Each summer Shidlovskiy mounts a safari of men, buses, trucks, amphibious vehicles, planes, helicopters, and riverboats and ventures onto the tundra of northeastern Siberia. In the extended Arctic daylight, he and his team spend weeks at a stretch recovering the bones and tusks of woolly mammoths, the lumbering precursors of today's elephants that until about 10,000 years ago wandered the bitterly cold steppes alongside our own fur-clad ancestors.The best of his finds he restores (with auto body filler and varnish) and assembles into complete skeletons. Bones and tusks of lesser quality he has carved into chess sets and knick-knacks. The least valuable are ground into powder for use in traditional Chinese cures. Eventually everything is sold, mostly in Hong Kong and the United States.
Shidlovskiy (Fyodor to his friends, and everyone quickly becomes a friend of this joyful, effusive Russian) invited photographer Lynn Johnson and me to join him on an expedition. It was to be more than your run-of-the-mill Siberian mammoth quest, he promised: A hunter had tipped him to the whereabouts of an intact baby mammoth skeleton, the rarest of the rare, and he'd love to have us come along to record what promised to be an important find. Hours before dawn on a balmy August morning, we met Fyodor outside his tony, pink-brick apartment building in Moscow and prepared to set out on his latest escapade.
