He trod with difficulty along the spur above the ice-bound river

He trod with difficulty along the spur
above the ice-bound river.
There used to be many of them,
the proud ones,
many,
and he was the last of such.
Tried more than once in the storm,
today he gave way, as if out of spite.
From the arrows
sticking out of his hide
he suddenly felt heavy.
He tried to trumpet, faintly,
so that the echo would shudder in the distance,
but he toppled with a wheeze onto his side,
and the arrows
went deeper
into his flank.
Already someone was shaking over the hide,
and, busy with the dividing,
someone was deftly cutting the meat
with a heavy stone knife.
Oh, if only these people knew
that the mammoth,
fearsome and stern,
would be more interesting to their descendants
than all the obedient elephants,
and that the tusks, tested in battle,
when he charged headlong,
still unyielding,
would be kept under glass!..

Literal translation

The Last Mammoth. Yevgeny Yevtushenko

In the photo: the most famous mammoth from Yakutia, Yuka, a 40,000-year-old mummy of a mammoth, discovered in 2009. It has been established that Yuka lived for between 6 and 11 years and died young, after breaking a leg during an attack by predators or hunters.