THE MAMMOTH THAT rose from the dead in 1999, the reeking Pleistocene carcass that made television history, now rests in an ice-sheathed tunnel bored into the bank of the frozen Khatanga River. The block that Buigues's team carved from the tundra was moved into the tunnel, where the temperature hovers steadily below zero, so that it may be slowly defrosted and studied without any of its tissues deteriorating—and in order to preserve its DNA.

Khatanga's 5,000 inhabitants seem, as Buigues had hinted, stranded somewhere deep in the grim and endless Brezhnev years. I'd arrived there on an Antonov turboprop from Moscow in the middle of the night, along with a group of scientists and Discovery Channel people. When the plane taxied to a stop, the cabin door swung open, and in a blast of frigid air a Russian soldier in a heavy overcoat came stomping in. As he lifted his hand to salute us, I saw that the shiny red badge on his cap still bore the gold hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union. Up here, apparently, they hadn't bothered to change. The town's main streets are lined with ramshackle wooden buildings, spewing smokestacks, and sad low-rise apartments, and the shops along Sovietskaya Street have names like Store Number 6—where a middle-aged lady stands guard over a locked vitrine containing three plastic combs, a rubber hairbrush, and a single box of Q-Tips.

Buigues's team hadn't built the so-called ice cave. It was already there. Last year's Discovery Channel special made much of the fact that it had been "constructed for unknown reasons during the Stalin era." But when I asked the Taimyr's regional governor, Nikolai Alexandrovich Fokhin, about this, he dismissed any hints of buried missile silos or secret torture chambers. "We built the cave about 15 years ago," he said, "to store frozen fish and reindeer meat." And in fact, when the television crews returned last fall, they found thousands of fish heaped up around the mammoth, stockpiled by locals less concerned with paleontology than with the kind of dead animals they could eat.

Despite the sanguine predictions of Buigues and the Discovery Channel, no one quite knew what was inside the block. True, there was hair and skin in some places on the outside, and a ground-penetrating radar scan had shown a large mass within it. But Ross MacPhee, a zoologist from the American Museum of Natural History whom Buigues had brought in to help with the defrosting, told me he suspected the permafrost contained little more than mud, rocks, and a few chopped-up bones, raising the discomfiting possibility that the Jarkov mammoth could become the Pleistocene version of the infamous live TV special during which Geraldo Rivera penetrated Al Capone's "underground vault." When I mentioned this analogy to one of the Discovery Channel producers, she blanched visibly.

The television crews had returned to get footage for a sequel, scheduled to air March 11, to "Raising the Mammoth," their great success of the year before. No expense had been spared. The executive producer, a short, red-faced Washingtonian named Mick Kaczorowski, told me they'd even commissioned a full-scale, anatomically correct mammoth carcass made of polyurethane and yak hair. In the course of the program, this faux mammoth would be attacked by real wolves and vultures.

For the defrosting scenes, Buigues and the scientists, under gentle coaxing from Kaczorowski's staff, were dressed up in shiny, Flash Gordonesque gray lab suits. ("I have no idea what this is for," MacPhee sighed off-camera. Strapping and bearded, the very image of an old-school fossil hunter, he wasn't exactly born to wear rayon.) The scientists' equipment was nowhere near as impressive as their costumes. It consisted, more or less, of hair dryers. In early experiments, Buigues had discovered that this prosaic technology worked wonders in melting the permafrost just enough to allow it to be scraped away without unfreezing the flesh of the dead animal. And so a battery of gleaming, salon-model Wigo Taifun 1100s stood by, waiting to be aimed at the block.

Yet the mammoth didn't actually have a lot of hair left. It had almost all been pulled out by local souvenir hunters last winter while the block sat outside the ice cave. Wherever they'd plucked the hair, they'd stuck in coins and ruble notes, as a gesture of appeasement toward the ancient beast, or perhaps toward the paleontologists. (A good deal of hair had been salvaged during the excavation, though, and was stored in the beer cooler I'd been shown. And enough genetic testing has been done to discern that the animal was a male.) The only thing mammoth-looking about the block—besides the tusks that Buigues had reattached—was that it was big, brown, and lumpy.

The cameras rolled, the hair dryers went full blast, and after a minute or so Buigues dramatically produced the first piece of mammoth flesh: a stringy scrap a few inches long, reddish and fibrous, like beef jerky. (He'd actually found it that afternoon, in an earlier defrosting session.) Nearby in the block, there were several protruding vertebrae and a broken rib. This wasn't quite the perfect heat-n-serve mammoth that the Discovery Channel, its viewers, and even Buigues himself had expected—it was more like one that had been through a Cuisinart—but the scientists were nonetheless pleased. The scrap of flesh was the first intact soft tissue recovered from the carcass.

Kaczorowski, the producer, was stamping his feet with excitement and from the cold—after a couple of hours in the ice cave, his face had reddened until he looked somewhat like a peeled and parboiled monkey. "We'll use the sound track of that Dolgan who was singing at Bernard's house last night," he told one of the other television people. "You'll love it when it's got a full orchestra behind it—it'll be very dramatic, very Russian."