But before the time of the cave men, it was
warm in England and France, and the mammoth went to live there then.
Afterwards, it became colder; but the mammoth liked it there, so he
grew himself a coat of thick woolly hair to keep out the cold and
stayed, while the reindeer lived there only in winter and went
northward in summer.
[Illustration: Drawing of a mammoth, on a piece of mammoth tusk; found
in a cave in France]
We know that the mammoth had this heavy coat of wool because, in the
cold country of Siberia, some time since, there was a mammoth thawed
out of the ice; and also because the cave men have left a drawing that
pictures the long hair. It was about a hundred years ago, when a
fisherman on the frozen Lena River saw an iceberg of odd shape. Two
years later, he saw the tusks of a mammoth standing out from it. And
five years after that, all the ice had melted from around it, and the
big body of the mammoth lay upon the sand. There was a flowing mane on
the neck, and the body was covered with reddish wool and long black
hair. The people about the country there cut up the flesh as food for
their dogs, and the bones and tusks were sent to the museum in St.
Petersburg.
Thousands of teeth and tusks of mammoths have been brought up by the
nets of fishermen in the North Sea, that washes England. And whole
islands along that coast are made up of nothing but ice and sand and
the teeth and tusks of mammoths.
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