NICHOLAS PIKE.
CHAPTER IV.
THE MAMMOTH.
In one of the old Chinese histories, there is a description of a curious creature called tyn-schu, supposed to be a subterranean, rat-like animal. It lived, according to the old chroniclers, entirely beneath the ground; was as large as an ox; and had enormous tusks, with which it threw up the soil, or made its burrows; and the rumbling of earthquakes was attributed to them. This was naturally considered a fable by Europeans, but finally an English traveller was shown a piece of the tusk. He found it to be ivory, and suspected that the strange animal was a mammoth, as indeed was the case. The bodies of these elephantine giants were found in the far North, buried in the tundra; and the simple Chinamen believed that they lived there, and on their return from trading-trips told the story in the South; and thus it became a part of their curious and, it is needless to say, erroneous history.
MAMMOTH HUNT.
The mammoth may rightly be considered the king of all elephants, and in general appearance it much resembled the African species. The full adult may have been a third more bulky than the largest existing elephants, and undoubtedly weighed at least twice as much. To protect them from the cold, they were covered with hair, which gave them a ferocious appearance. The hair was of three kinds: first there was a thick coat of reddish wool; over this grew a coat of long, thick hair; while upon the neck was a heavy mane. The tusks of the mammoth were enormous: some measured thirteen feet in length; and, curved in a circle, gave the animal a strange and formidable appearance.
While the mammoth greatly resembled the African elephant, there are some points of difference. The skull is narrower at the summit, and the molar teeth have great breadth of crown as compared to the length: the ridges also are narrow and crowded, while the enamel is thin and straight, the crimping that is seen in others being absent. The molars number, as in other elephants, eight, at one time present; or, one and a portion of another one each side of both jaws.
This huge elephant flourished principally in the far North; and, as its remains are now found in the greatest abundance on the shores of the Arctic Sea, it must have existed in vast herds. The majority of specimens discovered are buried in the soil, that is now frozen the year round in a solid mass for many feet. The finest specimen known is a skeleton in the museum at St. Petersburg; the original having been discovered in 1799 by a poor fisherman named Schumachoff, a Tongoose, who every spring followed down the Lena River that led into the Arctic Sea. One day while engaged in following his vocation, he observed on the side of a tundra a shapeless mass, appearing like some huge monster entombed. The following year he returned to the same locality, and found that the object had weathered out still more, and was a mammoth—a veritable frozen giant. Still, he could not claim the fine tusks; and another year passed, and then his family were so superstitions that they refused to consent to his again visiting the strange animal that he had described. But finally, five years after his first trip, he determined to again visit the scene of his discovery. He sailed down the river in his small boat, and, with mingled emotions of fear and curiosity, approached the imprisoned monster. Raising his eyes on reaching the spot, he saw a great cavity in the cliff, but the mammoth was gone. The ice had melted away, but beneath where the giant had rested lay the enormous body. The tusks were still intact; and Schumachoff carried them South in triumph, where he realized fifty rubles from the sale, leaving the body—which, wonderful to relate, was as fresh as if the animal had died only a week before—to the bears and wolves.