This is an excerpt from “The Last Animal,” a Colorado Book Awards finalist in the Novel category.
In the Age of Extinction, two tagalong daughters traveled to the edge of Siberia with their mother to search the frozen earth for the bones of woolly mammoths.
Eve was fifteen, reshaping herself more each day; Vera at thirteen was a stubborn straight line. Jane, their mother, was a graduate student in paleo-biology. Their father had died exactly one year before, plunged into a shock-green mountain in a tiny car on a tiny road in Italy where he was conducting his own research. Now they were three. Girls, sad and angry and growing and trying. Mom, sad and angry and trying. Now they hauled their bodies and hearts across the entire scoop of the sky to get to a bare place where ancient beasts had once roamed.
Jane’s professor had grown a beard for the trip, and Todd, a post-doc, wore all tan safari clothing. Everything had several pockets and zipped into different configurations. In New York, Vera watched Todd zip off the legs to his pants and jog laps around the terminal in shorts and hiking boots, his stained white athletic socks like burned down candles. The professor plugged in a full power strip to charge his computer, tablet and two phones and then ate three kale salads out of plastic to-go containers. He said, “We’re unlikely to get fresh veggies. I want to vitamin-load.”
Vera wondered if the professor was someone’s father.
During their five-hour layover in Moscow Jane brought blini with caviar on a real plate to the seats where her daughters were draped, sleepy and prickling.
“Airport fish eggs, Mom, I don’t know,” Vera said. She wanted a burrito.
“They’re actually so good,” Jane said, sour cream on her lips.
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“This is embarrassing,” Eve said.
Todd, in the next row of chairs, zipped his pantlegs off and slung them over his carryon, then jogged the halls again. Eve made a hand flourish and said, “Exhibit A.” Vera watched the Russians watch Todd and it seemed possible that he alone might inspire a war between the two countries. Americans, if this was any indication, needed to be put out of their misery. It would have been a service.
As the sun was going down, they boarded a plane that would take them from Moscow to Yakutsk. The stewardesses in stilettos served chicken cutlet and sweet wine. The plane crossed six time zones and they had only traveled two-thirds of the way across Russia.
Eve and Vera played a favorite game, Fortunatley/Unfortunately, a game that had traveled with them on buses, planes, ships, trains all over the globe.
“Once there were two sisters who wanted to run away,” Eve started.
Vera said, “Fortunately, they had large bags full of precious gems.”
“Unfortunately,” Eve continued, “the gems were heavy and the girls couldn’t carry them.”
“Fortunately, they came upon a cave where they could hide the bags until they had a way to transport them.”
“Unfortunately, there was a wild and ferocious bear living in the cave.”
Vera smiled at her older sister. “You always put a ferocious bear.”
“It’s a classic.”
The story was, by design, endless. Meant to carry the girls across land and sea, every piece of bad news immediately followed by the upswing of salvation.
It was morning again when they landed, dawn, a fine pink stripe on the horizon. Vera felt broken by tiredness. She was not a person anymore but a hunger for sleep. The tarmac smelled like fire and melt.
“The Last Animal”
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This was the coldest city on earth in winter and all the photos in the hotel lobby were of people with iced eyelashes, men in fur suits with fur hoods selling fish in the outside market and everything shimmered with frost and the fish were frozen but not because they had been in a freezer.
While the travelers checked in, the professor and Todd had a loud conversation about three-pointers in relationship to wingspan in the NBA. The professor said, “Who wants a drink?” Jane looked at her daughters, said, “It’s morning and I have children.”
“Go, go,” Vera said. “We want sleep.”
“If you sleep now you’ll never get onto the right time. You’ll ruin the entire trip.”
The desk clerk handed Jane her key. It was old fashioned and had a giant wooden block for a key chain.
Todd said, “You sure? We’re headed to the bar.” These were the moments when careers took shape. Trust was earned over jet lag vodka.
Jane said, “Go walk, girls” and motioned her sleepy daughters outside.
“Alone? In a foreign land?” Eve said.
“It’s safe. It’s good for you.”
“I’ve never hated anyone so much in my life,” Eve said to Vera, the day cracking at them with its light.
“Men are terrible,” Vera said.
“Moms are terrible. It was a mom who abandoned us just now.”
Vera said, “It wasn’t her fault.” She looked at her watch as if it could set her right, as if knowing the time would clarify the moment. The watch had belonged to her father, not fancy, a drug store purchase, but precious because it had been on his wrist and had been a tool for mapping his life. Vera could not get the numbers to make sense.
Everyone on the street was dressed well, especially the women, all looking as if they were about to be photographed. The buildings, meanwhile, were bloc and bland, storage for families, for lives, and the people looked especially dazzling in comparison.
“Americans are such slobs,” Vera said. “I am basically wearing jammies and I felt proud that I brushed my teeth and hair before we left the room. What are we doing here again?”
Eve said, “That’s easy. Mom is pretending to be a necessary part of an important project and not a token woman with both literal and emotional baggage. I can see the headline, Woman, supposed to be invisible, brings obnoxious children on science trip, ruins everything.”
Vera said, “We won’t ruin anything. Look at us being invisible and out of the way so that the adults can tour the future home for de-extincted woolly mammoths while also looking for ancient mammoth bits in order to better understand the genetic code and use that information to edit Asian elephant cells until they act like woolly cells. That’s a summer well spent.”
Eve was clearly impressed. “Listen to you, little lady. You sound better than Mom.”
“I have heard her say that ten thousand times. It’s embedded in my brain, like a phone number.”
“To making a mammoth,” Eve said, holding an invisible glass aloft, toward street lights strung up like a temporary display.
They cheersed with their fists. “Except I think we’re supposed to say ‘cold-adapted elephant.’”
Eve said, “How completely lame.”
“They don’t want to be criticized for playing God.”
“Which is what they are doing. You know the professor dreams of snuggling up to a woolly of his own making.”
Couples sat on benches and the girls walked across a bridge over a wide, shallow river. The bridge was covered in padlocks. Names were written on the locks. Hearts and arrows and the word LOVE in English.
At the other end of the bridge a worker in a green zip-up jumpsuit cut locks, one by one. He kneeled, brought the bolt cutter into place and squeezed. The locks that did not fall into the river were kicked in by the worker, each one sounded a different note as it fell into the water.
Love and declarations of love lasted however long, and then they sank.
“Do you think the grown-ups are drunk yet?” Vera asked. “Drunk enough that we can sneak past the bar and go to sleep?”
Eve said, “All I care about is a bed. I am willing to risk my life for it.”
Vera did not know what she was willing to risk her life for but it seemed to be a question she would have to answer sooner or later. Science, progress, comfort, love, sleep.
Ramona Ausubel is the bestselling author of “The Last Animal,” which was named a best book of 2023 by many outlets. Her previous books are “Awayland: Stories,” “Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, A Guide to Being Born” and “No One is Here Except All of Us.” She is the recipient of the PEN/USA Fiction Award, the Cabell First Novelist Award and has been a finalist for both the California and Colorado Book Awards and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. She is a professor at Colorado State University and lives in Boulder, Colorado, with her family.
