“I DON’T UNDERSTAND,” Vladimir said. “It’s your preserve. They are your mammoths. Why not just use their GPS trackers to find them? It would be easier than all of this searching.”
Dr. Aslanov had just taken a bite of scrambled eggs. He shook his head as he finished chewing. “They don’t have GPS trackers.”
“How can that be possible? You mean you don’t know where your mammoths are?”
Dr. Aslanov shook his head. “No, we don’t. And for good reason. Humankind learned hard lessons from the extinction of the African and Asian elephants. One of them was about digital information: if you can access something, so can the poachers. The cartels catch up with every encryption you can invent. They break into every system you can design. In Botswana, where the last of the African elephants lived in the wild, the rangers could not understand how the poachers were finding them. Then they discovered the cartels backing the poachers had not only penetrated the GPS system—they had also broken into their drone feeds, the encrypted communications of the rangers, the UN satellite mapping the movements of the last herds, the communications of every NGO working on elephant preservation. The cartels used the system against itself. All that technology scientists had designed to help them save the elephants ultimately doomed them. And the rangers, in the end—undersupplied, overworked—the ones who did not die for their cause … gave it up. The last of them threw their rifles down, and melted away. We won’t have that here. What protects us is the vastness of this place. Its remoteness. In order to even penetrate the preserve, you have to cross hundreds of miles of taiga and steppe. There are no roads—we tore out the few roads that had been here.”
“And no rangers?”
“There are rangers—a few. They patrol on horseback. But most of the preserve’s security is conducted the old way—the Tsarist way.”
“I don’t get that,” Anthony said. He was sitting on his folding camp stool, wearing a waxed canvas jacket, wolfing down eggs. He looked comfortable, in his element.
Vladimir was not. With every forkful of eggs, he still felt the roll of the Burlak’s cabin, and his stomach fought to keep his breakfast down.
But it was beautiful here. The dawn light was citrine, the sun’s sudden heat turning the frost into a haze over the undulating plateau. “Yes—I don’t get that, either. The Tsarist way. What does that mean?”
“Spies. Informants. We pay the locals in the villages and towns for information. For rumors. Anybody talking about entering the preserve. Anyone they see passing through who shouldn’t be there. We pay them well—well enough that if any of them decided to lead an expedition into this place, we would know about it right away. One of their own family members would turn them in, or someone who overheard them in a café.”
“And that works?” asked Vladimir.
“The old methods work best. The informant system is as foolproof as anything technology can come up with. Listen—there are two Russian proverbs you should know.” Dr. Aslanov held up his hand, and counted them off on thumb and index finger. “One: ‘The sober man’s secret is the drunkard’s speech.’ Two: ‘Confide a secret to a mute man, and he will speak.’ They are more than proverbs: they are truths. Between the two of these truths, the system of informants is as close to foolproof as you can get. But the informants are only half the system. The other half is disinformation. We spread rumors: terrible technologies that wait for the poachers. Land mines triggered by human pheromones. DNA-seeking bullets. Suicide drones the size of a bumblebee that will blow your head into a red mist. And one of my favorites: robotic cave lions that can run as fast as a high-speed train. If it inspires terror, we invent it. This was the other side of the Tsar’s coin—not just the collection of information, but the dispersal of disinformation. The two of them working together form a simple, efficient method of control.”
“I seem to remember the last Tsar ended up machine-gunned in a basement with the rest of his family,” Anthony said.
Dr. Aslanov shrugged. “In the end, all systems collapse. But I hope long before that happens here we will see mammoths roaming a steppe that stretches from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Their return means the return not just of some wooly elephants—it is the return of an entire ecosystem. Their browsing pushes back the forest and encourages the steppe grasses to grow. In the winter, their pushing away of the snow in search of grasses underneath exposes the soil to frigid air, protecting the permafrost. The mammoths are building a more resilient world. They are helping us to undo at least some of the damage man has done.”
“And you are bringing people in to shoot them,” Vladimir said.
One of the guides brought another panful of scrambled eggs. Vladimir found that his appetite was returning, now. And he was hungrier than he had expected. Maybe it was the altitude.
“Yes.”
“After all of this investment in keeping people from shooting them.”
“Yes.”
“If he’s getting under your skin,” Anthony said, “I’m sorry. But that’s just what he does. There’s nothing to be done about it. If you try to put a stop to it, it just makes it worse.”
“It is fine,” Dr. Aslanov said. “It is the way my colleagues and I all speak to one another. All we do is argue. I’m not sure we would be able to have a conversation without arguing. We joke that for us de-extinctionists, arguing really is the scientific method.”
Vladimir had finished chewing his eggs. “If you’re trying to avoid my questions—both of you—I haven’t forgotten.”
“He never forgets,” Anthony said. “Trust me. He’ll just keep at you until you answer.”
“I don’t mind answering. It is a good question. We keep the poachers at bay because they would quickly wipe out the population we have built here. There are only a few hundred mammoths now. Ivory has disappeared from the wild. In Asia and Africa, even the feet and skin of the elephants became commodities, dooming the few elephants without tusks to the fate of the others. In the Arctic, the business of extracting mammoth tusks from the permafrost was eventually outlawed—the environmental degradation was too great. The tusk hunters were spraying the riverbanks with high-pressure hoses, filling the water with silt. There were gangs of them in the thousands after the price of ivory went up. Even outlawed, that practice still continues. If those kinds of people began to get in here, the ivory wars would begin again.”
“Not an answer,” Vladimir said.
“No. Background. The answer is the same as always. The answer is money. The government demands the preserve become self-sustaining. That means revenue. The mammoth has no predators, yet—we have not brought back the steppe wolf, the cave lion, the massive Ice Age bears that might have been able to prey on their calves. The mammoths share their range only with caribou and bison, while we work on bringing back the wooly rhinoceros to keep them company. So there is room—limited, controlled room—for the hunting of a few of the males.”
“I can’t see how that could possibly be worth it,” Vladimir said.
“Then I take it Anthony has not told you just how much he has paid for the privilege.”
Vladimir looked at Anthony, in his waxed shooting jacket, scraping up the last of his eggs with his fork.
“How much?”
“There was a secret auction, Dima. Several of us bid for the privilege.”
“How much?”
“Enough to keep this preserve operational for a long time,” Dr. Aslanov said. “Enough to help us continue to protect the mammoth here until after my retirement.”
“How much is that?”
Anthony shrugged. “It was somewhere around a year of my income.”
“Good God. That’s—”
Anthony interrupted. “Please spare us the comparisons with the GDP of small countries, et cetera.”
The breakfast table, with its white tablecloth clamped to its metal aluminum frame, was set up just outside the triangle formed by the three Burlaks. Its view extended across kilometers of plateau, toward a range of mountains that could have been very far off, and extraordinarily high, or low and much closer. The plateau was nearly orange now in the light, and a dusting of snow on the mountains reflected a pale pink.
Now that the question had moved to the hunt itself, to the why of it, Vladimir had been arguing with only half his attention. And he knew Anthony. Many people had a part of themselves they kept from others—some dark place they went to, into which they did not let strangers, friends, or kin. Anthony’s was larger than most, and hunting was at the core of it.
If Vladimir wanted, he could start another argument about it—about what he had called, during other fights, Anthony’s need to perform “ritual murder.” About the hypocrisy of cloaking that need in some idea about conservation. But the argument never went anywhere: Vladimir would accuse Anthony of bloodthirstiness, of cruelty, of atavistic, backward tendencies. You think you’re Hemingway, he would say. You think you’re the Great White Hunter. You think you’re Teddy Roosevelt. But you aren’t. You are just a spectacularly rich man who gets his kicks killing animals.
But that wasn’t it. Vladimir had seen the pictures, which Anthony showed to no one else, of him with the animals he killed. He was never happy in those pictures. Never smiling. He looked like he had done exactly what Vladimir accused him of. He looked like he had committed murder. Worse, he looked like he had killed something he loved. In every hunting photo, Anthony looked hollowed out. Drained.
Anthony kept no trophies of the animals he killed. He allowed no pictures of him not taken on his own encrypted terminal. There was no Bluebeard room filled with taxidermized prizes at their elegant country estate. There was nothing at all, no record of the destruction, except that slideshow of devastating photos. Over and over again, in variations, the same image: an exhausted, defeated man. A dead animal lying where it had fallen. Both looked as if they had lost everything that meant anything to them.
Vladimir had never traveled with Anthony before on any of these expeditions. He had not been asked to, and if he had been asked, he would have refused. But this time, Anthony had invited him, and although he had expected to turn it down, he found himself saying yes. Why?
To understand, perhaps. To see the moment, the act. To get a little closer to this man he loved, but did not know well.
Anthony and Dr. Aslanov were talking technical details: distances the Burlaks could travel, the part of the journey they would take on foot. Vladimir, meanwhile, was watching a man on horseback. He had appeared from behind a fold in the undulating landscape, and was growing larger as he made his way toward them. Again, the distances here were impossible for Vladimir to judge. Suddenly the man was almost upon them, and Vladimir could make out details: a dirty, padded camouflage jacket. The horse’s glossy eye, the man’s sunburned mask of a face. A few dozen meters away, he dismounted. The horse began cropping grass, and the man walked up to the table and said something to Dr. Aslanov in Russian. Or in what Vladimir thought was probably Russian. Again he was amazed by the idea that people related to him had spoken this language, which he found completely impenetrable. That people who carried his genetic code had been able to decipher this series of sounds, and had lived inside its cadences.
“This is Konstantin—my head ranger. He says they have found one. A male mammoth.”
Anthony looked up.
The expression on Anthony’s face was so startling Vladimir took a step back.
“How close?” Anthony asked.
Konstantin shrugged, and said in English, “A day, two. It depends how far he moves from us, depends on the terrain. But close.”
Vladimir could not take his eyes off of Anthony’s face in the morning sun.
He had never seen Anthony so happy.