Creatures of the Kingdom: Stories of Animals and Nature

  The bull had no chance to defend himself; this first strike was mortal, but in his death agony he did release one powerful bellow that echoed across the steppe. Matriarch heard it, and although she knew the young bull to be of an age when he should be leaving the family, he was still under her care, and without hesitating, she galloped as fast as her awkward body would permit, speeding directly toward the sabertooth, who was crouching over its dead prey.

  When she spotted it she knew instinctively that it was the most dangerous enemy on this steppe, and she knew it had the power to kill her, but her fury was so great that any thought of caution was stifled. So with a trumpeting cry of rage she rushed in her clumsy way at the sabertooth, who easily evaded her. But to its surprise she wheeled about with such frenzied determination that it had to abandon the corpse on which it was about to feed, and as it did so it found itself backed against the trunk of a sturdy larch. Matriarch, seeing the cat in this position, threw her entire weight forward, endeavoring to pin it with her tusks or otherwise disable it.

  Now the broken right tusk, big and blunt, proved an asset rather than a liability, for with it she crushed the sabertooth against the tree, and as she felt her heavy tusk dig into its rib cage, she bore ahead, unmindful of what the fierce cat might do to her.

  Despite its injury, the sabertooth managed to free itself and rushed away lest she strike again. But before the cat could muster its resources for a counterattack, Matriarch used her undamaged left tusk to bash it into the dust at the foot of the tree, and then she raised her immense foot and stomped on its chest.

  Again and again, trumpeting all the while, she battered the mighty cat, crushing its ribs and even breaking off one of the long saber teeth. Seeing blood spurting from one of its wounds, she became wild with fury, her shrieks increasing when she saw the inert body of her grandson, the young bull, lying in the grass. With her mad stomping, she killed the sabertooth and when her rage finally subsided she remained, whimpering, between the two dead bodies.

  As in the case of her own destiny, she was not completely aware of what death was. In fact, the entire elephant clan and its relatives were perplexed by death, especially when it struck down a fellow creature with whom the mourner had been associated. The young bull was dead, of that there could be no doubt, and in some vague way she realized that his wonderful potential was lost. He would not come courting in the summers ahead; he would fight no aging bulls to establish his authority; and he would sire no successors with the aid of Matriarch’s daughters and granddaughters. A chain was broken, and for more than a day she stood guard over his body, as if she hoped to bring it back to life. But at the close of the second day she left the bodies, hardly aware that in all that time she had not once looked at the sabertooth. It was her grandson who mattered, and he was dead.

  Because his death occurred in late summer, with decomposition setting in immediately and with ravens and predators attacking the corpse, it was not fated that his body be frozen in mud for the edification of scientists scores of thousands of years later, but there was another death that occurred during the last days of autumn that had quite different consequences.

  The old bull that had broken Matriarch’s tusk, and had been a prime factor in the death of the young bull, strode away from the affair looking as if he had the strength to survive for many mating seasons to come. But the demands of this one had been heavy. He had run with more cows than usual and had been called upon to defend them against four or five lusty younger bulls who felt that their time to assume control had come. For an entire summer he had lusted and fought and eaten little, and now in late autumn his vital resources began to flag.

  It began with dizziness as he climbed a bank leading up from the great river. He had made such treks repeatedly, but this time he faltered and almost fell against the muddy bank that impeded his progress. Then he lost the first of his remaining four teeth, and he was aware that two of the others were weakening. Even more serious was his indifference to the approaching winter, for normally he would have begun to eat extravagantly in order to build his reserves of fat against the cold days when snow fell.

  On the day of the first snowfall, with a whipping wind blowing in from Asia and icicles of snow falling parallel to the earth, Matriarch and her five family members saw the old bull far in the distance, at what would later be known as the Birch Tree Site. His head was lowered and his massive tusks rested on the ground, but they ignored him. Nor were they concerned about his safety; that was his problem and they knew he had many options from which to choose.

  But when they saw him again, some days later, not moving toward a refuge or to a feeding ground but just standing immobile, Matriarch, always the caring mother, started to move toward him to see if he was able to fend for himself. However, when he saw her trying to intrude on his self-imposed solitude, he backed away to protect it, not hurriedly, as he might have done in the old days, but laboriously, making sounds of protest at her approach. She did not force herself upon him, for she knew that old bulls like him preferred to be left alone. When she last saw him he was heading back toward the river.

  Two days later, when thick snow was falling and Matriarch started edging her family toward the alder thickets in which they customarily took shelter during the long winters, her youngest granddaughter, an inquisitive animal, was off by herself exploring the banks of the river when she saw that the same bull who had spent much of the summer with them had fallen into a muddy crevice and was thrashing about, unable to extricate himself. Trumpeting a call for help, she alerted the others, and before long Matriarch, her daughters and her grandchildren were hastening toward the site of the accident.

  When they arrived, the position of the old bull was so hopeless, mired as he was in sticky mud, that Matriarch and her family were powerless to aid him. And as both the snow and the cold increased, they had to watch helplessly as the tired mammoth struggled vainly, trumpeting for aid and succumbing finally to the irresistible pull of the mud and the freezing cold. Before nightfall he was tightly frozen into his muddy grave, with only the top of his bulbous head showing, and by morning that too was buried under snow. There he would remain, miraculously upright, for the next twenty-eight thousand years, the spiritual guardian of the Birch Tree Site.

  Matriarch, obedient to certain impulses that had always animated the mammoth breed, remained by his grave for two days, but then, still puzzled by the fact of death, she forgot him completely, rejoined her family and led them to one of the best spots in central Alaska for passing a long winter. It was an enclave at the western end of the valley that was fed by two streams, a small one that froze quickly and a much larger one that carried free water most of the winter. Here, protected from even the worst winds, she and her daughters and grandchildren remained motionless much of the time, conserving body warmth and slowing digestion of such food as they could find.

  Now once more her broken tusk proved useful, for its rough, blunt end was effective in ripping the bark from birch trees whose leaves had long vanished, and it was also helpful in brushing away snow to reveal the grasses and herbs hiding below. She was not aware that she was trapped in a vast ice castle, for she had no desire to move either eastward into what would one day be Canada or southward to California. Her icy prison was enormous in size and she felt in no way penned in, but when the frozen ground began to thaw and the willows sent forth tentative shoots, she did become aware—how she could not have explained—that some great change had overtaken the refuge areas that she had favored for so many years. Perhaps it was her acute sense of smell, or sounds never heard before, but regardless of how the message reached her, she knew that life on the Mammoth Steppe had been altered, and not for the better.

  Her awareness intensified when she lost one of her remaining teeth, and then one evening as she wandered westward with her family, she came upon a sight that confused her. On the banks of the river she had been following stood a structure like none she had ever seen before. It was like a bird’s nest on
the ground, but many times bigger. From it came animals who walked on only two legs; they were like water birds that prowled the shore, but much larger, and now one of them, seeing the mammoths, began to make noises. Others poured from the large nest, and she could see that her presence was causing great excitement, for they made unfamiliar sounds.

  Then some of the creatures, much smaller than herself or even the youngest of her grandchildren, began running toward her, and the speed with which they moved alerted her to the fact that she and her herd were about to face some new kind of danger. Instinctively she began to edge away, then to move rapidly, and finally to trumpet wildly as she started running.

  But very quickly she found that no matter where she tried to go with her charges, one of the creatures appeared in the shadows to prevent her from escaping. And when day dawned, confusion intensified, for wherever Matriarch sought to take her family, these beings kept pace, persistently, like wolves tracking a wounded caribou. They would not stop, and when that first night fell they added to the terror by causing a fire to spring from the tundra, and this created panic among the mammoths, for they expected the dry grass of the previous summer to burst into uncontrollable flame, but this did not happen. Matriarch, looking at her children in perplexity, was not able to form the idea: They have fire but it is not fire, but she felt the bewilderment that such an idea would have evoked.

  On the next day the strange creatures continued to pursue Matriarch and her mammoths and were finally able to isolate Matriarch’s youngest granddaughter. Once the young animal was cut off, the pursuers closed in upon her, carrying in their front legs, the ones they did not use for walking, branches of trees with stones attached, and with these they began to beat the encircled mammoth and stab at her and torment her until she bellowed for help.

  Matriarch, who had outrun her children, heard the cry and doubled back, but when she tried to aid her granddaughter, some of these creatures detached themselves from the larger group and beat her about the head with their branches until she had to withdraw. But now the cries of her granddaughter became so pitiful that Matriarch trembled with rage, and with a mighty bellow, dashed right through the attackers to where the threatened mammal was striving to defend herself. With a great roar, Matriarch flung herself upon the creatures, lashing at them with her broken tusk and driving them back.

  Triumphant, she was about to lead her frightened granddaughter to safety when one of the strange beings shouted ‘Varnak!’ and another, a little taller than the others and heavier, leaped toward the threatened mammoth and, with an upward stab, drove a sharp weapon deep into her bowels.

  Matriarch saw that her granddaughter was not fatally wounded, but as the mammoths thundered off to evade their tormentors, it was obvious that the young one was not going to be able to keep up. So the herd slowed, and with Matriarch assisting her granddaughter, the huge beasts made their escape.

  But to their dismay, the little figures on two legs kept pace, coming closer and closer, and on the third day, at an unguarded moment when Matriarch was directing the others to safety, the creatures surrounded the wounded granddaughter. Intending to crush these intruders once and for all, Matriarch started back to defend her grandchild, but as she strove to reach the attackers and punish them with her broken tusk, one of them, armed only with a long piece of wood and a short one with fire at one end, stepped boldly out from among the trees and drove her back. The long piece of wood she could resist even though it had sharp stones on the end, but the fire, thrust right in her face, she could not. Try as she might, she could not avoid that firebrand. Impotently she had to stand back, smoke and fire in her eyes, as her granddaughter was slain.

  With loud shouts, much like the triumphant howling of wolves when they finally brought down their wounded prey, the creatures danced and leaped about the fallen mammoth and began to cut her up.

  From a distance that night, Matriarch and her remaining children saw once again the fire that mysteriously flamed without engulfing the steppe, and in this confusing, tragic way the mammoths who had for so long been safe within their ice castle encountered man.

  PORTRAIT OF RUFOUS

  It would be a dramatic coincidence if we could claim that as the horse left America he met on the bridge to Asia a shaggy, lumbering beast that was leaving Asia to take up his new home in America, but that did not happen. The main body of horses deserted America about one million years ago, whereas the ponderous newcomers did not cross the bridge that the horses had used—for it closed shortly after they passed—but a later bridge that opened at the same place and for the same reasons about eight hundred thousand years later.

  The beast that came eastward out of Asia had developed late in biologic time, less than two million years ago, but it evolved in startling ways. It was a huge and shaggy creature, standing very high at the shoulder and with enormous horns that curved outward and then forward from a bulky forehead that seemed made of rock. When the animal put its head down and walked resolutely into a tree, the tree usually toppled. This ponderous head, held low because of a specialized thick neck, was covered with long, matted hair, which absorbed much of the shock when the beast used its head as a battering ram. Males also grew a long, stiff beard, so that at times they looked satanic. The weight of the animal was concentrated in the massive forequarters, topped by a sizable hump, while the hindquarters seemed unusually slender for so large a beast. The animal, as it had developed in Asia, was so powerful that it had, as an adult, no enemies. Wolves tried constantly to pick off newborn calves or superannuated stragglers, but they avoided the mature animals in a group.

  This was the ancestral bison, and the relatively few who made the hazardous trip from Asia flourished in their new habitat, and one small herd made its way to the land around the twin pillars, where they found themselves a good home, with plenty of grass and security. They multiplied and lived contented lives to the age of thirty, but their size was so gigantic and their heavy horns so burdensome that after only forty thousand years of existence in America, during which time they left their bones and great horns in numerous deposits—so that we know precisely how they looked—the breed exhausted itself.

  The original bison was one of the most impressive creatures ever to occupy the land at the twin pillars in northern Colorado. He was equal in majesty to the mammoth, but, like him, was unable to adjust to changing conditions, so, like the mammoth, he perished.

  That might have been the end of the bison in America, as it was the end of the mammoth and the mastodon and smilodon, the sabertoothed cat, and the huge ground sloth, except that about the time the original bison vanished, a much smaller and better-adapted version developed in Asia and made its own long trek across a new bridge into America. This seems to have occurred sometime just prior to 6000 B.C., and since in the span of geologic time that was merely yesterday, of this fine new beast we have much historic evidence. Bison, looking much as we know them today, were established in America, and one herd of considerable size located in the area of the twin pillars.

  It was late winter when a seven-year-old male of this herd shook the ice off his beard, hunched his awkward shoulders forward as if preparing to fight, and tossed his rufous mane belligerently. He then braced himself as if the anticipated battle were at hand, but when no opponents appeared, he relaxed and turned to the job of pawing at the snow to uncover the succulent and sweet grass below.

  He stood out among the herd not only because of his splendid bulk but also because of his coloring, which was noticeably lighter than that of his fellows. He did not comport himself with any degree of dignity, because he was not an old bull.

  For reasons he could not clearly understand but which were associated somehow with the approach of spring, he started on this wintry day to study carefully the other bulls and, when occasion permitted, to test his strength against theirs. The two- and three-year-olds he dismissed. If they became testy, which they sometimes did, a sharp blow from the flat of his horn disciplined them. The four- and
five-year-olds? He had to be watchful with them. Some were putting on substantial weight and were learning to use their horns as well. He had allowed one of them to butt heads with him, and he could feel the younger bull’s amazing power, not yet sufficient to issue a serious challenge but strong enough to upset any adversary that was not attentive.

  There were also the superannuated bulls, pitiful cases, bulls that had once commanded the herd. They had lost their power either to fight or to command and dragged themselves along as stragglers with the herd. They grazed about the edges, and occasionally, when there was fighting, they might charge in with the valor of their youthful years, but if a six-year-old interposed himself, they would hastily retreat. Earlier they had suffered broken bones and shattered horn tips, and some of them limped and others could see only from one eye. Some of them had even been attacked by wolves, and it was not uncommon to see some old bull with flesh wounds along his flanks that attracted flies.

  It was the bulls nine and ten years old that were worrisome, and these Rufous studied meticulously. He was not at all confident that he could handle them. There was one with a slanting left horn; he had dominated the herd three years ago, and even last year had been a bull to contend with, for he had massive shoulders that could topple an opponent and send him sprawling. There was the brown bull with the heavy hair over his eyes; he had been a champion of several springs and had only a few days ago given Rufous a sharp buffeting. Particularly there was the large black bull that had dominated last spring; he seemed quite unassailable and aware that the others held him in awe. Twice in recent weeks Rufous had bumped against him, as if by accident, and the black bull had known what was happening and had casually swung his head around and knocked Rufous backward; this black bull had tremendous power and the skill to use it.