In light of Adam Goodheart's long-standing fascination with prehistoric mammals—an obsession dating back to a book on Ice Age animals that his parents gave him for his seventh birthday—it's no surprise that the Outside correspondent found himself transfixed by reports that the frozen carcass of a woolly mammoth had been discovered in the Siberian Arctic. And when Goodheart learned that Bernard Buigues, the French explorer who unearthed the mammoth, was returning in order to thaw the remains with hair dryers so the extinct beast might one day be cloned, he could barely contain himself. "It was this weird meeting of science and entertainment, the Third World and the First World, an era many millennia ago and the present—all coming together in this one place," says Goodheart, who lives in Washington, D.C., and also writes for The Atlantic Monthly and The American Scholar, among others. "I thought, My God, could there be a more perfect story for our times? I just had to get to Siberia."

Easier said than done. When he arrived in Moscow, the Discovery Channel group with whom he was traveling was told that their flight to the dilapidated Siberian outpost of Khatanga had been canceled. Fortunately, Buigues's fixers started working the phones. "The next thing I knew, a big, fat thousand-dollar wad of cash was being slipped to the representatives of the airline, and mysteriously some seats appeared for us on another flight."

More than 2,000 miles later, Goodheart was running his fingers through the hair of an animal that grazed the steppes 23,000 years ago—an encounter he relishes both for what it gave him and what it took away. "I definitely felt a voyeuristic thrill in going to see the mammoth," he says. "But somehow, the idea that those mammoths are still out there under the ice seems more powerful than what happens when you dig them up. What keeps people hunting these things is the air of mystery that surrounds them—which is all too easily dispelled. As Oscar Wilde said, you always kill the thing you love." Goodheart's story, "Bringing Back the Beast," begins on page 48.