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of it as it hit the ground below. The ground had been covered with a dusting of fresh white snow. There was no cloud covering and the day had been cold and crisp. His olfactory senses from that time so long ago had pulled up the freshness of the air. The heaviness of the mammoths had weakened the area around the cliff, and he remembered the scent of pollution-free air being quite a bit different than the toxic stew that currently existed.
    He played the scene forward and backwards.
    Dracula had been as surprised as the mammoth when it tumbled to its death off the three hundred foot cliff onto the beach below, where several ravens had fled the area with the deep thud as it hit the coastline. He reminisced of how the other three mammoths had backed away from the area as they also felt that they weren’t secure. The animal’s blood looked particularly red against the new snow. The red blood against the white snow was mesmerising to most vampires, such a delicious contrast.
    Some parts of that ancient recall remained murky, as if trying to recall things from a drunken stupor. Had there been a cave on top of the cliff? Had he emerged from that bat-filled cavern covered in blood and bat guano? The echo inside that cavity appeared to be stuck somewhere inside his old brain. Were there peculiar sounds that had reverberated off those uneven walls? But that part of the remembrance seemed unreliable, as if he had awoken from a strange dream during that time and then observed the scene with the mammoths. He could not with certainty say for a fact that there had been a cave. It would be interesting to once again tour that place, if it did in fact exist.
    It had been one of those after-the-snow day’s that was heartwarming and refreshing. He recollected a murder of cacophonous crows in a Giant sequoia tree. The birds were making such a racket that it annoyed him briefly, but then he had chased them off, observing the sky as they vanished. One of those days where it actually felt great to be alive, and he could remember those feelings even though they had long since departed him, and had occurred thousands of years earlier. A return to that innocent time was a wish that could not be attained, a place where humans had not yet learned to destroy the air and oceans; had not yet believed that they were more important than the planet itself.
    He imagined that had the human race died out the world would now be a pristine place.
    At that period in time he had only turned about a dozen others, the first one being during an accidental feeding when his hunger had overpowered him. Dracula had to no idea of who, what, or even how he himself had been created. Anything and everything before that period was non-existent to his memory. That period with the mammoths was spotty at best but somehow very interesting.
    Dracula recalled standing on the edge of the cliff and looking down upon the death scene; his skin soaked up the rays like a battery being recharged. He visualized his breath materializing in the cool crisp air, and how he himself had almost tumbled off the cliff. Funny how some memories stuck when others didn’t, no matter how hard he tried to hold onto them.
    When that particular night came to visit it was as if he had come home after a long journey away from his comfortable surroundings and familiar things. There were incredibly bright shooting starts that evening perhaps that had also helped to cement that memory. It had been a time of awe and of fascination with the world around him. But those days were long past and those happy feelings were lost in history as so many other things.
    Dracula had also recalled running down the path that had been beaten into the side of the cliff by nature. How he had fed voraciously on the mammoth’s blood, on his hands and knees in the snow. But it was there the episode ended. He couldn’t remember a single thing before that and only certain fragments more than a millennium afterward. A little