But first, you needed to gather the elephant eggs, and these were in the middle of full-grown cow elephants, eight tons of flesh that might not be eager to surrender them. Leland and Roger read some papers, called some colleagues. They figured they had a handle on it. They explained what they wanted to Queenie's handler, a lad who worked at the game farm in Simi Valley who had been given just enough instruction to lead the animal into a stall or onto a truck. He saw no problem with it; Queenie had never given him any trouble in the nearly three months he had worked with her.
That first entry was for test purposes, to calibrate the equipment as well as accustom the elephant to the process. Encouraged, the handler and the vets decided to go after eggs the very next day. The extraction process, called transvaginal oocyte retrieval, involved locating the ovaries with ultrasound, then extending a narrow probe through a needle inserted into the interior of the vagina. They had done it countless times with horses and cows, and expected no trouble because there were no nerve endings inside the vagina.
Queenie must have felt something, because she turned around and knocked Leland sprawling forty feet over the messy concrete floor with one massive thrust and shake of her head. She picked up the ultrasound machine with her trunk and smashed it on the floor, over and over, until it came apart. Then she went back to her manger and resumed placidly eating the delicious green alfalfa.
"Could have been a lot worse," Susan told them when she heard the story on her first day at work, which was the very next day after her cross-country trip. "Some of them store up their bad feelings. Then one day you do something she doesn't like and she pays you back all at once. Next day, she's fine."
Two days after that, when the quarters and examining and operating rooms were fixed to her satisfaction, they went in again with Queenie in the press and under mild tranquilizers. They harvested six ooctyes that had been primed and ready for ovulation by two weeks of hormone therapy. Under the microscope they looked good, and two of them began to divide after being injected with the mammoth DNA. They decided to try an implant. They were well into the procedure when Howard Christian walked into the lab with a guy wearing a lot of fishing lures stuck into his clothes.
"This is the mammoth-cloning project everybody seems to have heard so much about," Christian said, perhaps a little petulantly. It had not exactly been top secret, but he didn't like his projects to become the object of too much speculation before they showed results. That was because his projects had, fairly frequently, failed to show any results. He introduced Leland and Roger to his guest.
"And this is Dr. Susan Morgan. Susan, Dr. Matthew Wright."
"Just Matt, please."
"And just Susan." Doctor of what? she wondered.
"Susan worked for the circus until a few weeks ago. Now, if this fertilization is successful she'll be a nursemaid to this elephant for two years." "Must be quite a change after the glamour of the circus," Matt said with a smile. Susan thought he might be putting her on.
"We have a better grade of elephant shit here in California," Leland offered.
"No, that's bullshit you're thinking about," Susan said.
"I knew it was some sort of shit."
It was obvious that Howard Christian was eager to move on, but Matt asked a question, then another, and Christian paused to listen to the answer, and before long he found himself observing the entire implantation procedure. Matt seemed utterly fascinated with every aspect.
The three vets finished the implantation with Matt watching the ultrasound image over their shoulders as they positioned the probe and delicately inserted the tiny mass of tissue that hardly qualified as an embryo, but which in two years might grow to be the wonder of the century.
Leland pulled the probe out of Queenie, sighed, and stretched.
"Was it good for you, Roger?"
"I could use a cigarette."
"Oh, sure," Leland said. "Then you'll turn right over and snooze, when what Queenie wants right
now is a little cuddling."
Susan was busy injecting a dose of doxapram to bring Queenie back to full consciousness, but she looked up in time to see Wright and Christian going through a door in the wall that divided the building roughly in half, a door they'd all noticed and whose handle all of them had tried at one time or another, with no result.
Susan wondered what was on the other side.
FROM "LITTLE FUZZY, A CHILD OF THE ICE AGE"
Tsehe heard the song, and he came calling. Even though it was the wrong song.
Woolly mammoths and Columbian mammoths were very much alike, but they were different in some important ways. One of these were the songs they sang during the mating season.
We can't understand the songs whales sing, but a humpback whale knows the difference between a dolphin song and a sperm whale song. Canaries sing one way, and crows sing another. Usually these different species ignore the songs of other species.
But the two types of mammoth were very closely related, and Tsehe was feeling very confused and out of sorts, so the song sounded okay to him.
Tsehe approached the female and began his courtship.
Mammoths liked to stroke each other with their trunks, just like elephants do. They rubbed against each other and smelled each other, paying a lot of attention to the urine. We find this smell unpleasant, but mammoths found it very exciting!
Right away Tsehe noticed this female smelled funny. His eyes told him this was a female mammoth, and his nose told him she was in estrus. His nose also told him there was something different about her.
But it was all too much for his aching head.
Tsehe hadn't been near the herd very long when Big Mama became aware of him and decided to call a halt to the whole business before it got out of hand. The female Tsehe had chosen was a grand-niece to Big Mama, and she wasn't about to let this intruder trifle with the youngster's affections. Big Mama had her standards. No member of her family was going to consort with long-haired, smelly, tiny-eared trash from the wrong side of the tundra!
Even though he was angry, confused, and irritable, Tsehe knew when he was outclassed. Big Mama was by far the largest mammoth he had ever seen, even if she didn't have much hair. Her tusks were enormous, and her ears were huge! They were like the wings of a giant bird. As if that wasn't enough, there were half a dozen other females behind her as she charged at him in a cloud of dust.
He stood his ground only for a moment. One swipe of Big Mama's tusks to his aching head and he turned tail and ran!
The female watched his retreat sadly. Normally, this would have been the end of things. Vanquished males do not mate in mammoth society.
But he had been driven off by females, not by a larger male who would obviously make a better mate.
And it wasn't as if there was a long line of suitors vying for the trunk of this female mammoth. In fact, there hadn't been a single one.
With a guilty look back at Big Mama, still bellowing her triumph, the female started toward the low hill where Tsehe had gone. Soon she was farther from the herd than she had ever been.
As you've probably already guessed, the female was Temba. 9
9
It was fifteen inches long by twelve inches wide by six inches thick. It was made of aluminum, with two metal latches. The top fit snugly to the bottom, and there was a rubber gasket between the two parts. When it was built, it was probably waterproof. Now, in the shape it was in, all bets were off.