Plot synopsis

Maxim Arbugaev spent two months in the Siberian Arctic, in the company of “Uncle” Lenya and Misha, inseparable fortune seekers who excavate the bowels of this corner of the world each year as it thaws, searching for the fossilised ivory of mammoths freed from the sediment by the melting of the permafrost, or pulling it out with pickaxe blows. The resulting logbook has the air of a frontier western.