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Rocky tors covered with trees, deep vales from whose sides groups of lions might attack, these he avoided, and sometimes as he plowed noisily along, bending young and scattered trees to his will, he would see a group of lions in the distance feeding upon some animal they had run to earth, and he would change direction lest he attract their attention.
    The water animal with which Mastodon occasionally came into contact was the massive beaver, which had followed him out of Asia. Of giant size and with teeth that could fell a large tree, these beavers spent their working hours building dams, which Mastodon often saw from a distance, but when work was done the great beasts, their heavy fur glistening in the cold sunlight, liked to play at rowdy games, and their agility differed so markedly from the ponderous movements of Mastodon that he was amazed at their antics. He never had occasion to live in close contact with the underwater beavers, but he noticed them with perplexity when they gamboled after work.
    Mastodon had his major contacts with the numerous steppe bison, the huge progenitors of the buffalo. These shaggy beasts, heads low and powerful horns parallel to the ground, grazed In many of the areas he liked to roam, and sometimes so many bison collected in one meadow that the land seemed covered with them. They would all be grazing, heads pointed in the same direction, when a sabertooth would begin stalking a laggard. Then, at some signal Mastodon could not detect, the hundreds of giant bison would start running away from the terrible fangs of the cat, and the steppe would thunder with their passage.
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    Occasionally he encountered camels. Tall, awkward beasts who cropped the tops of trees, they seemed to fit in nowhere, moving slowly about, kicking ferociously at enemies, and surrendering quickly whenever a sabertooth managed a foothold on their backs. At rare times Mastodon and a pair of camels would feed in the same area, but the two animals, so vastly different, ignored each other, and it might be months before Mastodon saw another camel. They were mysterious creatures and he was content to leave them alone.
    In this placid, ponderous way, Mastodon lived out his uneventful life. If he defended himself against sabertooths, and avoided falling into bogs from which he could not scramble free, and fled from the great fires set by lightning, he had little to fear.
    Food was plentiful. He was still young enough to attract and hold females. And the seasons were not too hot and moist in summer or cold and dry in winter. He had a good life and he stumbled his gigantic way through it with dignity and gentleness.
    Other animals like wolves and sabertooths sought sometimes to kill him for food, but he hungered only for enough grass and tender leaves, of which he consumed about six hundred pounds a day. He was of all Alaska's inhabitants in these early years the most congenial.
    A CURIOUS PHYSICAL CONDITION LIMITED THE MOVEMENT
    of animals in Alaska, for Beringia's land bridge could exist only when the polar ice caps were so extensive that they imprisoned vast quantities of water which had previously sustained the oceans. Indeed, the prime requisite for the existence of the bridge was that the ice sheets be immense.
    However, when they were, they crept across western Canada, and although they never reached Alaska in an unbroken mass, they did send forth probing glaciers, and in time these frozen fingers reached right down to the Pacific shoreline, forming a set of icy barriers which proved impassable to animals and men. Alaska was then easy to enter from Asia, impossible to leave for the interior of North America. Functionally, Alaska became a part of Asia, and so it would remain during vast periods.
    At no time that we are aware of could any animal or man cross the bridge and proceed directly to the interior of North America; but since we know that eventual passage did occur, for mastodons, bison and sheep did move from Asia into