Mammoth Dawn Read Online Free PDF

coat of the nearest hybrid and pulled up the coarse guard hair to reveal silky red under-wool. “It’s so good now we should be able to leave them out all through next winter.”
    “Even in Montana’s worst?” Alex asked, trying not to sound as if he was just protecting his investment.
    “They’ll love it,” Helen said, smiling at the young woman.
    “And they’re getting interested in mating with each other now!” Cassie said, then lowered her voice as if embarrassed. “I follow them on the vidcams, and they really go at it. Just frisky play, so far. After all, they haven’t reached adolescence yet. But the males are starting to herd the females—another sure sign.”
    Helen said softly, “We can’t actually let them mate, though.”
    Cassie cried, “Why not? Just think—no more egg transfers, no sperm-sucking games to play.” Her face wrinkled in disgust, and Alex didn’t want to imagine the details of the mammophant sperm-harvesting operations.
    Helen put an arm around Cassie. “We’re careful with their genes. Select for mammoth aspects, weed out the elephant ones. Unchecked mating would scramble all that.”
    Cassie looked stricken. Plainly this had been her big announcement.
    “But you’re right,” Helen hastily added. “Just like in nature. Desire is the only sure diagnostic.” She gave her husband a quick, sultry glance. His breath caught. “These animals know, right down in their hearts—which by the way are bigger than a human head, bigger even than Alex’s!—that they are worth making more of.”
    He hugged her. “And so we’ll make more.” Some people buy diamonds for their wives … I clone mammoths.
    Cassie made quick jabs at nearby shapes, showing off as she quickly recited the names of the other hybrids. “Those two are Rachel and Napoleon—the shorter ones are always the worst—and Angel Pie.”
    Alex was amazed she could identify the individual herd members so easily. The Helyx geneticists had used five to ten elephants for each step of the process, because it took twelve years for any one of the hybrids to mature to fertility. And some interbreeding attempts spontaneously aborted, Nature’s editing.
    Cassie led them unerringly to a huffing female, her big eyes casting a calm gaze down at the small humans. Long breaths steamed in the cooling air as dew condensed on the rocks and trampled grass. “Here, Majestica is at term and already showing signs of labor. Everything’s normal, as far as I can tell. She’s been in labor for about a week already.”
    “I can’t imagine being in labor for a week,” Helen said.
    And the big female’s gestation period had already taken nearly two years. “Mammoths and elephants aren’t in much of a hurry about these things,” Alex said.
    Actually, the gestation period had varied with each hybrid generation, as the offspring approached pure mammoth stock. According to her continuing researches into the original genome, using numerous fourth-order projections with hypercomputers inside the pine-walled stable building, Helen was convinced that the mammoth gestation time in the Pleistocene would have been longer than a modern elephant’s twenty-two months. One of the earlier female hybrids, Alexandria, had carried her baby for twenty-three months.
    “We’re converging toward the mammoth pattern in the ancient wild, I bet,” Helen said.
    Alex smiled wryly. Given her anxious attention to all aspects of the projects, his wife probably would have preferred to keep the pregnant Majestica in a separate corral back at the Pleistocene Hospital, with a whole bank of real-time blood-test gear, round-the-clock technicians, and a full array of instrumentation and diagnostics surrounding her pregnant bulk.
    However, these creatures needed to bear their young naturally, in the wild, and Cassie Worth had seen more live births among ranch stock than any of Helyx’s experts. She was ready.
    But no one alive had ever seen the birth of a real