To Taste an Extinct Cuisine

A chilly wind shook the makeshift rope harness holding him over the slowly collapsing cliff of the riverbank and made the sweat streaking down his forehead feel as cold as the frozen soil he was digging away at. Two other men were hanging next to him leaning into the mire of mud and ice and attacking the permafrost with sorely abused picks. The work was exhausting and filthy, but they had to move quickly to come away with their prize before their labor came to the attention of the authorities or other prospectors. Excavating for mammoths in Yakutia in the northeast of Russia is illegal without a permit, but rivers like the Kolyma cut deep into the permafrost and regularly expose paleontological treasures frozen for tens of thousands of years when the relative warmth of summer melts away their tombs. Global warming has helped to free ever more specimens, but the shifting of the melting permafrost has wrought havoc on those who live atop it by demolishing buildings and thawing underground larders. These sorts of difficulties have only made it all the more tempting for residents to engage in unauthorized excavations in search of valuable mammoth tusk ivory.

However, he was not there for ivory nor to make money at all. In fact, he was paying a not insignificant amount to join the clandestine expedition to knock loose a new discovery from a crumbling bank of mud. A broad, woolly back had been spotted sticking out of the permafrost after a mudslide, a lucky stroke for him since the locals would have had no need to dig the mammoth free if its tusks had been facing out instead. What he wanted was flesh from the bone, as well preserved as could be found.

The discovery of primordial beasts mummified in the permafrost is a topic that has garnered interest for over a century. He had read about it as a child; how scientists had studied mammoths with grass still stuck in their teeth and wildflowers undigested in their stomachs. What had really captured his imagination were the tales of how meat from such finds had been brought back to civilization and served up at grand dinners like the Explorer’s Club gathering of 1951. He had imagined for himself a meal composed entirely of fare wrested from the arctic ice, a full course dinner not tasted by humans in ten thousand years. The dream had gone down in a notebook he’d kept in his youth filled with all his fanciful ambitions for the future and that he had carried packed amongst his belongings right up to the moment when he’d lost everything in a fire a few months ago. Everything, except a small black notebook with some burned edges. When an insurance payment for twenty grand had become the only other thing he had to his name, he had decided that the notebook’s survival was a sign that he shouldn’t try to resume the ordinary way of life that had gone up in smoke, but that instead he should use the Pyrrhic windfall to enact the plots and schemes he had fantasized about as a boy.

He had thought the Pleistocene feast would be one of the easier dreams to actualize, discounting the journey to frigid Siberia and the labor of digging up his ancient frozen dinner. Then came the research. The stories he’d read with wonder about mammoth meat being served at adventurers’ gatherings turned out to be either fictions or hoaxes. Despite being buried under permanently frozen ground, fatty tissues still transform into foul corpse wax and muscle fibers penetrated by ice crystals turn into formless grey goop when thawed. The situation with foliage wasn’t much better as scientists only recently managed to revive a plant from buried seeds, otherwise having simply pulled bits and traces of flora from the permafrost for study. There were no fields of salad in bloom waiting under the ice. His goal of an appetizing platter recreating the haul of long gone hunter-gatherers was replaced with the mere hope of finding a morsel of frozen muscle to gnaw on and maybe some scraps of greenery to pull from a mammoth’s mouth.

Still, he was not deterred by the stomach churning reality of that dream. Neither the long journey to isolated Yakutia nor the difficult language barrier stopped him, and now the last obstacle that separated him from his prize was the layer of half-frozen muck holding the ancient beast inside the riverbank. He worked alongside men with whom he could barely communicate, chipping away at the soil and ice for two summer days during which it had only reached sixty degrees and the sun had never dipped below the horizon. The animal’s exposed back had already begun to give off a fearsome stench of rot. On the evening of their second day hanging over the cliff, a frenzy began after the man to his left smashed apart a chunk of permafrost above the mammoth’s body. The crack of his pick striking the earth was followed by louder cracks and groans from inside the riverbank; the men started shouting and motioning to get back from the body. All at once, the colossus fell out from the cliff face and crashed into the muddy shallows below their excavation site. The mammoth was contorted in strange and unnatural ways, not looking at all like the image of a near life-like beast frozen in pristine condition which he had carried with him during their labor. The shouting turned into laughter and whoops of victory, the hard part was over.

One of his compatriots pulled himself to the top of the cliff to retrieve tools in order to cut off the tusks now exposed to the open air for the first time in millennia. The other man lowered himself down to the carcass. A clanging toolbox was sent down and the final work began with the roar of a power saw. After the tusks had been removed, he was handed the saw to use for his personal quest. First, he eased himself onto the giant mummy’s shoulder and set a pry bar between its jaws. With a series of loud snaps, he tore open the frozen mouth to search for any plant matter still trapped within. The beast’s maw was a mess of brown, grey and icy white and he had to pull out his phone to use as a flashlight before he found anything green. The strands of fiber wedged between two monstrous teeth were just big enough for him to spot and scrape out from the crevice.

With the first course of his dinner secured in his coat pocket, he turned his attention to sawing apart the hairy leather covering one of the mammoth’s legs. He hoped that the limb, covered in clumps of frozen dirt, had been a deeply buried part of the beast and that the flesh was not spoiled so badly as to be dangerous. The muscle beneath the skin bore little resemblance to a fresh cut of red meat, but he could imagine no better quality sample waiting for him than the brown-grey tissue that he sliced from the thigh.

Handing the saw back, he held up the scrap of flesh for the others to see. The two men started to cheer him on knowing full well what he had come to their part of the world to do. The ancient meat gave off a musty scent that might be the normal smell of a mammoth or the onset of decay, he couldn’t be sure which. To start his supper, he pulled the grass from his pocket and popped the strands into his mouth. The plants crumbled away without much effect as he chewed them, feeling and tasting more like he had eaten some of the icy mud than anything else.

Steeling himself, he held his next course before his face and sank his teeth into the ice-laden meat. He had to tear and gnaw to get bits to break off; splinters that he chewed with loud crunches before the stuff became an indefinable ooze that he hastily swallowed. The taste was as foul as the smell, so bad as to make him gag just from the few shards he could pry from the frozen chunk. His companions set up a final round of cheers upon seeing his reaction to the primordial corpse’s flavor. More than the vile sensations of the meat, he was overwhelmed by the thrill of accomplishment. Though it was a far cry from the idyllic image he had as a boy, he’d still traveled to the edge of the world and made one of his dreams come true.