The Land of Eternal Winter
The
herd of great, furry beasts lumbered through the frozen arctic tundra. They were
migrating south to the warmer climate and regions where the conifer forests were
abundant. With the spring thaw, the herd passed this way on their journey
to summer pastures in the north. Now, months later, they retraced their
steps in hopes of finding something to forage under thepristine pellicle of
snow. Food was good here last time.
The late afternoon storm passed
quickly and hadn’t flurried heavily enough to cover their deeply trodden tracks,
but it was sufficient to blanket everything in a fresh coating of white. The
newly fallen snow incited the rambunctious
young sters into playing tag. Running and sliding beneath the fringed
undersides and tree trunk legs of the adults, the calves’ acrobatic stunts stirred up
clouds of confetti-like frost. One of the elder females chuffed at the
impertinent nuisance of a snout full of powder.
She reared her head as she recovered
from the sneeze and blurted a loud trumpeting from her three-meter long trunk.
The calves scrambled out and away
from her gracefully curving tusks with their gentle upward twist.
The woolly mammoth, a
thirty-five-year-old female and the matriarch of the herd, stood eleven feet tall at the
shoulder. She was draped in a thick coat of fur; the ropy, cashmere-like locks of
hair flowed over each and every one
of her kind from head to toe.
In a panorama of nothingness, each
massive creature resembled a hairy oasis. Even in the murky dusk their
distinctive shape and oafish size made them oddities against the background of
eternal ice age winter.
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