Last night I met a sculptor who carves mastodon tusks. Yes, you read that right. Mastodon tusks.
This information made me positively giddy. I mean, mastodons have been extinct for, um, centuries? Where do you even find the tusk of a mastodon? It’s not like you can amble on down to your local artist supply store and buy one off the shelf. You couldn’t even special order one, I wouldn’t think.
I learned that they are buried deep beneath the surface of the soil in the outer reaches of the glorious state of Alaska.
So how do you get them out of the soil and back to your workshop?
You don’t just go out for a hike one afternoon, stumble across the bone of a long-extinct mega-mammal, and pop it into your backpack like an edible mushroom. I imagine you and twenty of your closest friends would drag it back to the trailhead, straining and sweating the entire way.
And then what? Do you strap it to the top of your SUV with a few bungee cords and drive down the highway like some mechanical rhino?
I was especially excited about the mastodon tusk because I’ve just spent several months buried deeply in Angus’s latest misadventure. And, you guessed it, this time Angus comes face-to-face with a living, breathing mastodon. Then there’s me last night, coming face-to-face with a mastodon tusk sculptor.
That’s what I call mastodon kismet.