Panthera Spelaea

I swatted away one of the bugs that swarmed us as soon as we left the protection of our tents. I heard a tent zipper to my right and behind me open and close. “Good morning, Mr. Cantwell,” a female voice said.

“John, please,” I replied as I turned to face her. “Surely we can dispense of the formalities when we are in the middle of freaking nowhere?”

A smile came to Nicole Silverman’s face, one that could light up a room. Nicole was thirty and an associate professor at the University of Chicago. She had a beauty that couldn’t be hidden, with a classical face and curly brown hair pulled back in a ponytail. Nicole was precisely the kind of woman I’d like to date, but the band on her ring finger put her out of reach. “When you’ve got Doctor before your name, you get the first-name treatment,” she said with a smile as she waved the gnats away from her face. “We should eat. It looks like a hot one today.”

I got in line behind her for the oatmeal, biscuits, and coffee we had at base camp. We sat at the picnic tables next to Ekatarina Zevkov, a biologist from the University of Moscow, and my team leader. “Vitali said they found a rear leg in Cave Three a few minutes ago,” Ekatarina said. “We’ll be heading there right away.”

Vitali Semchenko was the Expedition Leader, overseeing our group of ten scientists. Vitali worked the uneasy truce between our scientists and the ten men searching for a fortune in ivory during the short summer months. Wooly mammoth tusks could be up to fourteen feet long, and the ivory worth up to seventy-five thousand dollars (US) to the group recovering them. The larger of the two wooly rhinoceros horns could be three feet long and worth thirty thousand dollars a pair. It was a lot of money in a place where the average income was less than fifteen thousand a year.

It was why the Russian Government had to allow regulated searching as a way to control the illegal. Unfortunately, ivory poachers destroyed the evidence, leaving important biological specimens in piles of bones and rotting flesh along the riverbanks.

The solution was to work together as best they could. The Government issued permits, but Government officials and scientists would monitor the digs. If their hoses exposed remains of scientific interest, the ivory miners had to let them recover the specimens first. Once uncovered, it was a race for time to remove the dead animals and transport them to cold storage before they thawed and decomposed.

Cave Three was one of three deep exploratory caves dug into the riverbank about a mile upstream. Ivory mining didn’t use heavy equipment; it used submersible pumps, hoses, and fire nozzles. The pumps went out in deeper parts of the river, and workers used the hoses to blast tunnels into the frozen mud of the exposed permafrost. A cold slurry of muddy water got pumped out of the caves and back to the river, leaving the tunnel carved through the ice. It was a wet, miserable job going on around the clock to take advantage of the short season.

Finding places to dig was easy; you looked on the riverbank for the bones of mammoths and large animals, then worked back. The frozen cliffs were sluffing off melting permafrost chunks with every warm summer day, continuously exposing new areas to explore. Bodies piled up where thin ice and snow covering narrow tributaries or pits collapsed, trapping the animals that would freeze to death. The prospectors followed the trails like a miner following a trail of gold. Cave Three was close, but it was deep and COLD. “Wonderful. More sliding around in this crap.”

“That’s why I have graduate students,” Nicole laughed. The junior members had to go up with the hose team as they carefully excavated around the frozen body while the ‘experts’ came forward after the hoses were off. I’d be wearing a full rain suit and goggles, feeling the thirty-five-degree water spray all morning. Yay, me.

Thirty minutes later, we had our gear, grub, and butts in the boat heading downriver to the tributary leading to Cave Three. Nicholai was the driver of our beat-up, flat-bottomed riverboat. He was forty-two but looked to be eighty, and I’d never seen him without a cigarette in his hands. He beached the boat near the hoses, and I took the line and tied it off to a stake pounded into the mud.

I put on my jacket and put my goggles around my neck. The hardhat I wore had a rechargeable light on the front, and I had two extra battery packs in my pocket. The heavy fireman’s boots I had on sank into the mud to the bottom of my waterproof pants. Nicole and Ekatarina dressed, and we checked each other’s gear before heading into the cave.

Cave Three was dug straight into the riverbank until it was eight feet tall and ten feet wide at the entrance. The cave started where a mammoth carcass appeared early this season, spotted by a bit of tusk sticking out of the riverbank. After recovering it, the prospectors kept going. The scientists helped by using ground-penetrating radar to seek out anomalies that might be additional specimens.

Working in the cave was dangerous, and you had to be aware of your surroundings. You were walking through a muddy ice cube, not solid rock, and that ice cube was melting. The warmer water, your body heat, and your breath are all slowly melting the cave. Every surface you touched was wet and slippery, the hose spray would make visibility difficult, and the noise of the blasting water made communications difficult.

I followed my coworkers deep into the cave alongside the fire hoses along the side of the walkway. The water blasting stopped just before we reached the workers, and we joined Vitali and the nightshift team. “What do you have,” Ekatarina asked.

The hose team was taking a break, so we all got closer to take a look. “What do you think, Mr. Cantwell,” Nicole asked.

I examined the exposed rear legs and tail that the water blasting exposed. The elephant-like padded feet were over a foot across. “Mature male,” I said. “Well-preserved. I can’t wait to see the rest of it.”

Now that we’d found an animal, the blasting away with big firehoses stopped. The workers knew it was time for us to take over. They turned off the pump so we could remove the big nozzle at the end of the hose. In its place, a triple-splitter got added to the end of the line, and three smaller hoses with wands got hooked up. The workers at the river started the pump, and our crew went to work.

We spent the next hour working around the perimeter of the carcass, washing away the mud and ice holding it in place. I used one of the hoses, working my way along the upper legs towards the hips. The spray of mud and ice got in everything, including my mouth, as I cleared it away from the thick hair of the mammoth.

I’d cleared a two-foot-wide, six-foot-long channel along the left side of the carcass, completely exposing the upper thighs and short tail. Vitali had gone out with the workers to retrieve tarps, ropes, and come-alongs. A specimen like this was invaluable if removed whole, but that wouldn’t be easy. The bull mammoth could be twelve feet tall and weigh several tons.

We took a break from the spraying to drink water and evaluate what we had found. “We’re going to have to widen the cave to get this thing out of here,” Nicole said.

“If it is intact, it will be worth it,” Ekatarina said as she looked at the rear of the beast. “This could be one of the largest intact specimens ever recovered.”

“We won’t know until we’ve excavated around it,” Nicole said, letting out a sigh. There was a lot of work left to get it all. “Let’s get back to work.”

I grabbed my hose, spraying down the loose muck at the back of the opening I was creating. I spotted something near the back leg that didn’t look right. Turning my headlamp to it, I used a gloved hand to move the muck aside and expose the yellow fur. “Holy shit,” I said as my fingers kept trying to clean off the object. “Look at this!”

The others came up, some gasping as they saw what I had found. “Is that?”

“Panthera Spelaea, the Cave Lion. And this is an adult.”