On the Aesir and the Herding of Mammoths

The phrase mammoth herding is convenient, widely understood, and almost entirely misleading. It invites comparison with Human cattle, Dwarven pack goats, or any number of domesticated animals whose relationship with their keepers is founded principally upon enclosure, selective breeding, dependency, and the reasonable expectation that the animal will eventually go where it is told. None of these comparisons survives more than a few days among traditional Aesir herders. A mammoth is not an unusually large cow, and this should be obvious from the mammoth.

A mature animal may outweigh several Aesir combined, and an adult bull can move an object which a respectable engineering crew would first discuss at a meeting. Even the Aesir, whose stature encourages outsiders to imagine them as physically dominant over practically anything they encounter, appear quite sensibly proportioned when standing beside a mammoth. An Aesir may be strong enough to restrain a Human. He is not strong enough to restrain six tons of irritated elephant. The question, therefore, is not why mammoths obey the Aesir, since they generally do not. The question is why they cooperate.

Traditional herds are not driven in the manner of cattle. They possess their own social organisation, preferred routes, feeding grounds, family attachments, aversions, and, quite plainly, opinions. A competent herder works with these rather than attempting to replace them. The most important decisions within a herd are often made by the older females, and experienced Aesir herders learn these individuals with extraordinary precision: which will tolerate a route change, which distrusts unfamiliar water, which remembers a dangerous crossing from decades earlier, which will follow a particular Human-built road, and which regards bridges as an offence against nature. The herder’s task is therefore partly animal management and partly diplomacy, and I do not offer that as metaphorical flourish.

I once watched an Aesir woman named Halla spend nearly an hour persuading the senior female of a herd to enter a valley by a route the animal had refused twice before. No ropes were attached and no prod used. Halla walked ahead, returned, vocalised repeatedly, touched the mammoth’s trunk, then waited, and the mammoth ignored her. When she tried again the animal turned away, at which point Halla sat down. After perhaps ten minutes, the mammoth approached, touched Halla’s shoulder with the end of her trunk, and began walking toward the valley. I asked what had changed. Halla said, “She decided.” This was scientifically unsatisfying, and it was also an accurate description of what I had observed.

The social integration extends further than simple cooperation during migration. Mammoths recognise individual herders and appear capable of maintaining those recognitions over long periods. They display preferences, seeking out particular people when distressed and sometimes refusing handling from one Aesir while tolerating another. Calves raised around the same extended herding families often become accustomed to several generations of Aesir over the course of their own lives.

The reverse is equally important. A traditional Aesir child grows up learning individual mammoths rather than merely learning about mammoths. He knows which animals may be approached from behind, which dislike dogs, which will steal food, which are safe around children, and which should be given the dignity of an unnecessarily wide path. This knowledge is not ornamental folklore; it is survival. A Human farmer may make a minor error in judging the mood of a cow and receive a bruise. An Aesir who badly misjudges a mammoth may become an anecdote.

This fact has encouraged the belief that mammoth herding requires extraordinary courage. It does, occasionally, but courage is considerably less useful than judgement. Traditional Aesir herders succeed not because they are fearless around mammoths but because they know when fear is appropriate.

The herds themselves are only partly domesticated in the strict biological sense. Aesir breeding practices influence them, certainly, and some lineages have lived in close association with people for centuries. Yet the animals remain behaviourally independent to a degree which would be intolerable in most livestock. They forage extensively for themselves and reproduce with limited interference. They defend one another, and they may alter migration according to weather before their herders have decided to do so. A herd can survive without Aesir assistance.

This raises the obvious question of what the mammoths receive from the arrangement, and the answer is: quite a lot. The Aesir provide protection from predators, treatment of injuries, assistance during difficult births, access to stored fodder during severe winters, removal of dangerous obstructions from migration routes, and, historically, armed defence against anyone foolish enough to regard a herd as an unattended supply of meat and ivory.

The mammoths, in return, provide transport, labour, fiber, dung for fuel and agriculture, limited quantities of milk in some communities, and access to materials obtained from animals that die naturally. Their migrations also guide entire Aesir communities through seasonal landscapes which the mammoths understand exceedingly well. Neither side is thus wholly dependent upon the other, both benefit, and that is why comparisons to ownership so often fail.

Traditional Aesir law itself can be peculiar on the matter. In several northern jurisdictions, a mammoth may belong to a household for purposes of responsibility and inheritance while simultaneously being recognised as possessing the right to leave that household’s herd. Human jurists have devoted admirable effort to making this sound impossible. The mammoths appear unconcerned.

The practical limits of Aesir authority become especially apparent when an animal simply refuses. A horse may be pulled and a dog carried. A reluctant ox may eventually be forced through a gate. A mammoth which has decided not to cross a river has converted the problem from animal husbandry into geography.

The Aesir response is rarely to escalate force. They wait, alter the route, send another animal first, change the timing, investigate what has disturbed the herd, or find the particular herder the animal trusts. Outsiders sometimes interpret this as superstition or excessive indulgence, and it is neither. The mammoth is larger, a fact which clarifies a great many philosophical questions.

There is also an emotional dimension which academic descriptions of husbandry tend to treat poorly. Aesir mourn individual mammoths. Mammoths appear, at minimum, to react strongly to the deaths of both other mammoths and familiar Aesir. I hesitate to assign Human concepts such as grief without qualification, but I hesitate equally to dismiss behaviour merely because its implications are inconvenient. I have seen a herd remain beside the body of an elderly female for most of a day without feeding normally, and I have seen a mammoth repeatedly visit the house of a deceased herder for weeks after his death. One may call these attachment behaviours if the word mourning seems excessively poetic. The animals will not care what terminology we choose.

The relationship is therefore neither pet keeping, livestock management, nor anything quite equivalent to domestication as Humans usually understand it. It is a long-standing association between two highly social species, one of which is intelligent enough to understand the behaviour of the other and the other of which is large enough to ensure that understanding remains compulsory. This arrangement has endured for so long that neither Aesir culture nor the behaviour of their traditional mammoth herds can be fully understood in isolation. The Aesir have shaped the mammoths, and the mammoths have unquestionably shaped the Aesir. If one wishes to know which has done more to train the other, I recommend asking an Aesir herder; he will say the question is foolish, and the mammoth will probably have wandered somewhere more interesting while you were asking it.