“You kind of wonder how they held their heads up under all that weight.”

From Play With Fire, the fifth Kate Shugak novel:

The mammoth’s tusks spiraled up from the display, graceful in spite of their mass, nearly full curls of fossil ivory.  “You kind of wonder how they held their heads up under all that weight.”

“Make you feel kind of insignificant, don’t they?” Kate said.  “That something that big, that indestructible was stamping and snorting around here 12,000 years ago?  And now they’re gone.  Extinct.  Like that.”  She snapped her fingers.

He considered the skull mounted over the tusks.  “They make me horny.”

She turned her head so he wouldn’t see her grin.  “Everything makes you horny.”

“No, really,” he said, and she looked back and found he was serious.  “They make me want to procreate, as fast and as often and as much as I possibly can.”

She looked at the fossil, the huge, bony skull, the long curving tusks, and understood.  “You don’t think anyone’s going to preserve your skeleton after you die and stick it up on a museum wall?”

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Chatter Kate Shugak Uncategorized

Dana View All →

Author and founder of Storyknife.org.

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