It's springtime in Siberia, where slumbering mammoths are emerging from melting permafrost. Where great herds of TV crews roam the tundra in search of cloneable Ice Age DNA. Where Dolgan nomads traffic in Jurassic Park dreams. Where an unlikely French explorer-entrepreneur is chasing his strangely compelling vision of authentic wonder. Where the weirdness is just beginning.

By Adam Goodheart

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 dead these 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.