"Uncle Karl," she called out, her voice echoing.
He strode over to where she knelt on the cavern floor. Illuminated in the bull's-eye of light from her flashlight was a brownish mass of vegetation.
"What is it?" Schroeder asked.
She didn't answer right away. After a moment, she said, "It looks like elephant scat."
Schroeder roared with laughter. "Do you think the circus passed this way?"
She stood up and touched it with the toe of her boot. A musky, grassy smell arose from the mound. "I think I need to sit down," she said.
They found a wall outcropping to sit on and refreshed themselves from their water bottles. Karla told Schroeder about the baby mammoth that had been discovered not far from the cave entrance. "I couldn't figure out how it could be so well preserved," she said. "No one has ever found a specimen like that. It seemed to have died only days or weeks ago."
"Are you suggesting that there are woolly mammoths living in these caves?"
"No, of course not," she said with a laugh. "That would be impossible. Maybe they once did, though, and the scat is very old. Let me tell you a story. In 1918, a Russian hunter was traveling through the taiga, the great Siberian forest, when he saw huge tracks in the snow. For days, he followed the creatures that made them. They left behind piles of dung and broken tree branches. He described seeing two huge elephants with chestnut hair and massive tusks."
"An apocryphal hunter's tale, with no evidence, meant to impress?"
"Possibly. But the Eskimos and North American Indians recounted legends of great shaggy creatures. In 1993, the skeletons of dwarf mammoths were found on Wrangel Island, between Siberia and Alaska, not far from here. Their bones were dated between seven thousand and thirty-seven hundred years ago, which means mammoths roamed the earth well past Paleolithic times, when men were building Stonehenge and the Pyramids."
Schroeder chuckled and said, "You'd like to explore further, wouldn't you?"
"I wouldn't want to waste an opportunity like this sitting around and twiddling our thumbs. Maybe we'll come across some well-preserved specimens."
"I don't think preparing to repel a gang of desperate cutthroats qualifies as twiddling our thumbs, but I shouldn't be surprised. Once, when you were a child, I read you Alice in Wonderland. Not long after, I found you out in the yard trying to squeeze your head down a rabbit hole. You said you wished you had some tonic that would shrink you, like Alice."
"It must have been your fault for reading me such stories."
"Well, now it seems we have little choice," he said wearily. He picked up his pack and limped toward the opening. "Down the rabbit hole we go."
26
The chestnut stallion galloped across the verdant Virginia countryside as if it were racing neck and neck in the Kentucky Derby. Jordan Gant crouched in the saddle like an overgrown jockey and whipped his crop repeatedly on his mount's haunches. The horse had been running a punishing pace. Its eyes rolled, its sleek coat was shiny with sweat and its tongue hung from its mouth. Still, Gant showed no mercy. It was not so much cruelty, which would have assumed emotion on his part, but rather the disregard he held for anything that came under his control.
Gant crossed meadows and pastures, and rode along the edge of a driveway bordered by poplar trees until he came to a sprawling country house. He headed to a stable area near the house, and allowed the exhausted animal to come to a trot, then a walk and finally to a halt. Gant slid easily out of the saddle, took a towel from a waiting groom and carelessly tossed him the reins. The horse was limping as it was led away.
Gant strode up a stone walkway
toward the front door. He was dressed for polo in a black short-sleeved shirt and jodhpurs. Gant had a muscular, athletic physique, and he would have worn his clothes well even if they weren't custom-tailored. He whipped his knee-high boots of cordovan leather with his crop as he walked, as if his arm had a mind of its own. The massive wooden front door opened at Gant's approach, and he stepped into an enormous foyer with a fountain bubbling in the center. Gant handed his gloves and towel to the cadaverous butler who had opened the door.
The butler said, "Your guest has arrived, sir. He's waiting in the library."
"A Bombay Sapphire martini, straight up, and the usual for me."
The butler bowed and disappeared down a long hallway. Gant went through a door off the foyer into a spacious chamber lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves filled with the priceless volumes that he collected. Margrave stood near a set of French doors that overlooked manicured lawns that were as green as the top of a billiard table. He was perusing an antique book bound in red Moroccan leather.
"That's a rare edition of the Divine Comedy published in 1507," Gant said. "There are only three known copies. I own them all."
"You've got quite the extensive collection of Dante."
"Actually, it's the best in the world," Gant said without pretense.
Margrave smiled and slipped the book back onto the shelf. "I would expect no less. Did you have a good ride?"
Gant tossed the whip onto a side table. "I always have a good ride. The horse does all the work. The animal that I rode today is new to my stables. It's a stallion that needed to be shown who the boss is. I always take a new horse out for a test-drive. Those that survive are treated like royalty. Those that don't end up in a glue factory."
"Survival of the fittest?"