There is a legend that in 1581 the warriors of the famous conqueror of Siberia, Ermak, saw huge hairy elephants in the dense taiga. The guides explained to Yermak that they were taking care of these "elephants", since this was "nz" - an emergency supply of meat in case other game animals disappeared from the taiga.
The beast named Ves
Along the entire length of Siberia to the Bering Strait, beliefs about shaggy colossus with the customs of underground inhabitants persist to this day.
Among the Eskimos inhabiting the Asian coast of the strait, the mammoth is known under the name "Kilu Kruk", that is, "a whale named Kilu" According to legend, this whale quarreled with the sea monster Aglu and was thrown onto land, but it turned out to be too heavy and sank into the ground. Since then, he settled under the permafrost, where he digs his passages with powerful tusks.
Among the Chukchi, the mammoth personifies the bearer of an evil spirit and also lives underground, where it moves along narrow corridors. When a person meets tusks sticking out of the ground, he must immediately dig them up. Then the sorcerer will lose his strength and will not hide again underground to spread evil. They say that once several Chukchi noticed two fangs peeping out of the ground. They acted according to the precepts of their ancestors and dug up a living mammoth after them, which allowed their tribe to eat fresh meat all winter.
The Yukaghirs living in the Arctic Circle mention in their legends the mammoth under the name "Holkhut". Some of the local shamans believe that the spirit of the giant - along with the existing animals - is the guardian of the soul. Thus, the shaman, in whom the spirit of the mammoth has infiltrated, is considered incomparably more powerful than an ordinary clergyman.
Among the Yakuts and Koryaks inhabiting the coast of the Sea of Okhotsk, you can hear similar legends about a certain giant rat, which is called "mamanta", that is, "that-that-lives-under-ground." They say that the "mamanta" cannot stand daylight. As soon as they emerge from the ground, thunder rumbles and lightning flashes. They also cause tremors and earthquakes.
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The ambassador of the Austrian emperor Sigismund Herberstein, who visited Russia in the middle of the 16th century, wrote in 1549 in his Notes on Muscovy: “Siberia has a great variety of birds and various animals … In addition, Ves, in the same way, polar bears, wolves, hares … "Who was this mysterious beast Ves, for a long time the commentators of the" Notes "could not understand.
The Chinese envoy Tulishen, who traveled through Siberia to Russia, reported to the emperor in 1714: “And there is a certain beast in this cold country, which, as they say, walks through the underground, and as soon as the sun or warm air touches it, it dies. The name of this beast is "Mamunt", and in Chinese "Hishu" …"
Two videos with supposedly Siberian mammoths. One, according to most, depicts a bear with a fish, the other is taken from a computer game
In the 18th century treatise "The Mirror of the Manchu language" you can also find an echo of Siberian legends: "In the north, there lives an underground rat Feng Shu, that is," the rat of ice. " It is a huge, elephant-like animal that lives only underground and dies as soon as it appears up and touches the sun's rays.
Feng Shu come across, which weigh up to 10 thousand pounds. The rat of ice and glaciers lives deep in the north, under the eternal snow. Its meat can be eaten. Its coat is several feet long. It can be used to weave carpets that resist damp air."
Peter I, having learned that shaggy reddish-brown elephants roam the Siberian tundra, ordered to collect "material evidence" of their existence, sending the world's first scientific expedition to the North for mammoths.
The head of the expedition, the German naturalist Dr. D. Messerschmidt, was instructed to continue the development of the endless expanses of Siberia and at the same time to pay due attention to the search for the mysterious earth-moving elephant.
They bury their kin like humans
In the "Yearbook of the Tobolsk Provincial Museum" for 1908 one can find the publication of the local historian P. Gorodtsov "Mammoth. West Siberian Legend ". Here is what, in particular, he reports from the words of an old hunter from the village of Zabolotye, which is near Tobolsk: “The mammoth still exists on earth, only in small numbers: this animal is now very rare. In former times, mammoths were found on earth much more. The mammoth in appearance and body structure resembles a bull or an elk, but its size is much larger than these animals: the mammoth is five to six times larger than the largest elk. This beast has two huge horns on its head.
And Siberian ethnographers have quite a lot of such evidence. In 1920, two hunters who hunted game between the Chistaya and Tasa rivers (the area between the Ob and Yenisei), met the tracks of a huge animal at the edge of the forest. The tracks were oval in shape and were 60 to 70 centimeters long and about 50 centimeters wide. The animal put its front legs four meters from the hind legs. Heaps of manure that came across from time to time testified to the powerful size of the animal.
”Excited hunters followed these tracks. In the forest, they noticed branches broken off at a height of three meters. After a few days of pursuit, they finally met two monsters, which they watched from a distance of about a hundred meters (they did not dare to come closer). They made out white curled tusks. The animals had a brown color and long hair."
The modern Chelyabinsk biologist Nikolai Avdeev says that he talked with an Evenk hunter who, as a child, heard the sounds made by a mammoth.
This story happened in the 1930s. At night the boy was awakened by loud snoring, noise and splashes of water on the nearby lake Syrkovo. The hostess of the house, Anastasia Lukina, reassured the teenager and said that there was no need to be afraid - it was mammoths making noise. She had seen more than once how they came to this reservoir. They live nearby, in a swamp in the taiga.
The Mari researcher Albert Moskvin also talked to people who saw woolly elephants more than once. Here is what he writes: “Obda (the Mari name for mammoth), according to eyewitnesses, used to be met more often than now, in a herd of 4-5 heads. Stormy weather suits them most of all. During the day, they rest in a circle, inside which the cubs stand. Mammoths see very well, much better than elephants. They do not tolerate the smell of engine oil, burnt gunpowder, etc.
Mari eyewitnesses say that the herd tears off the hair of the deceased mammoth and undermines the earth with tusks until it sinks into the ground. Then they throw it over with pieces of earth and tamp the grave … Obda leaves no traces, for the traces are smoothed out by the hair on the foot from the sides. The mammoth's tail, although not developed, but the hair from it descends to the ground."
Also noteworthy is the testimony of military pilots who flew American planes from Alaska through Siberia in 1944. During the flight, they noticed from the air a herd of huge humpbacked animals with bent tusks. Due to the icing of the vehicles, the flight altitude was low, and the pilots clearly saw the dark thick hair on the animals. They moved in single file in deep snow.
In 1956, an elementary school teacher in a taiga village on the Tazov Upland, while gathering mushrooms, literally collided with a living mammoth, which passed at a distance of no more than ten meters from her.
One of the most recent press reports that Russian geologists in Siberia saw living mammoths appeared in 1978.
“It was the summer of 1978,” recalls the foreman of the prospectors S. Belyaev, “our artel was washing gold on one of the tributaries of the Indigirka River. In the midst of the season, an interesting incident occurred. In the hour before dawn, when the sun had not yet risen, a dull stamp was suddenly heard near the camp. Jumping to our feet, we stared at each other in surprise with a mute question: "What is this?" As if in response, a splash of water was heard from the river. We, grabbing our guns, stealthily began to make our way in that direction.
When we rounded the rocky ledge, our eyes were presented with an incredible picture. In the shallow river there were about a dozen, God knows where they came from … mammoths. Huge shaggy animals slowly drank the icy water. For about half an hour, we gazed at these fabulous giants as if spellbound. And those, having quenched their thirst, ceremoniously one after another went deep into the forest thicket …"
Mammoths are hiding underwater
A reasonable question arises: if mammoths still exist, where are they hiding? You will not find food in the coniferous taiga. Another thing is along river valleys and near lakes. Or in the lakes themselves! Fantastic? It depends on how you look at it.
… 30s of the twentieth century, the shallow West Siberian lake Leusha. After the celebration of Trinity Day, the youth returned home in wooden boats from the neighboring village. And suddenly, 200 meters from them, a huge hairy carcass rose from the water! Some of the guys shouted in fright: "Mammoth!" The boats huddled together, and people watched with fear as the three-meter-high carcass that appeared above the water swayed on the waves for several moments. Then the hairy body dived and disappeared into the depths!
There are many similar testimonies. The well-known Russian cryptozoologist Maya Bykova told at one time about a pilot who saw with his own eyes how a mammoth plunged into the water and swam away along the lake surface.
The closest relatives of the mammoth are elephants. It was recently revealed that these giants are excellent swimmers. They not only love to swim in shallow water, but also swim several tens of kilometers into the sea.
One of the first proofs of the existence of such elephants appeared in 1930, when the skeleton of a small elephant calf, with a preserved trunk and small tusks, was nailed to a glacier in Alaska, and in 1944, at Mahrihanish Bay, in the west of Kintyre, in Scotland, a headless the corpse of an adult elephant. And since these places are not the natural homeland of Indian or African elephants, it is not difficult to imagine the confusion and surprise of the people who found them.
In 1971, the team of the trawler Empula, unloading in the port of Grimsby after fishing in the North Sea, was surprised to find in their nets, along with ordinary cod and herring, a young African elephant weighing a ton.
Eight years later, an event occurred that conclusively confirmed that elephants can indeed swim thousands of miles offshore. The August issue of The New Scientist published a photograph taken the previous month by Admiral R. Kadirgama of a native elephant swimming in the sea twenty miles off the coast of Sri Lanka. The animal raised its head above the water, its legs moved measuredly. It was obvious that the elephant had absolutely no difficulty in traveling.
And when, in 1982, a fishing boat from Aberdeen came across an elephant thirty-two miles from the North Port, none of the skeptical zoologists were surprised.
Now let's remember what geologist Viktor Tverdokhlebov told the public about from the pages of the Soviet press in the 50s of the last century. In 1953 he worked in the vicinity of the Yakut Lake Labynkyr. On the morning of July 30, while on a plateau overlooking the lake, Victor observed something barely rising above the surface of the water. From the dark gray carcass of a mysterious animal, swimming with heavy throws to the shore, big waves diverged in a triangle.
Whom did the geologist see? Cryptozoologists stated that it was one of the varieties of waterfowl lizards that somehow survived in an incomprehensible way to our time and for some reason chose the icy waters of the lake, where reptiles, in principle, physiologically cannot live.
Numerous descriptions of encounters with lake monsters around the world tend to be similar: a dark body above the water and a small head on a long neck. However, if somewhere in Africa or in the swampy jungles of the Amazon this description can really be applied to an ancient plesiosaur that has survived to this day, then for cold Siberian lakes the explanation may be different: and it is not the neck that rises above the water, but a high-raised trunk mammoth!