Mammoth

6

MATTHEW Wright sat in his aluminum canoe and tried to think like a trout.

He was on Clear Lake, some dozen or so miles south of Mount Hood, in Oregon. He had been told to relax. Take it easy. Take a few months off, find a hobby, something to take your mind off your work. Because, frankly, Matt, people have been remarking about some of your behavior. No, you haven't stripped naked and painted yourself blue and run through the Student Union shouting about the end of the world, but you have been acting... well, a little unusual.

Matthew didn't precisely remember who it was that first suggested trout fishing as a suitable avocation for a scientist on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

"Breakdown? Breakdown?" he muttered. "A long, long ways from a breakdown. I saw A Beautiful Mind, too. That was a breakdown. All I was having was panic attacks."

One of Matthew's colleagues had commented, after seeing some of his preparations for his future hobby, that if Matt had decided to take up snowboarding, step one would have been to redesign snow, from the molecular level upward, and one day we'd all wake up to find that snow was half as cold and twice as slippery as it had been before. Matthew Wright was just that kind of guy, the kind who always starts from basics and goes logically from there.

Step one, in trout fishing, was to understand trout. How does a trout experience the universe? What does he see? What does he think? To find out, Matt first went to Safeway and bought a trout, which he then dissected. He learned a lot, including the fact that fish had hard, clear, spherical lenses in the middle of their eyes.

Using all the data he had collected he wrote a computer program, a virtual trout, in which he could adjust twenty-seven variables. After a long series of runs on the computer he had charts of optimum conditions. He could then cast a virtual fly into his program, and see if his cyber-trout was interested enough to bite.

After a few weeks he bought a metal canoe, a twenty-five-foot trailer, a tackle box for his specialized flies, and a rod and reel. He set out into the wilderness along a road that used to be part of the Oregon Trail, only in reverse, feeling pleasantly like William Clark or Meriwether Lewis.

At Clear Lake he launched his canoe and paddled out to the middle of the lovely little body of water. He opened his laptop and lowered a thermometer into the water, consulted a dandy little handheld weather station from the Oregon Scientific Company, and entered all the resulting data into his computer. The result immediately appeared on the screen: lure 14. He removed that lure—a gaudy one with two long red feathers and a bit of Christmas tree tinsel, one of his favorites—from the tackle box and tied it to the end of the clear nylon line, and prepared to make his first cast.

He figured that, if he did catch a trout, it would have cost him no more than a few thousand dollars per pound. But that wasn't the point, was it? He was doing this to relax, and he had to admit, just rowing out to the center of the lake was relaxing. Matt was a city boy, not used to such silence, to trees so green and thick, to the sweet smell of the mountain air.

He waved the line back and forth over his head as he'd seen casters do in one of the videos he studied, letting out more and more line. Then he cast it out before him.

The hook caught in the shoulder of his REI canvas fisherman's vest, barely missing his ear. The length of line he'd carefully paid out fell down all around him, like spider silk.

"Story of my life," he muttered. "Great on theory, poor on execution."

He was still trying to untangle himself when he heard the sound of an approaching helicopter. He waited while the noisy machine turned abruptly and hovered over the middle of the lake. He could just make out someone in the back looking at him through a big pair of binoculars. Then the chopper flew off to the east, toward where Matt knew there was a clearing large enough for a helicopter to land. He stowed his rod and reel and started paddling for shore.

The helicopter's engine had died by the time he reached shore, and as he pulled the boat up on the sand, a large, balding, powerfully built man in an expensive-looking gray suit was picking his way through the low shrubs and patches of mud that surrounded the shallow lake. Matt started toward him, indifferent to the mud on his L.L. Bean heavy-duty fishing boots.

"You must be the guy I talked to on the phone, Mr. Warburton," Matt said. "And I'm still not interested." "Be that as it may," the man said, stopping a few yards from Matt, "I have to make my pitch. You hung up on me."

Warburton looked momentarily confused. Then he shrugged it off.

"I spoke to some of your colleagues at the university, and it seems you're not that interested in money. You already have your full professorship. So it's a problem, since everybody I ask about finding the top man in the country concerning the physics of time immediately tells me it's Matthew Wright. No second place."

"Then you do have a problem," Matt said.

"I am prepared to offer you your own private lab with a research budget of ten million dollars yearly. No more faculty committees to satisfy, no pressure to publish, no agenda, no hindrance at all to exploring in any direction you choose. After you've addressed the job we're hiring you for, of course."

"I already have most of that," Matt said. "And the project would be...?"

"As I said on the phone, I can't tell you that until you've signed a secrecy agreement. This would be in effect whether or not you took the job. We are prepared to pay you one hundred thousand dollars simply to go with me this afternoon and examine certain artifacts that have come into the possession of the company I work for. Then you take the job or you don't take it; the hundred grand is yours either way."

Matt was going to take the job. He had known he would take it from the moment he hooked his jacket, before Warburton's helicopter even landed. But there was no sense jumping the gun, nor in giving up his negotiating advantage.

"We're not talking about the Company, are we? As in the Central Intelligence—"

"No, I can tell you that much. It's a private company."

"And what did you say the salary would be?" He laughed at the expression on Warburton's face. "Who told you I don't need money, anyway? Everybody needs money. That's why they call it money."

"I believe it was Professor Wellburn."

"Of course. Old Wellybelly has hated me since I got the Hawking Chair. I'd like a salary of... two million dollars a year."

Warburton, who had been authorized to offer another ten million, tried to look as if the demand was a bitter pill to swallow. After a suitable time frowning, he nodded.

"Done. I have a man aboard who will pack up your gear and drive your—" "Don't bother with the gear," Matt said. "If I kept it I'd only be tempted to try fishing again."

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

Temba had first come into season two years before that long dry summer, many thousands of years ago.

Though mammoths and elephants are very much like us in many ways, they are different in other ways.

Mammoth and elephant females become sexually mature about the same time that human females do. But human females are fertile once a month, and elephants and mammoths are only fertile once a year. With elephants that is usually in December or January. We are not completely sure when mammoths came into "season," or as scientists call it, estrus, but we think it was in the summer.

The two summers before that, Temba had watched as the male Columbian mammoths joined the herd and started looking for mates.

Another way humans are different from elephants and mammoths is that during mating season male elephants and mammoths go through something called musth. No other animals that we know of do this. During musth a male elephant gets very cranky, like human females sometimes do when they are having their menstrual period. He will tear up trees and go charging about angrily and attack anything that comes near him. You do not want to get in the way of a bull elephant during musth!

Poor Temba.

She smelled the bull elephants and she wanted to mate with them. But she was at the bottom of the pecking order, and so every time a bull in musth approached her she was shoved rudely aside by one of her older cousins or aunts. She could only watch through two summers as the mature bulls passed her by.

But this summer it would be different.