Mortimer Mastodon

By Solveig Paulson Russell

Mortimer Mastodon slept many an age

Locked tighter in ice than a bird in a cage.

‘Twas a nice frigid sleep, or so we suppose,

For a mastodon frozen from its tail to nose.

He slept and he slept as centuries went by

While men in the meantime had learned how to fly

And how to compute and make numbers of things,

Then suffered the troubles that having them brings.

Along came Jim Zipster, an Arctic explorer,

To dig into ice with an ice-splitting borer.

He set up his camp where old Mortimer lay,

With never a thought that in any small way

He was over a creature whose longtime sleep

Was proceeding beneath him, buried down deep.

So heedless but ardent Jim Zipster began

His drilling of ice holes. And his borer ran

At an ear-splitting rate and a deep-digging speed

That trembled the ice like a bison stampede.

And down through the coldness the tremors went

To where Mortimer lay snoozing in agelong content.

They tickled his trunk, they frisked his dark hair,

And vibrated the ice round his hide everywhere.

What’s this? Could it be? Mortimer Mastodon stirred

And stretched wide awake! And then there occurred

The greatest ice-splitting the North ever knew

And Mortimer Mastodon rose into view.

Up through the layers of cold he appeared,

And as he came up on a tusk he had speared

Jim Zipster’s tent and his high-speeding drill;

And Jim himself rose up onto the hill

That was Mortimer’s back. But he soon fell off

And landed head first in a cracked-ice trough.

“What in the world!” frightened Jim Zipster cried,

“To stay here on this job is sure suicide!”

He picked himself up, blowing frost from his mouth,

And not looking back, he ran fast, heading south.

Well, Mortimer Mastodon didn’t much know

What to think when awakening to ice and snow,

And to having man-things all round and about

That he very well knew he could do without.

But he lifted his trunk and sniffed the cold air

In hopes that some food was about him somewhere.

He looked on the ground, and then up at the sky,

And just at that moment a big plane flew by,

Over the Northland on its way flying east

Without even seeing the cold, ancient beast.

But Mortimer saw it and heard its wild roar—

A sound that no mastodon had heard before.

And the sound seemed to go through his aged skin,

Shaking all his innards from tail tip to chin.

The noise clattered his bones to such a bad state

That he soon decided he just couldn’t wait

For anything else. So he lowered his head

And followed his trunk to wherever it led,

Which was straight to the place where he had emerged,

When Jim Zipster’s tool had bored, drilled, and surged.

Then he crashed through the ice hole deep, deep, deep,

And Mortimer Mastodon went back to sleep.

Illustrated by Dick Brown