Thawed

• Chelsea Young, Grade 6
• Short Story
• 2018

Alma approached the glacier, eyes wide, footsteps crunching in the snow. She took out a small hammer, careful of where to tap the ice. She shivered under her thermal jacket and soft woollen beanie, though it was more from a strange mixture of fear and shock rather than the cold. She looked back, her footsteps were quickly being covered by the falling snow. She had spent hours trudging through the ice and snow, and had lost connection with the lab when her helicopter had crashed. And then she had found it. The great wooly mammoth, frozen in time.

Tap, tap, tap, the hammer slowly broke away small chunks of ice, until the mammoths fur protruded out of the glacier. When enough had been broken away so that she could get a clear picture, she took her camera of her fluro green backpack and began clicking away. She pulled out a chunk of fur, stiff with the cold, and surprisingly resistant, and stuffed it in a plastic clip top bag. From above, Alma could hear a strange cracking sound and ran back as the whole glacier moved forward. The ice from around the mammoth fell and the creature. fell into the snow. As Alma caught her breath, she could have sworn she saw the mammoths. eyelids... move. She decided that she was just hallucinating from lack of oxygen, but soon it happened again, except this time it’s whole body gave a shudder. She told herself that it was the wind.
There was no wind down here.
Cautiously, she approached the great creature, and to her amazement it stood up, looking straight at her. Alma gave a small scream, and ran up the nearest hill.

“Alma, Alma are you there?” She woke to the sound of a scratchy voice.
“Yes, Yes, i’m here,” she answered.
“Where are you?” Somehow she knew that she couldn’t give away the mammoths location, the lab would kill it, most likely.
“At the foot of the mountain.”
“Rescue teams will be coming soon.”
“Wait, I-“ but the line was already disconnected.

Alma analysed the fur, and guessed that the mammoth had died 20,000 years ago, in the last ice age.
But it had never really died, it had just frozen over, waiting to be thawed.