The Industry of Souls (17 page)

‘Give me your trowel,’ Solovyov ordered. I stood up and handed it to him whereupon he knelt where I had been and commenced carefully scraping away at the soil to ratify that what I had revealed was, in fact, mammoth and not something else.

‘That’s it,’ he confirmed after a few minutes. ‘You’re all more or less down to it. Go very slowly from here on. A millimetre at a time. No clumsy digging, no hurrying.’

We continued scraping. Soon, every one of us had our own patch of rock hard carcass before us. The skin was leathery in appearance, rough and covered in a thick layer of bristly hairs. Over about an hour, I uncovered an area fifty centimetres square. At last, Solovyov called a halt and crouched beside us.

‘So, comrades,’ he said, ‘what do you think of it?’ He was unable to contain his ebullience, had to share it, even with prisoners.

‘Remarkable,’ I admitted. ‘How old is it?’

‘Around 22,000 years. Soil samples taken from the bank during the summer suggest that age when subject to carbon dating.’

‘How did it die?’ Kirill asked.

‘That is what we want to know,’ Nedelko replied. ‘We have found other mammoths in the Soviet Union. In that respect, this one is not unique. Indeed, this is number 30 something. But the others have all died from obvious natural causes. The last I excavated in Poluostrov Taimyr had got stuck in a tar pit. The one before that, on Ostrov Komsomolets, was crushed by a fall of rocks from a cliff. But this one…’

‘What’s so special about this one, comrade doctor?’ Dmitri asked.

‘This one,’ Solovyov answered, standing up and looking down at the areas of exposed skin, ‘was not crushed by stone, or drowned in a pond, or sucked into a tar pit. It is, from its size, not a fully mature adult so we doubt it died of old age. It might be diseased, in which case we may learn why the species went extinct, or it might have died in a fight with other mammoths.’

‘But that assumption,’ Nedelko cut in, ‘is not likely. We know from studies of modern elephants that whilst they do fight from time to time, they rarely fight to the death.’

‘So?’ Ylli said.

‘So think,’ prompted Solovyov curtly. He was clearly exasperated by our ignorance or lack of imagination. ‘How do animals die – especially land animals – if they do not succumb to disease, die of senility or have an accident?’

We stood for a moment puzzling the scientists’ quandary: then the possibility dawned on us.

‘How will you tell, comrade doctor?’ Kirill asked at length.

‘Tell what?’ Ylli said, who had not yet arrived at our deduction.

‘Tell if it was hunted,’ I told him.

‘A bloody great mammoth like that!’ Ylli retorted. ‘By what? A sabre-toothed tiger would have a problem.’

‘Perhaps there are spear wounds,’ Solovyov said quietly, answering Kirill’s initial question and ignoring Ylli’s importunate outburst. ‘Perhaps we shall find arrowheads. Axe marks. Who knows?’

Even Ylli was silent now as we all stared at the square of exposed prehistoric creature.

Avel’s voice was not much above a whisper. ‘So we’re not the first poor sods to slave away up here,’ he said.

‘Internal exile goes back a long way,’ mused Titian.

The sun went down and the air chilled. Fedin piled crushed ice over the carcass as a precaution and we retreated to our tent. We were, I remember, subdued that night. The wonder of uncovering the mammoth was somehow diminished by the thought that we were not just touching an extinct creature but that we were, through it, possibly in tactile communication with humanoids who had lived out their lives in these barren wastes long before we were sentenced to join them.

For three more days, we worked on the mammoth. As more and more of it was unearthed, the more astounding became our discovery. The creature was almost perfectly preserved. It might have been an unbutchered carcass hanging in a cold store. Although somewhat desiccated, the flesh was firm, the hairs of the shaggy coat pliable and the toe nails, when we reached the end of the first leg, were as polished as cow’s horn. It might have been dead twenty-two months, not twenty-two millennia.

Despite being frozen, on the fifth day it started to give off an odour. It was not unpleasant, not the pungent perfume of putrefaction, but a delicate animal scent such as one might come across in a stable or byre, a mixture of bestial sweat, masticated vegetation and steaming dung.

By the end of day six, we had uncovered the entire right side of the mammoth, one of its tusks bending up into the air like an exposed root. The only part of its anatomy which seemed to be damaged beyond reconstitution was its eye which had collapsed. Now half exposed, the two scientists started their work of investigating the creature’s demise. Using butchery saws and sharp knives, they began to open the carcass along a line of incision running from behind its ear to the inside of the rear leg.

At first, they slit through the skin which they folded back or sliced off. The subcutaneous layers of fat were yellow, the colour of tallow or bees’-wax. Beneath that, the muscle tissue was dark red, almost black, striated and shot through with streaks of light grey gristle. This was cut away in blocks and stored in insulated boxes of ice. When Nedelko finally made an incision into the body cavity, the smell we had experienced increased tenfold. As the two men tunnelled into the carcass, samples from internal organs were taken – the lungs like huge grey sacks of stiff india-rubber foam, the liver the colour of ebony, the heart a maroon black, the intestines a dull military olive, the stomach layered with veins. All the time they worked, crushed ice was piled onto the mammoth. When it melted or was crushed under our boots, it became tinged with the delicate dark scarlet of the creature’s blood.

All the while, the southerly wind kept air temperatures only a few degrees below zero. Every evening, Nedelko spent twenty minutes at the radio transmitter in the half-track, conversing with the meteorologists, confirming that the weather was not going to change. At night, we could hear the ice on the river shifting, expanding and contracting with eerie creaks and screams.

With the excavation finished, for it was decided not to attempt to dig out beneath the carcass, we were set to other tasks. Titian and I were put in charge of storing samples in bottles of formaldehyde or methyl alcohol, labelling them and putting them in compartmentalised boxes for the journey back to civilisation. Kirill and Avel were responsible for carrying the samples to us from the excavation and ensuring we knew what they were. Ylli was set the task of helping Fedin keep up the supply of crushed ice whilst Dmitri was instructed to remove the exposed tusk and saw off four of the teeth, leaving them in situ in the jaw bone. Kostya, meanwhile, assisted with the actual dissection, holding back sections of flesh, dumping the gurry in a pile a hundred metres off.

At last, in the middle of day nine, Nedelko received a radio message that the winter was on its way back with a vengeance, driving the high pressure back south. Solovyov declared the investigation was to draw to a close. They had cut right through to the left side, taken out most of the viscera in the front two-thirds of the carcass and were satisfied that they had sufficient samples to keep them busy for some months.

We stood around the edge of what we no longer saw as a palæontological trench but the grave of an awesome beast and gazed down upon the mutilated body. None of us spoke. It was a solemn moment. The low Arctic sun shone in our faces, the ground hard under our feet. The wind carried a vague hint of the threatening resumption of winter.

‘What’s going to happen to it now?’ Kostya said, breaking our silence.

Solovyov replied, ‘You’re going to re-bury it in ice and soil. If our study of the samples turns up anything puzzling, we may need to return for more. As for the detritus we have dumped over there,’ he pointed to the heap of intestines and organs, ‘we shall incinerate it. Spasskiy,’ he turned to the half-track driver, ‘get a jerry can of gasoline.’

When the heap of orts was thoroughly soaked in petrol, Solovyov ran a trail back a safe distance and, striking a match, tossed it onto the ground. We watched as the flames raced towards the pile and exploded. A dense cloud of steam and oil billowed into the sky. The odour of burning flesh drifted over to us to taint our nostrils.

‘We never found if it was hunted or not, comrade doctor,’ Kirill remarked as Solovyov and his colleague returned to the excavation site.

‘It would seem not,’ Solovyov said. ‘We found no indications and there were no internal injuries. Not that I expected any. You would be hard put to bring down such a beast with a Kalashnikov, never mind a bone club and a wooden spear. Of course, the left side might show injury.’

‘To kill it outright would have been beyond primitive man’s abilities,’ Nedelko added. ‘They couldn’t bring such a creature down in one. They would have to wound it severely and follow it until it bled to death. That would probably mean hitting it from all sides. And the right was undamaged. Current thinking has it that when man hunted the mammoth, he killed it by driving it into a pit.’

Once more, we looked down on the carcass in the trench. Fedin was already starting to dump ice on the creature’s forequarters.

‘I want about twenty centimetres of ice over the whole thing,’ Solovyov ordered, ‘just in case. When you’ve done that, start shovelling the earth. But don’t throw it down. You’re not burying it but protecting it. Let the soil fall gently from your spades. We don’t want it damaged.’

With that, he and Nedelko headed back towards the tents, deep in conversation. They were already planning their laboratory research programme.

‘Well, you just going to stand there?’ Fedin asked sarcastically. ‘You heard him. Come on and fetch ice.’

Ylli and Dmitri slid down the bank and followed Fedin en route for the ice-maker.

‘I wonder,’ Kostya thought aloud when they were out of earshot, ‘what mammoth must have tasted like. To the cavemen hunters.’

The five of us exchanged looks. We knew what Kostya was thinking. Kirill scratched his nose.

‘Too risky,’ Titian declared. ‘What if it died of some disease transferable to humans?’

After a long silence, Kirill said softly, ‘What does it matter? We’re
zeks.
We’re dead men anyway.’

The cut Kostya took came from what would have been, were the mammoth a beef steer, topside. It was a substantial piece of meat weighing about four kilos.

‘How are we going to do it?’ I asked as we tossed earth on the layer of ice.

‘Make a stew?’ Avel suggested. ‘We’ve got cabbage and potatoes.’

‘No,’ Kirill decided, ‘we roast it. That’s what the cavemen would have done. They had no cooking utensils.’

That night, we erected a simple spit over a hearth of smooth river stones outside our tent, fuelling the fire with anthracite and timber obtained by chopping up a rations supply crate. Solovyov and Nedelko paid us no heed. They were in their tent and seemed not to have their suspicions aroused by our fire
al fresco.
The guards ignored us and, shortly after dark, went to Fedin’s tent for a game of cards.

Dmitri, as chef d’éléphant, caked some potatoes in mud and placed them around the fire to bake. The meat took some hours to cook and it was late by the time it was ready for eating.

We sat in a circle round the flames, balanced on boxes and barrels, except for Ylli who incongruously lolled back in one of the deck chairs. The flames danced upon our faces and hands, giving them a ruddy, primeval glow.

As Dmitri’s knife pierced the meat, a delicious aroma wafted over us, stirring memories of our former lives which were, it seemed then, as far removed from the present and lost in time as those of the cavemen we imitated. The mammoth joint itself was hard on the outside and crusted with burnt tissue but within it was well cooked, rare only in the very centre. We held our plates out as Dmitri sliced off generous portions and served them.

I cut into my share. A pink, bloody gravy oozed from it as the knife severed the tissue which, to my surprise, flaked almost as if it was fish. I spiked a piece with the blade of my knife, hesitating as I carried it to my mouth: we were all vacillating for one reason or another. It was Kirill who, as usual, decided for us.

‘What have we to lose, my friends?’ he said. ‘Tomorrow, we finish burying the past and return to the future.’

‘Screw the future!’ Ylli muttered.

‘From the primeval to…’ I began.

‘To Sosnogorsklag 32,’ said Kostya.

Together, we opened our mouths, like men taking part in some bizarre blood brothers’ oath-taking ceremony, and ate.

The mammoth meat was gamey, rich, and mouth-watering. It was not at all tough, almost dissolving in the mouth. The juice which seeped out of it as we bit into it was slightly salty.

We chewed without speaking, lost in thought. It was not that we were overawed by the thought of what we were consuming but more that we did not have the vocabulary, the means of expression at our command, to speak. It was as if, by eating ancient meat, we had been temporarily transmogrified into primitive men with no language other than grunts and grimaces.

When we had consumed the joint, we ate the potatoes and sat back satiated, the heat of the fire playing on us.

‘Only one thing needed now to complete the banquet,’ Titian announced. He rose from his seat and walked to a snow drift behind the tent, returning with a bottle in the bottom of which were two of three centimetres of good quality vodka. ‘Courtesy, albeit unwittingly, of Dr. Solovyov.’.

There was only sufficient for a thimbleful each. We held our mugs up in silent tribute to the mammoth and drank. The vodka was chilled and scoured my throat like carbolic.

Until after midnight, we all sat round the fire, drinking what was left of the coffee. Titian recounted bawdy tales of his student days at the University of Leningrad, Avel regaling us with stories of bravery in the skies above the 38th Parallel, of how he had engaged US Air Force F-86 Sabres and F9F Panthers over the Yalu River in his MiG-15, and Dmitri entertained us with a gamut of his jokes, filling our throats with laughter and our hearts with happiness. They seemed funnier than usual, I suspect because the vodka had gone to our heads, unaccustomed as we were to liquor, but I can remember not one of them now.