"John Varley - Mammoth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

MAMMOTH
John Varley

This book is dedicated to John and Doris Varley.

My father, John E. Varley, died on January 13, 2005, at the age of 79, in Big Spring, Texas.

He was a very good man who led a good life and raised two good daughters, and me. He hated
the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, the New York Yankees, and the Texas A&M Aggies, and loved
most other Texas teams. He lived to see the Red Sox humiliate the Yankees, and a lot of people
didn't.



FROM "LITTLE FUZZY, A CHILD OF THE ICE AGE"
Once upon a time in what would one day come to be known as the month of August, many,
many years ago, in a place that would one day be known as Manitoba, a herd of mammoths came
over the low hills to the south and into a gentle green valley rich with the scent of water.

There were twenty or twenty-five mammoths in the herd. Maybe thirty. No one is sure. What
we do know is that the herd was made up of females of all ages and males younger than fifteen years
old.

Mammoths did not live in families like we do, with a daddy and a mommy and their children, and
maybe a granny and a grandpa. Mammoths were like our elephants today, and their families were
bunches of sisters and aunts and nieces and young male mammoths.

When the males reached a certain age they became troublesome, bothering the females all the
time... just like boys do today! When this happened, the older female mammoths ganged up on the
youngster and pushed him out of the herd so he wouldn't cause so much trouble. The young male
would then find his way to a herd of other males.

The leader of this herd was the oldest and largest female, what scientists call the alpha cow.
We'll call her Big Mama.

Big Mama was old, maybe forty-five, maybe fifty; no one knows for sure because mammoths
didn't have calendars and didn't write down their birthdays like we do, so they didn't know how old
they were. But Big Mama had seen many winters and many summers, and she had been the alpha
cow for many years. She was the wisest and strongest member of the herd, by far, and all the other
females respected her without question.

It had been a hard summer. The places that would one day be called the Mississippi and
Missouri river valleys had not seen any rain in many months but there had been plenty of lightning.
The prairies were dry and there were many fires.
 Big animals like mammoths and bison and woolly rhinoceros had to keep moving to find enough
food and water. Big Mama had not led her herd this far north in many years, but her memory was
good and she kept them moving.

Sure enough, on that fine day in what would be August, they came into a land bursting with
green shrubs and grass and trees with tasty leaves just waiting to be pulled down by the clever trunks