He also suspected that a person willing to handle such a thing would probably turn a nice profit—ivory traders regularly visited the region to buy mammoth tusks, and who knows what they'd pay for an intact mammoth? Khudi's suspicions soon fell on one of his own cousins, whom some local Nenets had seen on the sandbar and later, riding away on his reindeer sled toward the town of Novyy Port.

Khudi and Serotetto set off in pursuit on a snowmobile. When they arrived, they found the little mammoth propped up against the wall of a store. People were taking snapshots of it on their cell phones. The shop owner had bought the body from Khudi's cousin for two snow­mobiles and a year's worth of food. Though it was no longer quite perfect—stray dogs had gnawed off part of its tail and right ear—with the help of some local police, Khudi and Serotetto managed to reclaim the infant. The body was packed up and shipped by helicopter to the safety of the Shemanovsky Museum in Salekhard, the regional capital.

"Luckily there was a happy ending," says Alexei Tikhonov, director of the St. Petersburg Zoological Museum and one of the first scientists to view the baby, a female. "Yuri Khudi rescued the best preserved mammoth to come down to us from the Ice Age."

Grateful officials named her Lyuba, after Khudi's wife.

Tikhonov knew that no one would be more excited by the find than Dan Fisher, an American colleague at the University of Michigan. Fisher is a soft-spoken, 59-year-old paleontologist with a bristly white beard and clear green eyes who has devoted much of the past 30 years to understanding the lives of Pleistocene mammoths and mastodons, combining fossil studies with some very hands-on experimental research. Curious to know how Paleolithic hunters managed to store mammoth meat without spoilage, Fisher butchered a draft horse using stone tools he'd knapped himself, then cached the meat in a stock pond. Naturally preserved by microbes called lactobacilli in the water, the flesh emitted a faintly sour, pickled odor that put off scavengers even when it floated to the surface. To test its palatability, Fisher cut and ate steaks from the meat every two weeks from February until high summer, demonstrating that mammoth hunters might have stored their kills in the same way.

Tikhonov invited Fisher to Salekhard in July 2007, along with Bernard Buigues, a French mammoth hunter who had helped arrange scientific study of several previous mammoth discoveries. Both Fisher and Buigues had examined several other specimens, including infants. But they were in relatively poor condition, and little hands-on work was possible. Lyuba was another story entirely.