By Yi Lai Wang

Don’t forget there are bones under the soil. They are countless, long, fragmented, sharp and shattered—not the same as rocks but buried with them. Buried with many other things. Moss grows over it all and topsoil forms and becomes sediment, which is pressed together until fissures close and it is solid. This is when we forget. It is easy to, when we can’t dig it up with our fingernails.  

Don’t picture human bones, although there are plenty of those. There are bones that you could not even begin to imagine, as tall as a child, as thick as the flesh of your thigh, almost alive in their curvature. Some things are meant to be buried and stay facing downwards forever, but sometimes, we find them poking out from under the ground. 

—Extract from personal diary of [Redacted], entry no.26, found hidden amongst company-owned files. 

As the ice age came to an end and the world began to melt, so did their population. Humans were there and we weren’t helping. We needed their intestines for bowstrings, and their fur to keep us warm, so we took it all from them with wooden pikes tipped with hunger and sharp intelligence. When I imagine the last Mammuthus Primigenius, she is dying, and the face of a human is reflected in her dinner-plate cornea. In a sense she lived on. Her sisters, Elephas Maximus and Loxodonta Africana still walked long after she was gone, but we hunted them with the same ferocity— first with spears and later with muskets and tranquilizer darts. Their tusks are especially valuable and, one day, when these species are also gone, we might keep them as artefacts to put behind glass, much like the skeletons of their ancestors that we dug up and strung together with invisible steel tendons. 

Lyuba was spotted on the banks of a river in May of 2007 by a reindeer herder, newly defrosted but fully intact. My company got a hold of her eventually, although her right ear and tail had been chewed off by dogs. A 42,000-year-old baby mammoth, aged 35 days, whose body had slept through both world wars, who had walked the same snowy plains as Neanderthals, who had lived and died and never decomposed because of the sheer cold of Siberia. Her internal organs were pristine, and we could even get samples of her faeces and observe her mother’s milk in her digestive tract. She still had fur, four knees, two eyes, and a small, shrivelled trunk. Did her parents miss her after she had inhaled mud and suffocated to death? Does she miss them now although her brain is long gone? 

I was responsible for sequencing her genome. The genetic material was in poor shape after its long hibernation, but I was meticulous; we took cells from her cheeks, eyes, hair, and intestines. Towards the end of it there were seven small syringe holes across her body, but we had all that we needed. I fed the samples to the computer who, with its vectors and darting green lights, knew what to do with all the strands. It wove them together, chirping slightly but not enough to wake me as I slept in the complaining office chair.  

In my dreams, the submerged Lyuba hummed in her formaldehyde tank. 

The company complained about the cost of the small library but I threatened to quit if they didn’t let me have it. It was all of Lyuba’s genetic information in paperback, printed out over hundreds of stacked volumes. I asked for hardcover, but they didn’t have the funds. It all fit into a small room in the back of the office, which used to house the vacuum cleaner and a resentful bundle of unused carpet. Now it housed an animal— translated and strung out, but still as alive as I saw it. I could feel her wool spilling from between the pages. 

Libraries are earthy. Not dry. Not wise or silent or noble. That would be characterising them as a single person, which is wrong. Libraries are many voices talking together; voices that drown in each other’s noise. As you watch the books gather dust, they are literally becoming buried. The pages slowly forget that they can be separated, and the spines forget that they can flex and learn how to crumble. Libraries will become something solid. It’s only a matter of time. 

But still, we sift through them with our fingers. Sometimes in the soil we accidentally brush up against something living which reminds us of how things once were. 

—Extract from personal diary of [Redacted], entry no.54, found hidden amongst company-owned files 

I spent a lot of time with Lyuba. I was learning to read her, trying to discern her tiny, round feet in all the letters, and trying to imagine what her eyes looked like with the snow reflected in them. I’d like to think I read through the whole library, but I didn’t. I just started to get the sense that I knew the author. 

There are only a few features that distinguish a woolly mammoth, like Lyuba, from Elephas Maximus, our modern-day Asian elephant. Woolly mammoths had smaller ears and a thick coat of fur to prevent the heat from leaving their body, and their tusks were significantly longer and curlier. While many people think they were larger, they were actually around the same size, but with a different sort of posture— more humped at the front, and shorter back legs. It was my job to locate these features in the genome: the paragraphs which spelled out “fur,” “ears,” “tusks,” and “vertebrae.” Then I could graft these into the zygote of an Asian elephant until it became something different, and sew it all back up with chemical threads and needles. This was what they told me to do, and I was unfortunate enough to be the only one who knew how to do it. In this stuffy office building, “how” came before “why.” 

On the night I slept in the library I could hear the books resting their shoulders against each other and making their deep earthy noises. I closed my eyes and found the shape of Lyuba scattered between the shelves, and she came together as I fell away from the dull carpet floor and back to a time which was more comfortable for her. I saw the snowy ground with pine needles scattered into it. 

And I saw her.  

She was between her parents’ legs as they walked amongst the colossal trees. But she was not her; I could see her skin was dull and hairless, and my mouth became dry, and I ran to her, ducking between stone pendulum legs. 

‘Lyuba, Lyuba, what’s wrong with you?’ 

I gathered her in my arms, but she began to crumble away like rotting wood, skin flaking in my hands. I felt the bony joints first and it was all I could do to keep rubbing away at the mess until I came to what was underneath. I recognised it immediately. It was the carcass we had found in Siberia. I could smell the dead alcohol on my hands as I gripped her shrivelled trunk. Then I woke.  

When I checked, Lyuba was in her tank in the other room, humming as always. 

*** 

It was painful at the keyboard, typing for all those weeks with sweat in my eyes. It felt like digging and slowly I unearthed it all— first with a shovel and later with a chisel and hammer, until I could see what gleamed under the surface. The computer chirped. My glasses rested on top of my head, crooked as always. Lyuba hummed louder because she knew I had found her.  

We just needed a womb for her to grow. 

They got a real Asian elephant—the surrogate mother— flown in from Thailand or Myanmar, I forget. I couldn’t help but smile when I first saw her stumble from the truck they had placed her in, all legs and ears with a great rolling barrel of a body. All my dreams of wool made her seem like a balding old man, but she was beautiful in her own sense with long eyelashes and a real intelligence which you could see in her curious trunk. Her name was Aya, and I cried when they made her conceive the child I had typed and edited into being. 

Lejla, the first living mammoth in tens of millennia, was born in 2021. There is death in all births, and I watched Aya die as the calf’s head emerged from her midsection. Poor old eyes closed, and new ones opened. 

‘It’s because of the shape of her spine.’ 

‘She was too large, and we couldn’t do anything about the internal bleeding.’ 

I only sat and watched. I was afraid that the cavity they pulled her from should never have been opened in the first place. I went to wash my hands. 

*** 

The tundra is like a slowly heaving chest. 

She walks off into the forest with such colossal ease, keeping time, each swaying footstep landing in a polyrhythm with the shivering trees and the rustles of small arctic animals. There is no trembling earth or cracked soil; Lejla is silent. She becomes the forest rather than interrupts it. She is a heap of clay which moulds itself to the frigid air and finds itself surrounded by new sounds: bird, fox, leaf, and insect. Her small ears flick. I can’t help but feel that I moulded her. 

There is a yellow tag on her left hind leg which tells us her location, as well as other data about her health and eating habits. She has been scarred by a long childhood of injections and blood samples. I regret all of them. She is a library come alive. The tightening of all the strands. She should have been treated with the same respect as one gives to a silent room. 

I love Lejla as Aya would have loved her, and as Lyuba would have loved both of them. I know that one day her bones will sink back into the ground, that her knees will hit the floor and then her mighty tusks and head. But unlike her ancestors, I only hope that they can rest there. 

Others watched her walk into the forest. I know they took notes and ran numbers. There are always more people with better computers, newer techniques, and the same excuses. I’ve kept the key to the library. I haven’t visited in weeks. Lejla lives and breathes in front of me, but she also lives in there— in those volumes stacked spine to spine. She is not safe from us, not really. I can only hope they cannot find her as I did. 

I can only hope that the dust will settle across those tight, beautiful shelves.