and Sergei had always conversed in German, the language of science, or French, the language of civilization.
“Instead of entering, the man went elsewhere, leaving the shack door open. An icy wind blew in. Rosa cowered in the middle of the mammoth. A vision came to her: she was in a hut. The walls were made of mammoth jaws. The roof beams were tusks. A dung fire burned on the dirt floor. Across the fire from her was an ancient woman, her long hair gray, her dress smoke-darkened and greasy.
“ ‘Stay here a while,’ the woman said. ‘Till the soldiers are gone.’
“ ‘Who are they?’ Rosa asked.
“ ‘Red Guards or White Guards, what does it matter? They are ignorant and desperate. Tsar Nicholas is dead, and his son will never rule. Tsar Lenin-and-Trotsky will not achieve the wonderful things he – they dream of. Things must get worse before they g
et better.’
“Rosa didn’t like to hear this, but she remained in the mammoth hut, which seemed warmer than her shack. The old woman fed dried dung into the fire. Her eyes were milky blue. Blind, maybe. Rosa couldn’t tell.
“Finally the old woman said, ‘You’ll freeze to death if you stay here. The soldiers have gone. Get up and go back to the cabin.’
“Obedient, Rosa stood and walked to the hut door. A mammoth skin hung over it. As Rosa raised her hand to push the skin aside, the woman said, ‘Remember one thing.’
“ ‘Yes?’
“ ‘The cold has done a marvelous job of preserving the bodies of my kin. But – like the revolution that is now beginning to fail – the job has not been good enough. What can make it better, Rosa? Don’t give up! Persist! And think!’
“Rosa turned to ask for more information, but the old woman was gone. For a moment, she stared at the empty hut. Then the dung fire vanished; and she found herself standing, numb with cold, at the entrance to the mammoth shack. Snow fell around her, kissing her cheeks. She couldn’t feel her hands. Her feet were barely able to move. Stumbling, she crossed the space to the cabin’s back door.
“Inside was chaos: spilled books, overturned furniture. Sergei lay on the floor in a pool of blood. The cabin stove was still lit, thank God. Red fire shone through the cracks around its door, and the cabin felt warm. She knelt by Sergei. Blood covered half his face, coming from a wound in his forehead. There was more blood on his carefully laundered, white shirt. His pince-nez glasses lay on the floor beside him, one lens shattered.
“ ‘Aaay, Sergei,’ she moaned.
“A green eye opened. ‘Rosa,’ he whispered. ‘They didn’t find you.’
“ ‘No,’ she replied, her heart full of joy.
“Examining him, she discovered he’d been shot twice. One bullet had gone through his shoulder. The other had grazed his head. Eager for loot, the soldiers had not given him a close look after he fell. Instead, they’d gathered the jar that held their little store of money; Sergei’s lovely instruments, made of brass and steel; her jewelry and most of their warm clothes. Half their books had gone into the stove to warm the soldiers while they searched the cabin.
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