Mammoth

8

LELAND said, "How do you give an enema to an elephant?"

"Diplomatically," Roger suggested.

Susan Morgan sighed and scowled at them from the other side of Queenie. "Will you boys get serious long enough to get this done? There's a lot at stake here."

"Especially for Queenie," Leland responded. Roger giggled.

Susan didn't know why she bothered. Leland and Roger were in fact both older than she was. But they were unable or unwilling to repress what she thought of as their frat-boy/med-student tendency toward the gross-out... what they would have described as irreverent humor.

The procedure they were about to undertake wasn't an enema but, as Leland had observed yesterday, it was close enough for rock and roll. What they were getting ready for was the last stage of a process Susan was pretty sure had never been tried on an elephant, in vitro fertilization. If it was successful, in about twenty-two months Queenie would give birth to a baby that was half Elephas maximus and half Mammuthus primigenius.

In laymen's terms, half Indian elephant, half woolly mammoth. SUSAN Morgan had been working for Howard Christian for almost eight years, but had never thought of it that way. She was circus people, third generation, and she worked for the circus. If that circus was owned by a network, which was owned by an Internet service provider, which was owned by some vast tax-evading offshore holding company that was owned by Howard Christian, who gave an elephant fart?

Susan was often at the head of that thundering parade, trotting along beside the leader, but she was not a performer. The spotlight never sought her out. She had no stage presence, and didn't want any. There was a Russian known as the Great Kristov who handled the glamorous part of the show, who wore the spangled tights and flashed the perfect teeth. Kristov was touted as the world's greatest animal handler, but the truth was that if it hadn't been for Susan and two big cat behaviorists doing the endless training behind the scenes, Kristov wouldn't have lasted a week in his big finale, which included four elephants, eight lions and tigers, and eight white horses.

There were those who said the day of animal acts was, or at least should be, over. They said it was barbarism to teach our animal cousins unnatural behavior, or to have them in captivity at all. Susan understood their point of view and had witnessed abuses, but as long as she was in charge her twenty-six elephants would lack nothing, and would get only the best treatment while working, and guaranteed care in retirement. She preferred to think of her relationship with her animals as a partnership, as it was with the best mahouts in Thailand and India and Sri Lanka, where she had spent three years teaching and learning after getting her D.V.M. She was the first in her family to go to college, a great source of pride to her grandfather.

She had heard of Howard Christian and his mammoth-cloning project and wasn't sure she approved, though the thought of getting to know an actual mammoth was almost too seductive to contemplate.

When Howard Christian sent out the emergency call for the world's best elephant handler, he was informed that there were many who were about equally good, but he already employed one of the best at the winter headquarters of the circus, in Sarasota, Florida.

A few hours later a man named Warburton picked his way carefully through piles of elephant dung and made Susan an offer she couldn't refuse.

NOW Susan checked the tension on the elephant press as the two mad doctors prepared their diabolical instruments of torture down at Queenie's other end. The procedure actually would have been more of a discomfort than torture, but it was academic. Queenie wouldn't feel a thing. Susan had administered a dose of azaperone an hour earlier as a calming agent, to assist the sometimes touchy process of getting her into the sling without alarming her. Then she was led into the elephant press, which was basically like a cattle chute with sides that could compress around an elephant and hold her immobile even if she got frisky.

After that, all Susan had to do was administer the big dose of carfentanil and assist the operation by monitoring Queenie's vital signs, standing ready to pump doses of diprenorphine and/or naltrexone into her if she got in any respiratory trouble.

The comedy team of Leland and Roger had been lucky. They were very experienced at the process of in vitro fertilization with cattle and horses. With an elephant, all you'd need was a bigger probe, right?

Wrong. They had made an attempt to inseminate Queenie without the press and the lift and the drugs, and were lucky to be alive. And so the call had gone out for an elephant handler and a vet, and Howard had found both in the person of Susan Morgan.

SUSAN had been flown to Los Angeles in a black private jet. At LAX she was limoed to a helicopter which deposited her at the base of the Resurrection Tower, then whisked to Howard Christian's office. It finally began to seem real to her, shaking hands with the man whose face she had seen on many magazine covers.

"You want to clone a mammoth, right?" she said. Christian sailed a copy of the secrecy agreement over his desk and sat back in his chair. Susan signed.

Howard Christian had driven her to Santa Monica in a car he said was a 1933 Pierce-Arrow Silver Arrow V-12. She had no reason to doubt him. The front looked a lot like a Rolls-Royce to her and the rear was a '30s version of a car of the future. The inside was luxurious enough, with a lot of maple wood trim. Cars didn't do much for her, though she tried to feign interest.

Their destination was a large but ordinary steel-sided warehouse in a district near the airport that had dozens of warehouses just like it. He drove through a big open door and parked beside a dozen trucks making deliveries. Then they dodged guys with hand trucks and dollies and forklifts unloading and stacking an amazing variety of stuff, most of it new in the box. Everybody was in a huge hurry. Howard Christian was used to paying big bonuses for work done very quickly.

Christian dug in one of his vest pockets and came up with a laminated I.D. badge with Susan's picture on it. She was pretty sure it was her driver's license photo, probably obtained from the Florida DMV. These people worked fast.

In one corner was a big concrete cube, and in it was a door of the type used on refrigerated meat lockers. It wasn't cold on the other side, but there was a second door at the end of a long room with a dozen heavy parkas on hooks and insulated boots and gloves in cubbies. They donned the cold-weather gear and Christian punched a code into a pad beside the inner door.

And there it was. Sitting back on its massive haunches, leaning a little to the right against a support that was no longer there, a looming mass of long, tangled, reddish gold hair. The first specimen of Mammuthus primigenius Susan had ever been close to, but judging from the many photos she had seen, possibly the most complete carcass ever recovered.

The animal was still largely in situ, reminding her of a museum diorama. The base was wrapped in black plastic, and it looked like they had brought a large chunk of frozen tundra with the animal.

It didn't smell very good. No matter. Susan was used to working in elephant houses, which weren't very sweet, either.

She took in the humps on top of the head and on the shoulders. She moved around the front of the animal and inspected the tusks, which were fifteen feet long and turned like a corkscrew. She had never heard an explanation of why mammoths had needed tusks that big; surely they would be a hindrance in many things.

She took off her glove and ran her hand over the ancient ivory, and smiled.

"The only work we've done on him so far is back here, of course," Christian said, and guided her around the mammoth's left side. Then she was peering into the incisions that had been made to get at the beast's testicles. Mammoths carried them internally.

"We removed one," Christian said. "Left the other in place in case we screw up the first one, then we'd rethink before we took the other. Two men are in charge of recovering and preparing the spermatozoa. They are well versed in animal in vitro fertilization... but they don't know elephants. That's where you come in."

Susan took a deep breath, but there was really no sense in beating around the bush. The only question was pretty much as Warburton had expressed it: Did she want to be involved in the experiment of the century?

"How do I join up?" she said.

THE well-versed men turned out to be Leland and Roger, the Abbott and Costello of veterinary medicine. But they were competent enough when it came to manipulating the genetic material recovered from the mammoth carcass. Very soon they were ready to implant some reconstructed DNA into elephant eggs cells.

But first, you needed to gather the elephant eggs, and these were in the middle of full-grown cow elephants, eight tons of flesh that might not be eager to surrender them. Leland and Roger read some papers, called some colleagues. They figured they had a handle on it. They explained what they wanted to Queenie's handler, a lad who worked at the game farm in Simi Valley who had been given just enough instruction to lead the animal into a stall or onto a truck. He saw no problem with it; Queenie had never given him any trouble in the nearly three months he had worked with her.

That first entry was for test purposes, to calibrate the equipment as well as accustom the elephant to the process. Encouraged, the handler and the vets decided to go after eggs the very next day. The extraction process, called transvaginal oocyte retrieval, involved locating the ovaries with ultrasound, then extending a narrow probe through a needle inserted into the interior of the vagina. They had done it countless times with horses and cows, and expected no trouble because there were no nerve endings inside the vagina.

Queenie must have felt something, because she turned around and knocked Leland sprawling forty feet over the messy concrete floor with one massive thrust and shake of her head. She picked up the ultrasound machine with her trunk and smashed it on the floor, over and over, until it came apart. Then she went back to her manger and resumed placidly eating the delicious green alfalfa.

"Could have been a lot worse," Susan told them when she heard the story on her first day at work, which was the very next day after her cross-country trip. "Some of them store up their bad feelings. Then one day you do something she doesn't like and she pays you back all at once. Next day, she's fine."

Two days after that, when the quarters and examining and operating rooms were fixed to her satisfaction, they went in again with Queenie in the press and under mild tranquilizers. They harvested six ooctyes that had been primed and ready for ovulation by two weeks of hormone therapy. Under the microscope they looked good, and two of them began to divide after being injected with the mammoth DNA. They decided to try an implant. They were well into the procedure when Howard Christian walked into the lab with a guy wearing a lot of fishing lures stuck into his clothes.

"This is the mammoth-cloning project everybody seems to have heard so much about," Christian said, perhaps a little petulantly. It had not exactly been top secret, but he didn't like his projects to become the object of too much speculation before they showed results. That was because his projects had, fairly frequently, failed to show any results. He introduced Leland and Roger to his guest.

"And this is Dr. Susan Morgan. Susan, Dr. Matthew Wright."

"Just Matt, please."

"And just Susan." Doctor of what? she wondered.

"Susan worked for the circus until a few weeks ago. Now, if this fertilization is successful she'll be a nursemaid to this elephant for two years." "Must be quite a change after the glamour of the circus," Matt said with a smile. Susan thought he might be putting her on.

"We have a better grade of elephant shit here in California," Leland offered.

"No, that's bullshit you're thinking about," Susan said.

"I knew it was some sort of shit."

It was obvious that Howard Christian was eager to move on, but Matt asked a question, then another, and Christian paused to listen to the answer, and before long he found himself observing the entire implantation procedure. Matt seemed utterly fascinated with every aspect.

The three vets finished the implantation with Matt watching the ultrasound image over their shoulders as they positioned the probe and delicately inserted the tiny mass of tissue that hardly qualified as an embryo, but which in two years might grow to be the wonder of the century.

Leland pulled the probe out of Queenie, sighed, and stretched.

"Was it good for you, Roger?"

"I could use a cigarette."

"Oh, sure," Leland said. "Then you'll turn right over and snooze, when what Queenie wants right

now is a little cuddling."

Susan was busy injecting a dose of doxapram to bring Queenie back to full consciousness, but she looked up in time to see Wright and Christian going through a door in the wall that divided the building roughly in half, a door they'd all noticed and whose handle all of them had tried at one time or another, with no result.

Susan wondered what was on the other side.

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

Tsehe heard the song, and he came calling. Even though it was the wrong song.

Woolly mammoths and Columbian mammoths were very much alike, but they were different in some important ways. One of these were the songs they sang during the mating season.

We can't understand the songs whales sing, but a humpback whale knows the difference between a dolphin song and a sperm whale song. Canaries sing one way, and crows sing another. Usually these different species ignore the songs of other species.

But the two types of mammoth were very closely related, and Tsehe was feeling very confused and out of sorts, so the song sounded okay to him.

Tsehe approached the female and began his courtship.

Mammoths liked to stroke each other with their trunks, just like elephants do. They rubbed against each other and smelled each other, paying a lot of attention to the urine. We find this smell unpleasant, but mammoths found it very exciting!

Right away Tsehe noticed this female smelled funny. His eyes told him this was a female mammoth, and his nose told him she was in estrus. His nose also told him there was something different about her.

But it was all too much for his aching head.

Tsehe hadn't been near the herd very long when Big Mama became aware of him and decided to call a halt to the whole business before it got out of hand. The female Tsehe had chosen was a grand-niece to Big Mama, and she wasn't about to let this intruder trifle with the youngster's affections. Big Mama had her standards. No member of her family was going to consort with long-haired, smelly, tiny-eared trash from the wrong side of the tundra!

Even though he was angry, confused, and irritable, Tsehe knew when he was outclassed. Big Mama was by far the largest mammoth he had ever seen, even if she didn't have much hair. Her tusks were enormous, and her ears were huge! They were like the wings of a giant bird. As if that wasn't enough, there were half a dozen other females behind her as she charged at him in a cloud of dust.

He stood his ground only for a moment. One swipe of Big Mama's tusks to his aching head and he turned tail and ran!

The female watched his retreat sadly. Normally, this would have been the end of things. Vanquished males do not mate in mammoth society.

But he had been driven off by females, not by a larger male who would obviously make a better mate.

And it wasn't as if there was a long line of suitors vying for the trunk of this female mammoth. In fact, there hadn't been a single one.

With a guilty look back at Big Mama, still bellowing her triumph, the female started toward the low hill where Tsehe had gone. Soon she was farther from the herd than she had ever been.

As you've probably already guessed, the female was Temba. 9