Mammoth

This book is dedicated to John and Doris Varley.

My father, John E. Varley, died on January 13, 2005, at the age of 79, in Big Spring, Texas.

He was a very good man who led a good life and raised two good daughters, and me. He hated the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, the New York Yankees, and the Texas A&M Aggies, and loved most other Texas teams. He lived to see the Red Sox humiliate the Yankees, and a lot of people didn't.

FROM "LITTLE FUZZY, A CHILD OF THE ICE AGE"

Once upon a time in what would one day come to be known as the month of August, many, many years ago, in a place that would one day be known as Manitoba, a herd of mammoths came over the low hills to the south and into a gentle green valley rich with the scent of water.

There were twenty or twenty-five mammoths in the herd. Maybe thirty. No one is sure. What we do know is that the herd was made up of females of all ages and males younger than fifteen years old.

Mammoths did not live in families like we do, with a daddy and a mommy and their children, and maybe a granny and a grandpa. Mammoths were like our elephants today, and their families were bunches of sisters and aunts and nieces and young male mammoths.

When the males reached a certain age they became troublesome, bothering the females all the time... just like boys do today! When this happened, the older female mammoths ganged up on the youngster and pushed him out of the herd so he wouldn't cause so much trouble. The young male would then find his way to a herd of other males.

The leader of this herd was the oldest and largest female, what scientists call the alpha cow. We'll call her Big Mama.

Big Mama was old, maybe forty-five, maybe fifty; no one knows for sure because mammoths didn't have calendars and didn't write down their birthdays like we do, so they didn't know how old they were. But Big Mama had seen many winters and many summers, and she had been the alpha cow for many years. She was the wisest and strongest member of the herd, by far, and all the other females respected her without question.

It had been a hard summer. The places that would one day be called the Mississippi and Missouri river valleys had not seen any rain in many months but there had been plenty of lightning. The prairies were dry and there were many fires. Big animals like mammoths and bison and woolly rhinoceros had to keep moving to find enough food and water. Big Mama had not led her herd this far north in many years, but her memory was good and she kept them moving.

But others were there before them. They were mammoths, but they were strange, completely covered with hair.

To understand why this should be strange to Big Mama and her herd, you should know that there was more than one kind of mammoth, all those years ago. (There were also cousins of mammoths, called mastodons, but we don't need to worry about them.)

There were people back then, and they hunted the mammoths, but we don't know what they called them. Today, we call the two types of mammoth that lived in North America the woolly mammoth and the Columbian mammoth.

The woolly mammoths stayed mostly in the north, in what we now call Canada.

The Columbian mammoths stayed mostly in the south, sometimes as far south as what we now call Mexico!

But there were places where you could have found both kinds of mammoth.

Mammoths sometimes traveled great distances in search of food. Scientists call this migration. When woolly mammoths and Columbian mammoths met they usually didn't get involved with one another, any more than they concerned themselves with the giant ground sloths or woolly rhinos or giant bison they shared the plains with. You can see a scene very much like this in Africa today, with elephants and rhinos and giraffes and wildebeests grazing in the same areas peacefully, ignoring each other.

Most of the time the woolly mammoths and Columbian mammoths ignored each other, too.

But sometimes they didn't.