Who can resist this one?
Prompt: Woolly Mammoth
So many images and ideas march across the frozen tundra as I stand at the pc, getting ready to set that 5-minute timer.
My first thought was the imaginative and engaging novel I reviewed years ago.
More on this after my five minutes are up
My love of large animals began in childhood when I handfed grass to Johnny Boor through the fence. He was the biggest hog ever to live on our farm. On market day, he walked the plank to the wagon, then sailed right over the side and tried to reclaim his freedom. (His life!) To this day I am not a fan of eating pork. But my love of pigs (particularly the giant boors) would be a topic for another day, another freewite.
As would my love of giant housecats, namely the Maine Coon.
Enormous dogs. The bull mastiff! Their gargantuan paws.
Clydesdales. Belgians.
The huge draft horses of my father's childhood.
You see a pattern here, right?
Me like big animals.
The biggest and most impressive, sadly, have gone the way of the dinosaurs.
The Tim Flannery book is the second one to rear up in my mind with the insistence of Lost Souls seeking redress. The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples has haunted me for years, particularly the part about how all the world's largest creatures (including the wooly mammoth) went extinct whenever humans entered the scene. There's more, so much more (including a lot of skip-able political invective), but the opening chapters, the history of North America, the demise of the beloved mammoth, made quite an impression on me.
You can get a quick summary of it from this 2018 NPR story:
New Study Says Ancient Humans Hunted Big Mammals To Extinction. It's short, and it's worth reading. Christopher Joyce concludes,
We still have lots of furry little mammals on the planet. But the pattern is clear: 11,000 years ago, the average mass of a non-human mammal in North America was about 200 pounds. Now it's about 15 pounds. And the researchers say they're getting even smaller.
The Flannery book offers more detailed explanations on how and why this is happening.
My third thought before setting the timer
was the "certainty" of scientists who are working to clone the big lovable fuzzball known as woolly mammoth. Even the title gets me:
"Scientists Are Reincarnating the Woolly Mammoth to Return in 4 Years:
Hello, old friend"
The long-dead woolly mammoth will make its return from extinction by 2027, says Colossal, the biotech company actively working to reincarnate the ancient beast.
... Through gene editing, Colossal scientists will eventually create an embryo of a woolly mammoth. They will place the embryo in an African elephant to take advantage of its size and allow it to give birth to the new woolly mammoth. The eventual goal is to then repopulate parts of the Arctic with the new woolly mammoth and strengthen local plant life with the migration patterns and dietary habits of the beast.
If Colossal proves successful on reincarnating the woolly mammoth—ditto the thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian tiger—expect a variety of new ethical questions to arise on how to handle the creature and potential reintroduction issues.
Bring it back!
Bring it back!
Here's a fun fact.
In the imagination of an engineer, the woolly mammoth does come back.
Along with some of the Cro-Magnon men who hunted them, back in the day.
Now I will return to that "first thought" on this prompt.
The Brothers Cro-Magnon by Roger Thomas Pepper
When New York reporter Corky Mason returns to her Siberian homeland to cover a story about mammoths, she unearths the frightening account of a prehistoric rape that casts a shadow over a 21st Century Woman—her. She could be the sister of four Cro-Magnon brothers, brothers who murder people that threaten their freedom.
Book Trailer on YouTube
My review at Goodreads, July 11, 2016:
Roger Pepper is a retired aerospace materials engineer with a love of science, travel, The Brothers Karamazov, the Arctic, Cro-Magnons, woolly mammoths
and all sorts of cool things (and really, really cold things!).
If you love woolly mammoths, elephants and all things prehistoric and big, this novel is a must-read. Never mind that willing suspension of disbelief is a gargantuan “must” as well. Sure, there’s a lot of poetic license going on here, but as the award-winning speculative novelist E.E. Giorgi says, “… if you don’t allow an author his or her poetic license you’ll miss out on the most fantastic premises.”
“The Brothers Cro-Magnon” is imaginative and ambitious, fusing the prehistoric with contemporary biology and futuristic science. It’s an adventure, a hero’s journey, a quest. Catherine, aka Corky, is a New York reporter who was born in Siberia but given up for adoption and raised in America when her parents were killed. She’s traveled the world, endured the heat of the desert (so hot “she wore a burka without underwear”), reported from many an exotic location, but none so cold as this one. A tall, strong, cosmopolitan woman, she shivers on the helicopter “a short hop from the North Pole” and receives a furry hat from the short man seated beside her. I love the way she peeks at the journal this man is writing, unaware that the woman beside him can read his flattering observations about her because she’s fluent in several languages.
Stu Uhlig, with his German name and Native American coloring, is a great foil for Corky, so I’m happy to report that he remains part of this novel to the very end. Stu and Corky share line after great line of dialogue. One of my favorites:
“So, where did you get the funny name?” Uhlig asked.
Corky frowned, and glared.
“Er, I mean, where’d you get that great name,” he stammered.
“That’s better.” Unable to stop smiling, she recalled (the newspaper gang she worked with) calling her Corky because she’d collected corks over the years, when not dodging bullets.
Gotta love the way Corky, when Stu offers her the wolfskin cap, wants to say “no way would she wear the skin of an endangered species, but she’d tasted the warmth and couldn’t pluck off the hat.”
There’s more to love, love, love in this opening scene. A huge man with bushy hair and a beard, also a passenger on this flight, has no hat or gloves, his parka wide open. Smerdyakov, or Smerd, “had a huge barrel chest, arms as thick as tree trunks and the biggest pair of hands she’d ever seen.”
He’s not the only one. Eventually Cork meets all four Brothers Karamazov–oops, Cro-Magnon–Dmitri, Ivan, Fyodor and Pavel (or was it Alyosha?). The four brothers, created from ancient sperm that survived being frozen in the body of a rape victim, loom large in this novel. So too does the disturbing possibility that Corky might be the sister of this quartet of murderous mad men.
She also meets the Russian Secret Service and a pack of hungry polar bears who guard a remote laboratory of cloned mammoths, and a captor who forces our heroine into a miserable prison cell until — well, you’ll have to read for yourself how she escapes.
You won’t want to miss the baby mammoth scene. What could have been the most terrifying, bloody and brutal scene in the novel becomes the most moving and memorable.
Pepper’s larger-than-life cast of characters also includes real-life people. I love the Dolgons, a marginalized people “from the other side of the tracks, a much maligned minority. Stalin persecuted the nomads. He made them Soviet citizens so he could draft them into the army.” Corky’s first encounter with them is chilling in more ways than a thermometer could indicate.
Great story, great characters, great premise, however fantastical – what’s not to love? Pepper’s enthusiasm for his subjects is infectious. He writes with passion and rich, descriptive detail, even if his prose may not show the mastery of a Dostoevsky or even a Tom Clancy. This novel is riveting and entertaining, even if the prose is a little awkward at times, and the descriptions may exhaust contemporary readers who didn’t grow up with the epic page count of 19thCentury literature.
I’ll suspend disbelief for a novel like this any time.
And, as always, considerably more than five minutes have passed!