Brandon chattered on. “I hope the new facility is a little closer to a town—or at least to a bar. I like the outdoors as much as the next guy, but for vacation, you know? For other times, I like a real bed.” He leered and patted Luis’s knee. “So, where do you want to go after the herd’s off our hands? We should travel, go somewhere fun. How about London? Or maybe Paris, I hear that’s nice.”
Luis kept his attention on the feeds. “Yes, you should. I’ll be busy looking after Silver and Gold.” He’d told Brandon that the two backup mammoths were separated because their pregnancies were in a critical stage.
“Oh.” Brandon sighed and gazed at Luis with soulful eyes. “Shit, I was hoping we’d get away. Spend some quality time together.”
“Yeah, well, the mammoths . . .”
“Right. The mammoths.” Brandon slumped. “Aren’t you getting tired of being a mammoth nanny? Don’t you ever think about settling down in a real home, maybe even have a real, human kid of your own?”
“You sound like my mother.” Luis wasn’t in the mood for a let’s-talk-about-the-future with Brandon. “The last thing this world needs is another little carbon footprint. As far as I’m concerned, the mammoths are my posterity.”
Brandon subsided with a pout. An experienced horse wrangler and trail rider, he’d been recruited by Luis to Project Hannibal the year before. They got on together well enough, sharing quarters at the research station and spending time off together at Luis’s Fairbanks apartment. That was about as permanent as Luis wanted to get, but lately, Brandon had been hinting he was interested in settling down together.
Not going to happen. Brandon was like one of those Alaskan sled dogs: rugged and useful, eager to be in harness and run with the team. Luis considered himself more of a lone wolf: wide-ranging, solitary, and seeking company only when the sexual urge was strong. He’d already decided to part ways with Brandon at the end of this trip.
But until the mammoths were in their new home, he needed Brandon.
Luis tried to nap as the trucks bounced over pot-holed secondary roads. The constant banging of skull on spine made his head ache. He hoped the mammoths were coping with the motion better than his stomach was.
All through the night hours, the two tractor-trailers traveled east until they met the infamous Dalton Highway, the “worst road in America.” Built to carry goods to the oilfields on the coast of the Arctic Sea, the Dalton Highway was four hundred miles of barely paved—and in long stretches, unpaved—rock-strewn road through windswept Arctic wilderness.
On the Dalton, the hours of constant daylight dragged on. The mammoth transports ground their way north, covering mile after mile through a forbidding landscape of trees and rock nearly devoid of habitations and traffic.
They stopped for fuel and restrooms at Yukon Crossing and, hours later, at the town of Coldfoot, named for the Gold Rush prospectors who’d turned back at that point. On the feeds from the transports, the mammoths exuded unhappiness in the droop of their heads and the shifting in their stalls.
From the lead truck’s cargo bay came the banging of an angry trunk—the big bull Diamond objecting to confinement.
After twelve grueling hours, the trucks slowed and turned east off the Dalton. Creeping at a snail’s pace, they followed a track that was nothing more than a trailhead into the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. A mile in, they stopped.
The driver opened the window to the passenger compartment. “The GPS says we’re here, and I can’t go no farther.”
“Thanks.” Luis and Brandon left the warm passenger cab to groan and stretch in the chill morning air. According to the satphone, it was five a.m., although the precise time had little meaning. In June, north of the Arctic Circle, the sun wouldn’t go down for weeks.
The trailhead was a bare, rock-strewn hollow. Sparse grass grew in the crevices between boulders, purple-flowered fireweed sprinkled the hillside.
One of the drivers approached. “Are you sure this is where you want to be? There’s no water or nothing.”
“It’s perfect.” Luis had picked the place carefully: enough grass to keep the mammoths occupied for a while, but no water and no tasty trees to munch. They’d be ready to move when Luis gave the order. “Wait in the trucks. You shouldn’t be on the ground when we unload the livestock.”
Bang, bang. Diamond, demanding release.
In response, a fluting trumpeting came from the second transport—Ruby, the matriarch, issuing a location call. Her call wasn’t so much answered as overridden by Diamond’s scream.
The driver’s eyes widened. “Sure, boss. Whatever you say.” He and his buddy scurried back to their cabs.
“Diamond first,” Luis said. “He’ll hurt himself if he keeps hitting the wall like that.”
Brandon snorted. “Hurting himself isn’t what I’m worried about. I swear, I’m afraid to turn my back on him.”
“Then go back to the cab. He’ll be easier to handle if you’re not in sight.”
Brandon and Luis pulled the heavy ramp from its slot under the rear loading doors.
Bang, bang.
“He sounds pissed,” Brandon said as they set the ramp braces. “Are you sure you’ll be able to handle him by yourself?”
“He usually behaves for me.” But Diamond had never been confined for so long before. The herd’s oldest and largest bull saw even human males as rivals to be driven off. Luis was the exception: he preferred to think it was his excellent rapport with the mammoths rather than a lack of masculinity that made him tolerable to Diamond.
As Brandon retreated to the cab, Luis opened the rear cargo doors and clamped them back out of the way. He coughed in the stench of mammoth excretions—urine and feces, he’d expected, but there was a sharper, more pungent smell, strong enough
