The very first ones I saw, out of all the thousands, were like this: a little platoon of eight or ten, coming along the edge of a field in ragged single file, lit by the peculiar flaring light of a summer rainstorm. As they skirted the muddy ditch by the roadside—arms swinging, faces wet and pale—they looked, in their old-fashioned campaign hats and capelike ponchos, like something not from the end of this century, but from its beginning, a faded photo taken at Ypres or the Somme. Then they swung out of sight, leaving me with the distinct feeling that I had entered a foreign country—one bordered not so much by place as by time.

In the America that most of us inhabit, the Boy Scouts seem an anachronism, a quaint holdover from sepia-toned decades past. And if the Boy Scout movement is one of the closest things to a folk religion that our century has produced, then the Philmont Scout Ranch is its Promised Land.

Like many sacred places, Philmont, situated in the cattle country of northeast New Mexico, straddles a boundary between two worlds. To the west, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains rear up, wild and gray: a wall. Immediately on the other side of New Mexico 21, which borders the ranch, the country flattens into vast prairies, vanishing into distant golds and greens among the scattered mesas. Philmont’s base camp is sudden and incongruous, a scatter of sprawling single-story buildings and then, just beyond them, row upon row of identical tents, boxy and olive-drab.

Every summer, nearly 20,000 Boy Scouts pass through those tents on their way out to 12-day treks through an immense wilderness. At any given time between June and August, 4,500 Scouts are rambling around the mountains and canyons. Philmont is not just a camp, then. It’s a self-contained little empire, with more acreage than certain European countries, its own bustling capital, isolated outposts, and strange provincial subcultures—all of it ruled by paunchy men in khaki uniforms, beribboned like Paraguayan generalissimos. Philmont, its managers say, purchases more freeze-dried food annually than any other single entity in America, including the Department of Defense. Each summer its campers go through 300,000 sticks of beef jerky, a quarter-million packets of Swiss Miss, and 90,000 PowerBars. Its wranglers handle more than 350 head of cattle; its buffalo herd numbers 130. Philmont receives more mail on a summer day than the nearby town of Cimarron does in a week.

The man who gave this empire to the Boy Scouts was never a Scout himself. An Iowan who came west at the turn of the century, Waite Phillips roamed the mountain states before settling down to make a fortune in the oil business. He was a great outdoorsman and, though no intellectual, a serious-minded moralist who composed epigrams for his friends. (“A life without plans results in aimless inefficiency.”) By 1941 Phillips had deeded his entire sprawling ranch to the Boy Scouts of America, along with an endowment so generous that a full Philmont program still costs just $375 per Scout.

Each morning from June through August, a stream of buses pours through the big wooden arch that says, “Welcome to Philmont,” disgorging hundreds of Scouts. Base camp, I saw as I walked around on the first day of my visit, is an anthology of American boyhood, circa 1999: midwestern troops with the cropped blond hair and perfectly pressed uniforms of an elite military unit; goateed, Teva-shod guys hanging around the snack bar playing Hacky Sack; boys with silver rings through their eyebrows.

Scouting’s traditional credos—”thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent” and all the rest of them—might seem of dubious relevance, uncool even, to today’s plugged-in adolescents. But oddly enough, in a nation with an ever-increasing number of youth soccer leagues, sports camps, and outdoor-education courses, not to mention the countless electronic distractions that kids can choose from, Philmont has a two-year waiting list. When the camp opened its phone lines last spring to take registrations for the 2001 season, all the slots—plus a 20,000-name waiting list—filled up within four hours.

And Scouting itself manages to steadily increase its ranks every year. In the 1970s the movement was in deep trouble. It stood for everything that American youth was shrugging off, and membership dropped precipitously. In response, the organization moved away from its antiquated-seeming emphasis on hiking and camping, adding new merit badges in things like American Cultures and Disabilities Awareness, and it hired Oscar de la Renta to bring the Boer War–era Scout uniform into the leisure-suit age. But it wasn’t until the 1980s that Scouting began to rebound—partly because of the country’s turn back toward conservatism, but also because of the increasing popularity of adventure sports. Boy Scouts started earning merit badges for things like whitewater rafting. And Scouting’s “high adventure bases,” of which Philmont is the largest, grew more and more popular.

Philmont’s 12-day treks are no ordinary camping trips. Participants are supposed to train intensively for at least a year before they arrive. For the first two days of their treks, the troops are accompanied by college-age guides, of both sexes, known as rangers—most of the males Eagle Scouts. But after that, for the next ten days, the boys are on their own in more than 200 square miles of wilderness. (Adult scoutmasters accompany them, but merely as “advisers,” a title that pointedly reminds them to let the Scouts take charge.)

The ranch’s vast backcountry is part Yosemite and part Disney World, with a touch of Colonial Williamsburg thrown in. Each troop follows one of 30 different itineraries that take them to campsites offering activities like rock climbing, mountain biking, and horseback riding. They visit “interpretive camps,” where staff members dress and live like characters from the Old West, teaching the Scouts to shoot Civil War–era rifles, pack burros, and pan for gold. All of this has a moral purpose, too: As a bronze plaque near the camp trading post puts it, Philmont’s goal is “to encourage the perpetuation of self reliance, courage, faith, [and] justice, on which this great country was built by the American pioneer.” It’s an experience designed to test what the participants have learned as Boy Scouts—not just the fire-building and knot-tying, but the other stuff, too, all those litanies that seem so strangely archaic: “On my honor I will do my best to do my duty…” “Do a good turn daily.” And in the process, the Scouts themselves test, each summer, whether those unlikely articles of faith still hold.

“They’re a good-lookin’ troop,” Mark Anderson, Philmont’s director of program, observed after the members of Troop 353 had spilled out of their Gray Line bus. “Wearing their Class A’s and everything.” (The traditional khaki uniforms are optional at Philmont.) With his badge-spattered uniform and cheery demeanor, Anderson himself had the air of an overgrown Eagle Scout—which is exactly what he is.

I’d been expecting The Andy Griffith Show; what I saw was more like South Park. Troop 353, just arrived from Howard, Pennsylvania, had a bit more than the standard teenage allotment of zits and orthodontia. Six faces stared back at me, more bored than curious. They were accompanied by four of the troop’s assistant scoutmasters. (There’s something about a grown man in Boy Scout uniform that looks a bit bloated in any case, but collectively, these four had to add up to about half a ton.) The troop and its scoutmasters were to be led into the backcountry by ranger Julie Nguyen, a bright-eyed and relentlessly enthusiastic Oklahoma college student.

Julie had already told me about what she and the other rangers called the “Camper Timmy” phenomenon. “Every crew’s got one,” she said. “He’s the smallest or the youngest kid, the one who everybody else picks on. You can usually see pretty soon who it’s going to be.”

It didn’t take long with Troop 353. “Let’s get a move on, guys,” one of the assistant scoutmasters was saying. “We gotta get over to the dining hall or we’re gonna miss lunch. Are we all ready to go?”

“No!”

The emphatic naysayer was fumbling with his pack. He looked about 14 or so, with a face like some uncataloged species of small forest mammal: big panicky eyes and a quivering lower lip. On one sleeve of his uniform was a badge that said “Chaplain Aide.”

“It’s Corey again,” groaned an assistant scoutmaster. “Will ya hurry it up?” He turned to me and rolled his eyes. “That’s Corey.”

At 14, Corey Mills was the youngest Scout in the group. The oldest was Jeff Davidson, a strapping blond kid of 17 whom the others looked to as a leader. In fact, they’d elected him crew chief; he’d be in charge of our expedition once we got out on the trail. Jeff had been to Philmont before, three years ago; he’d come back, he said, because he wanted to show it to the younger guys, especially to his 15-year-old brother, Greg, who was also in the group. There was another pair of brothers along as well: Sean Diehl, 15, a high-spirited boy with the flat-topped crewcut and gap-toothed leer of a comic-strip bully, and his quieter 17-year-old brother, Ryan. Last in the group was Kevin Morrison, a frowning, bespectacled 15-year-old who’d already been on an exchange program to Ireland earlier in the summer. He said he’d come to Philmont because his parents made him.

Kevin was the only one whose dad hadn’t come along as an assistant scoutmaster. Jeff and Greg’s father, Ken, had taken time off from his job (at a trucking company), as had Sean and Ryan’s father, Phil, who managed a construction firm. Corey’s father, George, was a shipping manager at a yearbook publishing firm. Corey’s uncle, Sam, was there too, on vacation from the accounting department of a chemical plant.

Julie looked like she was sizing the adults up, a bit skeptically. Philmont’s staffers are forever rescuing wheezing dads from the backcountry. And Troop 353 had chosen an itinerary classified as “rugged,” a 63-mile trek through both staffed and unstaffed campsites. The climax would be an ascent of 11,700-foot Mount Phillips—which would, George Mills told me excitedly, coincide with the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. On our final night out, we’d camp in the shadow of the Tooth of Time, an immense, naked molar of dacite porphyry above base camp whose distinctive jagged profile was printed on all the patches, caps, and T-shirts at the trading post.

It was raining when troop 353 arrived at basecamp. It had been raining for the last six days straight. Up in the mountains, where at that moment several thousand Scouts were hiking, wet clouds drifted across the treetops. But nothing could dampen the constant drilling cheerfulness of the Philmont staff.

The troop was ambushed at the dining hall by a mob of rangers—ruddy-faced college-age kids, in identical maroon polo shirts—chanting in unison the opening number in a two-week barrage of songs and cheers and mantras:

I wanna go baaaaaaack to PHILMONT!

Where the old Rayado flows,

Where the rain comes a-seepin’

In the tent where you’re a-sleepin’

And the waters say hello!

Waiting in line to eat, Troop 353 reacted with silent bewilderment, looking not at all eager to confront any rain a-seepin’ on them anytime soon. They only livened up when we finally got our food.

“This is disgusting,” Corey said, staring down at the compartmentalized plastic tray. The glistening meat filling of a sloppy joe was oozing over its barrier into the banana custard.

Greg rolled his eyes and shrugged. Sean pointed to Corey and explained for my benefit, “He lives in Julian, Pennsylvania.”

“Shut up!” said Corey. “Howard’s not that much bigger.”

“Naw, we’ve got close to 1,000 people. What’ve you guys got, a couple hundred?”

To Corey’s visible relief, they switched topics, and Sean began to tell Greg about tequila. “So it’s got a worm in it you eat that absorbs a lot more alcohol.”

“Yeah, but it’s a gummy worm, right?”

“Naw, a real worm.”

Greg just shook his head. “The only thing I like is wine coolers.”

That night was the much-touted “opening campfire” for all the Scouts who’d arrived that day, held out in a little spotlit amphitheater surrounded by prairie. The fire part turned out to be purely theoretical, since the rangers didn’t really manage to get the wood lit, despite copious amounts of kerosene. But once it was smoldering, the Philmont staff came out costumed as figures from local history—a gunfighter, a conquistador—and acted out well-rehearsed skits as the Scouts looked on as passively as if they were in front of the television.

Then a lone staffer addressed the dozen or so gathered troops. “Before we close this opening campfire,” he recited, “we’d like to take an opportunity to enjoy one of those things that makes Philmont what it is: the sky. Its vast expanses are inspirational to us all. We invite you to take a moment to enjoy the evening sky.”

For the first time, the klieg lights that spotlit the “campfire” dimmed, and for half a minute we had a view of the stars, of the darkened prairie, of the shadowy line of cottonwoods that ran off into the distance along a hidden stream. Then the tape-recorded music swelled to a climax, the lights came up, and the Scouts filed dutifully out toward their tents.

Meanwhile, across base camp, returning Scouts had gathered for a farewell campfire. We crossed paths with a group from Big Spring, Texas, and I asked them what was memorable about their trek.

“The smells,” said one, a Scout named Jerred who, with his blond brush of hair, could’ve stepped off the cover of Boys’ Life.

Smells?

“Yeah, till I showered today, man—I could smell myself from five miles away.”

“And some of those meals they give you—that makes it pretty bad, too,” said another. “This other troop we hiked with, from Colorado, they had a farting competition, with points. It was a point for every fart, two points if somebody else mentioned it, ten points if you cleared the area. The scoutmaster’s son won it. He had about 300 points!”

The rain had stopped by the time we shouldered our packs and made for the trailhead the next morning. Still, there were thick scarves of cloud below the Tooth of Time. We’d reached a swollen stream that Julie had made us walk through, ignoring an easy crossing a few yards upstream: “Hey, guys, that’s why you have boots!” she merrily told us.

A few minutes later, Ken Davidson, the heft-iest of the adults, stopped halfway up a modest incline. Sweat trickled across his bald dome and dripped off the tip of his nose. “Oh, man, that’s enough for me,” he gasped. “That’s about as much as I can stand.”

Then the mosquitoes started biting. Corey looked mournfully down at his left arm. “I got bit five times just on this one,” he said. He’d put on his hat, broad-brimmed, with a chin string; jammed down to just above his eyes, it made him look even more lemurlike. I helped him get his water bottle out of the side pocket of his pack, and he took a swig.

Corey grimaced. “Ewwwww!”

“You don’t like it?” I asked.

“Disgusting!”

“You don’t like water?”

“He doesn’t like very much,” explained Greg.

“He likes Mountain Dew,” Sean said.

“No, I don’t like that anymore,” said Corey. “I don’t really like eating.”

By the time we reached our campsite, though, even trail food looked good. Dinner was a glutinous mass of salty noodles speckled with wizened little cubes of chicken—but each boy finished his portion, even Corey. Part of the Philmont ethos is an almost obsessive dedication to cleanliness, and so before we washed the dishes, Julie made us lick every last morsel out of our bowls, till they glistened with the faintest coating of yellow slime. Jeff manfully picked up the cooking pot, stuck his head in it, and licked that out too, till he emerged a few minutes later, red-faced and smiling gamely. Then he noticed some stew still adhering to the inside of my bowl, and so, barely pausing for breath, he went to work on that as well. I was starting to see why the rest of the troop thought he was leadership material.

The rules didn’t stop with cleanliness. There were the Five W’s of choosing a tent site. The Four C’s of successful group bonding. The art of Making a Collective Decision. There would be no whittling. No washing in streams. No deodorant. Campfires—seemingly Scouting’s raison d’ĂŞtre—were discouraged for safety reasons, although once out of sight of the rangers, nobody paid much attention.

There are some good reasons for such rules. One night back in the 1980s, two Scouts who had sprayed deodorant all over each other when they were horsing around were dragged from their tent and mauled by a black bear. And just a few years ago, a Scout won a large out-of-court settlement from Philmont after scalding himself by tipping over a cooking pot into his lap. Scouting officials have also gone all-out to rid the organization of its reputation as a magnet for pedophiles. At base camp, separate shower houses are marked “Adult Males” and “Male Youth.” And the Boy Scouts’ “two-deep rule” decrees that at least two adult leaders must be present whenever scoutmasters meet with their charges.

The disciplined approach clearly had its benefits. Looking around our campsite, it was hard to believe that thousands of teenagers tramped through here every summer. There was no graffiti carved on the trunks of the fir trees, no litter in the grass. In the fringes of the woods beyond our tents, a big mule deer buck moved, browsing, through the twilight.

But here we were around a fire circle with no fire in it, in a wilderness where wildness was kept at bay.

Since its beginning, Scouting has had something of a divided soul. Nothing illustrates that more clearly than the vastly different personalities of the two equally strange men who inspired it.

The worldwide movement started in England under the last great stiff-upper-lip hero of the Victorian age: Lt. General Sir Robert Baden-Powell. Baden-Powell won fame as a commander in the Boer War in 1900, when he’d held the town of Mafeking for seven months under siege by a much larger enemy force, all the while sending out incomparably cool messages to reassure Queen and citizenry: “All well. Four hours’ bombardment. One dog killed.” After the war he became concerned by what he perceived as the slackness and softness of modern British boys, whom he described as “pale, narrow-chested, hunched-up…smoking endless cigarettes.”

A famous photograph of Baden-Powell at Mafeking shows an almost painfully dapper little man with waxed mustache-ends, a swagger-stick, and laced boots that seem to extend halfway to his shoulders. It is pretty much a caricature of a repressive personality, and Baden-Powell, in fact, was committed to the repression of sexual desires of almost every sort, in everyone: His original manuscript of the Boy Scout handbook included an extensive chapter warning Scouts against the terrible hazards of “self-abuse.” By dressing up boys like junior officers in Her Majesty’s African Rifles and haranguing them endlessly about character-building, Baden-Powell set the tone for a particular approach to Scouting that thrives to this day.

His American counterpart, Ernest Thompson Seton, was big, loose-limbed, and wild-eyed, with an unruly mop of black hair. A writer and illustrator of wilderness books, he rarely washed or shaved, and was known to emit unexpected wolf howls or moose mating calls in public. He espoused utopian socialism, feminism, and the restitution of the Great Plains to the Indians. Not surprisingly, his ideas on the proper upbringing of boys differed somewhat from Baden-Powell’s. In 1902 he founded a group called the Woodcraft Indians, whose young members frolicked in feathered warbonnets and camped out in Sioux tepees. The idea, he said, was to release boys’ “animal energy” and teach them to “think Indian.”

Seton met Baden-Powell in 1906 and, with typical impulsive enthusiasm, lent his support to Baden-Powell’s Boy Scout movement, which the Englishman would soon establish in America. Seton was given the title of Chief Scout and invited to write the first edition of the famous Handbook for Boys. Soon he came to regret his decision. “My aim was to make a man,” he later wrote, “Baden-Powell’s to make a soldier.” The Scouts’ uniforms, he believed, imposed conformity; the endless codes turned the boys into “a lot of little prigs.” But the Boy Scouts of America flourished, while the Woodcraft Indians withered away. Though today the organization honors Seton as one of its founding fathers—Philmont’s library is named after him—it drummed him out publicly during World War I, a response to his allegedly pacifist and anarchist views.

If Philmont’s base camp, with its uniforms and nightly chapel services, represents the Baden-Powell side of Scouting, in its backcountry the spirit of Seton lives on. There are no merit badges to earn out on the trail, no oaths to recite. Once the ranger assigned to a crew leaves, as Julie did on our third day, there’s no outsider to nag them about following rules. And the trekking Scouts leave their Class A uniforms behind. Instead, most of them wear T-shirts that each troop has designed specially for its trip to Philmont. Troop 353’s featured a migraine-inducing tie-dye pattern of hot fuchsia and piña-colada blue. Printed on top of this was the outline of what I first interpreted as a half-squashed chipmunk but turned out to be the Tooth of Time.

“Whoa…those shirts!” said the staffer who came out to greet us at Crater Lake, the first interpretive camp of our itinerary. He’d woken up not long before and looked unprepared for so much tie-dye so early in the day.

Troop 353 seemed equally nonplussed as they checked out his old-fashioned striped shirt, wool pants held up with suspenders, and dusty bowler hat. “Welcome to the home of the Continental Tie and Lumber Company!” he said. “We chop wood with all kindsa axes here: axes, broadaxes, and Conan the Barbarian axes. We climb spar poles, and if you don’t know what those are, you’ll find out. We’re gonna saw wood with a crosscut saw, and if you feel like tossing the caber, we’ll do some caber-tossing.”

Philmont’s backcountry staffers, especially at the interpretive camps, are often as eccentric—and as unwashed—as Seton himself was. Living by the light of kerosene lanterns, sleeping rolled up in buffalo hides inside log cabins, they defy the Eagle Scout stereotype. This is where you find the ski bums, the potheads, the vegans. Like the original pioneers, these staffers are fiercely clannish and independent-minded, scornful of the soft bureaucrats back in the decadent imperial capital of base camp. Theirs are the jobs at Philmont that nearly everyone wants.

Troop 353 was too tired for ax-swinging and log-sawing. Once they’d finished lunch and pitched their tents, most of them slept until midafternoon. They did make it down to climb the spar poles, though, pulling themselves up lumberjack-style. Even Corey ended up making it to the top. (“I can see Julian from here!” he shouted.) After dinner we had a campfire with a couple of other Scout crews: a real one this time, where the Crater Lake staffers strummed guitars and sang songs as the last glow of sunset faded.

The kids stumbled back to their tents, but the four Crater Lake lumbermen stayed on. They huddled around the campfire with some rowdy girls from one of Philmont’s trail-building crews, belting out more music: some Dead, some Johnny Cash, Indigo Girls, John Prine.

I asked one of them—a guy named Rob who wore a vest and watch fob out of an old tintype—why the Scouts themselves never sang. “Honestly, it’s kind of hard when they don’t seem to know any songs,” he sighed. “The kids who come through here now—I know it’s a stereotype, but a lot of them really do just seem to have that Gameboy-generation thing. It’s hard to get them roused up about anything some of the time. I remember a few years ago, when I started coming here, when the crews would come into a camp, they’d each have their own cheer to let you know they’d arrived, and they’d all have different songs they’d sing on the trail. Now it seems like a lot of them just want to get it over with and get home.”

The tough hiking began as we left Crater Lake. We slogged our way seven miles up a narrow canyon, soaking our boots crossing and recrossing a raging creek. A warm monsoon rain descended, and Sean started singing, “Phil-mont sucks… I hate Phil-mont…”

The next day, a hailstorm broke over our heads, followed by freezing rain. Corey wouldn’t get his raingear out of his pack, so he ended up drenched and shivering. Kevin slipped and twisted his ankle, and the other Scouts whispered that he’d tried to come down on it harder so that he could get sent down to base camp. Then, as the rain poured down, the boys realized they were lost. “This sucks,” said Phil, whose thick red hair was matted down with water. “I’ll tell you one thing, I’m never coming back here as long as I live.”

Somehow, though, the team was coming together. Jeff had been pretty quiet for the first several days, hiking out in front with a small American flag—the camp’s traditional badge of leadership—pinned to his pack. But even lost in the middle of a downpour, the Scouts deferred to him. He studied the map as they gathered quietly around, ignoring Phil’s and Ken’s loud demands to keep moving. Jeff had told me he wanted to study law enforcement when he graduated high school next year, and he already seemed like a solid cop.

In fact, most of the kids seemed solid—more like products of the 1950s than the 1990s. Their lives back home revolved around hunting, soccer, and Scout meetings, which the troop held every Tuesday night in the basement of Howard’s Methodist Church. They almost never cursed. Like typical teenagers, they were endlessly charmed and disgusted by any substance issuing from their own or any other creatures’ bodies—cow pies, no matter how many times we passed them crossing the pastures, rarely failed to draw comment—but they barely talked about sex. And they scarcely argued with their fathers, even during their biggest challenge: the assault on Mount Phillips.

As we climbed its flanks, the adults kept dropping behind. We’d hike for ten minutes and then Jeff would call a halt until Ken, Sam, George, and Phil caught up to us, panting and red-faced. Toward the end, Greg picked up his father’s pack and hiked with it in his arms. When we came up the final stretch, a steep and rocky uphill with no switchbacks, Corey was in the lead. He’d stop every few minutes, look back, and shout, “This is nuthin’! I’m not even tired!”

At last we emerged onto the summit, a Martian sweep of reddish-pink gneiss. It was late afternoon, and clouds were coming out of the west in slow procession like alien battle cruisers. The boys looked out over the rows of distant peaks.

“I’m on top of the world!” yelled Corey, scrambling up onto a cairn.

“No, you’re not,” responded Kevin and Phil, in near-perfect unison.

That night we celebrated with a campfire—our own now, fed with dry branches of firs and junipers—and stretched out on our backs to watch for meteors. All of us except two, that is. Jeff had gone off with Corey after dinner and hadn’t come back yet. Everyone wondered what they were talking about.

Still, it took a few minutes after Jeff returned, alone, before anyone asked him. “I just sort of thought I should talk to him about the last time I was here,” he explained. “I was the youngest kid on the crew then, and I remember what it was like. I remember how cool I thought it was when the crew leader would talk to me.”

After the conquest of Phillips, the rest of the hiking seemed almost easy. The last morning was a Sunday. The troop camped below the Tooth of Time, and one by one the boys straggled from their tents for an early-morning religious service. But as the Scouts gathered on the cliffside, their crew leader was missing. Jeff had left his tent before sunrise—against Philmont regulations—and gone alone up the Tooth.

So the rest of Troop 353 sat down together along the edge of the cliff. Far below, the brightening plains raced out toward the horizon, glinting here and there with sunstruck water. Corey, as chaplain’s aide, led the service out of little paperbound prayer books they’d issued us back at base camp (Eagles Soaring High: Trail Worship for Christians, Muslims, and Jews). When it was over, Greg and I walked back to the tents a little bit ahead of the others. “Look to your left,” he whispered. There was a doe grazing just off the path. She stood for a minute, oblivious to us, until the troop caught up and she cantered off into the woods. Sean and Ryan raised their arms at the shoulder and started pumping out imaginary rounds in her direction.

Then Jeff showed up. “Hey,” Ryan said to him, “you missed the church service.”

“I had my own church service up there,” he replied.

God and nature, boys at one with the woods—this is the Philmont that makes its leaders swell with pride. Earlier in the week I’d spent a few days away from the trek and gotten a lift down to base camp with no less a personage than Philmont’s general manager, Bill Spice, who took me bouncing down the mountain in a gigantic Chevy Suburban painted Boy Scout khaki. Spice himself was as khaki, and as oversize, as his vehicle.

We stopped off at an old hunting lodge built by Waite Phillips and now used to house well-connected guests. Its occupant that week was Congressman Pete Sessions, a Republican from Texas. “Pete and his family are good friends of Scouting,” Spice told me. “His dad was actually a scoutmaster while he was director of the FBI under Bush and brought his troop on a trek here one summer. I think that was the only time you had assistant scoutmasters out on the trail with Uzis.” The younger Sessions, blue-eyed and fair-haired, served coffee and made small talk on the porch of his cabin (“New Mexico is truly the Land of Enchantment…”). Back in the truck, as Spice lit up a cigar, he told me proudly that another congressman would be using the cabin the following week.

In fact, the Boy Scouts of America boasts that more than half of all members of Congress—plus most astronauts and airline pilots—were once Scouts. The ranks of former Eagle Scouts alone include an assortment of celebrity manhood ranging from Neil Armstrong to Gerald Ford to Ross Perot to John Tesh. And these days, Scouting needs all the friends it can get. While Troop 353 was out on the trail, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled in favor of James Dale, a former Eagle Scout who’d been expelled as an assistant scoutmaster after officials discovered he was gay. Lawyers for the Boy Scouts of America were vowing to fight the decision in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Homosexuality is just one of the issues that has lately seemed to push the Boy Scouts, an ostensibly apolitical group, further into the camp of cultural conservatism. Within Scouting, people refer to its principal battles as “the three G’s”: gays, girls, and godlessness. The organization, which is not affiliated with the Girl Scouts, has been much slower than European scouting groups in allowing female participation. And along with gays, Scouts who say they don’t believe in God are barred from membership. The organization’s national leaders have recently taken a sharp turn toward the Baden-Powell tradition, proclaiming that Scouting isn’t just about camping and hiking—it’s about a particular brand of morality. The Boy Scout Handbook now includes a section recommending that Scouts abstain from sex before marriage.

This stems partly from the Boy Scouts’ little-publicized institutional connections to conservative religious groups. Local troops are sponsored by affiliated organizations, often churches. In fact, nearly a quarter of all the scouting troops in America are under the aegis of the Mormon church. But even among parents who are not especially religious, Scouting is seen as a shelter from a hostile culture. And when I asked Bill Spice one afternoon what it was that still drew so many boys to Philmont, he had an immediate answer: “family values.” We were sitting in his office, underneath a framed Norman Rockwell poster. “This is the place where they see it all coming together, out on the trail: moral and ethical decision-making, getting along with others, self-respect. And I really think you can’t help but believe there’s a Supreme Being after you’ve come out here and seen the New Mexico sky.

“When I hear politicians saying, ‘Let’s get back to family values,’ I just say, the Boy Scouts never left them.”

True, Spice said, there were occasional unpleasant decisions to be made. “There was a young man who worked here for several years—in a real leadership position on the ranch, actually. Great young guy. Well, he wrote to me one winter and said he’d decided he couldn’t come back because it would violate the BSA policy on homosexuals. To tell the truth, I was sorry to see him go, because he’s a good kid. But I believe we have a mandate from the clients who send their kids out here that they’re going to be safe, out of harm’s way, and not subjected to alternative lifestyles.”

That was the official line. But I thought back to my first night in base camp, when I’d gone out to watch the meteor shower with Frank, a young staffer from the Midwest. Also joining us was Irma, a college-age Scout from Europe who was working at Philmont on a summer exchange program. (Frank and Irma are not their real names.) We drove in Frank’s car out the main gate and down to a place where Route 21 swings in a high arcing loop eastward.

Here, at the top of the rise, Frank pointed out the constellations: Cassiopeia, Cygnus, Scorpius. Eventually he pulled a case of Coors out of the trunk, and then a bottle of bourbon. This spot was a popular one for Philmont staff to come and drink, it turned out, since it was just off ranch property and hence exempt from the rules. Before long a few other cars had pulled up. In the backseat of one, a staffer passed around a bong. Meanwhile, Frank and Irma had started making out against the hood of Frank’s car.

Another car pulled up, and two more guys from base camp jumped out. The driver, a pale, lanky kid of 18 or 19, sat inside, smoking a cigarette. He wore one of the maroon Philmont staff polo shirts. He was very drunk.

“C’mon over here,” he beckoned to me. He had a throaty southern accent. “Get closer. I wanna see your dick.”

I stared at him, not sure I’d really heard him right: “What?”

“Yeah, c’mon, whip it out for me. I know you got a big one. Yer one of them tall, lean boys. Bet yer hung like a pony.”

Then he called out to the two friends he’d arrived with. “Hey, I want somebody’s dick in my face. Somebody whip it out and slap me with it.”

“Yeah,” said one of the guys, “let’s all take our dicks out.”

“Naw, let’s get naked and run sprints again this time,” his buddy said.

“So you guys are Boy Scouts, huh?” I joked.

“Yeah, Eagle Scouts. All three of us were.”

“And hey, don’ worry, we ain’t fuckin’ fairies or nothin’. We got girlfriends at college. We’re just messin’ around, y’know?”

“Hey c’mon, let’s get naked. Let’s get naked.”

Soon their car and Frank’s were the only two left on the hilltop. Frank detached himself from Irma and walked over. He was now drunk, too.

“Listen, man,” he told me, “you’re gonna have to ride back with these guys.” He looked down. “I mean, sometimes you sort of just find a kindred soul and, well, shit, the flesh is weak. So, uh, anyway, I think we’re staying up here tonight.”

A few minutes later I was in the southern guys’ old sedan, tearing down the road toward camp. They’d forgotten about getting naked, at least for the moment, but the pale, lanky kid was hanging out the window, hurling empty bottles of Bud Light against the road signs and whooping and hollering into the night.

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HOW DO YOU DESCRIBE IT—the smell of mammoth?

At first there’s nothing. You’re standing beside a beer cooler on the bank of a frozen Siberian river, and your nose is numb with cold. The picnic-size plastic cooler is full, not of beer, but of fur, thick brown tangles of it, like scraped-up remnants of week-old roadkill, clumped and clotted with gray mud. You reach in and grab a handful in your ski glove, hold it to your face, suck your breath in deep: the pure sting of Arctic air. Then come the first faint traces of the animal—warm, only slightly rank, ammoniacal, like a wet dog drying in the sun.

You kneel down over the cooler and lower your head inside, right above the shaggy mess of hair, which you see now isn’t just brown but also threaded with black, with red, with strands bleached gold by time. The next whiff knocks you back like a bong hit. It’s the hot reek of a walking, breathing, pissing, shitting beast, as real and as shocking as your first glimpse of the elephants on that preschool trip to the zoo—and these dead 23,000 years. And you think, How many living human beings have ever smelled this? And how many generations of the vanished dead?

That was also, for me, the moment I felt like I first understood Bernard Buigues.

WE’D MET NEARLY a year before and as far away from the tundra as I can imagine, in a bistro in Paris on New Year’s Eve day. I’d heard about him that fall, as many people had, when the story broke worldwide that the frozen, apparently had been unearthed by a team of French explorers in Siberia, that the carcass (under the bright glare of the Discovery Channel’s cameras) had been flown to a laboratory in an underground ice cave, and—here’s the part that really drove them wild, the TV reporters and scientific naysayers and millennial evangelists—that its discoverers hoped to clone it. I might as well admit: That’s what hooked me, too.

During a visit to Paris, I’d phoned Buigues, the head of the expedition, and he’d invited me to lunch at a corner restaurant not far from the Place de la Bastille, with worn tile floors and plate-glass windows and white paper tablecloths. Buigues is compact, bald, and supremely self-possessed, with the sort of easy charm that, when you first meet him, makes you intensely conscious of not being French. And—despite the Frankensteinish specters conjured up by such phrases as “underground Siberian cloning laboratory”—he isn’t a scientist at all, let alone a mad one. After spending half his life as a bohemian jack-of-all-trades, he took an improbable detour into polar exploration, becoming a kind of Arctic impresario, a Gore-Tex version of Jules Verne’s Passepartout.

Since 1992, Buigues told me, he’d been leading and organizing North Pole expeditions for scientists, film crews, and well-heeled tourists, using as his staging point an old Soviet outpost called Khatanga. (His permanent home is still just outside Paris with his wife, Sylvie, the general director of French clothing retailer Agnès B.’s European stores.) Buigues got to Siberia at just the right moment. With scientists, government delegations, and adventure tourists lining up to visit a region that had been closed off for nearly a century, his company—Cercles Polaires ExpĂ©ditions, or Cerpolex—boomed. That was how Buigues heard about the mammoth, which had been discovered in the summer of 1997 by Dolgan nomads who spotted its tusks and furry hide poking out of the thawing permafrost. Buigues went out to the site one night at dusk and decided to excavate the enormous animal himself.

Since then the French explorer’s mammoth-hunt has been fueled by passion, not profits. Buigues says he spent more than $1.2 million of his Cerpolex earnings before the Discovery Channel—which knew a good thing when it saw one and had been quick to sign Buigues on an exclusive contract—stepped in last year to pick up the tab. (The cable network won’t divulge how many millions it’s spent since then.) Driven by a single-minded desire to resurrect the defunct beast he’d laid claim to, Buigues had recruited an international team of scientists and spent weeks in the fall of 1999 at the site, chipping away with pickaxes at the granite-hard permafrost. Buigues managed to carve out a 23-ton block containing the mammoth and fly it by helicopter back to Khatanga, and—voilĂ !—the thawing was almost ready to begin.

The entire operation was filmed by the Discovery Channel, and the resulting two-hour special, which aired three months after our Y2K luncheon, set a new record as the most-watched program in the network’s history. Its money shot was an unforgettable sequence of the block of permafrost rising up into the sunset-lit Siberian sky and soaring off toward Khatanga with two huge tusks protruding from one side. (Buigues, with his unflagging showman’s instinct, had fastened them there.)

In Paris, as we drained the bottle of burgundy that Buigues had ordered with our meal, he covered the paper tablecloth with sketches: a diagram of how they’d lifted the mammoth, a map of northern Siberia. “An incredible place,” he said. “It is a place that obliges one to think about time, about the measure of time. In Khatanga, the Russian people live as if it were 30, 40 years ago—still Soviet times. For the nomads living in the tundra, dressed in reindeer skins, time stopped 500 years ago. And then there is this mammoth, this frozen animal that brings you back thousands and thousands of years. You have to realize, it isn’t a fossil. It’s got hair and skin and meat. We found plants trapped under the body that were still green. It could have died a few days ago.”

şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř the restaurant, in the fading winter light, Parisians hurried past toward New Year’s Eve celebrations, carrying flowers and champagne. Buigues didn’t seem to notice, or to care. He was, I suspected, already far away from the rest of us, somewhere up ahead or perhaps behind, in a millennium of his own making.

THE NEXT TIME I LUNCHED with Bernard Buigues it was somewhat different: a couple of protein bars forced down amid the stink of kerosene aboard an old, soot-blackened Soviet-vintage Mi-8 helicopter. We were going mammoth-hunting.

We’d set out that morning from Khatanga, a town that I’d found bizarrely transformed by the presence of Buigues and his frozen beast. On a typical evening at its only restaurant and bar (called Restaurant Bar) you’d find a clientele that included TV producers from southern California, Dolgan tribesmen, suave Frenchmen drinking cognac toasts, and Russian mafiosi in black leather blazers, dancing stiffly with the mastodontic local prostitutes. (The bartender, meanwhile, would be watching television: a dubbed episode of Friends.)

Our group aboard the helicopter was almost as motley. Discovery Channel tech guys fussed with their expensive equipment like nannies with restless infants, while Buigues and another of the Frenchmen lolled back atop the reserve fuel tank, steeped in kerosene fumes, unconcernedly smoking Gitanes.

Below us in all directions stretched a howling desert of white, stubbled here and there with a few stunted larches leaning at crazy angles against the wind-borne snow. These miserable trees make up the most northerly forest in the world—and the spur of land they cling to, the Taimyr Peninsula, is the northernmost continental land on earth, riding high atop the hunched back of Mother Russia. It’s a place farther east than Bangkok, farther north than Barrow, Alaska, and by the time I arrived, in mid-October, deep winter had set in for more than a month. Peering through the helicopter’s porthole, I thought of Ice-Nine, the apocalyptic Cold War substance in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle, one single drop of which is sufficient to freeze solid all the water on earth, forever.

But just as the Taimyr wilderness turns solid every September, in a single sudden shock, so too it thaws every June, abruptly, in a matter of just a few days. The barren ice fields become mosquito-ridden marshes, and the melting snow pours toward the Arctic Sea in streams and rivers that overflow their banks, cutting new channels through the hard substrata of frozen mud. This is when the mammoths come out. Not just mammoths, either, but other bizarre, antediluvian monsters: woolly rhinoceroses, giant elk, Pleistocene bison, all of which roamed these steppes until after the last Ice Age, 10,000 years ago—when all these shaggy beasts suddenly, mysteriously, died off.

The floods were what brought Buigues’s first mammoth to light. A Dolgan herdsman named Ganady Jarkov stumbled upon it near a riverbank as he drove his herd of reindeer toward fresh grazing. He removed the tusks, which he later bartered to Buigues for some coffee, tea, and gasoline.

Thanks to the infusion of cash from the Discovery Channel, Buigues relaunched his expedition on an even grander scale last summer. Not only did he prepare to defrost the Jarkov mammoth, he also sent scores of local operatives out looking for bones, tusks, and other remains. Buigues recruited various clans of Dolgan tribesmen (known as “brigades”), promising to reward them for any material brought back from their summer wanderings.

A few days before my arrival, word had come in through the grapevine to Buigues’s headquarters in Khatanga that the last of the Dolgan brigades was on its way back across the tundra, returning with a hefty load of bones and tusks. So we had gone out by helicopter to search for them, with nothing but the vaguest sense of possible rendezvous sites. The Taimyr Peninsula is almost the size of California, with an average of just one inhabitant every 13 square miles. It’s easy to lose yourself there.

BUIGUES HAD TOLD me that in Siberia he often felt like an 18th-century explorer, and now, on the helicopter, it was easy to see why, as our polyglot crew sailed over seas of snow aboard a smelly, cramped, fragile-seeming craft, scanning the horizon. The scrubby forest had given way to open tundra, illegible to my unaccustomed eyes. Were we flying a hundred feet above the ground, or a thousand? The landscape fractured into patterns of abstraction, vast matrices of polyhedrons and faceted surfaces of lakes, flecked with gray and white like hewn granite. Cresting a hill, we startled a herd of gray smudges that bolted away en masse across the snow. “Reindeer!” Buigues shouted above the engine’s din. Suddenly, Siberia seemed anything but barren: an icy Serengeti.

The tribesmen couldn’t be far off. Dolgans live on reindeer. They hunt reindeer, herd reindeer, eat reindeer meat, drink reindeer milk, ride on reindeer’s backs, drive reindeer-drawn sleighs, wear clothes and shoes made of reindeer skins. When a Dolgan man has to urinate, he goes out into the herd and pisses into the animals’ mouths, so that the reindeer will have a source of salt. Even the Dolgans’ houses are made of reindeer hides, stretched on wooden frameworks and mounted on sled runners—so that they can be pulled across the tundra, by reindeer. (On the Taimyr, I lived on reindeer, too, since this is what every meal at Restaurant Bar seemed to consist of. Over the course of a week, I sampled chopped reindeer, reindeer cutlets, reindeer entrecĂ´te, reindeer with egg, reindeer without egg, reindeer sausage, and reindeer Stroganoff—all of it similarly gray and stringy.)

Twenty millennia ago, a helicopter flying across the Taimyr would have startled herds of mammoths. Prehistoric elephants—not just the woolly mammoths of Siberia, but others, such as American mastodons—were a common sight across the northern half of the globe. Most scientists think that, like their modern cousins, they must have been highly intelligent animals, gentle unless provoked. You wouldn’t have wanted to provoke a woolly mammoth without good reason—they stood up to 11 feet at the shoulder, with tusks as long as 13 feet. Prehistoric people hunted them for their meat and ivory, but they also seem to have observed them as carefully as human beings have ever observed an animal: From Siberia to Utah, they chipped their images onto cliff faces, scratched them onto flat rocks, and painted them on cave walls. Mammoths, one might guess, were in some ways the reindeer of Stone Age man.

One of the Dolgan reindeer-pulled mobile homes sat atop a low swell ahead of us, behind a feeble windbreak of dead branches. As our helicopter touched down, sending up a spray of snow, a tiny, Asiatic-looking man, hooded in white reindeer fur, came staggering out, a pair of huskies at his heels. Buigues jumped out, a Discovery Channel cameraman close at hand. He made a few inquiries in Russian, and then we were off again in search of the missing brigade. The herdsman, left behind in his barely post-Pleistocene surroundings, gave hardly an upward glance. Already, the Dolgans are used to the paleontologist- and cameraman-bearing helicopters that occasionally drop from the sky. As Buigues told me proudly, “They very quickly learned to perform for the cameras, to do as many takes as the producers wanted.” If you asked some of these Dolgans how they earn a living, they might honestly be able to say reindeer herding, ice fishing, and the Discovery Channel.

We never did find the lost brigade. We did, however, come across some mammoth remains, of a sort, that afternoon. We had stopped in the village of Novorybnoye, the Taimyr’s largest Dolgan settlement. As soon as we landed, we were surrounded by a crowd of people of all ages, dressed in an assortment of cold-weather gear: fur parkas, beaded-leather moccasin boots, cast-off Russian army pants, a hat with the Adidas logo. The ever-present huskies marked their territory on the helicopter’s landing gear.

An old woman pushed her way toward me through the crowd, muttering something to our interpreter: “She have something she want to sell you.” Reaching deep into some inner recess of her oversize down parka, she produced a knotted thong of greasy reindeer leather, on which were strung four chunky pieces of old ivory—mammoth ivory. The yellowing bars and rings were pierced with well-worn holes, and deeply notched in strange crosshatching patterns. They were bridle fittings, used by the Dolgans to adorn—what else?—their reindeer.

While carcasses like the Jarkov mammoth are very rare, the bones and tusks of long-dead mammoths are so plentiful on the Siberian tundra that the natives carve them into buttons, knife handles, and utensils of every sort. For centuries, they’ve sold the ivory to traders who’ve shipped it to far corners of the world. Every summer the ivory merchants come out to Siberia from Moscow and St. Petersburg, and each year Russia legally exports about five or six tons of mammoth ivory, which American craft suppliers sell for $20 to $150 a pound, depending on quality.

As for the Dolgans, whose world contains no living creature remotely resembling a mammoth, their traditional belief is that the bones belong to a species of giant burrowing mole that dies instantly on contact with the air or sunlight. Most of them now accept the official paleontological explanations. But even so, the mammoth remains for them a mysterious being, gifted with terrifying powers. When the Dolgans remove a skeleton’s tusks, they sacrifice a dog or a white reindeer, lest the animal’s vengeful spirit return from deep underground, seeking revenge.

THE MAMMOTH THAT rose from the dead in 1999, the reeking Pleistocene carcass that made television history, now rests in an ice-sheathed tunnel bored into the bank of the frozen Khatanga River. The block that Buigues’s team carved from the tundra was moved into the tunnel, where the temperature hovers steadily below zero, so that it may be slowly defrosted and studied without any of its tissues deteriorating—and in order to preserve its DNA.

Khatanga’s 5,000 inhabitants seem, as Buigues had hinted, stranded somewhere deep in the grim and endless Brezhnev years. I’d arrived there on an Antonov turboprop from Moscow in the middle of the night, along with a group of scientists and Discovery Channel people. When the plane taxied to a stop, the cabin door swung open, and in a blast of frigid air a Russian soldier in a heavy overcoat came stomping in. As he lifted his hand to salute us, I saw that the shiny red badge on his cap still bore the gold hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union. Up here, apparently, they hadn’t bothered to change. The town’s main streets are lined with ramshackle wooden buildings, spewing smokestacks, and sad low-rise apartments, and the shops along Sovietskaya Street have names like Store Number 6—where a middle-aged lady stands guard over a locked vitrine containing three plastic combs, a rubber hairbrush, and a single box of Q-Tips.

Buigues’s team hadn’t built the so-called ice cave. It was already there. Last year’s Discovery Channel special made much of the fact that it had been “constructed for unknown reasons during the Stalin era.” But when I asked the Taimyr’s regional governor, Nikolai Alexandrovich Fokhin, about this, he dismissed any hints of buried missile silos or secret torture chambers. “We built the cave about 15 years ago,” he said, “to store frozen fish and reindeer meat.” And in fact, when the television crews returned last fall, they found thousands of fish heaped up around the mammoth, stockpiled by locals less concerned with paleontology than with the kind of dead animals they could eat.

Despite the sanguine predictions of Buigues and the Discovery Channel, no one quite knew what was inside the block. True, there was hair and skin in some places on the outside, and a ground-penetrating radar scan had shown a large mass within it. But Ross MacPhee, a zoologist from the American Museum of Natural History whom Buigues had brought in to help with the defrosting, told me he suspected the permafrost contained little more than mud, rocks, and a few chopped-up bones, raising the discomfiting possibility that the Jarkov mammoth could become the Pleistocene version of the infamous live TV special during which Geraldo Rivera penetrated Al Capone’s “underground vault.” When I mentioned this analogy to one of the Discovery Channel producers, she blanched visibly.

The television crews had returned to get footage for a sequel, scheduled to air March 11, to “Raising the Mammoth,” their great success of the year before. No expense had been spared. The executive producer, a short, red-faced Washingtonian named Mick Kaczorowski, told me they’d even commissioned a full-scale, anatomically correct mammoth carcass made of polyurethane and yak hair. In the course of the program, this faux mammoth would be attacked by real wolves and vultures.

For the defrosting scenes, Buigues and the scientists, under gentle coaxing from Kaczorowski’s staff, were dressed up in shiny, Flash Gordonesque gray lab suits. (“I have no idea what this is for,” MacPhee sighed off-camera. Strapping and bearded, the very image of an old-school fossil hunter, he wasn’t exactly born to wear rayon.) The scientists’ equipment was nowhere near as impressive as their costumes. It consisted, more or less, of hair dryers. In early experiments, Buigues had discovered that this prosaic technology worked wonders in melting the permafrost just enough to allow it to be scraped away without unfreezing the flesh of the dead animal. And so a battery of gleaming, salon-model Wigo Taifun 1100s stood by, waiting to be aimed at the block.

Yet the mammoth didn’t actually have a lot of hair left. It had almost all been pulled out by local souvenir hunters last winter while the block sat outside the ice cave. Wherever they’d plucked the hair, they’d stuck in coins and ruble notes, as a gesture of appeasement toward the ancient beast, or perhaps toward the paleontologists. (A good deal of hair had been salvaged during the excavation, though, and was stored in the beer cooler I’d been shown. And enough genetic testing has been done to discern that the animal was a male.) The only thing mammoth-looking about the block—besides the tusks that Buigues had reattached—was that it was big, brown, and lumpy.

The cameras rolled, the hair dryers went full blast, and after a minute or so Buigues dramatically produced the first piece of mammoth flesh: a stringy scrap a few inches long, reddish and fibrous, like beef jerky. (He’d actually found it that afternoon, in an earlier defrosting session.) Nearby in the block, there were several protruding vertebrae and a broken rib. This wasn’t quite the perfect heat-n-serve mammoth that the Discovery Channel, its viewers, and even Buigues himself had expected—it was more like one that had been through a Cuisinart—but the scientists were nonetheless pleased. The scrap of flesh was the first intact soft tissue recovered from the carcass.

Kaczorowski, the producer, was stamping his feet with excitement and from the cold—after a couple of hours in the ice cave, his face had reddened until he looked somewhat like a peeled and parboiled monkey. “We’ll use the sound track of that Dolgan who was singing at Bernard’s house last night,” he told one of the other television people. “You’ll love it when it’s got a full orchestra behind it—it’ll be very dramatic, very Russian.”

AS DRAMATIC AS it may have been, the defrosting still didn’t bode well for the prospects of cloning—the lurking, thrilling idea that had drawn the huge television audiences (and me) in the first place. Since the heady first days after the mammoth’s helicopter flight, the prospect of a reborn race of woollies someday emerging from the ice cave has receded further and further into the distance.

Ever since the movie Jurassic Park and the 1996 birth of Dolly the sheep, the idea of has hovered around the collective consciousness of both Hollywood and science. A few years before Buigues arrived on the scene, a Japanese expedition came to the Taimyr to search (without success) for a specimen from which they might clone . Buigues and one of his scientific collaborators, a University of Northern Arizona paleontologist named Larry Agenbroad, originally hailed their specimen as a possible source of viable DNA—or even sperm—that would permit cloning. But almost immediately other scientists (including MacPhee, who hadn’t yet met Buigues) stepped forward to denounce the notion that a mammoth could ever be cloned—or that even if it could be, it ought to be.

The biggest practical difficulty, MacPhee says, is that DNA’s fragile strands deteriorate quickly, and no foreseeable technology can repair it. And besides, he adds, “Who’s going to want to have a herd of mammoths lumbering across the countryside? You’d end up with one or two animals cloned, as a kind of freak show, and then everyone would lose interest.”

Even so, the week I left for Khatanga, a New York Times headline announced the planned cloning of an extinct animal: not a mammoth, but a breed of Spanish mountain goat, the last of which had died a few months earlier. The scientists were given a good chance of success.

Agenbroad still believes that the Khatanga mammoth, despite its condition, may yet yield cloneable DNA. Moreover, he has few qualms about the prospect. “I live in the West, where we humans, the hunters and ranchers, eliminated huge numbers of grizzly bears and wolves. Now the federal government is bringing them back. Is that so different?” After Agenbroad spoke in favor of cloning on the Discovery Channel’s first broadcast, he received a barrage of hate e-mail. But he continues unapologetically to envision a not-too-distant future in which mammoths range like bison across the grasslands of Asia and North America—and points out that the director of Pleistocene Park, a nature reserve in Siberia, has announced that he’s ready to provide a loving home to a cloned mammoth, whenever the first one happens to be born.

If the birth of that 21st-century mammoth remains out of reach, solid information about the disappearance of the Pleistocene mammoths is equally elusive. By around 8,000 b.c. they were all gone, save a remnant population that held out for a few thousand years longer on a small Siberian island, living and dying while the pharaohs ruled Egypt. Scientists are sharply divided over what caused the extinction. Their three leading hypotheses, Agenbroad told me, can be summed up as “overkill, overchill, and overill.” The debate is about far more than paleontology. It’s about the past and future of humanity’s relationship with the natural world.

MacPhee is the illness theory’s leading proponent. It’s nearly impossible that humans hunted mammoths to extinction, he told me as we sat one morning in his room at Khatanga’s lone hotel, drinking cognac. “It contradicts everything we know about how extinctions happen,” he said. “Look at whales. For centuries you had enormous whale fleets armed with the most sophisticated technology of their time, manned by experts working morning, noon, and night to kill more whales. And of course they caused enormous destruction. But how many whale species have gone extinct in the past 500 years? Zero.” The most likely culprit for the mammoths’ demise, MacPhee believes, was some sort of global epidemic, a “hyperdisease” possibly borne by humans. This would explain why the animals vanished from the New World shortly after the ancestors of native Americans arrived.

Scientists of the “overchill” school believe that climate changes after the last Ice Age destroyed habitat and vegetation that the mammoths needed to survive. But the theory that most captures the public’s imagination is the overkill hypothesis. Agenbroad has spent decades excavating mammoth remains around the western United States. “You can’t work on a mammoth-kill site without getting the idea you’re looking at a magnificent animal that has been butchered by humans,” he says. “Eleven thousand years ago, man and mammoths were mixing it up, no doubt about it. Especially in America, where they’d never been hunted before and weren’t used to this funny-looking predator. It was like shooting ducks in a bathtub.” Agenbroad believes that a sudden burst in human population, along with wickedly efficient new tools such as improved spearpoints, drove mammoths over the brink.

In other words, humans were doing then exactly what their descendants, according to environmentalists, are doing now: overbreeding and trashing nature with technology. MacPhee scoffs at what he sees as the all-too-convenient sentimental appeal of this idea: “It fits with the worldview that everything wrong with the planet has to do with what humans have done.” Furthermore, he adds, the theory would be far less appealing if woolly mammoths didn’t make such cute, guilt-inducing victims: not just elephants, but shaggy, plush-toy versions of elephants—a species that could’ve been invented by Hasbro.

Still, Agenbroad takes his argument one step further. If the mammoth was one of the first species that human technology sent into oblivion, we can atone for it by making it one of the first species that human technology will resurrect. “We almost owe it to ’em,” he says.

ON OCTOBER DAYS in Khatanga, the Arctic sun floats lazily into view at midmorning and then drifts along the horizon like a half-inflated helium balloon until midafternoon. Dawn and dusk last for hours, saturating the entire snowy landscape with the deep blue and orange of the sky. Among the drifts rise half-finished buildings, piles of bricks, and rusted twists of metal, since nothing in Khatanga is ever torn down or hauled away, but simply left to stand in the place where it died or was forgotten. One vast section of town is the abandoned military base, with skeletons of jeeps and a plane’s fuselage abandoned at the roadside, and rows of collapsing barracks, slogans from Lenin hanging askew above their doorways.

Still, here and there I found nodes of buzzing activity. Intermittently for several days, a lime-green ultralight plane whirred back and forth above the airstrip—a French pilot testing out the latest gadget that Buigues had ordered from abroad. A couple of blocks away, an old wooden bank had been converted into a laboratory, where MacPhee and his colleagues drilled core samples from bones gathered over the summer.

But the center of all the action was a sprawling single-story house where Buigues held court like a tribal chieftain. (A random sampling of its clutter tells everything about him: a mammoth tusk, a pair of Sorel boots, a half-empty case of champagne.) When Buigues is in town, there is a constant stream of visitors and supplicants: television producers needing to schedule a shoot, Cerpolex employees planning expeditions, Dolgans selling mammoth bones or just stopping by for a glass of cognac.

In every superficial sense, the 46-year-old Buigues is an unlikely Arctic explorer. He spent his early childhood on the edge of the desert, in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, on a farm settled by his grandfather. “Until I was seven, I never went to school,” he says. “I played outdoors with the Arab children, and my mother taught me at home.” Then, in 1962, amid the collapse of colonialism, his father moved the family back to France, to a small town near Toulouse. “On the first day of school, I was excited about this new thing, the books and the new clothes. I got there, sat and listened for a few hours, and decided I didn’t like it so much, so I stood up and told the teacher that I’d had enough school for the day and I was leaving. She told me to sit down. I remember how shocked I was that this was how it worked—that I’d lost my freedom.”

From that very first day, Buiges says, he plotted his escape. Finally, at 15, he ran away from home. Buiges moved in with an older friend, an artist, and—with plans of lending his support to the proletarian revolution—took a job in a plywood factory. Eventually he left and started university, but soon dropped out again. In his twenties he drifted from job to job: cook, ambulance driver, mechanic. Then, through the parents of a girlfriend, he happened to meet Jean-Louis Etienne, the French explorer who would later become famous for his ski expeditions across both poles. “He had just decided to make an expedition by ship to Greenland,” Buiges recalls, “and he told me, ‘I need somebody like you on board, someone who can do everything from cooking to fixing the engine.”

For the next decade, Buigues served as Etienne’s right-hand man. Shortly after the start of perestroika, he visited the Siberian Arctic for the first time and left Etienne to start Cerpolex. “Jean-Louis was mostly focused on the Antarctic,” he says. “But the Arctic has more magic for me. The North Pole is alive, with the ice always cracking and moving, and the tundra also always moves and changes, like a desert, like a white Sahara.”

Buigues says he also loves the far north because, unlike the far south, it’s alive with humanity. In fact, he is one of the few outsiders whom the nomads trust, according to Vladimir Eisner, one of his longtime confidantes in Khatanga. “Their life has been hard since Communism ended,” he told me. “Bernard gives them flour, tea, sugar, petrol, clothes for their children. And when he pays them money, he gives it not to the men, who will drink it away, but to their wives, who will feed the family.”

The forlorn environs of far northern Siberia are a kind of paradise for Buigues, one of the few places on earth where it is truly possible to slip the bonds of the present.(He revels in his double existence, in coming home after months, bearded and smelly, to his wife in Paris.) In Soviet times, too, despite the region’s reputation as a place of imprisonment, it was also a place where some Russians came seeking freedom. In Khatanga, Buigues has surrounded himself with men like these—frost-seasoned outdoorsmen like Eisner and Boris Lebedev, a hulking, gentle-eyed trapper who came to town in the 1970s. “I still remember my first sight of it,” Lebedev says, “a little village in those days, with smoke rising from the roofs of the houses. It was only here in the north that a human being could be himself.” Buigues’s reasons for coming, perhaps, are not so very different.

The French interloper’s presence in town has won him enemies as well as friends; recently, he told me, he got word that Moscow ivory dealers were irritated by his competition for mammoth tusks and might be planning some sort of reprisal. But he’ll continue his hunt, he says, even though he’s not exactly sure why, not certain what has brought him from a farmhouse in the African hills to a village at the edge of the polar sea. Perhaps, he says, what’s drawn him to mammoths is some half-lost ancestral memory of them, “a knowledge that we have all kept deep in our cortex. You know, in Paris I live near the zoo, and I often go there to see the children watching the elephants, standing there and looking, much longer than they look at the lions, or the bears, or the giraffes. Maybe this has something to do with it also.”

EVEN IF BUIGUES’S first mammoth didn’t, as the world expected, turn out to be a perfect specimen, ready to blink its eyes and reawaken, there are almost certainly others waiting, still asleep under the tundra.

In August 1900 a Yakut tribesman hunting elk along the Berezovka River, in far eastern Siberia, came upon the head and forelimbs of a monstrous creature—its nose the length of a year-old reindeer calf—protruding from the bank. Word eventually made its way to the czarist authorities, and the following summer an official expedition arrived at the site, after a four-month journey via Trans-Siberian Express, boat, sleigh, and horseback. (One scientist recalled eating reindeer meat, buying mammoth-ivory trinkets, and seeing people still dressed “in the style of the ‘eighties.'” Different eighties, otherwise a familiar story.)

The explorers found the carcass in a remarkable state of preservation—nearly intact except for its head. In fact, the mammoth’s flesh was so succulent-looking that they were tempted to eat some, though its awful stench deterred them. The expedition’s sled dogs, however, dived in with gusto. The scientists carefully recorded their find and photographed it. (One memorable image shows a local tribesman posing proudly beside the mammoth’s genitalia. The unfortunate animal seems to have died in a state of some excitement—its penis was fully three feet long.) They cut the carcass into pieces, loaded it onto dogsleds, and finally got it back to St. Petersburg to show the czar and czarina. Nicholas inspected the mammoth with interest; Alexandra pressed her handkerchief to her nose and asked to be taken “as far away from this as possible.”

The Berezovka mammoth—still on display, no longer pungent, in St. Petersburg—was, until Bernard Buigues and the Discovery Channel came along, the most famous mammoth ever found. Other fairly well preserved examples have turned up now and then, too, always by chance. But even in recent years, when Soviet scientists excavated such finds, they stripped away the permafrost with jets of hot water and preserved the mammoths with chemicals like paraffin—both of which irreparably damaged the specimens.

There’s every reason to think that more mammoths wait to be found—perhaps even hundreds more. “I don’t think the one we’ve got in the ice cave now will ever pan out to be very much,” MacPhee says. “But I have every expectation that Bernard’s eventually going to turn up the kind of mammoth he’s looking for. No one’s ever staged a search like what he’s doing, systematically, on such a scale.”

Last summer, in only a few weeks, Buigues’s oddly matched team of Dolgans, scientists, and Russian fishermen found so many mammoth tusks and bones that the collection, stored in the former bank in Khatanga, now rivals those assembled over centuries by the world’s great museums. And he plans to continue the hunt—at least for the time being, he told me, until the restlessness that brought him to the Arctic draws him into something new. (“You see,” he told me, “I’ve also got a plan for another kind of Arctic expedition, a truly incredible adventure, you aren’t allowed to publish anything about this…”)

For now, Buigues is firmly in the grip of his current obsession. His motives seem to have little to do with science, let alone entertainment. “Make no mistake,” says MacPhee, “he’s dreaming about that perfect mammoth. If not a cloned one, at least one that’s sealed up perfectly in the permafrost.” And until he finds his perfect mammoth, it’s not things like laboratory results or television ratings that keep him going. It’s a chunk of bone on the tundra, an ivory trinket in a Dolgan’s cupped hand, a whiff of mammoth on the cold Siberian air.

BESIDE THE FROZEN sheet of Lake Taimyr, I stood with Buigues as he knelt on the bank, freeing something from the drifted snow.

I’d taken off by helicopter from Khatanga again, two hours before—this time to pick up Buigues and his team, who were camped on the tundra on a hunt for new specimens. The Arctic sky was unusually clear that morning, and in the course of the flight my eyes had begun to grow accustomed to the glaring desert beneath us. I saw now that the unrelieved white of the landscape was actually the blue of buried water, the rose of reflected dawn, and the yellowish green of marsh grasses mounded beneath the drifts, awaiting spring.

We’d circled once before landing, watching the expedition members emerge, waving, from their tents. The wind was whipping off the lake’s huge surface, and they began striking camp even before we landed, eager to get aboard the helicopter. Buigues wasn’t among them. He was already down at the lakeside, waiting to show us his find. Here, last August, a Russian park ranger fishing in the shallows had hooked something unusual: a tuft of reddish-brown hair. Buigues suspected that it might be the rest of a partial mammoth that had been found eroding from the adjacent bank a decade or so earlier.

Struggling through the blistering wind toward the lake was like negotiating the surface of a hostile planet. As I made my way over the hummocky crest above the ice, I saw that the waters had receded before they’d frozen, exposing a dozen or so yards of bare lake bottom. Protruding from the frozen earth, like dinosaur fossils in a matrix of rock, was a row of brown vertebrae, ancient and massive. Only this wasn’t rock, and this was no fossil: All around it, like strands of fine, dead grass, long hairs sprouted from the snow. Buigues was crouched there, riding atop the buried animal’s back, imagining the living contours beneath him.

Adam Goodheart’s feature on the Philmont Boy Scout Ranch appeared in the November 1999 issue of şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř.

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