As the team waited for Buigues, the weather began to deteriorate, intensifying into a blizzard. The tent shuddered in the gusts; expedition members feared that it would be swept away, exposing them to lethal wind chill. "We didn't know when the huge helicopter would arrive," says Mol. "We were waiting and waiting." Every morning the trenches would fill up with blown snow that had to be shoveled out - until somebody thought to cover the block with a tarp. During this tense period, Mol collected from inside the trench several fragments of aquatic plant material, including some fragments two or three inches long that had retained a greenish luster. The plants suggested that 20,000 years ago, the site was the bank of a pond or stream. One hypothesis for the mammoth's death, says Agenbroad, is that "the guy came to get a drink and got mired."

But the TV crew was not satisfied by pond scum. When Buigues returned from Norilsk, his filmmaker Jean-Charles Deniau asked him to defrost a patch of the block to reveal a glimpse of the mammoth. Mol, not wanting to damage Jarkov more than it had already sustained, says he was against this idea, but Buigues acquiesced and turned to his trusty blow dryer. Working around the clock for three days, he and the others thawed the top few inches of a three-foot-wide section of the block, thereby liberating long bristly guard hairs, a silky layer of grayish-yellow wool, and the tawny hair of the undercoat. Mol stroked the hair. "It was like touching a living mammoth," he says. And it smelled like one too: the hairs exuded a pungent odor, like dung. "From what I could tell, the hair was still attached to skin," Mol says.

The film crew also wanted to use metal collars to attach the tusks to the permafrost block before it was raised from the pit. A betusked block gliding through the air, they argued rightly, would look much better on TV than a naked block. Buigues agreed, although later, when criticized for this bit of showmanship, he said he had attached the tusks to honor the mammoth. "I did not feel it would be appropriate for him to travel to his new home without them," he says.

The next day was Sunday, October 17 - "a day I will never, ever forget," says Mol. The storm had blown itself out the night before, and the day broke sunny and calm. About ten in the morning, Mol got a call from Khatanga: the helicopter was fueled and ready to fly; he should see to breaking down the camp.

Three hours later, the MI-26 arrived. "It was an incredible machine, about 30 meters long, the width of the blades about 28 meters, making a lot of noise," Mol says. The downdraft blew up snow and made visibility on the ground difficult. Christian de Marliave, who had designed the metal sling to hold the block, grabbed a hook on the end of a cable lowered from the belly of the copter. With 100,000 kilograms of metal hovering over his head, de Marliave fastened the cable to the block and signaled to the crew. Everybody was scared.

The massive helicopter strained against the load, which clearly was heavier than the estimated 16 tons. "It seemed impossible to lift," says Buigues, who was standing on the ground, the wind from the helicopter blades giving his fingertips frostbite. For several minutes the helicopter strained, but the block hardly budged. Mol imagined that at any second the helicopter would come crashing down. From his vantage point in the cockpit, the Discovery Channel's production assistant Dirk Hoogstra was also terrified. "More than once it felt as if our load was going to pull us down to Earth. Each moment seemed to last forever," he reported afterward on Discovery Online. Even a minor accident that didn't harm anyone might have had severe repercussions. "People would say, 'Look at that adventurer and that amateur doing that crazy things in Taimyr," Mol says. The outcry would have killed the prospects for other Western paleontologists hoping to do field work in Russia.

After nearly ten minutes of a tug-of-war, the block began to lurch upward before finally rising into a clear sky tinged with purple twilight. Mol gasped; he saw the block's iron frame, designed to support 30 tons, start to bend. But then, just as suddenly, the frame stiffened - and held all the way to Khatanga. Mol and the rest of the team from the base camp rode in a smaller helicopter that preceded the MI-26 back to the airfield. A few minutes after they arrived, the block appeared on the horizon, the tusks still attached. The pilots later revealed that the block weighed nearly 23 tons - 3 tons more than the helicopter's official lifting capacity.

"When we set the mammoth on the runway in Khatanga," Mol says, "I knew we had written history." Two hundred years after the woolly mammoth was described as an extinct creature and the Adams mammoth began to emerge from its frozen crypt on the Laptev Sea, Bernard Buigues had hauled frozen Ice Age remains for the first time to a safe place where they could be thawed gradually from their icy tomb. "This was a milestone in paleontology," Mol claims. "People will speak of this discovery 100 years, 200 years in the future."