BESIDE THE FROZEN sheet of Lake Taimyr, I stood with Buigues as he knelt on the bank, freeing something from the drifted snow.

I'd taken off by helicopter from Khatanga again, two hours before—this time to pick up Buigues and his team, who were camped on the tundra on a hunt for new specimens. The Arctic sky was unusually clear that morning, and in the course of the flight my eyes had begun to grow accustomed to the glaring desert beneath us. I saw now that the unrelieved white of the landscape was actually the blue of buried water, the rose of reflected dawn, and the yellowish green of marsh grasses mounded beneath the drifts, awaiting spring.

We'd circled once before landing, watching the expedition members emerge, waving, from their tents. The wind was whipping off the lake's huge surface, and they began striking camp even before we landed, eager to get aboard the helicopter. Buigues wasn't among them. He was already down at the lakeside, waiting to show us his find. Here, last August, a Russian park ranger fishing in the shallows had hooked something unusual: a tuft of reddish-brown hair. Buigues suspected that it might be the rest of a partial mammoth that had been found eroding from the adjacent bank a decade or so earlier.

Struggling through the blistering wind toward the lake was like negotiating the surface of a hostile planet. As I made my way over the hummocky crest above the ice, I saw that the waters had receded before they'd frozen, exposing a dozen or so yards of bare lake bottom. Protruding from the frozen earth, like dinosaur fossils in a matrix of rock, was a row of brown vertebrae, ancient and massive. Only this wasn't rock, and this was no fossil: All around it, like strands of fine, dead grass, long hairs sprouted from the snow. Buigues was crouched there, riding atop the buried animal's back, imagining the living contours beneath him.  

Adam Goodheart's feature on the Philmont Boy Scout Ranch appeared in the November 1999 issue of Outside.