Bernard Buigues, Ross MacPhee, and other scientists dry the block; the expedition helicopter north of Lake Taimyr; base camp, on the lake's Cape Sablera; the sleeping beast in his lair; Buigues consults with a Dolgan.

WE'D MET NEARLY a year before and as far away from the tundra as I can imagine, in a bistro in Paris on New Year's Eve day. I'd heard about him that fall, as many people had, when the story broke worldwide that the frozen, apparently intact body of a woolly mammoth had been unearthed by a team of French explorers in Siberia, that the carcass (under the bright glare of the Discovery Channel's cameras) had been flown to a laboratory in an underground ice cave, and—here's the part that really drove them wild, the TV reporters and scientific naysayers and millennial evangelists—that its discoverers hoped to clone it. I might as well admit: That's what hooked me, too.

During a visit to Paris, I'd phoned Buigues, the head of the expedition, and he'd invited me to lunch at a corner restaurant not far from the Place de la Bastille, with worn tile floors and plate-glass windows and white paper tablecloths. Buigues is compact, bald, and supremely self-possessed, with the sort of easy charm that, when you first meet him, makes you intensely conscious of not being French. And—despite the Frankensteinish specters conjured up by such phrases as "underground Siberian cloning laboratory"—he isn't a scientist at all, let alone a mad one. After spending half his life as a bohemian jack-of-all-trades, he took an improbable detour into polar exploration, becoming a kind of Arctic impresario, a Gore-Tex version of Jules Verne's Passepartout.

Since 1992, Buigues told me, he'd been leading and organizing North Pole expeditions for scientists, film crews, and well-heeled tourists, using as his staging point an old Soviet outpost called Khatanga. (His permanent home is still just outside Paris with his wife, Sylvie, the general director of French clothing retailer Agnès B.'s European stores.) Buigues got to Siberia at just the right moment. With scientists, government delegations, and adventure tourists lining up to visit a region that had been closed off for nearly a century, his company—Cercles Polaires Expéditions, or Cerpolex—boomed. That was how Buigues heard about the mammoth, which had been discovered in the summer of 1997 by Dolgan nomads who spotted its tusks and furry hide poking out of the thawing permafrost. Buigues went out to the site one night at dusk and decided to excavate the enormous animal himself.

Since then the French explorer's mammoth-hunt has been fueled by passion, not profits. Buigues says he spent more than $1.2 million of his Cerpolex earnings before the Discovery Channel—which knew a good thing when it saw one and had been quick to sign Buigues on an exclusive contract—stepped in last year to pick up the tab. (The cable network won't divulge how many millions it's spent since then.) Driven by a single-minded desire to resurrect the defunct beast he'd laid claim to, Buigues had recruited an international team of scientists and spent weeks in the fall of 1999 at the site, chipping away with pickaxes at the granite-hard permafrost. Buigues managed to carve out a 23-ton block containing the mammoth and fly it by helicopter back to Khatanga, and—voilà!—the thawing was almost ready to begin.

The entire operation was filmed by the Discovery Channel, and the resulting two-hour special, which aired three months after our Y2K luncheon, set a new record as the most-watched program in the network's history. Its money shot was an unforgettable sequence of the block of permafrost rising up into the sunset-lit Siberian sky and soaring off toward Khatanga with two huge tusks protruding from one side. (Buigues, with his unflagging showman's instinct, had fastened them there.)

In Paris, as we drained the bottle of burgundy that Buigues had ordered with our meal, he covered the paper tablecloth with sketches: a diagram of how they'd lifted the mammoth, a map of northern Siberia. "An incredible place," he said. "It is a place that obliges one to think about time, about the measure of time. In Khatanga, the Russian people live as if it were 30, 40 years ago—still Soviet times. For the nomads living in the tundra, dressed in reindeer skins, time stopped 500 years ago. And then there is this mammoth, this frozen animal that brings you back thousands and thousands of years. You have to realize, it isn't a fossil. It's got hair and skin and meat. We found plants trapped under the body that were still green. It could have died a few days ago."

Outside the restaurant, in the fading winter light, Parisians hurried past toward New Year's Eve celebrations, carrying flowers and champagne. Buigues didn't seem to notice, or to care. He was, I suspected, already far away from the rest of us, somewhere up ahead or perhaps behind, in a millennium of his own making.