"London, Jack - A Relic of the Pliocene" - читать интересную книгу автора (London Jack)

St. Elias, never descending to the levels of the gentler inclines. Now God so
constituted this creature for its hillside habitat that the legs of one side are
all of a foot longer than those of the other. This is mighty convenient, as will
be readily admitted. So I hunted this rare beast in my own name, told it in the
first person, present tense, painted the requisite locale, gave it the necessary
garnishings and touches of verisimilitude, and looked to see the man stunned by
the recital.
Not he. Had he doubted, I could have forgiven him. Had he objected, denying the
dangers of such a hunt by virtue of the animal's inability to turn about and go
the other way, I could have taken him by the hand for the true sportsman he was.
Not he. He sniffed, looked at me, and sniffed again; then gave my tobacco due
praise, thrust one foot into my lap, and bade me examine the gear. It was a
mukluk of the Innuit pattern, sewn together with sinew threads, and devoid of
beads or furbelows. But it was the skin itself that was remarkable. In that it
was all of half an inch thick, it reminded me of walrus hide; but there the
resemblance ceased, for no walrus ever bore so marvelous a growth of hair. On
the side and ankles this hair was well-nigh worn away, from friction with
underbrush and snow; but around the top and down the more sheltered back it was
coarse, dirty black, and very thick. I parted it with difficulty and looked
beneath for the fine fur that is common with northern animals, but found it in
this case to be absent. This however, was compensated for by the length. Indeed,
the tufts that had survived wear and tear measured all of seven or eight inches.

I looked up into the man's face, and he pulled his foot down and asked, "Find
hide like that on your St. Elias bear?"
I shook my head. "Nor on any other creature of land or sea," I answered
candidly. The thickness of it, and the length of the hair, puzzled me.
"That," he said, and said without the slightest hint of impressiveness, "that
came from a mammoth."
"Nonsense!" I exclaimed, for I could not forbear the protest of my unbelief.
"The mammoth, my dear sir, long ago vanished from the earth. We know it once
existed by the fossil remains we have unearthed, and by a frozen carcass the
Siberian sun saw fit to melt out from the bosom of a glacier; but we also know
that no living specimen exists. Our explorers--"
At this word he broke in impatiently. "Your explorers? Pish! A weakly breed. Let
us hear no more of them. But tell me, O man, what you may know of the mammoth
and his ways."
Beyond contradiction, this was leading to a yarn; so I baited my hook by
ransacking my memory for whatever data I possessed on the subject in hand. To
begin with, I emphasized that the animal was prehistoric, and marshaled all my
facts in support of this. I mentioned the Siberian sandbars that abounded with
ancient mammoth bones; spoke of the large quantities of fossil ivory purchased
from the Innuits by the Alaska Commercial Company; and acknowledged having
myself mined six- and eight-foot tusks from the pay gravel of the Klondike
creeks. "All fossils," I concluded, "found amidst debris deposited through
countless ages."
"I remember when I was a kid," Thomas Stevens sniffed (he had a most confounded
way of sniffing), "that I saw a petrified watermelon. Hence, though mistaken
persons sometimes delude themselves into thinking they are really growing or
eating them, there are no such things as extant watermelons."