I’d been working as a gold miner for only 30 days when I made my big discovery. The company I’d been employed by, Treadstone Gold, had begun its second season mining a cut in Eureka Creek in a remote region in Yukon, north-western Canada.
I had been operating various machines as I learned the ropes, and early in the afternoon of 21 June this year I was using an excavator with a “ripper” attachment – a big metal hook that allowed me to break through the permafrost.
The cut I was working in was surrounded by pine forests and had been dug down to about 60ft below the treeline. As I chipped at the bottom of a frozen bank of earth, I pulled a chunk away and saw something that I first took to be a skull. Miners often uncover the skeletons of animals such as ancient bison in this part of the Yukon – like other members of the crew, I’d been trained to remove these finds with care. My boss, Brian, was on site, so I called him on the two-way radio. “You’d better come down,” I said. “I think I’ve found a body.”
“Is it human?” asked Brian.
“I think it’s a buffalo or something,” I said. At that stage, we assumed we were dealing with a few bones, but when I looked closer I realised I was looking at something much more unusual. Wiping away some of the black muck coating the head, I saw it was more than a skull – it still had skin and ears, as well as what appeared to be a trunk. I grabbed the radio again.
“It’s like a tiny elephant,” I said. “Brian, I think it’s a baby mammoth.”
Brian told me to dig out the body and bring it straight up to camp. I had uncovered only the front half of the body, and wondered if there was more, so used the ripper attachment to cautiously poke around in the same area, eventually uncovering the mammoth’s back legs and rump, complete with a cool little tail. All in all, the body was about 4ft 6in long.
I loaded the remains into an excavator bucket and drove them up to the mine’s main camp, where Brian and I examined them further. He was pretty taken aback – I don’t think I’d prepared him for how well preserved the mammoth was. It looked like it could have died the week before, and you could make out pores in the skin and the patterns on the pads on its feet – there was even hair still clinging on.
Brian contacted the Yukon government palaeontologist Grant Zazula who promised to scramble a field crew as fast as he could. Meanwhile, we were advised to cover our find in wet blankets and tarpaulin. When the geological survey team arrived, it was clear how excited they were. They spent an extra couple of hours surveying the site of the discovery and found more hair from the mammoth, and preserved greenery from the time it had been entombed. We later learned the body was that of a female, probably a month old, and that she’d died during the ice age, at least 30,000 years ago.
She was packed with ice to help preserve her long enough to make the two-hour journey to Dawson City, where she could be stored in a freezer. As she left the site on the back of a truck, the most incredible thunderstorm blew up out of nowhere and rolled through the valley. Thunderbolts were striking the ground nearby, rain was coming in sideways and we were pelted with hailstones the size of golf balls. Brian had to shut down the whole operation until it passed. It was like a scene from a movie, as if we’d released something more than just the mammoth.
It took a few days for me to realise how significant the discovery was. We knew our find was a rare one, but soon learned I’d uncovered the most complete and best-preserved mummified woolly mammoth found in North America.
The land we’re mining belongs to the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation people, whose elders have called the mammoth calf Nun cho ga – in their Hän language, this means “big animal baby”. There has been a blessing ceremony at the Eureka site, and I gather she’ll remain on the traditional territory where she was found.
Meanwhile, I’m concentrating on mining for gold, though always conscious of what else I might find. Who knows – perhaps Nun cho ga’s momma is still in there.
• As told to Chris Broughton
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