LEGENDS OF THE NATIVES. 97 



posed that its horn was the talon of a species of gigantic 

 bird, regarding which many wonderful stories were told in 

 the tents of the Yakuts, the Ostyaks, and the Tunguses. 

 Their legends tell of fearful combats between their ancestors 

 and this enormous winged animal. 



In the year 1799, a Tunguse found on Tamut Peninsula, 

 which juts out into the sea from the delta of the Lena, a 

 frozen-in mammoth, and lie waited patiently five years for the 

 ground to thaw so that the precious tusks could be uncovered. 

 The skeleton of this mammoth is now in the Imperial 

 Museum at St. Petersburg. Its tusks are remarkable for 

 exhibiting a double curve, first inward, then outward, and 

 then inward again. They are each nine and one-half feet in 

 length (measured along the curve), and the two weigh 360 

 pounds. 



The tundra is in summer completely free of snow, but at a 

 short distance from the surface the ground is always frozen. 

 At some places the earthy strata alternates with strata of 

 pure, clear ice, and it is in these frozen strata that the carca- 

 ses of mammoths and rhinoceroses are found, " where," says 

 Nordenskiold, " they have been protected from putrefaction 

 for hundreds of thousands of years." 



The nearer we come to the Polar Sea the more plenty are 

 the fossil remains of the mammoth, but nowhere are they 

 found in such quantities as on the New Siberian Islands. 

 Every year, in early summer, fishermen's boats direct their 

 course from the Siberian rivers to the " isle of bones" ; and 

 during winter, caravans drawn by dogs take the same route, 

 and return with loads of fossil ivory, which finds its way in- 

 to China and Europe. 



