Cigarette haze filled the kerosene-scented cabin of the vintage
Aeroflot helicopter as we flew low across the Taimyr Peninsula
in Siberia, but my view from a small, round passenger window was
crystal clear. In the late-afternoon sun, treeless hills cast
bluish shadows, and ice-packed rivers that snake through a vast
frozen tundra glittered like golden blasts of dragon fire. A
herd of shaggy reindeer, startled by the whop-whop-whop of the
strange orange bird overhead, kicked up powdery snow and
sprinted by the last larch trees of the Ary Mas reserve, the
northernmost forest in the world.

I felt a twinge of anxiety as we approached the barren
wilderness site where the veteran Arctic explorer Bernard
Buigues and his team had been dropped off two days earlier. I
had grown fond of Buigues, watching this modern woolly mammoth
hunter in action one week in Siberia in late October 2000. A few
days earlier, I had been with Buigues when he flew into a remote
village. The indigenous Dolgans who live there - most dressed
in western-style winter clothes but a few in traditional
reindeer skin jackets and chaps - gathered around and greeted
him warmly. Buigues often brings them sacks of flour, shoes for
the children, and other supplies to ease their hardscrabble life
on the tundra - although on this trip, organized in a rush, he
came empty-handed. He asked how they were faring, and the look
in his kind blue eyes showed he genuinely cared. Buigues also
wanted to know where he could find skeletons of woolly mammoths
and - the greatest prize of all - a frozen carcass.

The Dolgans were silent at first. They fear disturbing the
remains of a creature revered by the older generations. Yet they
divulged to this Westerner, his blond hair graying at the
temples, the locations of a few recently spotted bone piles.
Buigues had won their trust, but he knew that the Dolgans would
never help him unearth a mammoth. Doing so, they believed, would
put their lives and their families' lives at risk.