He trod with effort on the spur above the icebound river

He trod with effort on the spur
above the icebound river.
There used to be more of them,
the proud ones,
many of them,
and he was the last of that kind.
Tried more than once in the storm,
today, as if out of spite, he gave way.
From the arrows
sticking out of his hide
it suddenly grew hard for him.
He tried to trumpet, weakly,
so that the echo would shudder in the distance,
but he toppled onto his side with a rattle,
and the arrows
went
deeper into his flank.
Already someone was shaking over the hide,
and, busy with the dividing up,
someone was deftly cutting the meat
with a heavy stone knife.
Oh, if only these people knew
that the mammoth,
formidable and stern,
would be more interesting to descendants
than all the obedient elephants,
and that, tried in battle,
when he charged headlong,
his tusks, not yet surrendered,
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 mammoth mummy discovered in 2009. It has been established that Yuka lived for between 6 and 11 years and died young, after breaking a leg in an attack by predators or hunters.