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of Canada could not be seen at all, for it was smothered in ice.
    This sharp droppage in the level of the oceans meant that land areas which had previously been separated were now joined by necks of land which the subsiding waters revealed.
    Australia was attached to Antarctica by such exposed land, Ceylon to India, Cyprus to western Asia, and England to Europe. But the most spectacular join was that of Alaska to Siberia, for it united two continents, allowing animals and people to pass from one to the other. It was also the only one 15
    which acquired its own name, scientists having christened it Beringia, the lost land of the Bering Sea.
    It was, perhaps, unfortunate that the phrase land bridge was invented by geographers to designate this phenomenon of revealed land connections, because the imagery connected with the word bridge
    is misleading. The Alaskan-Siberian connection was no bridge in the ordinary sense, a narrow structure across which one could travel; it was an exposed sea floor some sixty miles east to west, but a full six hundred south to north. At its widest, it covered about the distance from Atlanta to New York (in Europe, Paris to Copenhagen).
    It was four times wider than most of Central America from ocean to ocean, and if a man stood in the middle, he would hardly think of himself on a bridge; he would be on a substantial part of a continent. But it was an inviting passageway, and with its functioning the story of populated Alaska can begin. It starts with the earliest immigrants.
    ABOUT THREE HUNDRED EIGHTY-FIVE THOUSAND YEARS
    ago, when the oceans and continents were in place as we know them today, the land bridge from Asia was open, and a huge, ponderous animal, looking much like an oversized elephant but with enormous protruding tusks, slowly made his way eastward, followed by four females and their young. He was by no means the first of his breed to lumber across the bridge, but he was among the more interesting, for his life experience symbolized the majestic adventure in which the animals of his period were engaged.
    He was a mastodon, and we shall call him by that name, for he was a progenitor of those noble massive beasts who ranged Alaska. Obviously, a million years before, he had stemmed from the same source that produced the elephant, but in Africa, in Europe and later in central Asia he had developed those characteristics which differentiated him from his cousin the elephant. His tusks were larger, his front shoulders lower, his legs more powerful, and his body was covered with hair that was more visible.
    But he behaved in much the same way, foraged for the same kinds of food, and lived to about the same age.
    When he crossed the bridge less than seventy miles from Asia to Alaska Mastodon was forty years old and could expect to survive into his late seventies, supposing that he escaped the ferocious wild cats who relished mastodon meat. His four females were much younger than he, and as was common in the animal kingdom, they could anticipate a somewhat longer life.
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    As the nine mastodons entered Alaska they faced four radically different types of terrain, varying somewhat from the land they had left behind in Asia. At the farthest north, facing the Arctic Ocean, lay a thin strip of arctic desert, a bleak and terrifying land of shifting sands on which little that was edible grew. During the dozen winter weeks when no sun appeared, it was covered by thin snow that did not pile up into high drifts but was whipped by intense winds across the barren landscape until it came to rest in low drifts behind some ridge or rock.
    Since none of his breed could survive long in this desert, Mastodon intuitively shied away from the far north, and this left him three other areas to explore that were more rewarding. Just south of the desert and blending into it in various ways stretched another relatively narrow strip, a tundra, perpetually frozen twelve to twenty-four inches below the surface but rich in