Then, when the world’s
African elephant population finally dwindled to three, two old cows well past
their calf bearing age and an ancient sterile bull in the San
Diego zoo, the decision was made to kill all three and take their
genes to the University of Nebraska. The
scientists knew this desperate gamble might not pay off, but they also knew
that if the elephant genes could be preserved and expressed anywhere in the
world, it would be at the NU Beef Lab.
And, of course, tradition demanded that
the last elephants be sent to Nebraska
in a vial. Fossil elephant teeth had been found in every county in the state,
and aside from football and corn, the only thing Nebraska had to show for its several hundred
million year history was a museum full of mammoth skeletons unearthed by local
farmers.
So, the three old elephants were put to
sleep and their DNA extracted. Thousands of school children gathered at the San Diego airport to wave
goodbye to their beloved proboscideans, totally confident that the guys at the
Nebraska Beef Lab could revive the species. At NU, the genes were quickly
preserved. Then the scientists began trying to produce elephants. At first they
put elephant genes in mouse cells, then put the mouse cells into a cow’s uterus.
They succeeded in making perfect elephants, all right, but they were the size
of mice and acted like cows. Finally, elephant sized elephants were
successfully produced by putting some of the biggest genes in the library into
the mouse cells, namely the genes from the extinct redwood trees. The first
baby with those genes was still about the size of a mouse, but had enormous
feet.
“Jesus, look at the size of those feet!”
said one scientist. Then everyone in the room stared at one another. They knew
what they’d done, so named their baby “Redwood.” Baby Redwood died within a few
months, from complications resulting from her growth rate, but with that
experiment, the scientists had learned how to adjust the size of elephants. Within
a few years, they had a herd of regular African elephants in Nebraska.
Naturally, the Beef Lab was well prepared
when a frozen woolly mammoth was discovered in the rapidly melting polar ice
cap. Periodically in the past frozen mammoths had been discovered, but nobody
knew what to do with them. So the local explorers and Eskimos usually ate some
of the meat, and fed some to their dogs, then had their pictures taken standing
around the carcass with grins on their faces saying “look at us we ate mammoth
meat and survived.” But now with all the new genetic technology, the Beef Lab
scientists knew exactly what to do. The mammoth body was chipped out of the ice
and flown to Nebraska. Then the genetic engineers took out the mammoth genes
and put them into an enucleated elephant egg, which they implanted into a
surrogate elephant mother. Fourteen months later, for the first time in ten
thousand years, a live woolly mammoth walked the Nebraska prairies.
He could have no other name than Archie,
the nickname of Archidiskodon imperator,
the biggest skeleton of them all. Archie was only a few days old when the Beef
Lab scientists made a startling discovery:
woolly mammoths were many times more intelligent than elephants. Furthermore,
they were capable of the most amazing facial expressions. They could smile,
grin mischievously, cry and laugh. Their vocalizations were far more complex
than those of elephants. Right away the scientists re-wrote their theories
about why mammoths became extinct. For decades biologists had thought mammoths
were too stupid to compete with early humans. After studying Archie, they
decided that mammoths had in fact tried to domesticate humans. Evidently they’d
wanted to train humans to do many tasks that mammoths, because of their
structure, could not do. That effort was clearly a mistake. Like any new
technological tools, humans were a two-edged sword. The little bastards were
capable of magnificent feats, but they were also dangerous.
Archie, however, had awakened into a new
world, one that his ancestors could never have imagined. Values and attitudes
had changed since the Pleistocene. Thanks to corn slime, few people were truly
hungry any more. The humans that hovered around Archie were admiring, caring,
little animals, instead of cold and starving ones armed with spears. Time and
technology had accomplished for Archie what purpose had not been able to
accomplish for his extinct brethren, namely the domestication of Homo sapiens.
From the human perspective, woolly
mammoths turned out to be a marvel. They were smart enough so that they didn’t
need fences, which was fortunate because it was impossible to build a fence
that would hold them inside anywhere. But the best feature of woolly mammoths
was that they could, and would, eat unprocessed slime corn. Thus their massive
food requirements were easily met by the cheapest weed in Nebraska.
Archie himself was somewhat bored as he
entered puberty. Although he didn’t know it, the source of his boredom was the
environment in which he lived. There was no challenge to being a mammoth in the
21st Century, no problems of survival to solve, no would-be
predators to stomp, no floods and fires and volcanic explosions laying waste to
the plains. Archie was surrounded by people who did nothing more than feed and
study him, and wonder why he seemed so bored.
Then one day when Archie was about seven
feet tall and his tusks were just beginning to curve, the students asked the
Beef Lab if Archie could march in the Homecoming Day Parade. Sure, said the
scientists; a parade will cheer him up. Jack Alexander was president of his
fraternity and president of the pep club, so he got to be in charge of Archie. Or
rather, Archie got to be in charge of Jack. Jack was a junior in college. He
had not met Suzi yet. Jack had another girl friend at the time. Her name was Nancy and she played in
the band.
Jack was a little bit afraid of Archie at
first, but took the leash anyway. They marched right in front of the band, and
periodically Archie would plop great heaping mounds of steaming mammoth manure
into the street. This act made the band furious. They yelled and screamed at
Jack. Jack didn’t know that Archie was making the deposits on purpose in order
to stir up some excitement. Archie thought Jack was pretty dumb; Jack thought Archie
was undisciplined. Nancy
was not very happy either. She finished the parade with mammoth manure all over
her uniform.
“Jack,” said Nancy later that evening, “if I ever see that
goddamn mammoth again, you and I are through.”
By the time the parade had ended, Jack had
lost his fear of Archie and was rather proud of the attention he’d received.
“It was kind of fun,” he answered
defensively.
“If it was so damned much fun taking him
to the parade, why don’t you take him to the game?” Nancy was an expert at sarcasm. Lately her
smart-alec tongue had been irritating Jack.
“Well maybe I’ll do just that,” he said,
every bit as sarcastically.
Jack Alexander was sleeping on the morning
of the next game when the telephone rang.
“Alexander?”
“Huh? Yeah?” mumbled Jack.
“Archie wants to go to another parade.”
“There isn’t any parade today.”
“We know. We thought you could take him to
the game, since he had so much fun at the parade.”
“The band would kill him.”
“Fat chance,” replied the guy from the
Beef Lab.
“Find someone else,” said Jack. The game
was with Kansas State University,
usually the most boring game of the season. The KSU Wildcats were favored by at
least fifty points and everybody Jack talked to thought they might win by
eighty. The K State quarterback was a Heisman Trophy candidate and two of their
linebackers had been nominated for the Butkus Award. Nebraska
had not beaten Kansas
State since before Jack
was born. If he hadn’t been president of the pep club he would have slept all
day instead of going to the game. It was simply too painful to see the Huskers,
as they were called back then, a once great team with a winning tradition, get
kicked around so shamefully.
“Archie wants you, Alexander.”
“Hey, fix him up with a date,” offered
Jack, ever the quintessential fraternity guy. “A blind date. I’ve got just the
girl.”
“Is she smart?”
“Better than that, she’s wise.”
“What’s her name?”
“Nancy,”
said Jack, “she’s supposed to be my date but Archie can have her.”
“That’ll be great,” said the guy from the
Beef Lab. “How will Archie recognize Nancy?”
“Take him to the south entrance of the
stadium. She’ll have on red.”
So, one of the guys from the Beef Lab took
Archie to the game. There were very few people around, and most of them were
dressed in purple, not red. Even the Kansas
State fans wouldn’t
travel to watch such a boring game. Archie didn’t see anybody in red except the
band and he knew that after his performance in the parade nobody in the band
would go out with him. Finally two people wearing red showed up, but they were
both male. Another person, the only female not dressed in purple or in the
band, had on jeans and a brown leather vest. It was Suzi on her way to the
museum and art gallery.
When Suzi saw Archie she stopped and
stared. Even though Archie was six years old and seven feet tall, and Suzi had
watched the mammoths from the public viewing area, she’d never been this close
to one. By this time Archie was feeling pretty depressed, sad, and abandoned. Maybe
Nancy doesn’t
like me because I’m big and hairy, he thought. If she only knew how intelligent
and sensitive I am, she’d like me. The guy from the Beef Lab said “don’t cry,
Archie.” But Archie began to cry anyway, hanging his head, letting the tip of
his trunk drag on the concrete, and blinking out tears that hit the sidewalk
like water balloons.
Suzi was devastated. She could never have
imagined the power that a crying mammoth could have over her emotions. She
walked up to Archie’s handler and asked what was wrong. The man said “he was
supposed to have a blind date but she stood him up because he’s so big and
hairy. Now he’s all depressed.”
To which Suzi replied, “he’s no worse than
some of the football players.”
This wisecrack made Archie cry all the
more, his massive body heaving with gigantic sobs and three feet of snot
gurgling in his trunk. Suzi had insulted him terribly; he thought football players
were barbarians. Then Suzi said
“When I get depressed I usually kick the
shit out of something. Usually something big. That makes me feel better.”
“Uh oh,” said the guy from the Beef Lab. The
only big thing around to kick was the Kansas State
team bus, a superslick black windowed silver coach with an abstract purple
wildcat on the side.
Archie’s ears perked up. Then he raised
his head, wiped a tear with his trunk, blew out three or four gallons of snot,
reared up on his hind legs and smashed the KSU bus. Metal and glass went
everywhere. The two guys in red shirts stood off to the side. One of them said
“Wow! Tusker power!”
The other said “that’s cute; Tusker
power.”
The first guy yelled “Tus-ker!”
The second guy yelled “Pow-er!”
The two students looked at one another. Something
out of their distant past, maybe something acquired by their grandparents,
bubbled to the surface, as they began to chant:
Tus-ker! Pow-er! Tus-ker! Pow-er!
The Cornhuskers lost by only three
touchdowns that day. They played their finest game in years. But the best part
of the day was that a legend had been born. Before the end of that season, Suzi
had met Jack at a party, Archie had become a cult hero, and the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers had started back on
their winning tradition. Well, at least they stopped losing quite so badly. They
even tied Oklahoma. Next to Nebraska, Oklahoma was the worst
team in college football. The tie spread hope among the faithful and the few
fans that did attend the games began to yell Tus-ker! Pow-er!
It would be another five years before the
Cornhuskers actually won a game, but each year their losing margins were less
than the year before. The optimism generated by this turn of fortunes was
contagious. The fans worshipped Archie. The year after he’d destroyed the Kansas State
bus, Archie was allowed to run around the field after every score. The
Cornhuskers kicked five field goals that season and made one touchdown. Archie
got to run around the field twice after the touchdown and once again after the
extra point attempt, even though the kick was blocked. Everybody in Nebraska knew deep in
their hearts that it was only a matter of time before the Cornhuskers won a
game. What they didn’t know was that when it happened, there would be no more
“Cornhuskers.”
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