The Case of Halvar and Mett

There is one case which I have avoided discussing until now because it sits uncomfortably close to anecdote. I include it because sometimes an individual example clarifies what tables of observed behaviour cannot. Halvar Norr was three years old when Mett was born, a fact repeated to me often enough that I eventually understood its importance. Mett was not an animal Halvar acquired, inherited, trained, or selected. He simply appeared in the herd at approximately the point that Halvar’s own earliest permanent memories began, so that each grew up with the other already present.

According to Halvar’s mother, the relationship was troublesome almost immediately. Mett was a curious calf and Halvar an adventurous child, neither possessing sufficient judgement to compensate for the deficiencies of the other. Halvar learned to crawl beneath fences because Mett could not. Mett learned to push down poorly constructed fences because Halvar could. Between them they developed an efficient system for reaching places from which both had been excluded, and his mother described the period with the resigned expression peculiar to parents whose children have survived long enough for disasters to become amusing.

She claimed that at six Halvar attempted to sleep among the herd because Mett was ill and he did not believe the adults would notice if the calf worsened during the night. The adults noticed Halvar first and returned him to his bed. He escaped again, and after the third attempt his father brought blankets and slept beside both of them. Mett recovered. Halvar remembered none of this clearly, though he believed the story because, as he told me, “It sounds like something I would have done.”

By adolescence, the two were rarely far apart during migrations. Mett had become large enough to carry loads but remained unusually tolerant of Halvar climbing over him, leaning against him, sleeping beside him, and committing various indignities which the mammoth refused from nearly everyone else. Halvar, in turn, knew the animal’s moods with a precision difficult to distinguish from intuition, as I observed myself once.

Mett had stopped while the rest of the herd continued toward a river crossing, with nothing obvious obstructing him. The herders called, and he remained where he was. I asked whether he was frightened of the water, and Halvar said no. I asked what was wrong.

“His foot.”

I had seen no limp, and neither had anyone else. Halvar walked to Mett’s right foreleg, examined the underside of the foot, and found a narrow shard of stone lodged deeply enough to cause pain but not yet enough to alter the animal’s gait. I asked how he had known.

“He was standing wrong.”

I asked in what way. Halvar attempted to demonstrate, failed, and finally said, “Wrong.” The answer irritated me considerably at the time, and I now suspect it was the only accurate one available, since forty years of familiarity had taught him patterns too subtle to decompose conveniently into rules.

Their relationship was not one-sided obedience, and Mett frequently ignored Halvar. On one occasion, while I was present, Halvar spent nearly half an hour attempting to lead him away from a muddy bank where the herd needed to pass. Mett remained immovable. Halvar coaxed him, pushed him, insulted him, offered food, withdrew the food, and finally announced that the mammoth was “an enormous bastard.” Mett took the food from his hand and continued standing there. Several minutes later part of the bank collapsed.

Halvar looked at me and said, “He knew.”

I pointed out that Mett might simply have preferred the mud.

Halvar said, “He knew.” I did not argue further.

There are several documented instances in which Mett appears to have protected him. The clearest occurred during a winter storm when Halvar, by then an adult herder, became separated from the main group after a sled overturned. Visibility deteriorated too rapidly for the others to find him, and Mett left the herd. Nobody had commanded this. Indeed, the other herders initially attempted to stop him, and he ignored them.

Several hours later the storm eased enough for a search party to follow his trail. They found Mett standing with his body turned across the wind. Halvar was beneath him, pressed against the mammoth’s forelegs and partially covered by a wool blanket which had apparently become trapped beneath the animal’s trunk, and he had suffered frost injury but survived. When I later asked whether he believed Mett had deliberately sheltered him, he seemed surprised by the question.

“What else would he have been doing?”

Naturalists will object that such an answer presupposes intention, and they are welcome to propose another explanation. The incident which affected me most, however, was considerably less dramatic. Halvar married, and Mett disliked his wife. No one could determine why. She had never mistreated him, feared him, or behaved carelessly around the herd, and the food she brought him repeatedly he accepted while remaining unimpressed.

For perhaps eight years, whenever she approached Halvar in the pasture, Mett would place himself between them. Not aggressively: he simply occupied the available space. Halvar found this hilarious. His wife did not. Eventually the behaviour stopped, though whether through habituation or resignation nobody could say. Years later, when their first child was old enough to walk, Mett displayed none of the same suspicion toward the boy. He allowed the child to touch his trunk, followed him around the enclosure, and once prevented him from wandering through an open gate by lowering his trunk across the path.

Halvar’s wife reportedly said, “So I’m good enough to make the children.” Mett offered no defence.

It was during one of my visits that I first heard Halvar call him his brother, and he did so casually. Mett had wandered toward our camp, and Halvar interrupted our conversation by saying, “My little brother wants something.” I looked at the mammoth, then at Halvar. Halvar was approximately eight feet three inches tall and Mett weighed several tons, so I asked whether little was customary. Halvar replied that Mett was younger.

“By three years?”

“Four.”

Apparently this settled the question. When I asked whether he genuinely thought of the animal as a brother, Halvar became uncomfortable in a manner I had never seen when discussing bodily injury, sex, war, or death.

“No,” he said. Then, after a pause, “Not really.” Then, after another, “It’s just what I call him.” This was plainly false, and I allowed him the lie.

Mett lived to an advanced age for his kind. By his final years his joints had deteriorated, his teeth were worn, and he could no longer keep pace with the longer migrations. The family altered its movements accordingly. Younger animals travelled with the principal herd while Mett remained near one of the permanent winter settlements with a few older mammoths and several Aesir who could be spared from migration. Halvar remained with him more often than was economically sensible, and nobody criticised him for it.

Mett died during the early spring, lying in a sheltered hollow where he had spent much of the previous winter. Halvar was with him. I was not, and visited approximately three months later, by which time Halvar had lost weight. The observation sounds trivial until one understands how difficult it is for an Aesir of his build to lose enough weight for a Human observer to notice immediately.

He spoke about Mett freely, but always in practical terms. The tusks had been preserved and the hide divided according to custom. Several bones would remain with the family, and the remainder had been used, with nothing wasted. He told me all of this before I asked, and I suspect he had already repeated it to many visitors. Eventually I asked how he was managing.

He said, “Fine.”

I had known him too long to accept this, so I asked again. He became irritated, and I waited. After some time he said, “Everyone keeps telling me he had a long life.”

This was true, as Mett had lived unusually long, and I said so. Halvar looked at me with such anger that for a moment I believed I had seriously offended him. Then he said, “So?” I had no answer, and he continued.

“My father had a long life. It still mattered when he died.”

That was the first time during our acquaintance that Halvar explicitly placed the two relationships beside one another, and he seemed to realise it immediately and looked away. After a while he said, much more quietly, “He was there before I knew anybody was supposed to leave.”

There are sentences one remembers without effort, and that is one of mine. For nearly all of Halvar’s remembered life, Mett had been present. Childhood, apprenticeship, marriage, children, migrations, injuries, quarrels, deaths, winters, summers: Mett had existed alongside all of them. The loss was therefore larger than an animal, larger even than a beloved companion, in that it removed one of the few living things that had accompanied Halvar from the beginning of his conscious life.

Aesir longevity makes this especially cruel. Halvar could reasonably expect to live for another century or more, and Mett could not. He knew this, obviously, since traditional herders understand mammoth lifespans better than I do and he had seen old animals die before. Knowledge does not perform the work people ask of it.

Halvar stopped calling Mett his brother after the mammoth died. When referring to him afterwards he always used his name, and I once asked why.

He said, “Because people thought I was joking.” I do not believe he ever was.

The case finally persuaded me that the word family, though scientifically imprecise, may sometimes be less misleading than the alternatives. Halvar and Mett shared neither species nor blood, and whatever Mett understood of the relationship cannot be known with certainty. Yet they grew together, recognised one another as individuals, sought one another’s company, protected one another, quarreled, adapted their behaviour to one another, and suffered when separation occurred. If this does not satisfy some technical definition of kinship, the deficiency may lie in the definition. Traditional Aesir usually avoid saying that mammoths are members of the family, and one should perhaps pay more attention to what they do after one dies.