The Tusk That Rings

There's a sound in the Yakutian tundra that people wait months to hear. Thin. Metallic. Like nothing else alive. It's the sound of a mammoth. Or what's left of one. A tusk that has lain in frozen ground for tens of thousands of years answers an iron probe with a ring. It answers a metal detector too. And whoever hears that ring first can earn more than a full year of ordinary work would pay.

Now, why here? Why northern Yakutia, and not all of Siberia? Because along the rivers Yana, Indigirka and Kolyma lie roughly eight out of every ten mammoths on the planet. They were swallowed by ice at the end of the last ice age. While the permafrost held, they slept. Now it's thawing. Every summer the river cuts into the bank and uncovers a fresh stretch. A rib sticks out here. A yellow curve of tusk there.

The expeditions leave from a village called Kazachye, and people pack seriously. Old tracked vehicles. A boat. A satellite phone. Jerry cans of petrol, sacks of grain. And above all, a motor pump. By law, you may only collect what lies on the surface. In practice, diggers run a hose to the bank and blast the frozen ground with pressurised water until the mud washes into the river. That's when the ring comes. The probe touches bone, and the sound travels up your arm faster than the thought that you've struck lucky.

None of this is new. In the late eighteenth century, a Yakut merchant named Ivan Lyakhov walked north across the ice and found a chain of islands where mammoth bone lay right underfoot. They're still called the Lyakhovsky Islands. From then on, tusks went by cart from Yakutsk to Saint Petersburg, and to China. They became combs, jewellery boxes, piano keys. You'd think that after more than two hundred years the supply would have run out. Yet every summer the tundra gives up about a hundred and twenty tonnes more.

A good pair of tusks can buy an apartment in Yakutsk. A bad season means half a million roubles lost and an empty rucksack.

Almost everything found goes to China. After Beijing banned imports of elephant ivory, mammoth tusk began to be sold as "ethical ivory." The elephant is alive, the mammoth has been gone for ages, and international bans don't reach that trade. In Hong Kong, a kilogram of top-grade tusk can fetch up to a hundred and fifty thousand roubles. That's the fever. People go out for the whole summer, live in trailers, lose teeth to scurvy and health to icy water. And they come back the next year.

The Yakut people themselves long wondered what creature left those yellow curves in the riverbanks. In the old belief, the mammoth was a water bull. A huge beast living underground, breaking the ice with its horns and walking beneath the earth, leaving ravines and lakes behind. Nobody could see it. Whoever did would soon die. So finding bones was a bad omen, and digging them up was a sin. Today, the grandchildren of people who turned away from a tusk in the tundra hunt for it with a probe and a pump.

The same riverbanks give scientists whole baby mammoths. A calf named Yuka came out of the permafrost almost untouched. Red hair, skin, even a brain inside the skull. She had lain in the ice for about thirty-nine thousand years, and looked almost alive. The diggers know such stories. Sometimes they hand a rare find to researchers instead of dealers. That pays too, and usually not badly.

The work itself is brutal. Under the pump's jet, frozen ground loses its support, and a bank can come down on your head. In the washed-out slurry, ancient carcasses turn up. Fur, flesh, and a smell that turns the stomach even of hardened men. Virologists have long argued about whether it's safe to handle all this with bare hands. Something that slept in ice for forty thousand years might wake up. The diggers know it. They go anyway. There's simply no other way to earn as much in one short northern summer.

The tundra waits. Each summer the water carries off a little more earth, and some day the next tusk will ring.

What should we tell you about? Your own street would do. moygid dot online.