A thousand miles beyond the nearest outpost, deep in the far north, an isolated prospector gets an unexpected visitor: a stranger named Thomas Stevens, looking for tobacco and a place by the fire. Before the night is out, Stevens has told him why he is really there, recounting how his dog and her newborn litter were trampled by a bull mammoth thirty feet long, and how he set out after the animal with nothing but a hand-axe (and taken half his store of very fine tobacco).
What follows is Stevens's account of a months-long pursuit through a hidden maze of valleys, won by patience, fury, and a refusal to let the beast ever rest. He returns from the hunt with a pair of boots cut from its hide, and a story that the narrator, hedging carefully throughout, is not quite willing to either believe or deny.
Jack London's "A Relic of the Pliocene" is a tall tale told with a straight face, a piece of frontier mythmaking from the author of White Fang, The Call of the Wild, and many other foundational frontier tales.
