“Yes,” said Harry, taking up the simile, “and there are two that stick out of the frozen mud like an elephant’s tusks, only they are curved too much and about fifteen feet long. Let’s get nearer.”
As they approached, their interest gave way to wonder. The seeming bones were bones in very truth, piled fantastically and protruding in strange profusion. Harry climbed by knobs and steps of bone part way up the bluff and shouted down to Joe.
“These are tusks, mastodon tusks, sticking right out of the bank, and here is a bit of the skull sticking out with shreds of hide and hair on it. There must be a whole one frozen into the bluff here.”
Joe climbed up and viewed the remains with him. It really seemed as if, concealed in the frozen mud behind the great tusks, the whole creature might be preserved, in cold storage as one might say, kept during the long centuries, and exposed by the crumbling of the bluff during the rush of the river torrent in spring. An astonishing number of bones were in this place, all of the mastodon, and the only explanation seemed to be that in the forgotten ages when the frozen zone was a warm one and the mastodon roamed there in large numbers, this ground must have been a deep bog, in which many of the creatures became mired and were in a great measure preserved, as peat preserves things. The boys settled it in this way to their own satisfaction, at least.
“Come on,” cried Joe, in exuberance of spirits, “let’s ride the elephant.”
“Ride the mastodon, you mean,” replied Harry; and each scrambled for a tusk. “Get up!” cried Harry, “cooning” along to the tip of his tusk. “Get up old fellow and give us a ride. Great Scott, he’s moving!”
The tusks of the mastodon, moving together, dipped gently and easily downward and both boys shot off them into space.
It was a matter of twenty feet to the soft snow, and they plunged into it out of sight.
Behind them came the great tusks, hundreds of pounds of weathered ivory, plunging through the snow nearer the base of the cliff. They missed the two by a little, but they missed them. Harry felt himself smothered in a whirl of snow, then falling again for a short distance, and finally brought up on a soft turf, where he lay for a moment half dazed by the thud with which he struck. Then he scrambled to his feet and looked around. He was in a low-roofed, wide cavern, dusky with a greenish pale twilight. Joe was sitting up on the ground by his side, rubbing his elbow and leg alternately and looking foolish, as no doubt he felt.