Rostov started to open the inner door, then cleared his throat. Warburton realized the man was nervous.

Rostov had just a trace of an accent. He looked the part of a university professor, with an unkempt mane of white hair and a goatee that was more salt and pepper. But his face was almost as weathered as Charlie's, and he had an alarming red nose shaped like a potato. Though his hands were now clad in fur-lined gloves, Warburton knew the doctor had lost the tips of several fingers to frostbite. Being a mammoth hunter in the twenty-first century didn't entail the same risks as it had for our mammoth-hunting ancestors, but it was no picnic, and it took you to climates that could kill just as surely as a wounded and enraged mammoth.

"It never entered my mind that you would bring me up here as part of a joke, Doctor," Warburton said. Now that the green light had come on over the inner door, Rostov ushered the group inside. The interior was well lit, and not nearly as warm as Warburton had hoped, but at least it was out of the wind.

"We keep it heated to only about four degrees below zero to protect the specimen," Rostov said. Warburton translated from the Canadian centigrade scale: high to mid twenties.

In the center of the tent was the excavation into the side of the hill, a rectangular area about twenty by twenty feet. It was well lit by floodlights on tripods. The crew had dug out the mammoth's head and back and most of one side, but those parts were covered with protective cloth. Christian wanted this frozen creature intact, and that meant excavation was a painfully deliberate process, starting with small ice axes, moving to hammers and chisels, getting down to warm brushes and toothpicks before the hairy pelt was reached. And even then, when a section of hide was bared, it was refrozen in distilled water. It would be absurd for this creature to have survived for ten, fifteen thousand years, perfectly preserved to the point that its flesh was probably still edible, and then to have it rot in a few days of digging. The plan was to free the creature from the permafrost and then quickly airlift it to a large refrigerated facility where further actions could be contemplated at leisure.

"Seven is by far the best and the largest primigenius we have yet investigated," Rostov said. "In fact, it is so large I have begun to wonder if it might be an actual hybrid, possibly with Mammuthus imperiori, which was quite a bit larger than primigenius. The flesh is in wonderful shape. The nuclei we've tested so far have yielded promising DNA, though of course we have yet to reach the sexual organs."

Warburton had learned a lot about mammoths in the last four years. He always had to learn things to keep up with his boss's newest manias. He knew Mammuthus primigenius was the Latin name for the woolly mammoth. He'd learned a bit about cloning, too, though he had no aptitude for science. But the basic facts were easy enough to absorb. If one wished to re-create a mammoth, one needed some DNA that was reasonably intact. No perfect specimens had ever been discovered, but as the years went by, the criteria for "reasonably intact" had steadily lowered, as new techniques for reassembling genetic material had been discovered and elaborated. Four years ago he had dismissed the whole project as highly unlikely. It hadn't been the first time his boss had pursued a chimera.

The best mammoth cells to use for cloning would be an egg from a female or a sperm cell from a male. The resulting embryo could then be implanted in a female elephant—not an easy project in itself, as the reproductive cycle of elephants was complicated and not completely understood.

This was the following Wednesday, and Warburton presumed he was about to be shown something astonishing concerning mammoth reproduction. It wasn't a prospect he relished, but he'd undertaken tasks much less appetizing in his work for Christian.

One of the things he had not learned was the precise location of mammoth testicles, but he had assumed they were pretty much where they would be on other quadrupeds, like horses, sheep, cattle, and probably elephants, though he had never actually seen an elephant's family jewels. But Rostov didn't take him all the way around the massive beast, but to its left side. The mammoth was sitting more or less upright, with its legs folded under it.

Now Rostov indicated a lump by the hind legs that did not fit with any picture of a mammoth Warburton could come up with, unless its left hind leg was twisted grotesquely out to one side. The lump was covered with the same protective material that concealed the rest of the mammoth.

Warburton looked at Rostov, waiting, and Rostov sighed and pulled back the cover.

The lump was a man.

He was huddled tight against the side of the mammoth, still partly buried. Only his head and torso had been chipped out of the ice. Most of his face and part of his upper arm had been eaten away, gnawed at by animals. Where Warburton could see the chest, the skin was yellow and shriveled and looked like wax.

Warburton looked at Rostov again.

"No joke," the man assured him, with a helpless shrug.

"How old?"

"Around twelve thousand years," Rostov said.

What was left of the man's hair was long and wispy and gray. There were scraps of gray beard lying on his chest. Because of the tissue shrinkage and what Warburton could only think of as an extreme case of freezer burn, it was hard to estimate his age, but he got the impression the man was old. Many of his teeth were missing, or blackened, or brown stumps. But that didn't prove much, did it? Without dental care a young man's teeth could rot out, too, and he supposed the best dental care available where this man had come from was a whack in the mouth with a stone ax.

"I am not an anthropologist," Rostov said. "What I can see of his clothing is consistent with what I know of the era."

Warburton didn't think you'd need a Ph.D. to figure that out. What clothing he could see was made from fur and leather. What else would the man be wearing on a mammoth hunt? Spats and a school tie?

"If you lean over just a bit," Rostov said, "you can just see the top of the head of the second person."

Second person? Warburton leaned over the corpse—noting it smelled a little like the inside of his refrigerator when he returned from a long trip—and could just make out what might be the top of a human head through a thin rime of ice.

"You're sure?"

"Oh, yes. When we got this far we stopped and did a close-range sonogram scan. There is a second person between this one and the mammoth. It is somewhat smaller. Possibly a woman, or a child."

Two people? Woman or child? Better and better, Warburton thought. Alley Oop and... what was her name? Ooma? Oona? The cartoon strip was a bit before his time, but he had to figure that a Stone Age couple was twice as interesting as a lone mammoth hunter. As for a man and his son or daughter, sheltering behind the massive corpse of a freshly killed woolly mammoth while a savage blizzard froze them solid... well, you couldn't do much better than that.

And then, because he was a troubleshooter and not really in the business of turning out made-for-cable documentaries or television movies, he thought about what sort of troubles he might be called upon to shoot.

When you got into the area of North American antiquities there was always the Indian question to consider. A lot of tribes considered the study of any old dead bones, much less a couple of more or less intact corpses, to be grave robbing. What's more, governments lately had begun agreeing with this, and museums were being forced to return bones for proper burial on tribal lands. What was the name of that ten-thousand-year-old skeleton they'd found in Oregon or Washington? Kennebunk Man, something like that? They'd hassled over that one for years. He made a mental note to find out what Canadian law had to say on the subject.