Category:

The tusks of a mammoth brought back from extinction had never been sold before. But already, there were buyers waiting. The prices were fantasy numbers. Enough for all of them to retire on, if it worked out. Enough to build a life on. In Moscow, sure—but even farther off, in places wreathed in fantasy. London. New York. Theoretical cities no one ever returned from. Places that might have been other planets.

It did not seem possible, to live through all of this. To actually get out of here. To leave this life behind. The stench of poachers' tents, the smeared faces of drunken men, the crushed limbs and drownings and accidental gunshot wounds.

Svyatoslav was sixteen, and he had known nothing else for years now. Before his mother died, there had been none of this. There had only been the grim apartment blocks of the city—the dim stairwells full of chipped paint and trash, the flowers of frost blooming on the window of his bedroom, the rusty playground. And then his mother in the hospital, thin as if she were withdrawing into her own skeleton—thin as if her bones were breathing in her flesh and consuming it.

Up to that moment, his father had been a rare thing in their home—sweeping in loud and chaotic, accompanied by other men, by the corpses of animals. Scheming and oiling his rifle. Not a parent—a myth. An anticipation, an encounter, a departure. He was thirteen when his mother died. After she went into the hole hacked in the frozen ground, he hunted with his father. He had nowhere else to go.

They said his father was the best hunter for a thousand kilometers, but all Svyatoslav saw was chaos, filth, destruction. Hunting didn't seem like a skill: you armed yourself, you went out into the woods, and you waited. And then you killed something that did not have any of the tools you had.

The waiting was simple enough—wind direction, blinds, concealment. You could learn it in a season. The real advantage was the gun, and knowing how to use a gun was also nothing to be proud of. Any idiot could use one. Most of the people who used them were idiots. Svyatoslav had always known how to use one. During his father's rare appearances in his early childhood, there had always been time to learn, pegging cans with the little gun his father had also learned on. Shooting was just muscle action, as easy as walking.

What was harder, for the hunters, was to stay sober. To stay alert and together, against the backdrop of endless taiga, the swarming mosquitoes and the swamps sucking at your boots, the slaughter of creatures for profit. To go to sleep at night, not stay up drinking and then stagger through the expedition in a destructive haze. It was because of the drinking that the expeditions ended in disaster, injury, death.

It seemed at first like they drank out of boredom—but really it was out of disgust. They drank to throw a curtain of intoxication over the filth, the stench of themselves, the violence of their actions, the futility of it all.

And it was futile. They were often robbed by gangsters—who were nothing but other desperate men. But even that wasn't always necessary: they found other ways to lose it all. They invested what they gained in fraudulent schemes, blew it all gambling, dropped it out of a pocket on a bender, gave it to a lover who skipped town.

None of the poachers creeping through the taiga or the mammoth tusk hunters blasting gouges into the permafrost with hoses ever got rich: all of them went into the earth early, one way or another. All of them went into the earth with nothing to show for it.

Into the frozen underworld with Nga, perhaps. That explanation was as good as any.

Svyatoslav slipped the headset on and released the drone, a thing the size of a bumblebee, and no heavier, watching from its perspective as it spiraled into the air, looking back at the monochrome green thermal image of himself looking up at the drone. The mules barely registered, just thin bleeds of heat around their joints like spots against the darker earth, little hotter than the grass—but he could make out the grass, subtly warmer than the earth around it, and a  thermal spring near the camp that they had not known about, heat-green veins along the ground. Somewhere out there in the dark, in the green of this false sight, were the two mammoths they had killed. Svyatoslav wanted to see them, their bulk barely visible against the grass they had fallen onto. Their heat fading. They would be peaceful, seen from the drone's perspective. They would be part, already, of the land around them.

And maybe that final sight of them, at peace now, would erase the memories of the kill in his head: the terrible trumpeting of the mammoths rearing in pain; the fear in the eyes of the smaller one as bullet after bullet thudded into him and he charged clumsily, uncertainly, in one direction and then another until finally he sank to his knees.

The older, larger one had caught sight of the hunter Sergei and charged him, and for a moment Svyatoslav had thought that was it for Sergei, who tripped and fell. Sergei scrambled to his feet and then tripped again, like someone running from a monster in a movie.

But Svyatoslav's father put a high-caliber bullet into the mammoth's eye. It crashed down in a pink mist, sighing its life out with a moan like the earth's protest against everything humans stood for.

Svyatoslav helped with the detusking. He felt completely shut off—almost peaceful, void of any emotion at all, hacking into the great skulls to free the long, curving tusks. But then, as the others were lugging the tusks and strapping them with thick tie-downs to the drone mule, Svyatoslav went behind the kurgan, put his face in the grass, and wept. Wept terribly, choking back sound, shoving his face into the grass and earth. Wept until he shook, and his entire body felt empty and drifting.