1
“Look—over there,” said the guide in a hushed voice, handing Olivia the binoculars. “On the far side of the lake.”
Olivia
Gunnerson took the binoculars and directed them toward the turquoise
pond, which lay a mile away at the bottom of the cirque, below their
vantage point. It took her a moment to locate the woolly mammoths, four
big ones and two smaller ones, on the opposite shore. She touched up the
focus, and the animals sprang into sharp relief. It took her breath
away. They were so gigantic they looked almost fake—much bigger than the
elephants she’d seen on safari in Africa. The bull was drinking deeply.
He was fifteen feet at the shoulder, his tusks great scimitars of ivory
as long again as his body, sweeping outward from a shaggy domed head.
The matriarch of the family was standing guard, her trunk elevated and
moving back and forth, warily testing the air, as her calf huddled under
her protective bulk, pushing his head upward to suckle. An older calf
splashed in the shallows, dipping his trunk and playfully squirting
water from it. It was early fall, but here in the mountains, the
mammoths were already growing out winter coats, the long brown hair
hanging down several feet.
Olivia was thrilled. It was a scene
straight out of the Ice Age, the family of mammoths lingering in a lush
meadow bordering the pond, with the glittering, snowcapped peaks of the
Erebus Mountains of Colorado forming a majestic backdrop. To one side of
the group stood a grove of fall aspen trees, their leaves a cloud of
shimmering gold rustling with every swell of the breeze.
“Mammuthus columbi,” whispered the guide. “The largest of all the mammoths, the northern subspecies with fur. That bull weighs at least ten tons.”
Olivia
continued staring through the glasses. The bull finished drinking and
playfully sprayed water from his trunk at the young one, who squealed in
delight, the faint sound drifting across the valley.
“Incredible,”
she breathed. As a girl growing up in Salt Lake City, Olivia had been
crazy about dinosaurs and wanted to be a paleontologist, until skiing
had taken over her life.
“Don’t bogart those binocs,” said Mark, Olivia’s husband.
“Sorry,”
she said with a laugh, handing them over and giving his shoulder an
affectionate squeeze. She was so mesmerized she had almost forgotten the
rest of the world existed. She turned to their guide, Stefan. “What
will they do when the snow comes?”
“They’ll move lower down in the valley and take shelter in the forests,” he said.
Their
guide, Olivia observed, was one of those super-fit older men who seemed
to be made of cords and cables, with a grizzled beard and leathery
skin, exuding a sense of vigor. She wondered if Mark would be like that
in his fifties. Probably. He would never let his fitness regimen slide,
and neither would she.
“In winter, what do they eat?” Mark asked.
“They’ll
tear down the aspens and cottonwoods and eat the twigs and buds, and
they’ll paw up the snow to get at the mosses and bushes along the creeks
and bogs. They wreak havoc—but it’s an environmentally good kind of
havoc. Since being rewilded, they’ve changed the ecology of the valley,
opening up meadows and churning up the ground—which increased the
landscape’s carbon absorption by fifty percent.”
“It looks like
they’re coming around the lake,” said Olivia. Even without the glasses,
she could see them on the move, the matriarch leading the way, moseying
along the shore. “They’re coming our way.”
“Nothing to worry about,” said the guide. “They’re as peaceful as puppy dogs.”
The
backpack to the campsite had been fourteen tough miles over a
three-thousand-foot vertical gain, carrying fifty-pound packs. They had
camped in a high meadow at ten thousand feet, not far below the tree
line, in a magnificent cirque of mountains called the Barbicans. Olivia
had spent much of her thirty years of life outdoors, skiing and
backpacking, but she had never seen a place quite as spectacular as
this, with its towering, snow-clad peaks, the aspens shivering with
gold, the flawless aquamarine of the lake reflecting the evening
cumulus—and the crowning glory of it all, the family of woolly mammoths
ambling around the lake, their trunks swinging as they went, two little
ones trotting along.
That morning, they had left the lodge in a
jeep before dawn: her husband, herself, and Stefan. It had been a bumpy
eleven-mile drive to the trailhead. They had begun hiking at first
light, going up through a deep forest of Douglas firs before coming out
on a ridge, with views down into the Erebus Valley and the now distant
lodge and its nearby lake, created along the Erebus River by the gnawing
and tree-felling of giant beavers, Castoroides, another animal that had been “de-extincted,” in the jargon of the Erebus Resort.
While
at the lodge, every evening, they had watched woolly mammoths and other
Pleistocene megafauna coming in to drink at the lake, regular as
clockwork. The guests congregated at the glassed-in wall to watch them
gather. It was like Disneyland, everyone crowding forward and oohing and
aahing, clutching their drinks and trying to get selfies with their
cell phones. But here, in the mountains, seeing the mammoths living free
and naturally, was a totally different experience. It was like seeing
elephants in a zoo versus viewing them on safari in the African bush.
Mark
handed her the binoculars, and she looked again. The mammoths were now
on the north side of the tarn and had paused at a thicket, pulling twigs
and branches off the bushes and stuffing them into their mouths. One of
the mammoths paused to take a dump, and an almost ridiculous amount of
stuff came out, leaving a giant pile. On the hike up, she had just
avoided stepping in a similar mound, so large she had almost mistaken it
for a brown rock. If the guide hadn’t warned her, she would have sunk
up to her knees in it. What a laugh they had about that. Later they had
spied a group of glyptodons grazing in a far-off meadow. A more
outrageous-looking animal could not be found, Olivia thought. Glyptodons
were giant armadillos, the same size and shape as a Volkswagen Beetle.
She couldn’t see their heads or tails, just five nubbly gray humps in a
meadow, moving slowly, leaving cropped trails in the long grass.
But
more than anything else, Olivia was dying to see a woolly indricothere.
It was the latest animal Erebus had de-extincted, and there were
supposed to be two of them in the valley. The indricothere was the
largest land mammal that had ever lived, an ancestor of the rhinoceros.
It was fully twice the mass of the mammoth, a fifteen-foot behemoth on
legs like pillars. The indricothere, she had read in her orientation
packet, had been discovered in Siberia in 1916 by a Russian
paleontologist named Borissiak, who had named it after the “Indrik
Beast,” a mythological Russian monster believed to live deep in the Ural
Mountains, so large that when it walked, the earth quaked. The Indrik
Beast had the body of a bull, the head of a horse, and a giant horn on
its snout and was covered with coarse black fur. The woolly indricothere
did in fact look very much like that, except without the horn. Despite
their size, the indricotheres were shy and hard to find, because they
tended to bury themselves in the dense thickets of chokecherries and
buckthorn that grew along the streams in the lower areas of the Erebus
Valley, or hide themselves in the densest forests on the upper reaches
of the valley.
She shook aside her blond hair and took another
look at the mammoths, which had moved beyond the lake and had become
more visible as they rambled through the thickets, feeding and leaving a
wake of ripped-up vegetation.
“We won’t get stepped on tonight, will we?” she asked with a laugh.
“They’re super careful where they put their feet,” said the guide. “And anyway, as soon as the sun sets, they’ll bed down.”
“Do they lie down to sleep?”
“They’re
a bit like horses—they mostly sleep standing up but might lie down for
thirty minutes or so. They’re so heavy that if they lie down too
long—such as if they’re sick or hurt—they can suffocate.”
The
last rays of sunlight were spearing across the lake below, and the air
was cooling down fast. At that altitude, Olivia knew, it would dip below
freezing in the night.
“Let’s light a fire and rustle up some grub,” said Mark.
“You bet,” said the guide, rising.
The
two went to build a fire and prepare dinner. She was glad she’d found a
guy who not only liked to cook but was good at it—and on top of that,
he washed dishes. The menu that night would be freeze-dried, as usual.
That was fine. This was not meant to be a luxury safari where they were
waited on hand and foot. On the contrary. For their honeymoon, she and
Mark had decided on a serious backcountry adventure—an eight-day
backpack along the hundred-and-ten-mile Barbican Trek. It was Erebus’s
most famous circuit, and it offered a serious physical challenge,
spectacular scenery, and the chance to see incredible Pleistocene
megafauna brought back to life by the science of de-extinction and
rewilded in a natural habitat. She was a little sorry Mark had insisted
on a guide, but she had to admit he had been a fountain of information,
while being quiet and unobtrusive. There were no maintained trails or
developed campsites in Erebus; that was one of its attractions: you felt
like you were a John Muir exploring an unknown and untouched land. It
was silly, of course, because Erebus was one of the most curated
landscapes in Colorado, but Olivia was tired of backpacking along
heavily eroded trails and camping at overused, beaten-down campsites,
even deep in the wilderness. In the years since the COVID pandemic, the
wild places in America seemed to have gotten more and more overrun.
She
watched from her seat on a log as Mark and the guide busied themselves
with dinner. Mark had pulled out a flask of Michter’s, and they were
trading swigs as they worked. He was such a sweet, eager-beaver guy;
you’d never know his father was the billionaire from hell. Mark took
after his mom, one of the most wonderful people Olivia had ever met. How
those two could’ve paired up she’d never figure out, but she considered
herself fortunate in her mother-in-law. The big, blustery,
honking-and-swearing tech-billionaire father wasn’t much in the picture
anyway. She hoped it would stay that way after she had her baby.
They
now had a cheerful fire going. The magic hour had begun, and the peaks
were aflame with alpenglow. The temperature was dropping. She pulled on a
fleece from her backpack and headed to the fire. She would’ve loved a
hit of that bourbon, but, being pregnant, she had to abstain.
“Sorry, hon, I hope you don’t mind,” Mark said, waving the bottle with a guilty grin.
“No worries. You two go right ahead.”
The
mammoths were no longer visible, having disappeared behind a rocky
ridge between them and the lake. The guide explained they would spend
the night in a protected hollow.
The menu was freeze-dried
chicken tetrazzini, along with instant soup, hot chocolate, and Toll
House cookies for dessert. She watched Mark eat, his jaw muscles
working. He was ripped but not bulked up, with long, smooth athletic
muscles, dark curly hair, and white teeth. It was funny how being
pregnant seemed to make her hornier than ever. She assumed it would have
tamped down those kinds of feelings, but apparently not. They’d have to
be super quiet, but that made it even more fun, with his hand over her
mouth as she came. It was like high school days when she was in her room
supposedly studying with a boyfriend, but instead, they had their hands
down each other’s pants.
The guide, with his usual sensitivity,
had set up his tent discreetly out of sight, behind a clump of trees a
good hundred yards from theirs.
Darkness fell, and the stars came
out, like God had kicked a bin of glowing dust across the sky. At ten
thousand feet, she thought, you could see stars that no sea-level human
had ever seen.
The fire had died down, and she could see her breath in the glow of the coals.
Mark stood up. “I’m ready to turn in.”
“Me
too,” she said, pretending to yawn. She was already aroused just
thinking about it. Something about the strenuous hike, the glyptodons
and the mammoths, the snowcapped peaks and the dome of stars made her
horny as hell.
She held his hand, and they crawled into the tent.
They had already zipped their sleeping bags together, and they quickly
stripped and burrowed into the bag, her arms pulling him close. He was
ready, and they wasted no time with preliminaries.
2
Olivia
lay in the dark, Mark breathing softly next to her. The night was
still, without the breath of breeze, the silence profound. It had
dropped below freezing, but their sleeping bags were super warm, and she
was used to camping in alpine weather. Her dad had taken her and her
brothers camping in the Wasatches and Manti-La Sal in all seasons,
sometimes on cross-country ski trips in the dead of winter in
ten-foot-deep snow and nights to twenty below. God, she missed him. Mark
was a little like that, unintimidated by wilderness conditions, totally
cool with anything nature might throw at him. The first thing she did
with any new boyfriend was go camping. So many of them, despite their
big talk, failed the test—all it took was a little rain or snow, a swarm
of mosquitoes, or a rattler, and they were in a panic. Or they just
didn’t have a wilderness sense—like casually leaving trash or pissing
too close to a stream or not knowing how to set up a tent.
She
shifted her body, not feeling the slightest bit tired. The sun set so
early in the fall, it was still probably only eight o’clock. She wished
she could fall asleep like Mark, who could drop off anywhere, anytime,
in five minutes. It was a dark, moonless night. The mammoths would be
sleeping in their hollow below them. She listened, wondering if mammoths
snored. But she could hear nothing.
Her mind wandered, and she
thought of her Olympic medal, sitting in its sock in the back of her
underwear drawer in Salt Lake. All those years of work, struggle, risks,
crashes, injuries, surgery, rehab, recovery, more work, more
struggle—and finally Pyeongchang. All that work had been squeezed up and
stamped in a piece of bronze sitting in the back of her drawer. Mark
had been upset that she wouldn’t frame it and hang it with a picture of
her receiving it on the stand. Why would she? She hated even looking at
it.
It would be different for her child. Son or daughter, it
didn’t matter. He or she wouldn’t make the mistakes she’d made. Olivia
had been through it all and knew now how the system worked and what had
to be done, and she could guide her child to something a whole lot
better than bronze.
She suddenly was hyperalert, tense. She heard
a sound. A strange plucking sound. Mark was instantly awake too. And
then it started, the loud tearing sound of the tent fly, like it was
being cut.
“What the fuck?” Mark sat up like a shot.
She
pulled a headlamp out of the tent pocket and switched it on. She shined
it through the mosquito netting of the inner tent to reveal a long,
ragged cut in the outer fly.
“What was that?” said Mark. “A branch?”
“There’s no wind,” Olivia said.
“You think it’s a bear?” he said.
“They said the bears had been removed.”
“Yeah, but one could have wandered back in over the mountains.”
Olivia wondered. Maybe it was an animal, smelling the humans inside and reaching out to scratch the fly just to see what it was.
They listened, but the silence was total.
“I’m going out,” said Mark.
“No, wait.”
“I’m not waiting. If it’s a cat or bear, we’d better drive it away. We can’t wait for it to come in here.”
He
took the headlamp from her, put it on, and pulled his buck knife from
its sheath, before slipping out of the bag. He was wearing Capilene
full-body long johns. He went to the tent door and unzipped it.
He paused. No sound. Then he stuck his head outside the door.
“See anything?”
“Nothing.”
She
was filled with uncertainty. It could be a mountain lion in wait. Maybe
it ran off when they turned on the headlamp. But Mark was right: they
couldn’t just cower in the tent. They had to do something. Calling out
for the guide would only put him in a place of danger, and besides,
asking for help from the guide ran against her wilderness ethic.
