The meal started with Ukrainian borscht, moved on to a hearty beef goulash, with ponchiki cookies for dessert. All washed down with tea, and followed with high-octane vodka that took the edge off the late-afternoon coolness. After sampling Maria's cooking, Karla understood that Sergei's girth may not have been all his own fault.

Karla downed her last cookie. “I'm amazed that you can turn out such great food under relatively primitive conditions.”

“There is no need to starve, or eat freeze-dried food like the Americans like to do,” Maria said. “As long as I have fire, a pot and the right ingredients, I can cook as well as the finest Moscow restaurant.”

Karla raised her glass of vodka. “I want to congratulate you again on your find. You must be very happy.”

Dr. Sato's Japanese ear for subtlety picked up on Karla's oblique attempt to introduce a touchy subject into the dinner conversation.

“Thank you,” he said. “As we indicated earlier, it is a bit of a problem.” He glanced at Arbatov.

The Russian nodded. “You know what we are trying to do with this expedition?”

“Yes,” Karla said. “You are trying to find the remains of a mammoth that will lend itself to cloning.”

“Correct,” Arbatov said. “The seeds for this project were planted in 1999, when a multinational expedition unearthed some promising remains in a block of frozen mud.”

“The Zharkov mammoth,” Karla said. The remains had been named after the Siberian family that owned the land where they were found.

“That's right. There was a great deal of interest in the beast from a number of genetic research facilities from all parts of the world. They said that if DNA could be extracted from the soft tissues it might be used to clone a woolly mammoth.”

“The mud yielded only bones and no soft tissue, as I recall.”

“With no soft tissue, the cloning attempt died, but not the interest. Experiments continued,” Arbatov said. “A group of Japanese and Chinese researchers cloned two cows, using skin cells from a dead cow embryo that was kept frozen at the same temperature as the Russian permafrost. Since then, expeditions have continued to search for suitable remains in Siberia. My wife and I work for a Siberian wildlife park that plans to impregnate a female Indian elephant as a surrogate to produce a partial-mammoth offspring, then repeat with its offspring as well. They hope to have a creature that is eighty-eight percent woolly mammoth in fifty years.”

“This is a joint venture with the Japanese,” Dr. Sato said, picking up the thread of the explanation. “Students from Kinki University and veterinary experts from Kagoshima, where Dr. Ito is from, have been looking in Siberia for DNA samples since 1997. There are estimated to be ten million mammoths buried beneath the Siberian permafrost, so we came here hoping to find what we need.”

“How would the cloning be done?” Karla said.