This was no bison and it certainly wasn’t just a skull: this was an animal with skin, eyes and a trunk. He stopped what he was doing when something strange tumbled out of a section of the permafrost-perhaps a bison skull, he thought. Like the hundreds of other Yukon placer mines, he was looking for gold. Travis Mudry, only 30 days into his job at McCaughan Family’s Treadstone Gold company, was operating the excavator with a ripping attachment that cut chunks out of a cliff of permafrost. It was June 21, both National Indigenous Peoples Day in Canada and the summer solstice, the longest day of the year.įor some, however, it was just another day at work. Remarkably, the day this little mammoth appeared last week is significant. The Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in are one of 14 First Nations in the Yukon, and it is upon their land that the mammoth was found. “‘Cho’, of course, is ‘big.’ And ‘ga’ is ‘animal.’”
“‘Nun go’ is ‘baby,’” Debbie Nagano, heritage director of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in Government, told Gizmodo, explaining the words chosen from the Hän language.
