Harper's Young People, September 19, 1882 / An Illustrated Weekly

Long and long ago, before you or I were born, in the year 1799 in fact, a man by the name of Ossip Schumachoff threw away a golden opportunity. Having undertaken an expedition up to the Arctic Ocean in search of ivory, he started from home with his wife on a reindeer sledge, and was so far successful in his undertaking that he discovered on the banks of the river Lena a certain block of ice that would have set all the naturalists in the world in commotion if he had but known it. This block of ice was of untold value, for it contained the body of an enormous tusked animal in a perfect state of preservation.
Owing to the impenetrable masses of ice surrounding the mammoth, Ossip did not at that time succeed in reaching it; but returning to the same spot some two years later, he found that the ice had so far melted that a portion of the huge creature was exposed to the air.
And yet Chief Ossip was no nearer to his prize than he had been at first. It is true the Ice King smilingly placed it in his grasp, but a mightier power, Superstition, stepping in with her rod of iron, bade him touch it if he dared.
All the old men of his tribe shook their heads discouragingly. All the old women told direful tales of what had happened long years before, how a certain Tungusian chief, having seen just such a monster as this, had immediately fallen ill and died, with all his family.
And as good luck—or bad—would have it, Ossip Schumachoff too began to feel ill, so he slowly went back to his home again to dream by day and night for three years more of that magnificent pair of tusks going to waste up there in the North.
At last he could stand it no longer. Making another expedition to the Lena, he found the monster now entirely melted out of the ice, and slipped down upon a sand-bank; but this time he sawed off the magnificent pair of tusks, and sold them for fifty good Russian rubles.
It was not until two years later, in 1806, that the naturalist and traveller Adams heard of the affair in Jakutsk. In June of the same year he travelled thither to rescue what was still to be saved. Schumachoff accompanied him, together with ten Tunguses.