Mammoths in the Snow

Allow me dear reader to relate to you a singular incident which lately occurred, and which you may find to be in some measure surprising, and perhaps even a little disconcerting. Over the winter holiday I was spending time with family at our Sussex home, hemmed in by both foul weather and the beastly yet strictly necessary curfew as occasioned by an ongoing pandemic. It was at a late hour that I occupied a room upstairs, listening to the most atrocious blizzard blowing outside and watching as sheets of snow struck the windowpane. I was thankful for being comfortably indoors, lamenting that it must be a wretched man indeed who would brave such Siberian conditions as those raging out there. With a mind to smoke a pipe and lose myself in a book, I was distracted by another sound above the howling of the wind. A low rumbling noise, followed by a terrible crash sent me over to the window to look out onto the street.

Due to the driving flakes of heavy snow and the light at my back, it took some time for my eyes to adjust to the darkness outside, but I was gradually to make out some looming shapes over by my neighbour's property. At first I assumed these to be some garish festive decorations, as we were in that period of gluttony and limbo between Christmas and New Year. I took out my camera, hoping by the flash to illuminate the darkness and get a better view of what I assumed would be some damage wrought by the storm. Imagine my stupefaction when, after clicking the shutter, I beheld two monstrous woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) intruding on the neighbouring lawn. As any self-respecting, half-witted fellow knows, these primeval pachyderms went extinct sometime between the Pleistocene and Holocene, so what then were they doing here alive in the modern day, and on my street no less?

Well, it appeared that, with the aid of their muscular trunks, they were plucking off the brightly coloured baubles and Christmas lights from an overhead wire and popping them into their mouths. In spite of my great alarm, I could not help thinking that such a meal must not only be exceedingly unpleasant, but also potentially harmful. I took all of this in during the space of a few seconds, for at the flash of my camera, the beasts startled and began to lumber out onto the road, blinking their small eyes. I called my family upstairs to witness this extraordinary spectacle, but before they arrived the mammoths were already retreating down the road into the blizzard. They were sped on their way by a man riding a dromedary (Camelus dromedarius), furiously beating them with some manner of riding switch. When I recovered my senses, I remembered that I had taken a photograph of the mammoths, bad though the quality was.

With a frenzy of excitement, I began to communicate with everybody I knew, telling them what had transpired. For reasons I could not fathom, nobody seemed the slightest bit interested in my experience, they dismissed it out of hand and showed signs of disbelieving me, even with my photographic evidence. I spent the rest of the evening in bitter reflection that extinct animals coming back from the dead was less exciting than political debate. In the morning, the footprints of the mammoths had already been covered by the snow, but the effects of their devastation were everywhere present. I was much aggrieved to find that my bicycle was crushed beyond repair, pieces of twisted metal poking out of the snow. I wondered if the mammoths were some ominous portent of things to come, or the results of hybridisation and cloning. Before I could ruminate further, I was called by my wife to the kitchen where we have a broad view of the countryside.

The morning sun revealed a vast floodplain of many interconnected puddles, all glimmering in the golden light of dawn. An astonishing number and variety of waterfowl had settled on the waterlogged ground, as though some heavenly aviary had suddenly let loose all its flocks at once. Where outside the front of the house a fierce blizzard had blown, here at the back it had rained in Biblical proportions. My wife asked what the meaning of all these birds could be, and with grim foreboding I gleaned the truth. They were moving in to re-inherit the world from us humans. The mammoths too, were not the result of Soviet genetic engineering, but were in fulfillment of that prophecy as set down in the Book of Revelation which states 'all the dead will rise.' What could one do, but fall to one's knees and pray?