“Picture to yourself an elephant with a body covered with thick fur, about thirteen feet in height, and fifteen in length, with tusks eight feet long, thick, and curving outward at their ends,[64] a stout trunk of six feet in length, colossal limbs of one and a half feet in thickness, and a tail, naked up to the end, which was covered with thick tufty hair. The animal was fat and well-grown; death had overtaken him in the fulness of his powers. His parchment-like, large, naked ears, lay fearfully turned over the head; about the shoulders and the back he had stiff hair, about a foot in length, like a mane. The long outer hair was deep brown and coarsely rooted. The top of the head looked so wild, and so penetrated with pich[65] that it resembled the rind of an old oak tree. On the sides it was cleaner, and under the outer hair there appeared everywhere a wool, very soft, warm and thick, and of a fallow-brown colour. The giant was well protected against the cold. The whole appearance of the animal was fearfully strange and wild. It had not the shape of our present elephants. As compared with our Indian elephants, its head was rough, the brain-case low and narrow, but the trunk and mouth were much larger. The teeth were very powerful. Our elephant is an awkward animal, but compared with this Mammoth it is as an Arabian steed to a coarse, ugly dray-horse. I could not divest myself of a feeling of fear as I approached the head; the broken, widely-open eyes, gave the animal an appearance of life, as though it might move in a moment and destroy us with a roar.... The bad smell of the body warned us that it was time to save of it what we could, and the swelling flood, too, bid us hasten. First of all we cut off the tusks, and sent them to the cutter. Then the people tried to hew off the head, but notwithstanding their good will, this work was slow. As the belly of the animal was cut open the intestines rolled out, and then the smell was so dreadful that I could not overcome my nauseousness, and was obliged to turn away. But I had the stomach separated, and brought on one side. It was well filled, and the contents instructive and well preserved. The principal were young shoots of the fir and pine; a quantity of young fir-cones, also in a chewed state, were mixed with the mass.... As we were eviscerating the animal, I was as careless and forgetful as my Jakuti, who did not notice that the ground was sinking under their feet, until a fearful scream warned me of their misfortune, as I was still groping in the animal’s stomach. Shocked, I sprang up, and beheld how the river was burying in its waves our five Jakuti and our laboriously saved beast. Fortunately, the boat was near, so that our poor workpeople were all saved, but the Mammoth was swallowed up by the waves, and never more made its appearance.”
[64] This must be incorrect (see [p. 203]).
[65] “Und mit Pech so durchgedrungen.”
Much may be learned from this highly interesting account; it contains the key to several questions which otherwise might have remained unsolved. Let us see what conclusions can be derived therefrom. First, its position and perfect state of preservation are sufficient to prove that it was buried where it died. It sank in a marsh, probably during the summer. Then came the cold of winter; the carcase, together with the ground around it, was frozen so that decomposition was arrested, and frozen it must have remained for many centuries till the day when M. Benkendorf came across it. Or it may have been buried up in a snow-drift which in time became ice.
In the region where frozen Mammoths occur (and there are at least nine cases on record), a considerable thickness of frozen soil may be found at all seasons of the year; so that if a carcase be once embedded in mud or ice, its putrefaction may be arrested for indefinite ages. According to one authority, the ground is now permanently frozen even to the depth of four hundred feet at the town of Jakutsh, on the western bank of the river Lena. Throughout a large part of Siberia the boundary cliffs of the lakes and rivers consist of earthy materials and ice in horizontal layers. Middendorf bored to the depth of seventy feet, and after passing through much frozen soil mixed with ice, came down upon a solid mass of pure transparent ice, the depth of which he was unable to ascertain.
The year 1846, when M. Benkendorf saw his Mammoth, was exceptional on account of its unusually warm summer, so that the ground of the tundra region thawed, and was converted into a morass. Had any Mammoths been alive then, and strayed beyond the limits of the woods into the tundra, probably some of them would have been likewise engulphed, and, when once covered up and protected from the decaying action of the air, the cold of the next winter would have frozen their carcases as this one must have been frozen up.
Truly, “there is nothing new under the sun,” and the present highly useful method of freezing meat and bringing it over from America or New Zealand to add to our insufficient home supplies, is but a resort to a process employed by Nature long before the age of steamships, and perhaps even before the appearance of man on the earth!
Secondly, with regard to the food of the Mammoth, Benkendorf’s discovery is of great service in solving the question how such a creature could have maintained its existence in so inhospitable and unpromising a country. The presence of fir-spikes in the stomach is sufficient to prove that it fed on vegetation such as is now found at the northern part of the woods as they join the low treeless tundra in which the body lay buried.
Before this discovery the food of the Mammoth was unknown, and all sorts of theories were devised in order to account for its remains being found so far north. Some thought that the Mammoth lived in temperate regions, and that the carcases were swept down by great floods into higher and colder latitudes. But it would be impossible for the bodies to be hurried along a devious course for so many miles without a good deal of injury, and probably they would fall to pieces on the way. But, as Professor Owen has so convincingly argued, there is no reason why herds of Mammoths should not have obtained a sufficient supply of food in a country like the southern part of Siberia, where trees abound in spite of the fact that during a great part of the year it is covered with snow. And this is his line of reasoning. The molar teeth of the elephant show a highly complicated and peculiar structure, and there are no other quadrupeds that feed to such an extent on the woody fibre of the branches of trees. Many mammals, as we know, eat the leaves of trees; some gnaw the bark; but elephants alone tear down and crunch the branches. One would think there was but little nourishment to be got from such. But the hard vertical plates of their huge grinders enable them to pound up the tough vegetable tissue and render it more or less palatable. Of course, the foliage is the most tempting, but where foliage is scarce something more is required.
Now, in the teeth of the Mammoth the same principle of construction is observed, only with greater complexity, for there are more of these grinding plates and a larger proportion of dense enamel. Hence the inference seems unmistakable that the extinct species fed more largely on woody fibre than does the elephant of to-day. Forests of hardy trees and shrubs still grow upon the frozen soil of Siberia, and skirt the banks of the Lena as far north as the sixtieth parallel of latitude.