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

of the mammoths.

But others were there before them. They were mammoths, but they were strange, completely
covered with hair.

To understand why this should be strange to Big Mama and her herd, you should know that
there was more than one kind of mammoth, all those years ago. (There were also cousins of
mammoths, called mastodons, but we don't need to worry about them.)

There were people back then, and they hunted the mammoths, but we don't know what they
called them. Today, we call the two types of mammoth that lived in North America the woolly
mammoth and the Columbian mammoth.

The woolly mammoths stayed mostly in the north, in what we now call Canada.

The Columbian mammoths stayed mostly in the south, sometimes as far south as what we now
call Mexico!

But there were places where you could have found both kinds of mammoth.

Mammoths sometimes traveled great distances in search of food. Scientists call this migration.
When woolly mammoths and Columbian mammoths met they usually didn't get involved with one
another, any more than they concerned themselves with the giant ground sloths or woolly rhinos
or giant bison they shared the plains with. You can see a scene very much like this in Africa today,
with elephants and rhinos and giraffes and wildebeests grazing in the same areas peacefully,
ignoring each other.

Most of the time the woolly mammoths and Columbian mammoths ignored each other, too.

But sometimes they didn't.




5
[e-book note: Yes, this novel starts with chapter 5! Chapters 2, 3, and 4 come a bit later in the book,
with chapter 1 at the very end. Please don't "fix" this, because while pretty odd, it is what the author
intended.]
THE helicopter flew low over a landscape as barren as any to be found on planet Earth. This
was Nunavut. It wasn't a province and hardly a territory though they called it that. As far as
Warburton was concerned they could give it all back to the EskimosтАФwhich was exactly what
Canada had done, back in 1999. Nunavut was 810,000 square miles of nothing much, one-fifth of
Canada's land area.
 Warburton looked out his frosty window and was amazed to see a polar bear loping along a few
hundred feet below him. Hunting? Fleeing the helicopter? He was tempted to ask the little Inuit with
the brown and weather-beaten face, but realized he could never hope to deal with the man's name.
He was introduced to Warburton at the Churchill airport as Charlie Charttinirpaaq, which sounded
like a man with a bad cough and a severe case of the hiccups.

Warburton hated helicopters. And he hated large helicopters even more than he hated small