Will Mathonsi

The Yakutia Mystery

Chapter One - Finding it Yuri Vasiliev, at 55 years old, was surprisingly tough as nails. A stocky build with graying hair, his body a mass of sinewy muscles sculptured by years of digging for mammoth remains in the hills. In his local village in Yakutia, Russia, he was affectionately known as "the bull," a nickname his wife Nadia found rather amusing. Yuri and Nadia were poor, childless mammoth hunters who lived at the bottom of the Sakha mountain frontier. For centuries, this northern region of Russia had been an unforgiving and desolate permafrost once teeming with giant mammoths before their demise and disappearance from the face of the earth. Shifting weather patterns have recently led to a significant thaw of the permafrost, revealing what Yakutians referred to as a "treasure trove" of mammoth remains, highly prized in China. First described in the Siberian Times as the mammoth rush, mammoth hunting has recently exploded into a thriving local economy, attracting hunters from all over Russia into Yakutia, the kingdom of permafrost.