We know it once existed by the fossil remains that we have unearthed, and
by a frozen carcase that the Siberian sun saw fit to melt from out the
bosom of a glacier; but we also know that no living specimen exists. Our
explorers--"

At this word he broke in impatiently. "Your explorers? Pish! A weakly
breed. Let us hear no more of them. But tell me, O man, what you may
know of the mammoth and his ways."

Beyond contradiction, this was leading to a yarn; so I baited my hook by
ransacking my memory for whatever data I possessed on the subject in
hand. To begin with, I emphasized that the animal was prehistoric, and
marshalled all my facts in support of this. I mentioned the Siberian
sand-bars that abounded with ancient mammoth bones; spoke of the large
quantities of fossil ivory purchased from the Innuits by the Alaska
Commercial Company; and acknowledged having myself mined six- and eight-
foot tusks from the pay gravel of the Klondike creeks. "All fossils," I
concluded, "found in the midst of _debris_ deposited through countless
ages."

"I remember when I was a kid," Thomas Stevens sniffed (he had a most
confounded way of sniffing), "that I saw a petrified water-melon. Hence,
though mistaken persons sometimes delude themselves into thinking that
they are really raising or eating them, there are no such things as
extant water-melons?"

"But the question of food," I objected, ignoring his point, which was
puerile and without bearing. "The soil must bring forth vegetable life
in lavish abundance to support so monstrous creations. Nowhere in the
North is the soil so prolific. Ergo, the mammoth cannot exist."