EVEN IF BUIGUES'S first mammoth didn't, as the world expected, turn out to be a perfect specimen, ready to blink its eyes and reawaken, there are almost certainly others waiting, still asleep under the tundra.

In August 1900 a Yakut tribesman hunting elk along the Berezovka River, in far eastern Siberia, came upon the head and forelimbs of a monstrous creature—its nose the length of a year-old reindeer calf—protruding from the bank. Word eventually made its way to the czarist authorities, and the following summer an official expedition arrived at the site, after a four-month journey via Trans-Siberian Express, boat, sleigh, and horseback. (One scientist recalled eating reindeer meat, buying mammoth-ivory trinkets, and seeing people still dressed "in the style of the 'eighties.'" Different eighties, otherwise a familiar story.)

The explorers found the carcass in a remarkable state of preservation—nearly intact except for its head. In fact, the mammoth's flesh was so succulent-looking that they were tempted to eat some, though its awful stench deterred them. The expedition's sled dogs, however, dived in with gusto. The scientists carefully recorded their find and photographed it. (One memorable image shows a local tribesman posing proudly beside the mammoth's genitalia. The unfortunate animal seems to have died in a state of some excitement—its penis was fully three feet long.) They cut the carcass into pieces, loaded it onto dogsleds, and finally got it back to St. Petersburg to show the czar and czarina. Nicholas inspected the mammoth with interest; Alexandra pressed her handkerchief to her nose and asked to be taken "as far away from this as possible."

The Berezovka mammoth—still on display, no longer pungent, in St. Petersburg—was, until Bernard Buigues and the Discovery Channel came along, the most famous mammoth ever found. Other fairly well preserved examples have turned up now and then, too, always by chance. But even in recent years, when Soviet scientists excavated such finds, they stripped away the permafrost with jets of hot water and preserved the mammoths with chemicals like paraffin—both of which irreparably damaged the specimens.

There's every reason to think that more mammoths wait to be found—perhaps even hundreds more. "I don't think the one we've got in the ice cave now will ever pan out to be very much," MacPhee says. "But I have every expectation that Bernard's eventually going to turn up the kind of mammoth he's looking for. No one's ever staged a search like what he's doing, systematically, on such a scale."

Last summer, in only a few weeks, Buigues's oddly matched team of Dolgans, scientists, and Russian fishermen found so many mammoth tusks and bones that the collection, stored in the former bank in Khatanga, now rivals those assembled over centuries by the world's great museums. And he plans to continue the hunt—at least for the time being, he told me, until the restlessness that brought him to the Arctic draws him into something new. ("You see," he told me, "I've also got a plan for another kind of Arctic expedition, a truly incredible adventure, you aren't allowed to publish anything about this...")

For now, Buigues is firmly in the grip of his current obsession. His motives seem to have little to do with science, let alone entertainment. "Make no mistake," says MacPhee, "he's dreaming about that perfect mammoth. If not a cloned one, at least one that's sealed up perfectly in the permafrost." And until he finds his perfect mammoth, it's not things like laboratory results or television ratings that keep him going. It's a chunk of bone on the tundra, an ivory trinket in a Dolgan's cupped hand, a whiff of mammoth on the cold Siberian air.