Zhelikov’s chief assistant and the technicians in our party gave their opinion that the attempt should be abandoned and advised an immediate return to the station with our remaining fuel. By radio I asked Zhelikov for a second opinion — in no doubt what it would be. And was not surprised. That obsessed man, hanging on to life for one reason only, told us not to waste precious time and ordered that one attempt — ‘a good real attempt’ — should be made to land. After the beast had been recovered we should then delay a return until the weather improved.
The pilot scowled, gritted his teeth and dropped again through the furious bombardment, seesawing violently over the pattern of lights before setting us precariously down. Even on the ground we were so rocked about that we had to wait, strapped in, for vehicles to take us the two hundred metres to the residential hut.
Here there was a tremendous blaze of heat and light, the sheet-metal stoves glowing cherry red, the construction workers lounging on their bunks in singlets. They came bounding at us like eager dogs, Zhelikov’s standstill order having kept them hanging about for the best part of a week.
Without being relieved of my furs, or my hat even, I was at once made to look over the technical drawings of the exposed crevasse and of the ledge where the mammoth was lodged; and within minutes was back outside again and being hurried towards it in a ‘snow tank’.
A saucer-shaped depression had been excavated at the construction site, rather steeply stepped down at the centre where the crevasse had been exposed. This was surrounded by short pylons, upon which were mounted the floodlights that normally enabled work to proceed twenty-four hours a day. A crane had been rigged with a double bosun’s chair, and in this I and Zhelikov’s chief assistant were hastily strapped and lowered, first into the depression and then, more cautiously, into the crevasse.
Above, it had been impossible to speak in the tremendous volume of howling and shrieking, but as we descended the noise diminished, in the crevasse itself to a mere distant fluting. We were soon conversing in normal, even soft tones, for the narrowness of the glassy chasm did not incline one to loudness. I carried a torch, no floodlight reaching here, and the assistant (whom I will call V) a communications set.
We dropped slowly to the ledge, at first visible only as a long uneven hump of ice, and with V giving instructions on his set had ourselves swung to the left and the right and then below while we examined in torchlight the structure of the ice and the dim shape of the animal entombed in it. It had fallen on its left side, its limbs inwards towards the cliff, so that only one of its tusks, and no part of its trunk, could clearly be made out. Very little could be made out except its approximate size, some two and a half metres long (which marked it as a juvenile beast) and the characteristic upward slope of its receding quarters to the bulge of its abdomen. The sandwiched layers of ice, about seventy centimetres in depth, allowed only the most opaque view from above, but in a narrow window of clear ice at the side it was possible to see strands of the animal’s shaggy coat.
We swung there and back, above and below, while V, an expert in the properties of ice, took careful note of the faults and stresses of the crevasse and suggested amendments to Zhelikov’s recovery plan. Then we had ourselves hauled up and gave the orders for work to commence.
Two teams were lowered into the crevasse carrying steam lances and hooks, and within a couple of hours had successfully cut away and raised the immense block of ice; which was then bound up in the tarpaulins and chains we had brought with us. This work, in the constant fury of wind and ice, was completed with the greatest difficulty; and was no sooner done than the storm itself ceased, leaving complete frigid calm — as is the way in these regions.
We at once boarded the helicopter, hovered while the load was attached and the rotors cautiously took the strain, and then took off. Thus, flying close to the ground and very slowly — in ceremonial slow motion almost as if at some great state funeral — we carried the animal back to the station.
We carried it back and manoeuvred it to the prepared position in the tunnel. And had not long removed the tarpaulins when Zhelikov appeared, driving erratically down the ramp in his chair.
In our absence the old man, wasted by pain, had forcibly been given drugs. Left alone in his room, in a state of semiconsciousness, he had none the less caught wind of our arrival and ‘escaped’. He now began driving round and round the block of ice, vainly trying to raise himself to view the animal. V and I assured him that nothing apart from a tusk was to be seen. But in his befuddled anxiety he suspected that we were concealing something — that the block had been fractured in the course of removal and the mammoth damaged. We insisted that this was by no means the case, but still could not satisfy him.
The indomitable small figure, muffled in furs in the frozen tunnel, seemed to have shrunk further while we were away. His head was no bigger than a grapefruit. But still he tried to impose his will. He insisted angrily that no attempt whatever should be made to repair the damage until his planned programme of X-rays and photography of the animal in position had been carried out. And this had to be carried out immediately!
V and I were so exhausted we almost told him the secret there and then. And were mightily relieved when his doctor and an attendant hurriedly appeared and spirited him away. For some moments afterwards we gazed at each other, knowing that the shock of it might have killed him on the spot.
In the fine and even lighting of the tunnel a far better view was obtainable through the window of clear ice. Some bits of frosting had been knocked off, and the shaggy coat of the animal was clearly visible inside. It was not the coat of a mammoth. It was that of a bear. Bears were not extinct — were indeed very plentiful. The whole body of science held that they had not changed their form in millions of years. Yet what we appeared to have here was a bear with a tusk.
But still we left it for the night.
I slept the sleep of exhaustion, and early next day supervised the X-rays and photography. Zhelikov slept on, heavily sedated. The first plates were developed in minutes and I imposed immediate secrecy on the small team involved until Zhelikov himself, after suitable preparation, could be informed. But this was not to be. That doughty fighter, in the front rank of scientists, did not return from wherever he had gone, and shortly before noon his mantle passed to my shoulders; and with it the problem of the animal in the tunnel.
In subsequent days I had it photographed again and again, from all angles and by the most advanced means. But from the very first plate the facts had been clear. We had not been wrong about the coat of the bear, or about the tusk. Yet it was not a bear with a tusk; and animals other than bears wear the skins of bears.
This animal was human; it was female; it was 1.89 metres tall (six feet two and one half inches); it was in the thirty-fifth week of pregnancy, and it had given birth before.
These latter facts and some others I of course established later, yet I will state the leading ones now.
Sibir (as we call her; the sleeper) is a handsome, indeed a beautiful, female, of fair complexion and finely set features. Her eyes are grey, very slightly slanted — the only ‘mongoloid’ feature, for there is no mongoloid fold to the lids — and her cheekbones are high, somewhat flattened. One would say, in short, that she is of Slav type, if such terms had meaning, which of course they do not. She pre-dated the Slavs and all existing peoples by tens of thousands of years; for her moment of death was near to 40,000 years ago.
By our best reckoning she was in her eighteenth year when she fell into the crevasse and broke her neck. She had eaten a recent meal of fish, and had more with her in a large deerhide bag. The bag had been on a sled, which she was drawing, and the tusk (one quarter of a tusk, the terminal curved portion) was attached to the sled as one of its runners; its twin had evidently broken off and fallen farther into the crevasse on impact. The force of the impact had dislodged the load on the sled and distributed it around and above her upper body, giving the impression of bulk and length we had noticed.