The mammoth lived during the Ice Age. Nana watched Birdie while my mother took me and James to the Maine State Museum to see the tusk for my tenth birthday last year. It was a very long drive, two hundred and forty-five miles south, which is seventy-five percent of the whole length of Maine and thirty percent farther than anywhere else I’d ever been.

After Mom paid for us to get in, I hurried past the displays about sardine packing and ice harvesting straight to the mammoth exhibit. But when I got there, the sign underneath the tusk said:

REPLICA

The volunteer at the museum explained that when the tusk was tested to see how old it was, and to make a mold of it, it was destroyed in the process. He said the replica was even more accurate than the original one had been. He pointed to a mammoth tooth that was real.

The tooth and the replica both hung on a wall behind glass. I got as close to the glass as I could, but there was no way to tell by looking what the tooth felt or smelled like. And I knew the replica wouldn’t have the muddy smell from the pond where the real tusk was found.

The volunteer was very proud of the replica. I thanked him for explaining about the tusk and told him how far we’d come to see it.

James liked seeing the replica and the tooth. He loved the steam locomotive, the three-story waterwheel, and the stuffed seabirds on the pretend beach. Mom spent a long time looking at the hull fragment from a wooden ship that ran aground after a midnight collision with another boat. The fragment was bigger than my uncle Lincoln’s whole house.

On our way out, we got postcards at the museum gift shop. I picked one that showed the real tusk in the ground where it was found. During the long drive home, I studied the postcard of the tusk they’d used to make the replica and thought about the real mammoth tooth, which was bigger than my head.

I didn’t know then that I’d get to see and touch something much, much older than the tusk. A rock in our hayfield that could be even older than the sun.

Chapter 5

The Inuits revealed to Robert E. Peary, the famous American explorer, the locations of three of the meteorites. The Inuits called the masses Ahnighito or Tent (31 tons), Woman (3 tons) and Dog (0.4 tons).

—Alex Bevan and John de Laeter, Meteorites: A Journey Through Space and Time

I WAIT FOR JAMES to come on the school bus. When his father, Wendell, works the evening shift at the paper mill, James stays with us. Birdie is visiting Nana up at Bower One.