Mammoth Dawn (14 page)

The mammoths close in, smart and vengeful. They have cut off Kinsman’s escape in all directions. They raise their trunks and trumpet into the blanketing white silence, a soaring cry that strikes primal fear deep into his bones.

Mr. Clean Genes soils his jeans. He doesn’t even have a chance to run.

O O O

Heading back toward the hunters’ camp, outwitting the mammoths that have nearly killed them, Alex and Gregor are in turmoil. Gregor may be a romantic beneath his shell, but he is a genius at the dynamics of power. He now understands that Sylvia has meant to destroy
both
him and Alex.

On top of shutting down the Preserve and confiscating Helyx’s assets, Sylvia can also deliver the notorious former Soviet mafia boss “Gregor Galaev.” Many Federal agencies, starting with the CIA, will be ecstatic. Using Gregor and Alex as scapegoats, with evidence of the drug running from the Preserve, the Senator will use RICO laws to grab everything. The huge public benefit she will reap from all this is sure to put her in the governor’s mansion.

Gregor has been a fool. And all of it coming from his deepest vulnerability—a woman as clever as he. He will have to become an exile again as soon as the authorities arrive. Perhaps he can escape to Siberia, where he will eventually set up another empire, changing his name and his entire identity—starting over. He is dismayed that all his work, all his vision has come to nothing. Worse, he allowed himself to love Sylvia and believe that she cared for his daughter … but she blithely risked all their lives as part of her power games. Cold fury fills him.

Alex and Gregor feel as if they’re being hunted. They hear cracking branches, see something moving. The reader may think it’s another sabretooth or dire wolves—but instead, the wildman Psyk drops out of a tree, gripping his spear and brandishing his long hunting knife. He tackles Alex and raises his knife to kill the man.

Gregor has to drag his henchman off of Alex, yelling at him in English and Russian, before finally wrestling the knife away with main strength. Psyk is pumped up on the fern drug and not thinking clearly. At last, Gregor gets through to him—Alex is not the enemy. It was Senator Chesney.

Looking as if he has degenerated to a much more primitive human being, Psyk stalks off into the snowy forest without saying a word.

O O O

When the sabretooths close in on the wrecked campsite, the Chinese businessman shoots twice more—but his aim is off each time.

Now Cassie races toward them on Zach’s snow-skimmer. Though she is herself bleeding from the dire wolf attack, Cassie yanks the magnum away from Hector Chu and stands in defense.

Within an hour, the sabretooths return, smelling blood. She recognizes one with a pronounced limp—the cat she knocked out of a tree during her survival trek back from the northern section of the Preserve. Feeling no compunctions now, Cassie kills the leader of the sabretooth pride. The other big cats run. The three humans are saved.

Senator Chesney is relieved at the rescue, but still annoyed that her carefully orchestrated, behind-the-scenes coup of the Resurrection Preserve has gone so clumsily wrong. She tells Cassie not to expect any gratitude, that Alex Pierce will still face charges, that all of the Resurrection work will be forfeit. She knows enough people in Washington that Alex, Cassie, and even his hotshot lawyer LeVay won’t be able to stop her.

Astonishingly, a thick spear slams into Sylvia with such power that she doesn’t even fall—it skewers her to a tree. She dies with the rant still on her lips.

On the other side of the campsite, Psyk stands silently, looking at what he has done. He thinks of his son, and all the crimes this woman committed for the sake of power,
civilized
crimes that never seem to warrant a proper punishment.

He walks into the forest, confident that he can always make more spears.

O O O

Wrap up. With the blizzard abating, Alex and Gregor arrive back at the camp. Rescue operations are called in, the military standby troops, now no longer under the Senator’s control.

Randall LeVay, though, has been able to scare up media copters as well, which fly over to see the mammoths that have been slaughtered by the Evos. The very idea of an illicit mammoth hunt by big-game hunters creates quite a scandal, and finally public sympathy turns. The participants are bound to face charges themselves. LeVay is sure he can tie everything up in the courts for years—certainly enough time for Alex to prove that his mammoths did not suffer from any sort of retrovirus, unlike the Japanese dwarf mammoths.

Finally Alex and Cassie are together. They are ready to face the scandal and challenges that will appear in the aftermath of the mammoth hunt. It will not be easy. But they are proud of what they have accomplished in their lives, proud of what they have found in each other.

Cassie reveals that she has found the preserved genetic samples of Helen (and saved them from the Evo attack). She is afraid to know what Alex intended to do with them—did he mean to try to clone his dead wife? Heartsick, but healing, Alex reveals that Helen was
pregnant
when she was killed in Montana; he had hoped one day to have another child with a surrogate mother, because at the time he had never imagined he could love again. Now, though, he has changed his mind.

Many of the Preserve’s animals will have already escaped into the Arctic wilderness, since the fences are now down—both the sonic fences around the Resurrection Preserve, and the ones around Alex Pierce’s heart.…

O O O

We see Psyk alone, trudging farther north, into the wilderness. He has a new spear, his knife, and a few tools. It is all he needs. He sees himself as a great hunter, returning to the old ways, the old life, and is content with the prospect.

O O O

Gregor manages to slip away, picked up by his backup team. “One always has a bolt-hole,” he says as he leaves Alex.

He has easily bribed his way out of Alaska and is now hurrying to the Siberian mainland. There he will create a new identity for himself, find the stashes of wealth he has hidden, call in a few old favors, and start all over again.

In a bittersweet “sense-of-wonder” final scene, Gregor is flying low on his way back to Russia, to put his life back together. As he cruises over the Bering Strait, Gregor looks down. He sees the dark shapes of woolly mammoths, free and healthy and escaped from the Resurrection Preserve, swimming across the icy waters toward the vast, virgin wastelands of Siberia.…

Bringing Back the Mammoths

The notion of bringing vanished species back to life—“de-extinction”—hovers between reality and science fiction. It has sunk into the public mind over the past two decades, ever since
Jurassic Park
unleashed special-effects dinosaurs on the world.

Until the 2010s, the technology for de-extinction has lagged far behind the science fiction. Now we can see the prospect better, and several teams are working toward it.

But before looking into that, the big question is now not
could
we, but
should
we.

Why?

Jurassic Park
resurrected dinosaurs for their entertainment value. The disasters and excitement that followed were mostly due to bad management, not anything intrinsic to the idea. So any answer to the
why?
question has to start with what we can actually do.

Not dinosaurs, no. People forget that realistically, the only species we can hope to revive now are those that died within the past few tens of thousands of years. Only for those can we find remains that harbor intact cells or, at the very least, enough ancient DNA to reconstruct the creature’s genome. Natural rates of decay mean that we can never have much hope of retrieving the full genome of
Tyrannosaurus rex
, which vanished about 65 million years ago. Any species theoretically capable of being revived all disappeared within our reign, while humanity rapidly climbed toward world domination. And ever faster, we humans were the culprits who wiped them out—by hunting, destroying habitats, or spreading diseases.

This fact frames the major argument for bringing them back.

Michael Archer, a paleontologist at the University of New South Wales, who has championed de-extinction for years, puts it thus: “If we’re talking about species we drove extinct, then I think we have an obligation to try to do this.” Any system of justice dictates that if damage can be restored, it should be, by the perpetrator.

Of course, some say that reviving a species that no longer exists amounts to playing God. Archer scoffs at the notion. “I think we played God when we exterminated these animals.”

Another objection is more detailed. “Mammoths, like elephants, were intelligent, highly social animals,” says Adrian Lister, paleontologist and mammoth expert at the Natural History Museum in London. “Cloning would give you a single animal, which would live all alone in a park, a zoo, or a lab—not in its native habitat, which no longer exists. You’re basically creating a curio.”

But of course, raising not one but a herd of mammoths would mean they could forage on their own, closely watched by humans, who can help with their reintroduction. Tom Gilbert, an expert in ancient DNA at Copenhagen University (who has pioneered the harvesting of mammoth DNA from hair) thinks that this is reasonable. Indeed, he admits that as a student of mammoths, he’d be the first to go see one trundle across a paddock. But he does question both the utility and the wisdom of cloning extinct species. “If you can do a mammoth, you can do anything else that’s dead, including your grandmother. But in a world in global warming and with limited resources for research, do you really want to bring back your dead grandmother?”

That pseudo-grandmother would not have the memories of yours, of course—she would be a child. The essence of “grandmotherness” is surely the intelligence and social connections we associate with our grandmothers. With mammoths, it’s their sheer majesty.

There are many extinct creatures that some would bring back: the dodo and the great auk, the Tasmanian tiger and the Chinese river dolphin, the passenger pigeon (which only a century or so ago numbered in hundreds of millions in America). They are from a long list of animals humans have driven extinct, sometimes deliberately. And with many more species now endangered, they will have much more company in the years to come.

There’s another large issue, too. Once species resurrections seem near, we would have to prepare habitats for them, perhaps ones that don’t exist now. Also, we would not allow hunting of a recovered species, at least until they had a large population. (Thinking on how to fund all the work to resurrect mammoths, imagine how much the rich would pay to go on a mammoth hunt!) For many species, though, there’s no place left to call home.

The Chinese river dolphin became extinct due to pollution and other pressures from the human population on the Yangtze River. Things are just as bad there today. Around the world, frogs are getting decimated by a human-spread pathogen called the chytrid fungus. If Australian biologists someday release a resurrected version of the rare gastric brooding frogs into their old mountain streams, they would promptly become extinct again. Fixing the habitat has to come first.

“Without an environment to put re-created species back into, the whole exercise is futile and a gross waste of money,” says Glenn Albrecht, director of the Institute for Social Sustainability at Murdoch University in Australia.

In this sense, mammoths have an edge. There is plenty of Arctic tundra for them to rove. Indeed, trees, and shrubs are spreading north as global climate change warms the Arctic, so there will be more of that fodder for mammoths.

Still, even if species resurrection were a complete logistical success, the questions would not end. Take passenger pigeons, famously wiped out by hunting in the 19th Century. Brought back, they might find the rebounding forests of the eastern United States a welcoming home.

Some would cry, “But wouldn’t that be, in effect, the introduction of a genetically engineered organism into the environment?” Yes, but that’s not new. We’ve done it with many plants and several animals already. Plus, “genetically engineered organism” is a buzzword that neglects how we have for thousands of years turned natural species into forms more useful to us—through breeding, or “animal husbandry.” (Notice how that term assumes that
we
are the husbands….)

Others say, “Could passenger pigeons become a reservoir for a virus that might wipe out another bird species? And how would the residents of Chicago, New York, or Washington, D.C., feel about a new pigeon species arriving in their cities, darkening their skies, and covering their streets with snowstorms of dung?” These seem to me minor issues, especially since viruses evolve naturally all around us, all the time. And cities clean their streets often, anyway. A study of modern cities showed that they were cleaner than in the 19th Century, since horses drop a lot of dung.

There are other arguments, too. “There is clearly a terrible urgency to saving threatened species and habitats,” says John Wiens, an evolutionary biologist at Stony Brook University in New York. “As far as I can see, there is little urgency for bringing back extinct ones. Why invest millions of dollars in bringing a handful of species back from the dead, when there are millions still waiting to be discovered, described, and protected?”

An answer to that is, okay, let people do it with private investment, not public research funds. Charities can help. Once you have a living mammoth, the social momentum will build. Millions will pay to see them.

But does that mean we
should
bring any species back? Would the world be that much richer for having, say, an extinct kind of female frog that grows little frogs in their stomachs? There might be tangible benefits, such as the insights the frogs might be able to provide about reproduction, from their return. Such insights might someday lead to treatments for pregnant women who have trouble carrying babies to term.

Mammoths are a special, striking case—we probably killed them off, so they’re our problem. Still, for many scientists, de-extinction is a distraction from the pressing work required to stave off mass extinctions. De-extinction advocates counter that the cloning and genomic engineering technologies being developed for de-extinction could also help preserve endangered species, especially ones that don’t breed easily in captivity. And though cutting-edge biotechnology can be expensive when it’s first developed, it could become very cheap very quickly. “Maybe some people thought polio vaccines were a distraction from iron lungs,” says George Church of Harvard. “It’s hard in advance to say what’s distraction and what’s salvation.”