Alaska by James A. Michener

called a woodland or even a forest. However, it was the steppe that had grown in size, until its mixture of edible grasses and nutritious willow shrubs provided ample forage for the mammoths who roamed it.
    Indeed, the expanded area proved so hospitable to these huge, lumbering creatures that later scientists who would try to reconstruct what life in Alaska was like twenty-eight thousand years before would give the terrain the descriptive name 'the Mammoth Steppe,'
    and no better could be devised, for this was the great, brooding steppe, trapped within the ice castle, which enabled the slope-backed mammoths to exist in large numbers. In these centuries it looked as if the mammoths, along with the caribou and antelope, would always be the major occupiers of the steppe named after them.
    Matriarch moved about the steppe as if it had been created for her use alone. It was hers, but she conceded that for a few weeks each summer she required the assistance of the great bulls who otherwise kept to themselves on their own feeding grounds.
    But after the birth of the young she knew that the survival of the mammoths depended upon her, so it was she who chose the feeding grounds and gave the signal when her 29
    family must abandon grounds about to be depleted in a search for others more rich in foodstuffs.
    A small herd of mammoths like the one she commanded might wander, in the course of a year, over more than four hundred miles, so she came to know large parts of the steppe, and in the pilgrimages she supervised she became familiar with two perplexities, which she never solved but to which she did accommodate. The richer parts of this steppe provided a variety of edible trees whose ancestors the vanished mastodons might have known larch, low willow, birch, alder but recently, in a few choice spots protected from gales and where water was available, a new kind of tree had made its tentative appearance, beautiful to see but poisonous to eat. It was especially tempting because it never lost its leaves, long needlelike affairs, but even in winter when the mammoths had little to eat they avoided it, because if they did eat the attractive needles they fell sick and sometimes died.
    It was the largest of the trees, a spruce, and its distinctive aroma both attracted and repelled the mammoths. Matriarch was bewildered by the spruce, for although she dared not eat its needles, she noticed that the porcupines who shared these forests with her devoured the poisonous leaves with relish, and she often wondered why. What she did not notice was that while it was true that the porcupines did eat the needles, they climbed high in the trees before doing so. The spruce, just as clever in protecting itself as the animals that surrounded it, had devised a sagacious defensive strategy.
    In its copious lower branches, which a voracious mammoth could have destroyed in a morning, the spruce concentrated a volatile oil which rendered its leaves unpalatable/
    This meant that the high upper branches, which the mammoths could not reach even with their long trunks, remained palatable.
    In the few places where the spruce trees did thrive, they figured in the second riddle.
    From time to time during the long summers when the air was heavy and the grasses and low shrubs tinder-dry, a flash would appear in the heavens followed by a tremendous crashing sound, as if a thousand trees had fallen in one instant, and often thereafter fire would start in the grass, mysteriously, for no reason at all. Or some very tall spruce would be riven, as if a giant tusk had ripped it, and from its bark a wisp of smoke would issue, and then a little flame, and before long the entire forest would be ablaze and all the grassy steppe would erupt into flame.
    At such moments, and Matriarch had survived six such fires, the mammoths had learned to head for the nearest river and submerge themselves to their eye-level, keeping their
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    trunks above the water for air. For this reason lead